I thought my breakfast with Matt Andersen1 was really great.
Matt and I ended up talking a lot about prayer, his journey from atheism to finding a Higher Power and the importance of understanding the contours of that Higher Power, particularly in early sobriety. If you’d like a quick refresher:
While I’ve always believed in God, I’ve had a much harder time coming up with my conception of God. I spent a lot of time in Church growing up and I just could never wrap my head around the idea of God. At some level, the notion of God that I heard people talking about, a God who closed doors and opened windows, who took an interest in sporting events of all kinds and seemed not to mind being invoked in wars of all kinds and on all sides, even though the stance on killing has been pretty clear for a long time, well, that version of God didn’t make sense to me.
First, I saw significant logistical and bandwidth issues. I also had a very skeptical view of Santa Claus because that’s just a lot of work in a pretty limited window of time. What I really couldn’t wrap my head around was how a caring, loving omniscient God could let such terrible things happen to people who had done nothing to deserve it. When we prayed before basketball games in high school, I wondered whether we should be bothering God about a game we were very likely to lose when there was obviously a lot of more important work to be done elsewhere. An active God, who was constantly willing to intervene, put his/her/its’ thumb on the scale, just made no sense to me, because that meant God just wasn’t interested in doing anything to stop the bad stuff. That left me with a kind of science-y God, one who started the Universe and all of that, but left everything else to us.
During my own time in the wilderness2, the 40 years of drinking alcoholically, the last ten spent desperately trying to find a way out, I still had a relationship with God. I knew there was no hiding and I was pretty ashamed. I got the sense he was mostly sad and resigned and pretty disappointed it had turned out like this, which was what I thought, too. That time for me was marked by all of the things I couldn’t believe and one of those things was that God had a plan for me, that there was some purpose for my life, other than the witty, wine-intincted banter that came from my end of the bar.
My conception of God began changing when I moved here to New York. I had been living in an insane situation, about as far from being the person I was meant to be as was possible. When that finally, mercifully fractured and left me with very little in the way of options, that’s when God started showing up. That’s actually a pretty arrogant way for me to put it. What really happened was that when I shut up, when I stopped manufacturing all of those stories and resentments about how things were and how the world had treated me and what I was entitled to, God started to fill in the quiet moments. When I stopped and listened, really paid attention, I could sense God’s presence
What did that feel like? Mostly overwhelming emotion, followed by a sense of peace and the weird knowledge that things were going to be ok. I remember the first time I went to rehab, I was making calls and telling people that I was finally going away and I just couldn’t stop crying. A friend of mine said that’s how he knew when God was close—that overwhelming, unexplainable, cleansing emotion.3
Anyway, the other thing that started happening was that people started showing up in my life. I had moved to New York at the height of the pandemic. I didn’t really know anyone, I wasn’t working and people just began showing up. I started going to meetings, I got a sponsor, I started working the steps and reading the book. I stayed sober and celebrated one year of sobriety that October. That was the longest period of sobriety in my life since the 1970’s. I realized that wasn’t me, that was God. I mean it was me doing all of that stuff, but it was God leading me around and pointing out the next right thing. I had finally just taken the cotton out of my ears or the logs out of my eyes or whatever. The more I was quiet, the more I heard God.
I really identify very strongly with Bill W. I see a very similar crazy-idea-filled salesman who could persuade people of some pretty crazy-ass shit.4 People like that, people like me, well, we are also spectacularly talented at lying to ourselves. No one was going to talk Bill W. or me into sobriety. In fact, if you look at my first copy of the Big Book, I was definitely not going to let even Bill W. talk me into it.
The seeds of Bill’s spiritual transformation were planted in his kitchen by a good friend and huge alcoholic.5I find these few pages of the Big Book to be the most compelling and moving and it’s in those pages where I finally found the seeds of my own recovery. What hooked me was the way Bill reasoned his way into believing in God. In the same way that I had reasoned God out of my life, Bill used reason to make God inescapable:
But my friend sat before me, and he made the point-blank declaration that God had done for him what he could not do for himself…Like myself, he had admitted complete defeat. Then he had, in effect, been raised from the dead…Had this power originated in him? Obviously, it had not. There had been no more power in him than there was in me at that minute; and this was none at all.
Big Book, p. 11
Bill continues to fall all the way off the donkey:
That floored me…Here was something at work in a human heart which had done the impossible. My ideas about miracles were drastically revised right then. Never mind the musty past; here sat a miracle directly across the kitchen table. He shouted great tidings.
Big Book, p. 11
But even in this moment of enlightenment, Bill is not entirely comfortable with the idea of letting his pre-conceived notion of God take center stage. That last objection melts away when Ebby tells Bill, “Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?” Bill the salesman knows he can’t argue with that:
That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered for many years. I stood in the sunlight at last. It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make a beginning.
Big Book, p. 12
The Second Step is coming to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. I think that involves coming to an understanding of your Higher Power. One of the other realizations that has been important to my journey was finally understanding one of the things we said in Church every Sunday—the line in the standard Protestant liturgy about God passing all human understanding. I finally figured out that meant it’s not possible for me to understand or comprehend God and that waiting to believe until I had figured out the whole puzzle was a severely flawed strategy.
Instead of trying to come up with a comprehensive assessment of God, I focused on the things I thought God could do for and with me. Matt said pretty much the same thing when he talked about how he began praying while still an atheist. Prayer is simply an acknowledgment of the possibility of the existence of a Higher Power and that Higher Power’s ability to transform our own lives. I think we can believe our Higher Power into existence when we begin to enumerate the ways he/she/it can impact our lives. If you were to ask me for my understanding of God, well, the best I can do is to list some of the things I think I’ve learned as I let God into my life. This is my current list, it is highly incomplete, not backed by objective evidence and subject to revision at any time6:
God can and will listen to me
God can and will find ways for me to figure out when I’m wrong
God will put me in situations where I need to learn
God will not push too hard, but his hand is pretty firm
God will find a way to help me when I need it, but it may not be what I expected or wanted
God will let me know if things are going according to plan, but I may have to listen pretty hard
God will put people in my life unexpectedly and for reasons that aren’t always clear to me. They will leave in the same way.
God will not always show up when I think I need him
God will answer my prayers in unexpected ways
God plays the long game
God wants me to feel happy and be loved
God prefers if I stay busy7
God can have a pretty warped and inappropriate sense of humor
God likes/loves irony
God can be deliberately confusing
God has plans for me
God is understanding and willing to tolerate a fair amount of nonsense
God doesn’t give explicit instructions
God is very creative
God likes basketball, too
God likes it when I listen
I heard someone at a meeting say, “I found the power to stop drinking and I called that God.” That stuck with me for a while, but I have come to believe that God is actually way, way more powerful than that. God’s power in my life seems limited only by my own imagination. The more I believe God can do for me, well, more and more crazy stuff just seems to happen. As long as I didn’t believe God had a purpose for my life, I kept drinking.8 It was that simple. As I used to tell my kids when they were little: “If you don’t believe in Santa, where are the presents going to come from?”
Thanks for Letting Me Share
You can find Matt’s writing here:
I think one of the compelling themes in the Bible is the journey in the wilderness, demarcated in 40’s. Moses wanders the desert for 40 years; Noah floats atop a flooded world after 40 days and 40 nights of rain; Jesus spends 40 days fasting in the Wilderness.
If I was going to be really honest, I’d tell you that it still makes me cry to even write about that, seven years later.
Like reading a book can lead you to sobriety.
There are many passages in the Big Book that kill me, but this in Bill’s description of his friend: “There was that time we had chartered an airplane to complete a jag.” Chartering a plane in the 1930’s to keep drinking? That’s a real alcoholic.
It goes without saying that I’d be very interested in hearing about your conceptions of God.
This would make sense given his role in the Laws of Thermodynamics and such and bodies in motion staying in motion, etc.
Also, once you realize God has a purpose for your life, saying “no” gets tricky.
I’ll inconspicuously leave this here:
https://idiotspit.substack.com/p/an-atheist-walks-out-of-a-bar?r=1epxph&utm_medium=ios
In all seriousness, great deep dive into “working out the contours.” As a stubborn atheist, I’m afraid I’m ill-equipped (or just too ignorant) to speak to this in a meaningful way. Regardless, it’s such an important topic that many people need to read. So I’m glad you’re out here putting it so eloquently!
“To complete a jag” hahah. This honestly makes me want to re-read the Big Book. I see what you did there!!!