Why Does Your Higher Power Look Like the Vice-Principal?

Sobriety and Choosing Your Religion

I’m grateful for being where I am. I’m grateful for an impromptu field trip. I’m grateful for a cloudless, sunny morning. I’m grateful when I’m able to see through other people’s eyes. I’m grateful for the people in my life. I’m grateful to have discovered my own frequency. I’m grateful to be sober today.

It being a beautiful day yesterday, I suggested to a certain sponsee that we conduct “class” outdoors and even volunteered to travel all the way to Union Square to facilitate things. I tried to figure out a way to involve the ferry in my transportation plans, but the timing just wasn’t going to work, so I was off to collect a quick coffee at the place on 84th Street that I’ve convinced myself is “on the way to the subway.”¹ It’s not. It’s not remotely “on the way,” as it entails a multi-block frolic and detour.

At some point, it occurred to me this was a remnant of the alcoholic thinking that used to undergird the whole show. Like finding a fossilized shark’s tooth at the beach, a very small reminder of a very big, bad thing. Maybe it’s helpful to think of alcoholic thinking as the old “operating system,” and the upgrade has been great and all, but sometimes you still open up a DOS window to run one of the old applications.² I was able to convince myself of some pretty monstrous things back in the day, I think that self-dishonesty (you could call it “delusional” but that seems judge-y) is pretty close to the core of addiction. Bill W. could see it all the way back in the 1930’s, when he noted that the folks who didn’t get better were the ones who lacked the capacity to be honest with themselves.

Self-delusion is a pretty complicated topic, I mean, I knew I was lying to myself and yet, I was okay with that. More than that, I was very, very willing to believe all that. I was definitely willing to eat my own dog food. I think the disease of addiction is somehow bound up in the thinking patterns that are spawned in this ego-centric, delusion-driven, alcoholic, bizarro world. Before I ladle more adjectives onto this, let me point this out, the most delusional, self-dishonest alcoholic in the world already has the seeds of recovery planted deep inside:

Faith and a Willingness to Believe

It’s actually more of a “hiding in plain sight” kind of thing. You see, I was willing to believe that my drinking wasn’t hurting anyone, that my drinking wasn’t really different than anyone else’s, that I could stop when it was actually time to stop, that people didn’t know that I was drinking mostly all day, that my life amounted to something more than just being a transitory alcohol collection vessel, that when people left, it was okay. Those are some stupid things to believe in. I was willing to believe them because they were part of the whole alcoholic system, foundational elements of the Jenga Tower of Me.

This is where the hidden genius of the Big Book kicks in. Bill saw it was about flipping his “willingness to believe” from the old system of lies and deceptions to a new world order, presided over by a Higher Power who possessed the strange and unique ability to restore alcoholics and addicts to sanity. For those who cling to the idea that AA is some crypto-religion, let me assure you this is not remotely close to what came from the Zion Lutheran Church pulpit at the 8am service.³ That’s why Bill identified the willingness to believe in such a higher power was the foundational element of sobriety.

It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning.

Big Book, p. 12

The trick is, believe in what? I had forty years of alcoholic drinking invested in the old belief system and to my way of thinking, “God” had been there pretty much the whole time and hadn’t seemed that interested in resolving things. That was maybe the biggest lie that I told myself and whole-heartedly believed. That there was a God who just didn’t care that much about how my life was going. I get there are plenty of much bigger problems, and frankly, some of those could use a little more attention, but it was the belief that I was alone in the Universe, responsible for my setting my own course, that spurred the alcoholic thinking that made necessary the alcoholic drinking.

The thing that set the hook in Bill W’s lip was that he got to choose the nature of this soul-restoring power. Once that happened, once he realized he didn’t have to believe in anyone else’s God, the enormous reserves of faith and belief that were formerly directed at the whole ego-centric, self-deceptive, self-enthralling operation were able to focus on the new Higher Power, the one that was intent on bringing meaning to life. The job was letting myself begin to see the outlines of that Higher Power, the one that could restore me to sanity. We just needed a little regime-change. The King is Dead. Long Live the King.

So, then the task is figuring out the details of this Higher Power. The one I’m now willing to believe might actually exist. A Higher Power that might actually exist enough to help me get and stay sober. That might even exist enough to help guide my life and will. The neat metaphysical trick buried in “Bill’s Story,” is turning the alcoholic’s cult-y worship of alcohol into a belief in a world where the point is finding a way to be of maximum service, not finding the quiet seat at the end of the bar.

I don’t think I need to keep convincing you that’s better. The question becomes, what is the nature of that Higher Power? For the life of me, if I’m given the choice of my conception of a Higher Power, why would I choose this?

I mean, isn’t that the conception many folks have of AA? Sit in those chairs, shut up, think about what you’ve done,

Maybe you’ll even learn a little about yourself, Mister.

If that works for you, then get to it. I finally found a slightly different route. This alcoholic was pretty good at making shit up,. And for a long time. I had an enormous capacity to believe, it was just horribly misdirected and deployed in service of a monstrous, self-destructive, probably moustache-wearing, regime. Sobriety just re-directs all of that energy and effort into a self-creative, light-strewn, generally kind of cool serenity factory. I’m not 100% who or what exactly presides over the enterprise. I’m not going to judge your conception of your Higher Power and if they communicate with you via birds, the position of the planets and stars, that’s all good. My Higher Power understands that it’s sometimes a challenge to break through the squeaking noise of the hamster-wheel going full-tilt, so the love-based he/she/it sends me messages via music, because they know I’m always listening to music. I’m even pretty sure my Higher Power makes a cameo appearance in this video:

Happy Friday. Remember:

Number one’s gonna be number one.

1. One of my BHAG’s for 2023 was to more fully integrate the NYC Ferry into my life.

2. I realize no one has actually done this with a computer since probably 2003, but that’s why it’s called “creative writing.”

3. I can’t speak to what happened at the maybe-heretical, vacation-like 10:30 am service. Maybe not Sodom, but Gomorrah?