Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
—Step 3 of the Twelve Steps
“O, come to the water all you who are thirsty. Though you have no money, come! Buy corn without money, and eat; and, at no cost, wine and milk. Why spend money on what is not bread, your wages on what fails to satisfy?”
—Isaiah 55:1–2
“Work for your salvation in fear and trembling. It is God, for his own loving purposes, who puts both the will and the action into you.”
—Philippians 2:12–13
“Ask, and it will be given to you; search and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For the one who asks always receives; the one who searches always finds; the one who knocks will always have the door opened.”
—Matthew 7:7–8
Some think that the most helpful of the personal stories in A.A.’s Big Book is the one entitled “Acceptance was the Answer.” I am sure different stories move different people, depending on their temperament and the stage of their own journey when they read it. But surely Step 3 on acceptance and surrender is quite succinct and telling, and cuts to the chase. It gives new meaning to the word “mercy killing.” Surrender will always feel like dying, and yet it is the necessary path to liberation. Many excellent books have been written in recent years on “the art of dying.” Stephen Levine led the parade in the early 1980s, but now many have expanded the field, and it is almost becoming its own theological source.1 It tells me we are surely growing up spiritually.
How long it takes each of us to just accept—to accept what is, to accept ourselves, others, the past, our own mistakes, and the imperfection and idiosyncrasies of almost everything. It reveals our basic resistance to life, a terrible contraction at our core or, as Henri Nouwen, a Catholic priest and writer, told me personally once, “our endless capacity for self loathing.” Acceptance is not our mode nearly as much as aggression, resistance, fight, or flight. None of them achieve the deep and lasting results of true acceptance and peaceful surrender. It becomes the strangest and strongest kind of power. You see, surrender is not “giving up,” as we tend to think, nearly as much as it is a “giving to” the moment, the event, the person, and the situation.
As many have said, “What you resist, persists.” This became the groundwork of most nonviolent training, and yet it took us until the twentieth century to believe what Jesus had taught two thousand years ago in a most shocking and incomprehensible line: “Offer the wicked man no resistance” (Matthew 5:39). How could that be wise or true? Why did St. Francis, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., agree while most of the rest of us missed the point? Dualistic minds tend to miss spiritual points, but we will talk about this more in a later chapter.
Our inner blockage to “turning our will over” is only overcome by a decision. It will not usually happen with a feeling, or a mere idea, or a religious Scripture like the ones above. It is the will itself, our stubborn and self-defeating willfulness that must be first converted and handed over. It does not surrender easily and usually only when it is demanded of us by partners, parents, children, health, or circumstances. We see our ingrained “will to power” already in two-year-olds and teenagers, when it is only getting started. By the time we are “adults,” we have all taken control and tried to engineer our own lives in every way possible. In fact, our culture does not respect people who do not “take control.”
We each have our inner program for happiness, our plans by which we can be secure, esteemed, and in control, and are blissfully unaware that these cannot work for us for the long haul—without our becoming more and more control freaks ourselves. Something has to break our primary addiction, which is to our own power and our false programs for happiness. Here is the incestuous cycle of the ego: “I want to have power” > “I will take control” >“I will always be right” >“See, I am indeed powerful!” This is the vicious circle of the will to power. It does not create happy people, nor happy people around them.
Any foundational handing over of our will to power is previous and prior to any belief system whatsoever. In fact, I would say what makes so much religion so innocuous, ineffective, and even unexciting is that there has seldom been a concrete “decision to turn our lives over to the care of God,” even in many people who go to church, temple, or mosque. I have been in religious circles all my life and usually find willfulness run rampant in monasteries, convents, chancery offices, and among priests and prelates, ordinary laity, and at church meetings. In fact, there are about the same percentage of people who have actually handed over their will to God in most church circles as there are people I meet at many “secular” gatherings. It is really quite disappointing that we all could be that successful at missing the major point. Islam even means “surrender” and yet finds it hard to surrender to the truth about terrorism, suicide bombers, and its own will to power. Religious surrender, I am afraid, is often to status itself and the status quo instead of to the full truth of a situation. So Bill Wilson was wise enough to make it a clear Step 3 in the program.
But Jesus made it step one, you might say: “If anyone wants to follow me, let him renounce himself [or herself!]” (Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23; Matthew 16:4). Have we ever really heard that? It is clear in all of the Gospels: “Renouncing the self!” What could Jesus possibly mean or intend by such absolute and irresponsible language? Is this what Buddhists are trying to do in meditation? Of course! I am pretty sure that Jesus meant exactly what Bill W means in Step 3: a radical surrendering of our will to Another whom we trust more than ourselves. Buddhists just stopped arguing about the personal name of to whom they were surrendering, but they often do much better about the how of actually surrendering their mental ego and their control needs. Christians and Jews sort of avoided that foundational renunciation.
The Myth of Sacrifice
Now do you know what is the most common and, in fact, almost universal, substitute for renouncing our will? Dedicated people have made it into its own form of religion, and I will call it “the myth of heroic” sacrifice. The common way of renouncing the self, while not really renouncing the self at all, is being sacrificial! It looks so generous and loving, and sometimes it is. But usually it is still all about me. It is the classic “first half of life” gesture2 that gives the self boundaries, identity, superiority, definition, admiration, and a real control of the scene.
Who can argue with a sacrificial person? It has driven most of the wars, and the romanticization of war, in all of human history, on both sides. It serves those with power that the common folks all believe mightily in sacrifice, while far too often their own sons and daughters never go to war or work at all. “Personal sacrifice” creates the Olympics and American Idol, many heroic projects, and many wonderful people. It is just not the Gospel, but only its most common substitute.3
You see, there is a love that sincerely seeks the spiritual good of others, and there is a love that is seeking superiority, admiration, and control for itself, even and most especially by doing “good” and heroic things. Maybe we have to see it in its full-blown sick state to catch the problem. Suicide bombers are sacrificial, most resentful people are very sacrificial at one or another level, the manipulative mother is invariably sacrificial, all codependents are sacrificial, a phenomenon so common that it created its own group called Al-Anon.
“Codependency” was the disease of those who supported and contributed to others’ disease by what we call “enabling” behavior. Sometimes the enabler is sicker than the alcoholic and does not know what to do when the alcoholic enters recovery. Like all heroic sacrifice, codependent behavior was so well disguised that it took us until the last century to give it a name—and yet it is everywhere. Codependency studies made us aware that much love is actually not love at all, but its most clever and bogus disguise. So much that is un-love and non-love, and even manipulative “love,” cannot be seen
or addressed because it is so dang sacrificial. Your hands are well tied.
Codependents end up being just as unhealthy as the addict, while thinking of themselves as strong, generous, and loving. The martyr complex reveals this false side of love and, yes, I think it even applies to some of the martyrs in the church. Some of them, even some of my brother Franciscans, did everything they could to get others to hate and kill them, so they could be sacrificial and be proclaimed martyrs and saints. No wonder Jesus said, “Unless your holiness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20). In other words, there is an early stage “holiness” that looks like the real thing, but it isn’t. This is sacrificial religion, on which the scribes and Pharisees in every group pride themselves.
All zealots and “true believers” tend to be immensely sacrificial on one highly visible level, and fool almost everybody. “I sacrifice myself by obeying these laws and attending these services or even serving the poor” and by being more heroic than you are, they might think. Often they do not love God or others in such heroic “obedience,” they are merely seeking moral high ground for themselves and the social esteem that comes with it. (See Luke 18:11–12.) Or as Paul puts it, “I can give my body to be burned, but without love, it is worth nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3). Most bogus religion, in my opinion, is highly sacrificial in one or another visible way, but not loving at all. Yet it fools most people. I will not dare to name names here, but you can fill in the blanks.
It is a common disguise in every religion of the world. The Jewish Pharisees are merely a stand-in for all of us at the lower levels, whereas Jesus is the Jewish stand-in for all of us at the highest level. He affirms full love of God and love of neighbor, and says, “This is far more important than offering any temple holocaust or sacrifice” (Mark 12:33). In several contexts he quotes Hosea the prophet (6:6), saying, “Go, learn the meaning of the words, what I want is mercy, not [your dang!] sacrifices!” (Matthew 9:13, 12:7). He seems to use this quote in several contexts to counter people who are righteous and judgmental, and the holier-than-thou types who are judging him and his disciples for not being “sacrificial” enough.
The Genius of the Twelve Steps
The absolute genius of the Twelve Steps is that it refuses to bless and reward what looks like any moral worthiness game or mere heroic willpower. It spotted the counterfeit and “drags it publicly behind it in a triumphal parade” (Colossians 2:15). With Gospel brilliance and insight, A.A. says that the starting point and, in fact, the continuing point, is not any kind of worthiness at all but in fact unworthiness! (“I am an alcoholic!”) Suddenly religion loses all capacity for elitism and
is democratic to the bone. This is what Jesus affirmed in
prostitutes, drunkards, and tax collectors, and what Paul praised when he said, “It is when I am weak that I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). When the churches forget their own Gospel message, the Holy Spirit sneaks in through the ducts and the air vents. A.A. meetings have been very good ductwork, allowing fresh air both in and out of many musty and mildewed churches.
False sacrifice is an actual avoidance of any real “renouncing” of the self, while looking generous or dedicated. This is also revealed in Jesus’ insistence that the temple has to go. The temple is the metaphor for sacrificial religion in his time, and explains why he vigorously releases the animals penned up for sacrifice, and all of the “selling and buying” of God (Matthew 21:12) that follows from the sacrificial mind. This is why Jesus mocks the people putting “a great deal” of their money into the temple “treasury” (Mark 12:41) and praises the widow who gives her “mite.” As French philosopher and writer René Girard convincingly argued4 Jesus came to proclaim the death of all sacrificial religion! He ended it “once and for all by offering himself” (Hebrews 7:27), and “abolished the first sort of sacrifice to replace it with a second” (Hebrews 10:9). Once you see this pattern, it is very hard not to see it for the rest of your life.
Sacrificial religion was all exposed in Jesus’ response to any mechanical or mercenary notion of religion, but we soon went right back to it in many Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant forms, because the old ego will always prefer an economy of merit and sacrifice to any economy of grace and unearned love, where we have no control. The first one makes us feel heroic and worthy, the second one makes us mere “fools” for Christ as Paul puts it, “those who are nothing at all to show up those who are everything” (1 Corinthians 1:17–31). I know Paul might say a few strange things, but he did understand and teach the marrow of the Gospel. And there it is!
It is no surprise that we could not “turn our will and our lives over to God as we understood him”—because we understood God’s love as tit for tat and quid pro quo! As long as the spiritual journey was a moral achievement contest, none of us felt worthy, ready, or able to come forward. And many who did come forward did so by splitting themselves, and by denying their own ego and shadow self, and then imposing it on others.
“As We Understand God”
We wasted years of history arguing over whose God was best or true, instead of actually meeting the always best and true God of love, forgiveness, and mercy. A.A. was smart enough to avoid this unnecessary obstacle by simply saying “God as we understood Him,” trusting that anyone in need of mercy as much as addicts are would surely need and meet a merciful God. If they fail to encounter this Higher healing Power, the whole process grinds to a bitter halt, since we can only show mercy if mercy has been shown to us (Luke 6:36–38). We can only live inside the flow of forgiveness if we have stood under the constant waterfall of needed forgiveness ourselves. Only hour by hour gratitude is strong enough to overcome all temptations to resentment.
You will never turn your will and your life over to any other kind of God except a loving and merciful One. Why would you? But now that you know, why would you not? At this point it is not sacrifice, or the resentment that often goes with being sacrificial, that motivates you.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, said that what he resented in most Christians was what he perceived as a constant underlying resentment: (1) a denied resentment toward God for demanding sacrifice, (2) toward others for not appreciating our sacrifice, (3) sacrificing as much as we sacrifice, (4) and a resentment toward others for not having to do it! There is much evidence of this passive-aggressive stance in many religious people, but not in all, thank God.
We have been graced for a truly sweet surrender, if we can radically accept being radically accepted—for nothing! “Or grace would not be grace at all”! (Romans 11:6). As my father, St. Francis, put it, when the heart is pure, “Love responds to Love alone” and has little to do with duty, obligation, requirement, or heroic anything. It is easy to surrender when you know that nothing but Love and Mercy is on the other side.