Great post, Nicky, and thanks for officially opening the board to this type of discussion. I can't say I even believe in belief any more, because in sobriety I have learned to trust experience instead.

My own drunkalogue as a Christian and my experience with being "struck sober" are such that I can't begin to retell it in a way that validates any theological system that I know of. What have always gotten my attention most, though, are those highly improbable and apparently random coincidences when something happens outside myself that speaks directly to what's going on inside me, and especially if I'm confused and vulnerable when it happens and the rational boundary between inside and outside just evaporates. Here's the most compelling and, as it turns out, enduring such experience I can recall.

I'm what you could call a very low-bottom alcoholic. In the Fall of 1988 I was making six dollars an hour as a greenskeeper at a golf course, and winter was coming. I'd been evicted from five places to live in the previous year and a half. I wanted to stop drinking whenever I was dry-heaving, but twenty minutes later I was ready to start up again. By mid October I was living on unemployment in an unheated apartment with no electricity, waiting for the next eviction notice and drinking around the clock.

I couldn't stop and I wanted to die. But at the same time I was obsessed with the idea that if I died in that state of mind, I would only have to come right back and clean up the mess in another life. It was as if I could no more kill what "I" am than I can put the electric company out of business by turning off a lamp. In other words, death wouldn't be the end of the show at all, but merely a postponement of unfinished business. Prior to that, the whole notion of reincarnation was simply incomprehensible to me in any factual or doctrinal sense. But in the face of imminent death, it was as real as jug of Scotch.

Late that summer I got the idea that if I could reconnect with my lost faith, it might spark a real desire to stop for keeps. I bought the thousand-page edition of Thomas Merton's Collected Poetry, but it sat unread for months. Now Merton had been a huge influence on me when I was younger, so much so that in my twenties I spent five and a half dry years in his Order of monks, the Trappists, and left on January 6th, 1965. Finally, on Friday, January 6, 1989, I took my last drink and on Monday the 9th I checked into an AA drunk farm in Kent, CT. In my suitcase, just in case I got really bored, was the Merton poetry book.

Tom Steel, the director, turned me over to a staff member who showed me my room and told me to put the suitcase on the bed, explaining that they would rifle it for contraband during lunch. An hour later I was in a tiny non-sectarian chapel with forty two fellow gin lovers, where the only icons were the original black and white glossies of some of AA's pioneers. While he was speaking, Tom pulled a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and read from notes he'd made the night before. And as he spoke, I felt a strange new energy surge through my body, a sharp tingling sensation I've never had before or since, starting in the solar plexus and spreading out through the torso and into my arms and legs and lasting perhaps a minute.

For against what seemed incalculable odds, the man was quoting Thomas Merton. That apparently random coincidence was my first glimpse of what I call the mosaic or, even better, the tapestry-- one of those unpredictable moments when the frayed and irregular threads on the back of the fabric of our lives suddenly weave recognizable and meaningful shapes when you turn it around and look at it from the other side. It was the beginning of what Thomas Kuhn in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" called a paradigm shift, a compelling new perception of reality that simply dissolved the validity of my old assumptions about life, death and the limitations of the human experience.

That was a good post. I have found as a living example that out beliefs and traditions have been passed down from generation to generation. Be them right or be them wrong they seem to shape who we become. I like to think of it as "Ifs thats all you know, thats all you know" We are taught . We are not born with a belief system. When I found Alcoholics Anonymous my old belief system was replaced.
Greg

agree... strongly... and make no bones about it to women i sponsor

"Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations" Totally agree.

There are many things in my belief system that runs on being there instead of what others believed in only because that's what they were taught by someone else and religion and Christianity being a huge one. Like I believe this and so should you,not the I do things.

With this said I always keep an open mind and always seeking and searching.

Personality I was asked to not believe but to just take action and find out.

Whatever it has been all these years away from drink ,involved discipline coupled with observation of What goes on around me.

I like the analogy "the verdict is still out"on anything as long as I'm not applying and willing to become that which I wasn't for many years growing up.

So I'm really not to sure how this topic applies with out a real sense of wanting things to both change and become righted in real life Not on a internet thread :( Way to much to investigate or try and make sense of I've found until ones willing to challenge what they believe as nothing more than a escape from reality disguised as busy making!
Billy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0bNDvAG10o
Billy

I agree with everyone. I had a belief system when I was drinking, I just couldn't live up to it. Once I sobered up, the God deal was a real downer. God was irrelevant.

My concept of this higher power began to change as time went on and I experienced odd goings on that had nothing to do with me and I couldn't explain them away. Something was working in my life and changing me on the inside.

This took years for me to comprehend. The slow seeping of God into the soul of this sick alcoholic. Takes time for sure. Not an overnight deal. My sobriety has been totally experiential. Couldn't have read a book to learn it. Had to experience it.

I was just talking to a friend about my HP experience.

I grew up very comfortable with my HP that I called God and this was a very typical Christian sort of God. I believed most of what I learned and thought it was the right perception of my HP to help me get sober. But the problem was that I partly believed that this wanted me to struggle and figure out how to keep myself sober. For a LONG time, like 10 yrs, I thought my drinking was just a test of my will and that I could never really be worthy until got sober and started the life I believed my God wanted me to.

When I TRULY was defeated and resigned to the fact that I could not get sober and would just die drinking, something strange happened. All of the ideas I had about God just disappeared. In a way I guess I abandoned the thought because I did not feel worthy. I could no longer pray even. But then all of these undeniable miracles started happening and CAME TO BELIEVE in a power that was not me but was also nothing like I had ever imagined. I don't think it is a different God, but my perception changed. I have virtually no concept of this power. It is a mystery that I no longer question but cannot deny.

A few months into my sobriety I read We Agnostics for the first time and what I heard was all about having an open mind. What I learned was that I had boxed my HP into a place where it was unable to hep me. It was a form of denial that cracked at my point of desperation along with a lot of my other denials.

I could not get step 1 until I broke and then I HAD to get step 2 or I was dead. Step 2 just sorta happened - in my hopelessness I just thought MAYBE. It was like that story about stepping off the cliff thinking my life was ending and then realizing I could fly.

Good stuff.

A little story of what just happened to me yesterday. i was forwarded a link to a video of a co-worker and 6 other women who had gone to rwanda in 2010 to help villagers who survived the genocide massacre in 1994. it was a touching video and to see the gratitude for the simple things in their lives was astonishing.

i ran into the coworker who had participated and she gave me the whole story of how the trip came to be. i told her i would be interested in helping them out with their volunteer work.

i go back to my desk and i received an email from a local retreat house that they will be showing a documentary of a woman who survived the rwanda genocide. when i told my coworker about the "coincidence," she said even more of a coincidence is that the woman in the film is a good friend of one of the volunteers.

think i am being led in a certain direction? yeah, i would certainly say so. that was more than a tap on the shoulder. my coworker agreed. lol

pay attention. this stuff happens in our lives all the time if we are awake enough to see it. :)))