If You Want What We Have

[bluidkiti]

From the Book

If You Want What We Have:
Sponsorship Meditations
By Joan Larkin
©1998 Joan Larkin


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When God wants to be what is not God, man comes to be.
KARL RAHNER

Newcomer
I listened to a long reading from the AA Big Book that was all about atheists and agnostics, and how, if they expect to stay in recovery, they have to recognize the evidence that God exists. I didn’t find the God argument very convincing. Sometimes I think that the program literature is incredibly illogical and old-fashioned.

Sponsor
Yes, there are days like that. I, too, have sat in meetings saying, “No,no,no” to everything that I heard said about God. Though I may resist certain ideas, it helps me to remember that this isn’t a debating society. I don’t have to agree with everything I hear, but I’m not in this program to make intellectual arguments against the existence of a Power greater than myself. The intellect I’m so proud of today neither prevented me form engaging in addictive behavior nor led me to recovery. I’m here to address my addiction, and my path is the path of my spirit.

Each of us knows what our won experience of a Higher Power is. We don’t find this Power through argument—our own or anyone else’s—but through going deep within. We know that when we entered recovery, we surrendered our heavy task of trying to be God. Our egos are no longer in charge.

Today, I don’t have to be my own Higher Power.