Some more highlights from John Z.’s remarkable Grace in Addiction:
“The only person lacking desperation is the one who does not know herself very well. Usually a few examples of typical, universal human difficulty are enough to ‘raise the bottom’ to the point where the idea of powerlessness will connect with any layperson. Let’s explore some of these…
Like Swiss cheese, people are full of holes. The Twelve Step approach is quick to draw attention to those holes, rather than try to dodge, cover, or counterbalance them. So which weaknesses tend to be present universally? The Big Book provides its own list:
“We had to ask ourselves why we shouldn’t apply to our human problems this same readiness to change our point of view. We were having trouble with personal relationships, we couldn’t control our emotional natures, we were prey to misery and depression, we couldn’t make a living, we had a feeling of uselessness, we were full of fear, we were unhappy, we couldn’t seem to be of real help to other people…” (52)
I have yet to meet the person who cannot identify with a least one of the items on that list. Who, for example, is a stranger to fear? Jesus offered a similar list in his famous Sermon on the Mount, but his list also included anger, lust, and anxiety. These are the “classics”, and they account for much of the content of the day-to-day experience of being human.
Using similar logic, AA would liken sin to sickness. R. C. Sproul voiced this sentiment when he wrote, “We are not sinners because we sin; we sin because we are sinners.” We would happily extrapolate along those same lines: “we are not alcoholics because we drink uncontrollably; we drink uncontrollably because we are alcoholics.” Have you ever thought of misdoing as a kind of illness? Like an allergy or a virus, self-centeredness cannot easily be mastered or controlled. The good news is that our negative attributes can become a bedrock upon which effective spirituality can be built. Without them, there is no hope for spiritual rejuvenation; in the place of health, there is apparently no need for recovery.
The realization of our own weakness is so counterintuitive to human nature that the revelation can be rightly ascribed to the divine. A Christian would ascribe this work to the Holy Spirit. The old-fashioned word for it is repentance.
And so it is with the entire progression of AA’s Twelve Steps. As the ego is deflated and self-confidence is discouraged at every turn, something called “faith”, or “God-confidence” miraculously begins to take its place – although it doesn’t appear that way to the subject at first. In Step 12, AA refers to the fruit of this faith as “a spiritual awakening.”
We close this section on Step 1 with an incisive quote from the sixteenth-century English theologian Richard Hooker:
My eager protestations, made in the glory of my ghostly strength, I am ashamed of; but those crystal tears, wherewith my sin and weakness was bewailed, have procured my endless joy; my strength hath been my ruin, and my fall my stay.
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One response to ““My Fall My Stay”: Addiction and Low Anthropology”
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Great insights, Mr. McDavid. Now how can we square that with the voluntary nature of American religion, particularly Protestantism? Especially when churches are, at this moment in history, so damned frightened of becoming obsolete that they are willing to resort to all sorts of flattery and diversion to get people’s minds off supposedly “negative” images of Christianity’s past? Maybe you or the other MBirders would like to take a stab, as you have on the cultural implications thereof, at the institutional ramifications of truth-telling of the AA kind in a consumerist, deracinated religiosity that we have in this land of disestablished free-thought on the one hand and fanatic revanchism on the other. I’d like to see a follow-up on that angle of things, since none of this is going to matter a fat rat’s behind if it cannot have some measure of public organizational continuity. An AA meeting’s purpose is far narrower in many respects than the church’s–common sense tells us that directly.