The God Stuff: Rewriting the Twelve Steps

For anyone who knows or doesn't know, I've been a Friend of Bill W. since August of last year, and I have over seven months of sobriety under my belt. It's common knowledge that Alcoholics Anonymous follows twelve steps and twelve traditions, which can be easily googled. The Big Book and its precepts have saved many a life, and I take my hat off to Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob for creating this program of recovery.

However, I'm having trouble with what is commonly known as The God Stuff.

These are the original twelve steps as published by Alcoholics Anonymous:^[10]

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

First, a disclaimer: The Eleventh Tradition states: When dealing with the media, the traditions of the 12 step programs request that members maintain anonymity, not so much for their protection, but for the good of the fellowship as a whole.

Tradition 11: Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.

Nowadays, people in recovery are outing themselves left and right, which is thought to be in violation of this tradition. The subject of disclosing one's AA recovery program has come under discussion many times during the 7+ months I've sat around the tables. While I agree that tabloid sensationalism is inappropriate, I have no problem with letting people know I am a recovering alcoholic. I don't blast it all over Facebook and I certainly don't "advertise" the program to people; rather, I try to walk the walk every day of my life and let that be living testimony to the power of recovery. It goes without saying that I honor the anonymity of any person who is in recovery; to do otherwise would be a grave violation of what we call "practicing these principles in all our affairs."

However, I am having trouble with Step Three. The language gets under my craw. First, I want to make this abundantly clear:

1. I am not an atheist and I am not an agnostic.
2. I believe that there is a Holy Spirit that "passeth all understanding," and my mind is open to the promptings of the Spirit.
3. I don't think God is a man, and I don't think God is a woman. I don't believe that you can assign a gender to God because God doesn't have a body.
4. I have become increasingly bothered by hearing both men and women constantly referring to God as "he" and "him." I cannot do this.

I realize it's a semantic problem; we don't have a gender-neutral pronoun unless you use "it." I also realize that it isn't the purpose of AA to sit around the table and debate theology. We are drunks, and we there for the whole purpose of maintaining our sobriety and helping others do the same. I accept that we say the Lord's Prayer at the end, which begins with "Our Father." And when Bill W. and Dr. Bob wrote the book, they used language that would be commonly understood in order to reach as many alcoholics as possible.

I've been mulling over the God issue for a long time, and I went so far as to go to Catholic priest to discuss the topic. He told me that many groups get around the gender issue by saying, to themselves, "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood GOD."

In talking with this priest, I had a semi-spiritual awakening--hearing a phrase I thought I could accept. I walked away feeling as if my Third Step issue was resolved. It was only when I got home later that I discovered the problem:

• How can we say we understand God?
• How can we use a cognitive verb when discussing our concept of God?

Therefore, I have rewritten the Third Step for myself:

"Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we experience God."
 
There are those who are fondly known as "Big Book Thumpers" who would disapprove of this. There are those who insist we must take the entire book as is, with no changes, and that we should "keep it simple" and "don't analyze." I'm sorry. I can't do this. I am analytical. God as I experience God gave me an analytical brain. And I can't accept an entire philosophy as written without discussion, debate, analysis and questioning. If this means I take a cafeteria approach to AA, so be it. Because one of the other slogans we have is "Live and let live."