They Have the Magic

It has been an interesting and intense week.  We've been to more classes and more meetings and more therapy sessions.  It is what we do.  In between, we try to do all the things that other people do -- meals and dishes and bills and trash and jobs and -- just life.  However, since our lives are currently consumed with the work of recovery, and make no mistake, it IS work, that is pretty much all there is for us to talk about here (unless of course, you are just dying to know how I mate socks).

We are, officially I suppose, 12-steppers.  There seems to be no other way to do this.  We've investigated a number of the alternatives, and to be honest, the cognitively based models don't offer what we need on a variety of counts.  That may not be true for others, but we are finding that, in spite of our misgivings and negative reactions, the 12 step model has something that we all seem to need.  We've found some meetings that feel pretty welcoming and hospitable -- one is actually a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, but the process is the same and THEY don't distinguish between drugs, so it works. 

The intensive outpatient program that we are attending has a family component, and T and I are spending our Wednesday and Thursday evenings in classes and "group" sessions there.  The counselor/facilitator, a woman named Kelly, is an avid, AA'er who responds to our concerns and discomforts regarding the "god" issue in pretty much the same judgmental voice as our most critical anonymous commenter does here on the God as We Understand post:  

"Your comments have the same tone that Tom's did before he admitted he was an alcoholic. It's so very rage against the machine-like.

Lots of people work the AA program and do not subscribe to the white bearded man in the sky.

I'm not sure you can see that right now. Tom has a disease and as his family of enablers, you are as well. Or perhaps you think that it is only him engaged in this dance?

The plan works if you work the plan. Lots of people recover and stay recovered and all of them subscribe to a higher power. Not all of them call it God."

... and then here in response to the Sunday Update  post:

"As long as the 3 of you can find so many reasons to reject the AA program, or any other cessation program, you will not have to face the painful prospect of changing the many, many attitudes and behaviors which have, in your case, resulted in this very serious problem.

Or you can choose to take what you like and leave the rest."

In fact, on Thursday evening, after T expressed her deep frustration at the continued and pervasive emphasis on God and Him, even as there continues to be an insistence that this program is NOT RELIGIOUS, Kelly put her hands over her ears, declared that the whole discussion was frustrating and made her head hurt, and stormed from the room.   We all just sat there, looking at one another, amazed.

So, I've been continuing to contemplate the set of conundrums posed by our situation:  

• We clearly have a very real issue.  Alcoholism is an acknowledged problem for our family.
• We have been unsuccessful in addressing the problem using all the resources and skills that we possess.
• We need help and cannot do this by ourselves.
• We have come to accept that this AA approach is the one that "feels" like it offers the best chance and hope for recovery, and recovery has become the thing we want.
• To do AA is to "work the steps;" all of them, in order, to the best of our ability. 
• That means we've got to get a grip on this business of the "higher power" that is so central to the process -- "God as we understand Him."

I don't know where the rest of the family is going to come down on all of that.  Clearly everybody is going to have to resolve the paradox of our non-religious world view and our simultaneous reliance on and submission to a "higher power" for themselves. Here's my attempt to accommodate this whole tangle for me:

I cannot get to the personified god thing.  My notion of the divine does not match up with the idea of "god as a person."  So, by definition, I am not going to be understanding "god" as "him."  For this to work for me, I am going to have to simply ignore that language and try not to let it grate on my nerves.

My understanding of the creative divine in the universe is grounded in some odd mix of pantheism and sub-atomic physics and a conviction that we are all creating the universe together in some sort of gigantic evolutionary endeavor of which we are only very vaguely aware.  My belief is that I am connected to and mingled with all the energies of all the "beings" who have ever existed or ever will exist anywhere in the universe.  Together with stars and spruce trees, buffalo and bumble bees, I am moving the universe into existence and then forward -- making the creation happen in every instant. 

The plodding and prosaic religiosity of AA trudges through my spiritual landscape like a Fuller Brush salesman in a shabby brown suit, and I find my impulse is to turn it away at the door.  Except that, as I have struggled to be present to this process in these weeks, I keep seeing the glimmers of something magical under the drab threads and tired visage.

I think that, perhaps entirely by accident, Bill W. and Dr. Bob (the original and almost mythical authors of the Alcoholics Anonymous fellowship) grabbed onto a powerful bit of magic -- and I do absolutely mean MAGIC.  I think that they were ordinary enough fellows, caught in the trap of alcoholism, who had no idea about magic, and surely no sense of what it really was.  They were, I suspect, a spiritually unimaginative pair.  All they knew was that they had been saved by some "power greater than themselves," and given the times and the place (Akron, Ohio), they explained the phenomenon with the clumsiest of references to the most mundane religious practices of their day.  Their "magic" got distilled down into a confessional-sort-of-Rock-of-Ages-Bible-carrying-Businessman's-God, and there it has remained, forever frozen in the pages of their Big Book.  Today, if you push very hard, every single AA'er will ultimately resort to the response -- "if it isn't broke, don't try to fix it."  They all seem to have that glimmer of something so numinous that it defies description, but I have yet to find one willing to look at their burning bush straight on.  You would think that they are all afraid they'll be turned into toads.  Magic, indeed!

Consider the world of AA in the context of "magic:"

Definitionally, magic is the use of means (as charms or spells) believed to have supernatural power over natural forces; (step 1 -- We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol) magic rites or incantations (Hi, My name is _________________, and I'm an alcoholic/addict -- Hi ___________________);  an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source (step 2 -- we came to understand that there was a power greater than ourselves that could restore us to sanity);  something that seems to cast a spell (coins and tokens given at milestone marks). 

Magic is the claimed art of altering things by supernatural means (we turned our lives and our wills over to God as we understood Him).  There are two modern perspectives on the theory of magic.   The first sees magic as a result of a universal sympathy within the universe, where if something is done here a result happens somewhere else. The other view sees magic as a collaboration with spirits who cause the effect.  One category of magic is “sympathetic magic,” --  the thought that if a certain result follows a certain action, then that action must be responsible for the result. Therefore, if one is to perform this action again, the same result can again be expected (If you want what we have and are willing to go to any lengths to obtain it, ...). Another primary type of magical thinking includes the principle of contagion. This principle suggests that once two objects come into contact with each other, they will continue to affect each other even after the contact between them has been broken (keep coming back -- it works if you work it AND read the big book, go to meeting).

Magical rituals are the precisely defined actions (including speech) used to work magic. The language used in ritual is archaic and out of the ordinary, which helps foster the proper mindset to believe in the ritual.  The purpose of ritual is to act as a focus and the effect will vary depending on the individual.  I've been amazed, attending AA meetings at the remarkable and ubiquitous ritualized formulas every single meeting follows: 

• reading the steps, the traditions, the promises.
• passing the hat for the universally understood dollar donation
• reciting certain phrases from the Big Book in unison
• the prohibition on "cross-talk"
• the shared slogans and sayings -- one website that I found lists 400 such aphorisms

Magic often utilizes symbols that are thought to be intrinsically efficacious.  The performance of magic almost always involves the use of language.   Only certain words and phrases or words spoken in a specific context are considered to have magical power.  Magical language  is emotive and it converts words into symbols for emotions.  It constructs metaphors that establish symbols and link magical rituals to the world.  The language of magic is sacred, set and used for an entirely different purpose to that of ordinary life, and differentiated through word choice, grammar, style, or by the use of specific phrases or forms: prayers, spells, songs, blessings, or chants.  Another potential source of the power of words is their secrecy and exclusivity. 

Magical knowledge is usually passed down from one magician to another through family or apprenticeships.  Magical knowledge is often well guarded, as it is a valuable commodity to which each magician believes that he has a proprietary right.  Yet the possession of magical knowledge alone may be insufficient to grant magical power; often a person must also possess certain magical objects, traits or life experiences in order to be a magician.  In AA this acquisition of "magical" knowledge is embodied in the accumulation of days/weeks/months/years of sobriety.  Every practitioner knows his or her sobriety date and the duration of his or her sobriety.  When one attains a certain level of achievement, both in terms of the steps and in terms of the duration of practice, then it is the norm to undertake to sponsor others -- to help them gain in their own practice of sobriety.  And so the magic is passed on and the secrets are carefully divulged.   

Magic is powerful stuff.  Practiced by us, for us, and on us, it changes the world -- and that scares us half to death.  If we are the purveyors of spells and incantations, of charms and assorted wizardry, then we are also responsible.  We can do it.  We do do it.  It belongs entirely to us.  We come together, each with our own capacities and our own lacks, and work our magic.  Who knows precisely the outcome?  We only know what we can see.  We only experience what we live through.  Tom explained His current understanding of the "spiritual" aspect of all of this in a meeting last night, as "backing into it."  He said that He simply feels better when He participates in the fellowship of AA, and that He does not have that experience when He is in contact with the more cognitively based approaches to alcohol cessation.  There is magic afoot.  Wouldn't it be safer to put it all into the hands of some all-knowing "higher power?"  After all, are we not flawed and fallible -- and frankly, in need of some serious fixing?  How can we safely wield such power? 

Most often, I find that AA people suggest that they find the "higher power" is the group, the meeting, the rooms full of men and women working to become clean or sober and stay that way.  Whatever the force is that moves among them, they live in awe of it, grateful for its working in their lives, aware that, for them, it is a daily miracle.  Is it god?  Is it something else?  The answers come from people's own experience, couched in the language that makes the most sense to them.  It is whatever it is.  The magic works.

swan