We are all powerless, not only those physically addicted to a substance. Alcoholics simply have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments, especially our addiction to our way of thinking.
We all take our own pattern of thinking as normative, logical, and surely true, even when it does not fully compute. We keep doing the same thing over and over again, even if it is not working for us. That is the self-destructive nature of all addiction, and of the mind in particular. We think we are our thinking, and we even take that thinking as utterly “true,” which removes us at least two steps from reality itself.
~From Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
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“You see, Alcohol in Latin is spiritus and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison.” ~Carl Jung’s letter to Bill Wilson in 1961, shortly before Jung’s death
If we can speak of the traditional Christian stages of the journey as (1) purgation, (2) illumination, and (3) union, too many addicts never seem to get to the second or third stages—any real spiritual illumination of the self—and even fewer get to the rich life of experienced union with God.
The Twelve Step Program and Christianity seem to have too often stayed at the problem-solving level, and missed out on the ecstasy itself—trustful intimacy with God, or what Jesus consistently called “the wedding banquet.”
~From Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
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In what is commonly called prayer, you and your hurts, needs, and perspectives are still the central reference point, not really God. But you have decided to invite a Major Power in to help you with your already determined solution! God can perhaps help you get what you want, but it is still a self-centered desire, instead of God’s much better role—which is to help you know what you really desire (Luke 11:13, Matthew 7:11). It always takes a bit of time to widen this lens, and therefore the screen, of life.
One goes through serious withdrawal pain for a while until the screen is widened to a high-definition screen. It is work to learn how to pray, largely the work of emptying the mind and filling the heart—that is prayer in one concise and truthful phrase. Or as some say, “pulling the mind down into the heart” until they both operate as one.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
