step two two-step

My first 12-Step program was Al-Anon, which I went to because a male nurse I knew told me I needed it.  I was, after all, married to an alcoholic.  But he warned me that I should understand that 12-step programs are spiritually based.  Step Two says, “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”  He said that a lot of people call their Higher Power “God” and here in the South, “Jesus.”

“You don’t have to believe in God,” he told me.  “Your Higher Power can be that Coke machine over there.  When they talk about their God, you have to listen with respect and not argue with them.  But by the same token, when you talk about your Coke machine, they have to give you the same courtesy.”

My kind of group, I thought.

But the first time I went to Al-Anon, I wasn’t thinking about God or anything theoretical.  I was thinking about what a failure I was.  I had sunk so low that I needed this meeting in a run-down house in a room with chairs pushed around card tables and a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling, like in the movies.  I saw a woman I knew and hated.  She saw me and patted the empty chair beside her.  I sat down, and to my chagrin, cried through the whole meeting.  She just patted my knee and told me I’d be all right.

I cried some in the second meeting, but after a while, I began to have some hope.  Going to that meeting became my respite from the week.  No one told me what I should do or feel. They said, “We’re glad you’re here.”

I felt the love and camaraderie.  But after a while, I realized that people were saying things abhorrent to me.   I’d hear women talk about the bullying or unkind ways their alcoholic husbands treated them and then say, “I guess that’s just God’s will for my life.”  I wasn’t allowed to set them straight.  I felt the God cooties crawling all over me.

I sought out a Unitarian minister.  I told her I didn’t believe in God, but I believed the love in that room.  She laughed.

“It’s all semantics,” she said.  “When they say, ‘accept God’s will for my life,’ you translate that as ‘accept what is.’ And when they talk about God, you think of Nature or anything you love that is bigger than you are.”

I wish I could find that woman and thank her for the gift she gave me.  Her rephraising let me stay in Al-Anon and absorb its gentle wisdom.  I saw a book at Parnassus the other day called The Zen of Therapy: Finding the Hidden Kindness in Life.  Al-Anon taught me how to search for kindness and to believe in goodness.  I came to see that there are no words to describe what love and acceptance feel like, and no explanation of Life that makes any sense to me.  I now think that all religions are languages trying to describe the Unknowable and that religious practices are ways of seeking.

In writing, the trick is to let go of the words that get in the way.  In life, the trick is to learn to trust without worrying about the words.