The Higher Power Business You Can’t Ignore Forever – 1964 – Karen T.

My name is Karen Tinsley, and the group meetings that I usually attend are at Elmwood Park, although this is just barely on the other side of Harlem Avenue in Chicago, as perhaps most of you know. Although I think of this particular talk as a leaning toward completion, perhaps I might also add that you may want to call it Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear To Tread. because this is concerned with the spirituality of the AA program. So I want to say that these opinions are mine and not necessarily binding on the management and also that what we don't understand in AA we don' t worry about. I know that each person's reaction is unique to every part of this program but when I first came to AA any talk that I heard about spiritual things made me a little bit fidgety I know that I confused the words spiritual and religious and thought that this was going to be about supernatural stuff and maybe religion and perhaps even swing low sweet chariots sung by a barbershop quartet and I had very long and successfully avoided discussions on religion and also the people who seemed hell-bent sometimes to make me either agree to what they said or get into an argument about it. My prejudice was quite unreasonable, and it wasn't based on anything in particular that I recall. I do remember that early in my AA association, one of the pieces of AA literature that I came across mentioned that this is essentially a program of conversion. And I thought, aha, I will never give that piece of literature to anyone that I work with because I was allergic to the word conversion. And later on, of course, I came to understand that conversion simply means change. Many people in or out of AA, I do believe, confuse the words spiritual and religious and think they mean the same thing. so I am actually just trying to define the word spiritual as I understand it and also maybe to take a look at how and why spiritual principles are of some interest in this program of ours which is aimed at helping us to recover from the things which made us drink I was very relieved at the start to find out that AA is not for nor is it against any organized religion it seemed that the AA members didn't care whether I went to a church or whether I didn't but they did suggest that it might be of help for me to stir up a little belief in something especially myself and they did imply that alcoholism is a deadly serious business and that if I wanted to live and do well I should employ any power in the universe that I could bring to bear on my own particular problem but you know you aren't around AA meetings very long before you run into these references about a power greater than ourselves and God as we understand him I didn't really understand God at all when I came to AA and if a person wants to take all the 12 steps of this program to heart and make use of them every day, there is this higher power business that you just can't ignore forever. You're so bound to think about it. For many years I had simply given no thought to anything of this kind. Oh now and then I used to claim that I was agnostic because that sounded nice and broad minded I thought because as I understood agnosticism these people simply said I don't know and this seemed to be a safe approach and it also left room for you to jump in either direction as the situation might indicate now one of the very common factors that came out in a Yale research questionnaire that was answered by 5,000 AA members several years ago was this. Most of us desert our early training along religious or spiritual lines very early in our adolescent years. Now, this is not exclusively an alcoholic tendency by no means because just about every child goes through the same process. It just seems to last longer with some of us than with others. Maybe it starts when we begin to rebel with authority or when we find out that Papa isn't Santa Claus after all. Or maybe it begins when we can't understand adult ideas and aren't yet capable of thinking through our own. It might seem a little far-fetched, and I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but I had to go back and review my 12- or 14-year-old ideas to make any beginning toward a concept of God as we understand him. because that's when I had stopped thinking about him at all I even felt guilty when I said the word God I sort of expected the scars to fall down or that I would be punished for my neglect or something like that I don't see anything wrong with reappraising our own beliefs from time to time in fact it seems to me that we should just to make sure that they have grown along with us now I want to make it very clear that this must not be interpreted to mean that I am suggesting that a person switch from their own religion to another this is not what I have in mind at all it has nothing to do with it I am speaking of the spiritual beliefs that we live by or die by thinking on these things is something I would just as soon not have done but up in St. Paul, Minnesota where I got into AA we had beginners discussions and when a new person came to the organization they went to about four meetings one each week and they were divided into the usual four sections of the program you know, the admission that you are an alcoholic and inventory and restitution and then a program on the spiritual aspects of AA and went on 12-step work, excuse me, helping other people. And the girl who had conducted the spiritual program the third week in this beginner's session was going to have a baby. And so she had to stop temporarily coming to AA meetings and they asked her if she would suggest someone to take over this job and for pity's sake she recommended me. now why this is so I have no idea because I was certainly the least spiritual minded person in the whole organization up there in St. Paul but anyhow because of Margaret's baby I was recommended to present the spiritual aspects of the AA program so really it was an act of God you know if you want to look at it that way and I told a fellow who was in charge of this thing that I would think about it and he said you do some reading and some thinking and let us know when you are ready. And I started to do that and it wound up being the most delightful adventure, I guess you might say, of my entire life, certainly of my whole life. Of my entire AA association. All I started out with was a line in the big book that said even the willingness to believe is enough to start on. And that's all I started with because what the greater power was or why it worked these miracles of sobriety in the lives of people who had been able to do nothing up to that time. I didn't know then, and I don't know now. So I simply decided that I would accept this whole business on a sort of a watchful-face basis and just wait for developments. The very first AA meeting that I attended discussed Step 2, in which it says we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. I listened to the talk as we went around the room that night and it didn't make a great deal of sense to me but something I had read years before seemed to come to life in my mind that night every cloud feels a stir of might an instinct within it that reaches and towers and groping blindly above it for light it climbs to a soul in grass and flowers and you know I said that little bit of poetry right out loud at the first AA meeting I ever attended, and I have an idea that the old-timers there wouldn't have given you two cents for my chances of making the program. The very idea, Johnny come lately, speaking up at the First Meeting and reciting poetry yet. I know they worried about me, and probably got on several prayer lists that night because of this. But you see, I didn't know that reading or reciting poetry might interfere with my understanding of the program, so I just kept on coming to the meetings anyhow. But if I remember rightly, it was pretty close to six months before I could use the word God without half choking to death. Yet this seemed to be the one word that I must learn to use because it was the only thing that seemed to express what I had in mind. I think my interim higher power, if you want to call it that, was, as perhaps many of yours was, the faith of my first group that I would be able to get a grasp on sobriety through the program if I wanted to. Well, set three came along and this didn't bother me too much. Someone explained that if the word God was a troublesome thing to me at this stage in my development, that I could just think of it as turning my will and my life over to the care of good. Well, I didn't find this very satisfactory for my purposes. It just didn't ring a bell for me. And a great deal later, I heard something that did seem to help a little bit. Someone said, why not think of the letters G-O-D as meaning good orderly direction? Now, this made a little more sense to me and it was a help. Step six in the program was getting pretty close to brass tacks, I felt, because here you were ready to declare that you were ready to have your defects of character removed. But hold on there, I'd say, to whatever it was that was going to swing into action. I haven't said go ahead yet. So it was really Step 7 that got me down to business. Step 7 reads, humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings and this is it. This means business. I worried a very great deal over what was going to happen to me after I said, go ahead. Was I going to lose my ability to become angry? Would I just sit in the corner with my hands folded and become a hymn singer? In all the mental turmoil that I put myself through, a very illuminating idea was presented to me some member said you know what you think God is or is not doesn't really matter too awfully much because your ideas about God neither change nor do they establish the nature of God your ideas and thinking only change and establish the Nature of You and someone else said we really, none of us ever reject God the things that we reject are our own inadequate concepts and these things helped me tremendously they all made some sense now thinking about God as the deity as the creator as the first cause or the over soul or whatever you prefer to call him is just one facet of spiritual considerations. So I'm still a little bit puzzled when I hear members say they don't get the spiritual side of the program, they don' t understand the spiritual angle of the program because this makes it sound like there's only one special thing and it means the same to everybody and I don't believe this is so. There are many sides and many angles, and I would like to suggest one. And this is learning to live in sobriety. I consider this a highly spiritual endeavor. Everyone has a higher power of some sort at all times, although most of us have to look around inside and find out what we really do value the most, and ask ourselves perhaps, what throne am I worshipping at today? Because there are times in some of our lives when money and the accumulation of things seems to represent God to some of us. Public opinion or what others will say, this can be a God to some OF US. Alcohol becomes a God to SOME OF US, I am sure that it was at one time for me, because this was the thing that I valued the most highly, and it conferred some very special and unique blessings that I could find nowhere else. Each person has a central core from which his thinking and behavior radiate, something which permeates every thought and activity. And my life was bottle-centered for a great many years because alcohol had become, for me, the need of the moment. It represented most of the past that I can remember and I was well on the way to having it become all of a rather limited future. Self-examination of the fearless and searching variety, I think, has to come before some of us can make any kind of satisfactory concept for ourselves of God as I understand him. At least it was so for me. First, I had to understand powerlessness and thinking about drinking actually helped to clear that up about as much as anything because I came to the realization that I never actually got plastered once in my life all by myself because someone had to first plant the grain and the earth had to nourish it and the sun had to help it grow and then it got harvested and distilled and bottles were made and it was stuck in the bottles and shipped to the markets and all I did was take the result of this considerable effort on the part of many other people and pour it down my gut so I really never got drunk by myself I depended on a lot of people to help me even do that nor had I any power over alcohol once it was inside of me this I recognized very early in my life although I wouldn't admit it out loud and finally this admission of powerlessness over the effects and the intake of alcohol was a wedge that started to open what had become a very closed mind because it's rather a difficult admission for a person who has always considered herself highly sufficient to say they are powerless over anything it represented a revolution in thinking a conversion if you will now it's fairly easy for most of us I think to accept the idea that there are unseen forces at work in this universe maybe putting the stars in place at night and also seeing the sun gets up on time in the morning I even took off on a short spell reading something about the size of the universe just to get a little better perspective of things and I came across one calculation I thought was rather interesting supposing you were going on a train that was running at the rate of 60 miles an hour and you took off from the earth at that speed into outer space how long do you think it would take you to reach the nearest star not planet star well I'll tell you the answer so you won't have to figure it out it would be it would probably take you 40,000 years and this is a long time it's an awfully big world isn't it And of course we read nowadays that all the elements and matter are arrangements of these atoms and neutrons, electrons, protons, things like that. I don't really know what I'm talking about when I even mention these things because I'm remarkably ignorant on these subjects. but I do read a little bit about them and I hear that our world is maybe 1500 million years old gee now these things helped me in a way because I could relate them to myself and it made me seem quite small this was a help to me but I suppose each one of us has stepped outside our own back door and marveled at some exquisite creation of nature perhaps a red rose And, well, we should marvel at things like this. I don't know of anything that makes you feel more humble than to look at a perfect flower. And I don' t think most of us have marveled nearly enough at the most complex creation of them all, human beings. Because we are certainly a fantastic collection of nature's very best wonders and mechanisms. and perhaps we even deserve to give a little bit of care to this miracle of life and the structure that houses it. By even rather shallow observation, I think most of us see that there are at least three sides to human nature. We see the bodily aspect. We apprehend the evidence of mental processes which include our ability to think and remember and we can also find the evidence of our spiritual nature if we know how to look for it. And it can be explained very simply by saying these are our finer qualities. Now normally a person develops more or less equally in these three areas through experience and handling the problems of living because these compartments aren't boxed off individually, they're all related, they all affect one another. But any potential that we have must be used if it is going to remain alive and if it is going To develop. But it is our choice, our free will choice, to ignore any potential if we want to do that. Through the higher planes of consciousness we experience emotions and feelings that are sometimes beyond the realm of logic and reasoning, and which we find very difficult to put into words. We all have had flashes of inspiration and of insight, and these are things that we perceive spiritually, the things we sense and feel but can't point to. All of us have are many spiritual resources, character building blocks that can be expanded and developed if we choose to do so. Like the inner urges that lift us up and exalt us and make us want to be a little better today than we were yesterday. We can all consciously cultivate enthusiasm and zest for life. We have potentialities for tolerance and charity and for honor and honesty and for loving kindness and integrity and sincerity and truthfulness. And all of these things are spiritual qualities. They are things of the spirit. You can't point to a single one, but you recognize their existence in yourself and every person that you meet. And we can begin their cultivation through this moral inventory wherein we list the things that we have and the things that we don't have so the first step much to my surprise turned out to be a very large part of the spiritual section of the AA program too because I recognize the need to develop qualities that are good or you may call them godlike if you prefer and the urge to do this as I see it is an action of the creator upon that which he has created. And if we respond to this urge, we begin to use these qualities. We begin to use them in broad daylight because it isn't enough just to say that we want them. Like it says in our AA big book, we must be willing to grow along spiritual lines. We alcoholics have an awful lot of things in common besides just the problems of excessive drinking. We all hope to find a way back to or maybe forward to some personal attainments that we have misplaced or lost, or maybe we never had them to begin with. At some time or another, probably every one of us has wondered and we should wonder just what do we want out of life anyhow? And if anyone has asked you that question or you have asked yourself that question, it's dollars to donuts. One of the things on your list, and mine too, is peace of mind. Or maybe you'd like to have a restoration of self-confidence and self-respect maybe you would like to be free from this host of nameless fears that plagues us as practicing alcoholics or maybe the need is to know that we are here for some purpose these are all spiritual aims things we sense and feel but can't point to and if the prayers we have been following the beliefs we have lived by or nearly died by aren't giving us what we want out of life why not change our beliefs and find another path and again I must remind you this has no reference to denomination or religion although all religions are assuredly spiritual all spirituality is not necessarily religious well how do you begin to do these things especially if you are an alcoholic like me who hasn't given any thought to this sort of thing for, lo, these 20 or 30 years. Well, it just seems that things come to you when you need them, when you want them, and you express the desire. Because a sentence started to haunt my mind, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. And when I first began to say this over to myself, I would actually walk along the street and look up at the tops of the buildings and try it sometime. You'll find there's an awful lot of very fine artwork on the top of buildings, and most of us really never see it at all. This is a very serious suggestion. Now, at the place where I worked, there was a long bank of windows sitting alongside my desk. And when I felt that I needed a little quiet time, usually to keep my mouth shut until I had a chance to think what it was I really wanted to say, I would cultivate the habit of delaying speech just a fraction of a second by glancing out this window and letting the words run through my mind I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my strength I know now that these quiet times that we have are a form of prayer a brief retiring from the world not to stay out of the world but to get the strength to come back and live in it properly and there are times too when the world of an alcoholic seems just filled with alcohol and this is another word for trouble for us so I must lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my strength it comes from God a person might reasonably wonder why do you direct yourself along these lines all you have to do is just not drink, isn't it? Yeah, I guess that's all you have to do if that solves all your problems. It didn't solve all mine. It just temporarily shelled the problem of drinking and gave me a chance to see what other ones there were there. And I found several and I knew that I had to come to terms with those problems because trying to get away from them had been ways of justifying drinking bouts for me. So you wonder why you direct yourself along these lines. Well, consider that once upon a time alcohol was our dearest companion before it started the old double cross. Once upon a time most of us could choose how much we would drink or when we would drink. But came the day though when alcohol took possession of us and our efforts to remain in command were of little or no avail. And eventually we came to know, one way or another, that we were alcoholic and by the time we found this out, we were addicted. Because this is the way the disease works. And whether you're ignorant of it or not, it doesn't excuse you from suffering the consequences they're built in. So comes now the decision what do you propose to do about this? And a choice has to be made at this point when you know you're an alcoholic because this is a fence that you can't sit on too long. You can continue to take it for as long as mind and body will hold together or you can set about learning how to leave it alone if you're lucky with the help of AA. But you have to make a choice because you can' t have both. And coming to AA means that we want to abandon alcohol and so we call into active operation the only power we have which has not been sacrificed to alcohol. Because alcohol has us licked physically, we can no longer take it. And alcohol had us licks mentally, we could no longer leave it alone. But as long as hope and a tiny flicker of faith can be found, alcohol does not have us lick spiritually. So in my case at least, this long-neglected force had to be called into the fight against alcohol. I had no other power to use against it. When we are able to take a clear-headed look at what we have become as practicing alcoholics, I think most of us know that there are other habits besides just the drinking that are going to have to go. And we must find habits to replace these things. maybe we even find a desire to want to become regular citizens of the world again and if that's the case we had better take a look at what makes a regular citizen of the word because like attracts like and if we want to reap a few spiritual rewards like peace of mind and self respect and the respect of our fellow men we had best learn a little something about this growth in the spiritual realm because it's the only place these things will be found. For too long we broadcast the seeds of chaos in our life and expected to be repaid with serenity, and the crop just doesn't come up that way. I had worried so much about becoming a pious hymn singer if I declared I was going to turn my life over to God, and after a while it occurred to me that if God had all this power I suspected him of having enough to change me all around if he so chose gee, he could have saved himself a lot of trouble and made us all like peas in the pod to begin with couldn't he have? So I decided then it was a pretty safe assumption that I would be able to retain my precious positive personality since that had been allotted to me to begin with although it wouldn't do any harm to prune it and cultivate it a little so it seems essential to me anyhow that we must get a true picture of what we really are and then try to be that. For this is the most direct path toward being at peace with yourself and your surroundings when you so live that your inner thoughts and desires are smoothly and naturally translated into your outer behavior and actions. And then a person is truly at home in this universe in his own tiny little spot knowing that you don't have to be indeed you can't really be any better or any worse than anyone else in the world this is not what God requires of you he made you as you are so that you can be yourself and this gives us serenity and security and it equips the person to get up and set about the matter of living once again because now you have something unique to offer for life and it is only yours to give your very own self. Someone wrote one time that in growing up we go through three stages which might be described this way as little children our attitude says to the world I'm rather weak and helpless and you had better help me and then we grow into adolescence and we get real defensive and we find ourselves a large sized chip for our shoulder and our attitude says to the world very plainly I don't need any help from anyone and no one is going to tell me how to run my life now if a person progresses normally he should enter the adult stage where his attitude says to the world what can I do to help you? And he has realized at this point that all lives are made up of sorrows and of blessings none of us exempt from either. And he is realized that people are set together in the family of man to help one another share their burdens and enjoy the pleasures that come to us. In our alcoholic thinking, some of us may have overstayed ourselves a little bit in the adolescent stage, continuing to say that we didn't need help from anybody and nobody was going to tell us how to run our lives until finally it became crystal clear that nobody could tell us how to running our lives not even ourselves I don't think we need to feel ashamed of backtracking a little bit and once again saying please help me I can do nothing by myself the chances are that more than any once you or I appealed to someone somewhere to get us out of a mess we were in maybe in the depths of a hangover when we were scared of living and feared of dying we called for help and help came. We are here, aren't we? So now with a few sober days as evidence that we intend to put something into this project we try to be big enough or little enough to ask for help and guidance while we are in a condition to recognize it and use it. I think most of us have cherished the heritage and the birthright of independence that goes with being an American citizen or we more or less tolerated the disciplines of going to school and of being told what to do or what not to do for a few years but came the day, boy when we were on our own masters of our fate captains of our destiny and if you were like me you proceeded to give a lengthy and dramatic demonstration of total inability to manage the one thing I had been given to manage myself. But the things that happen to us aren't really too important, are they? It's how we permit them to affect us. We can learn from them or we can be defeated from them. We have the choice. I don't understand the nature of things or the workings of God in this endeavor of AA but I don't have to understand things to use them any more than I have to understand electricity before I'm able to go over there and push a switch and get a light offer on I don' t have to understand electricity or gravitation these are just natural things that are here that people use without understanding actually they aren't understood by anybody I think for too long a time maybe some of us have had the peculiar notion that science understands the why of things and is simply withholding information from us, the folks. And this is not true. Science only describes and seeks to understand the how of things. It is given to no man in this universe to understand the why of any single thing that happens. Not yet. So I no longer attempt to explain the unexplainable, although once upon a time I did. All I really know is that I am alive and with a certain amount of time to use as I choose to use it and that each day actually can be an exploration of new tangents of thought provided I keep my mind and senses in order and provided I keep my spiritual antenna unfurled and provided I hold myself receptive to learning because I realize that the sources of learning are all about us and sometimes they are so obvious and so common that I don't see them at all to me AA is a wonderful example of exactly this look at AA for years being here ready and waiting for me even before I knew that I was going to need it. Might it not also be that every other need of ours is already similarly met, just waiting our recognition of it and our humbleness to accept the answer that we get? I think so because I believe there is a constantly available source of inspiration and strength in operation here and now and underlying and explaining it all is for me the idea of a creator who is interested in me not just my religion or lack of it I have a desire for completeness and the idea of God as loving father and patient teacher fills in for me the missing spot in my life but no one needs to take my word for this actually you can't take my words for this you have to be sufficiently curious to find out for yourself and then it will mean a little something have you ever looked down stretch of railroad track and seen the tracks come together in the distance they don't really do they but it looks like they do they tell us the sun whirls around our planet and we are going around in space but we have no sensation of speed I take their word for it this must be true how much can we actually believe I wonder of just the evidence of our eyes supposing I were to say to you that you are invisible to me would you think I had lost a few buttons I can't see the real you what do I know of your hopes and your dreams and your aspirations and your ideals and those things are the motivating real you and the vast unseen world in which you live and move and have your being we are all much more than two thirds submerged like icebergs I feel very grateful for this wider world that has been given to me more or less on a platter because of AA and I am glad to have the inner assurance that God and I together can do more than either one of us can apart and it's really a lot of help to know that if I fail at what I am doing now at least it will be failing at trying to do what I ought to be doing I believe this just about brings me to the end of the sermon if you want to call it that I hope you haven't really found it to be that and that I have offended no one with my thinking on these things because it surely was not meant to be back way but just because I want that I would like to say God bless you all thank you