Alcoholism Support Group

ABeliever,

Back in the Dark Ages of 1988 when I was still drinking between AA meetings, I once heard a lady speak on the occasion of her 18th anniversary of continuous sobriety. She told how she had first come into the fellowship shortly after moving to Boston, and with her gin-soaked brain, she thought she heard the people saying that they all had faith in some spook they called Hyapowah. She concluded that these people were praying to a Native American princess or goddess named Hyapowah, and were obviously more than a little cracked.

She had been raised in a Christian home, she reasoned, so if she was going to start praying again she was going to do it to the proper & duly appointed recipients of such entreaties or not at all. But after one more devastating bender she was finally desperate to stop drinking, and that desire overrode all of her theological misgivings. So one night she started praying to Hyapowah, and her compulsion to drink promptly vanished and had never returned. A week or two later, she explained, her head had cleared up enough to realize that they were saying "Higher Power."

I resemble her remarks, because before I got down to any serious drinking in my late 20s, I had already spent five and half dry years as a monk in a Catholic order called the Trappists. For reasons I won't go into in detail here, that was a jarring and permanently disillusioning experience because it gave me a rare, firsthand glimpse into the hardball politics of scripture authentication.

Last January, I in turn celebrated 20 years of continuous and happy sobriety, and Hyapowah still works for me.

I find it interesting to understand how people find their own concept of God.

I never had a religious upbringing and I just wasn't sure if there was a God or not. Finding faith, to me, was a walk through a lot of fear. Fear like knowing I have committed many sins, fear that I was not good enough for God to want to take any notice of me, anger that bad things had happened and God didn't seem to care.

I had a big axe to grind against religion and was surprised to see how strong it was when I did Step 4. My sponsor pointed me to that part in the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous where it states "Be quick to see where religious people are right."

Anyway, my journey through the Steps took me to a point where I was able to challenge the negative, deluded thinking in this area and one of the Step 9 amends I made was to go and speak with a religious minister. I still don't follow a religion but now I never say never.

I realised that I had been practising what the Big Book refers to as "contempt prior to investigation."

Imagine a substance that runs through all things-call it life.

Imagine experiencing life.

What is it that stops us from experiencing life?

"It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or other it is there." BB pg. 55

"He was as much a fact as we were" BB pg 55.

"I meant to ask, who or what is your higher power then? "

It's kind of cool to see what others believe. Even the NOT believing is belief in itself. I for one cannot condemn or be upset at someone that doesn't know what I do. I BELIEVE. I too have proof of what I believe and am more than willing to share that. If someone asks.

Everyone here believes in something. The only thing I will argue against is using a doorknob for your HP. They turn on everybody.