My sponsor is a methodist preacher. She always said that she feels that there is more spirituality in the rooms of AA than in the church. Something to do with desperation and gratitude I think might be the reason.

Agree that if you look the 12 steps dont offer anything new - they embrace the principles of all major spiritualities. i follow buddhism and it is so similar to the steps. The steps just lay things out in a simple way for alcoholics to come to a spiritual awakening.

Bob,

In theory, of course, most of us in in AA like to say we're spiritual but not religious. I'm still not sure where that line in the sand is exactly, especially when it comes full circle and gets trotted out as some sort of doctrine or dogma when sponsors and oldtimers get quoted like saints & popes.

One thing that continually amazes me is how certain spiritual principles keep popping up even when there is no direct communication, either spoken nor written. Here's undoubtedly one of the strangest and, to me as a former Catholic monk and committed 12 stepper for the last 22 years, most intriguing stories in the genre. It's about the apparently spontaneous, unwitting and random re-creation of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola by AA's cofounder, Bill W. The fact that American Protestants might be a bit reluctant to give credit to the Spanish founder of the Jesuits with his Counter-Reformation agenda-- well, that seems to go without saying:)

First, the story of the founder of the Jesuits, Igantius of Loyola:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_of_Loyola

Second, here is Bill Wilson's own account of the coincidence:

http://silkworth.net/ask_billw/Q&A23.html

History of the Exercises:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_Exercises_of_Ignatius_of_Loyola

A retrospective by Robert Fitzgerald, S.J. in the April, 1991 issue of "The Catholic Digest":

http://www.barefootsworld.net/aafreddowling.html

And a book;

http://www.amazon.com/12-Step-Approach-Spiritual-Exercises-Ignatius/dp/1580510086

Prayer of St. Ignatius:

"Receive, O Lord, all my liberty. Take my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. Whatsoever I have or possess Thou hast bestowed upon me; I give it all back to Thee and surrender it wholly to be governed by Thy Will. Give me love for Thee alone along with Thy grace, and I am rich enough and ask for nothing more."

Third step prayer (BB, p. 63) which was written prior to anyone in AA knowing about the coincidence:

"God, I offer myself to Thee-to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always!"

Bob, I don't know why or how that all works, but there's definitely something to a room full of people who have lived their own hell. For me, it's the camaraderie. The pain and desperation... the hope and laughter that binds us together. It's powerful.

Nemo, you would fit in well with my friends. They frequent St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Mass. I always get a jar of preserves when they return. lol

whos2ay,

You're not gonna believe this. Before I got down to any serious drinking in my late twenties, I was a Trappist monk from 1959 to 1965 at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, VA, which in turn had been founded by monks from St. Joseph's in Spencer, MA in 1950.

nemo my first sponsor was a monk in catholic church....he got out and broke down the door on the closet he had lived in...came out gay as could be...he now may not be alive I have lost contact lately he has HIV AIDS

bwf,

And they kicked me out for blowing the whistle on all that. Back in '02 my friends were flabbergasted because I was predicting what would happen next in Boston, and I tried to explain to them that I had already seen the playbook.

my older brother was a druggie and an alcoholic....and an atheist. he is my best friend........he mocked all programs and reliance of the hand of God. something clicked in his head...........he told me "while sitting in a bar waiting for his connection he saw a light"

that was 1993...........he went cold turkey on his own and has been clean since. he is still an atheist........

just a side note.....he was beating the hell out of my younger bro in backgammon..........my younger bro's only response? "there is a God" LMAO

just a reminder.....keep your eyes open.......images cross our path every day . the open eye is always humbled.

I want to barf when they read the 3rd step prayer!!

It just brings back memories of being beaten over the head with the bible for all those many years and how fake it all was.....bad kharma for me.

AA works for me IN SPITE of its "religious" overtones

I agree with ya poobear a lot of similarities but it works for me also despite them all. I don't say the lords prayer at the end of the meeting I did in the beginning but I felt hypocritical so I stopped,
or read the 24 hour a day book because of the overtones. .

There is a Jesuit practice called 'The Awareness Examen' it is very much like our inventory steps.

HOw it works? LOL. Is it working for you? THen work it baby. ;)

This is between you and God.

I don't say the prayer at the end either, gjm. I am just wondering how AA will work for me with all the spirituality. I am seriously thinking about not going anymore. I think I will go in this one last time on this Friday. Just to tell the people I have come to know, a simple good bye.

There's one huge difference between AA spirituality and any religion I can think of, and that's because in AA we quite insist that you need not consider anyone else's conception of God, and I have yet to meet a Jesuit OR a Protestant who isn't genuinely alarmed by that proposition.

Hi Nemo. Nice to meet you.

ExJG,

Here's part of my own story about all this.

My own drunkalogue as a former 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 somethng 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.

This is the passage that Tom Steel read to us that morning:

"At this point I am making a public renunciation, in my own name at least, of all tactical, clerical, apologetic designs upon the sincerity of your unbelief. . . I think this apology is demanded by the respect I have for my own faith. If I, as a Christian, believe that my first duty is to love and respect my fellow in his personal frailty and perplexity, in his own unique hazard and need for trust, then I think that the refusal to let him alone, to entrust him to God and his conscience, and the insistence on rejecting them as persons until they agree with me, is simply a sign that my own faith is inadequate.

"My own peculiar task in my Church and in my world has been that of the solitary explorer who, instead of jumping on all the latest bandwagons at once, is bound to search the existential depths of faith in its silences, its ambiguities, and in those certainties which lie deeper than the bottom of anxiety. In these depths there are no easy answers, no pat solutions to anything. It is a kind of submarine life in which faith sometimes mysteriously takes on the aspect of doubt, when, in fact, one has to doubt and reject conventional and superstitious surrogates that have taken the place of faith. On this level, the division between believer and unbeliever ceases to be so crystal clear. It is not that some are all right and others all wrong: all are bound to seek in honest perplexity. Everybody is an unbeliever more or less."

From "Apologies to an Unbeliever" by Thomas Merton, Harper's magazine, 1967.