Higher Power: Seeking God in 12-Step Recovery - Softcover

Himes, Douglas D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1426745818 ISBN 13: 9781426745812

Publisher: Abingdon Pr, 2012

Synopsis

Willpower is not enough.You need more, and that more is a Higher Power.Every recovering alcoholic or addict--regardless of length ofsobriety--will reach a time when the only thing that stands between himor her and picking up a drink or drug will be a personal relationshipwith a Higher Power.This book is an invitation to explore and nurture that relationship.Reconnecting with the Christian roots of Alcoholics Anonymous, Higher Power combines classic biblical teaching, spiritual formation, and contemporary 12-Step practice. Higher Power is an excellent resource for anyone in recovery seeking to develop a personal relationship with a loving and merciful God.[Doug Himes] knows his Bible. He knows his Big Book. And he knows amultitude of quotations relevant to the way out. Here is an extremelywell written, scholarly formula for renewal. I loved reading it. And sowill you. --Dick B., author of 44 books and more than 1,000 articles on AA history and Christian recovery Douglas Himes provides those who suffer from addictions with muchinspiring and practical wisdom and guidance that can help them walk theego self-emptying path that leads to the realization of their true selfand life in God’s image. His own 12-Step experience and considerable spiritual knowledge and practice enrich the value of his insights. --Tilden Edwards, Founder and Senior Fellow, Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation Douglas D. Himes, Ph.D., is a trained spiritual director andsought-after retreat and workshop leader who provides spiritual counselat Cumberland Heights, one of the country’s leading alcohol and drugtreatment centers, in Nashville, Tennessee. A formerFulbright Scholar and Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, he has degrees in physicsand historical musicology and is published in two languages in sevenfields. In his words, “I was so smart that it took me only nine and a half years to get the First Step. This book parallels my now life-saving journey from self-sufficient knowledge to universal truth.”

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Higher Power

Seeking God in 12-Step Recovery

By Douglas D. Himes

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2012 Douglas D. Himes
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4267-4581-2

Contents

Preface, 
A PRAYER IN THE DARKNESS, 
Chapter 1: Do You Want to Be Made Well?, 
Chapter 2: Finding Our Way out of the Darkness, 
Chapter 3: Choose Life, 
Chapter 4: Beginning Again, 
Chapter 5: Gather Up the Fragments, 
Chapter 6: You Are Called by Name, 
Chapter 7: Claiming Our Authentic Self, 
Chapter 8: Standing on Holy Ground, 
Chapter 9: Living into Our Importance, 
Chapter 10: Learning to Pray, 
A PRAYER FOR SOLITUDE, 
Chapter 11: Caring for Our Anger, 
Chapter 12: Granting and Accepting Forgiveness, 
Chapter 13: Losing and Finding Faith in God, 
Chapter 14: Saying Yes to God, 
Chapter 15: Surrender to Live, 
A PRAYER FOR FAITH, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

DO YOU WANT TO BE MADE WELL?

Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Bethzatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, "Do you want to be made well?" The sick man answered him, "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me." Jesus said to him, "Stand up, take your mat and walk." At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.

—John 5:2-9a

The miracle of recovery contains a paradox: one must consent to the miracle in order to participate in it. This chapter poses the question whose answer is the gateway to the miracle.

* * *

It seems a strange question: "Do you want to be made well?" The man in John's Gospel had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years. He was sick, miserable, helpless, pitiful. Why wouldn't he want to be made well? Why wouldn't anyone who had been sick that long want to be made well?

Located in northeast Jerusalem, the pool in the story is actually two pools surrounded and separated by five porticoes, or covered porches. According to a combination of ancient folklore and Jewish superstition, it was believed that an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and stirred up the water. Whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well from whatever disease that person had. As a result of this belief, the five porticoes were filled with invalids—sick people with all manner of diseases and disabilities—waiting for the stirring of the waters and hoping then to be the first into the pool. It was into this gathering of broken humanity that Jesus walked.

The Gospel tells us that the central character of the story is a man who has been paralyzed for thirty-eight years. He has come to this pool—perhaps every day for thirty-eight years—hoping to be magically healed by the stirred waters. Every time he struggles to drag himself to the waters, someone beats him to it; and, defeated once again, he returns to his pallet. (If this happened just once a day for thirty-eight years, he would have made nearly fourteen thousand attempts to reach the pool!) Life for him was a saga of perpetual hopelessness.

Comfortable Hopelessness

There is, however, a certain comfortable familiarity in his hopelessness. While able men toil and sweat all day in the blazing sun, the paralyzed man sits in the shade of the portico. People who see him feel sorry for him. They undoubtedly bring him things and do things for him, compensating for his disability; and no one expects anything from him. Each day is characterized by a numbing sameness. There is predictable comfort in his hopelessness.

There is comfort in our hopelessness as well. Like Saint Augustine in the fourth century, we find again and again—often to our bewilderment—that the life to which we are accustomed grips us more firmly than the life for which we long. An Arab chief tells the story of a spy captured and sentenced to death by a general in the Persian army. This general had the strange custom of giving condemned criminals a choice between the firing squad and "the big, black door." The moment for the execution drew near, and guards brought the spy to the Persian general.

The best opportunities in our lives stand behind the forbidding door of the great unknown.

"What will it be," asked the general, "the firing squad or 'the big, black door'?"

The spy hesitated for a long time. Finally he chose the firing squad.

A few minutes later, hearing the shots ring out confirming the spy's execution, the general turned to his aide and said: "They always prefer the known to the unknown. People fear what they don't know. Yet, we gave him a choice."

"What lies beyond the big door?" asked the aide.

"Freedom," replied the general. "I've known only a few brave enough to take that door."

The best opportunities in our lives stand behind the forbidding door of the great unknown. We are more comfortable, however, with "the devil we know" than with any risk of change, even if it would mean a better life. We become resigned to our own disabilities.

Like the paralytic in the Gospel story, we, too, spend a great deal of time sitting on our mat, paralyzed, beside various pools in this life where we hope somehow to be cured. We feel sorry for ourselves, attributing our disabled state to a variety of insufficiencies: we're not strong enough, smart enough, rich enough, attractive enough, popular enough. We blame others for not helping us into the pool. We resent those who step in front of us and get what we think we deserve. In all of this we cling stubbornly to our illusion that what we do can in any way bring about our healing. We seek magic where only a miracle will suffice.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, we enter recovery through the first three Steps, which we summarize by the qualities that they require of us: Honesty, Openness, Willingness. It's H-O-W we get into recovery. The Big Book calls these qualities "indispensable," "the essentials of recovery." Phrases like "Surrender to Win" and "Let Go and Let God" become mantras that sustain us in our sobriety one day at a time. In "How It Works," the passage from the Big Book that has been read at the beginning of AA meetings since 1950, we are reminded that "some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely." We must let go absolutely, if we are to experience release. We must let go of our own controlling, in order to let God do what only God can do to heal our brokenness.

The Paradox of Surrender

This key point is explained further by authors Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham in their marvelous book The Spirituality of Imperfection:

Alcoholism and addiction, characterized as they are by the rigid clinging of obsession and compulsion, help us to understand the experience of release. Perhaps the greatest paradox in the story of spirituality is the mystical insight that we are able to experience release only if we ourselves let go. This is the paradox of surrender. Surrender begins with the acceptance that we are not in control of the matter at hand—in fact, we are not in absolute control of anything. Thus the experience of surrender involves the "letting in" of reality that becomes possible when we are ready to let go of our illusions and pretensions (our "unreality").

A familiar poem expresses it poignantly:

As children bring their broken toys
With tears for us to mend,
I brought my broken dreams to God,
Because he was my friend.

But then instead of leaving him
In peace to work alone,
I hung around and tried to help
With ways that were my own.

At last I snatched them back and cried,
"How can you be so slow?"
"My child," he said, "what could I do?
You never did let go."

As in the Third Step, in which we make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God, surrender is an integral part of faith. Surrender is not an abandonment of ourselves in the face of difficulty, nor is it synonymous with submission. We yield ourselves to God freely, not under coercion. Surrender is not resignation, but rather an invitation into something greater, fuller than ourselves. It is an invitation to be ourselves more fully. Surrender is not so much giving up as it is an opening up. We open ourselves to new perspectives and dimensions of life yet to be explored. Through surrender we are brought more fully into ourselves and, at the same time, into that fullness which is greater than all that is. As discussed more fully in chapter 15, surrender is an absolute requirement for recovery.

Surrender is an integral part of faith.

Many of us have been able to experience release and surrender only when we reached a point of exhaustion where we were willing to let go of our own efforts and permit ourselves simply to be. The nineteenth-century American evangelist Dwight L. Moody related a story told to him by a friend:

Dr. Andrew Boar told me how, in the highlands of Scotland, sheep would often wander off into the rocks and get into places that they couldn't get out of. The grass on these mountains is very sweet, and the sheep will jump down ten or twelve feet, and can't jump back again. They may be there for days, until they have eaten all the grass.

The shepherd will wait until they are so faint they cannot stand, and then he will put a rope around himself and go over and pull the sheep up out of the jaws of death.

"Why doesn't he go down there when the sheep first get there?" I asked.

"Ah," Dr. Boar said, "if he did, the sheep are so very foolish they would dash right over the precipice and be killed!"

How true that is for so many of us who resist recovery right up to the point where we are finally too exhausted to hurl our self over the precipice to our own death.

Once we have decided in the Third Step to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the God of our understanding, we are led in due time to the Sixth Step, where we become entirely ready to have God remove all of our defects of character. This is the heart of the message. It is God who removes our defects of character; it is only God who can heal us. Healing is a miracle. It is not anything we can do for ourselves. Like the grace of God, we do not deserve it and cannot possibly earn it. It is freely given to us. We have only to accept it. And this brings us back to Bethzatha. Come along with me to that place.

The air is hot and dry, laden with dust from the nearby road. You can feel the dryness on your skin, see the clouds of dust floating by. You can hear and smell the sheep as they are driven through the nearby gate in the wall encircling the city, on their way to sale in the market or sacrifice in the temple. As you sit by the pool on your mat, resigned to your paralysis, a stranger approaches.

Surrender ... is an invitation to be ourselves more fully.

Standing before you, the stranger looks deeply into your eyes. It feels as if he can see right to the bottom of your soul. He knows that you, like the paralytic in the Gospel, have been here a long time. He speaks to you, reaching the deepest places of your brokenness. You can see in his eyes that the question he poses is not rhetorical. He does not say: "Wouldn't you like to be better off than you are now?" But rather: "Are you willing to let go of your comfortable hopelessness? Are you willing to give up the excuses that you use to justify your disability? Are you willing to have removed those defects of character that keep you from wholeness? Are you willing to open your hands and your heart to receive this unconditional, lifesaving gift?"

And you hear the tender words: "Do you want to be made well?"

How will you answer?

CHAPTER 2

FINDING OUR WAY OUT OF THE DARKNESS

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

—1 Peter 1:3-9

By the time we reach recovery, our losses can be extensive, leaving us to face a mountain of grief in a very dark place. How do we find our way out of that place? Is there any way to avoid the pain? Why is this happening to us?

* * *

She lay so still. How small and frail she seemed. Just eighteen months ago she had been a beautiful, talented second-grader, full of life and energy—a violin recital and a dance recital in the same day! Then suddenly the illness and the diagnosis: acute leukemia. Eighteen months of excruciating pain, treatment, remission, more pain, more treatment. Through countless hours he had knelt by her bed, holding her small hand, praying that somehow she would be spared. Now he had watched her take her last breath, as she departed alone on a journey that he could not comprehend. Why, God, why? What did we do to deserve this? What purpose could possibly be served by the death of a ten-year-old girl in a loving Christian family? Where are you, God, in this overwhelming pain?

Her name was Laura Lue Claypool. Her father, John, was a pastor and one of the great spiritual writers of our time. I suspect that most of us have been where he was. We may not have lost a child; for us perhaps it was a parent, or other loved one, or a close relationship. Many of us lost our life in our addiction. At some point, we find our self plunged into a darkness that seems to go on forever, alone in a wilderness of pain and despair. What do we understand about that place? How do we survive it? Where is God in our darkness?

Suffering is not only a part of life; it is an essential and vitally important part of life. Buddha taught Four Noble Truths, the first of which was: Life is suffering. Suffering is universal. No one is immune from it. Even Jesus, who was as human as we are, experienced overwhelming desperation and abandonment when he cried out on the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matt 27:46b).

Anyone who has struggled with addiction has certainly known suffering, perhaps as a constant companion for many years. Hitting bottom in my own addiction, I became engulfed by a world of pain I had never before experienced. For the first time, I understood what the psalmist described as "the valley of the shadow of death." I could sleep for no more than four hours at a time before waking up to begin crying again. Many days I could barely function. Some days it was almost literally impossible to put one foot in front of the other to walk. I existed under the constant, crushing weight of grief, separated from all of my hopes and dreams. My pain seemed larger than life itself. I wanted to scream with the psalmist: "Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD. Lord, hear my voice!" (Ps 130:1, 2). I felt totally abandoned.

Many great figures throughout history have experienced and documented such suffering. You may recall the movie Shadowlands, which tells the story of how the great twentieth-century Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, a confirmed bachelor, found himself, at the age of fifty-six, married to Joy Davidman and stepfather to her two children. After only four years of glorious happiness together, Joy died of cancer, and Lewis chronicled in several journals the devastating grief that tested his faith. From the depths of his despair he wrote:

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, if you turn to Him then with praise, you will be welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away.

We can learn a great deal in the darkness of our suffering. I'd like to suggest four valuable insights that I believe we can find in our pain.

The first insight is: God did not cause our suffering. In the throes of despair we are tempted to question why God would want to hurt us so deeply. We are asking the wrong question, often arising from an image, perhaps conditioned from our youth, of a vengeful, punishing God of wrath—a "gotcha God." God does not want us to suffer, and God does not cause our suffering. Because God has allowed something to happen does not mean that God has willed it to happen. When God created the universe, God built into it two fundamental principles: a physical world that runs according to consistent natural laws, and human freedom. God will never interfere with either, for to do so would be to violate God's own gift. Living life on life's terms requires that we come to grips with this reality. We cannot change the laws of nature; and human freedom, in the hands of one who does not know how to use it, can be a deadly weapon. In the Hebrew Wisdom Literature, we read: "Whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back on the one who starts it rolling" (Prov 26:27). It is one of the overarching principles of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: Wrong choices lead to painful consequences. How many times have we proven that in our lives? It's not God's fault. In some ways it would be easier for God to step in, to have faith for us, to help us in extraordinary ways; but God has instead chosen to stand before us, arms extended, while encouraging us to walk, to participate in the development of our own soul. That process always involves struggle, and often involves suffering.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Higher Power by Douglas D. Himes. Copyright © 2012 Douglas D. Himes. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Abingdon Pr
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1426745818
• ISBN 13: 9781426745812
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 192