Good Orderly Direction (pt.1).

There is the claim that, if not for the spiritual aspect of the program, Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, would've easily claimed a Nobel Prize. After all, at its inception, AA was found to be the only salvation for the incurable alcoholic, write offs of the medical community who had tried every scientific approach with these desperate and hopeless cases. While the CAMH's of the world are funded for their research into harm reduction and lofty intellectual, scientific and medical approaches, AA has kept millions of people sober using two basic principles: fellowship and spirituality.

When I entered treatment, I was a pretty self assured atheist.

I was born into a Roman Catholic family. We went to church, I attended a Catholic elementary school, I was baptised, went to catechism classes and got communicated. I opposed simply sitting in an uncomfortable pew while at St. Christopher's and actually marched down with the procession, Bible held aloft, and read from the gospels to the congregation. I made jokes with the priests and was even a participating member of the youth group.

As I got older, the repetition and lack of relevant daily application became more and more apparent and I slowly began to turn my back on the church. The more I learned about organised religion, the less purpose it seemed to have for me and I began to see it as a coping mechanism for the masses. The over-sized, angst ridden paintings I created for my final art project in high school were a final "fuck you" to simpler times. I had too many questions I felt were based in reality that religion simply couldn't answer. In University, a World Religions course just further emphasized my realisations: all religions followed similar paths, confused all to hell by human interpretations.

I said I was an atheist when I entered treatment, but what I actually labelled myself was an Absurdist Nihilist Humanist. Read: There was no point to life, you could do anything you wanted, but try to be a good person.

I was considered a real problem case in treatment because of my intelligence. AA is a very simple program and I still wanted answers to all of my questions. I wanted things based in fact, science, medicine -- what I really wanted was a way out, but I didn't realise that at the time.

In AA they use the term "God", but they expand it to say "a God of your understanding". This is also termed "a higher power". They tell you that you must be willing to turn your life and your will over to your higher power because sobriety is not a thing you can achieve under your own will power. It's akin to telling a diabetic to use his will power to process sugar or yelling at a cancer patient to stop being such a wimp. Trying to shame an alcoholic or addict to stop using simply doesn't work.

Here's a condensed version of how I began to embrace the spiritual side of the program:

"You're a pretty smart guy, huh?"
"Yeah!"
"So, you have irrefutable proof that God doesn't exist then?"
"... well, no."
"Okay, so you're not atheist, you're agnostic."

Pft, whatever, semantics.

"Do you have a conscience?"
"Yes."
"And your conscience knows the difference between 'right' and 'wrong'?"
"I guess so."
"Can you ever fool your conscience into thinking that doing something wrong is actually right?"
"Uh, no, I guess not..."

This is where I started. Using my conscience as a "higher power starting point", I was asked to list out the ideal attributes of my higher power.

My list included:

Love, compassion, humility, honesty...

When I was done, I was told to do my best to be like my fictional higher power. That was it. Did I want to be those things?

"Yeah, I guess so..."

And what if you find it hard to be those things, what can you do?

"I dunno."

Pray.

Well...  shit. Now there's a sticking point. But I'll talk about prayer later.

So, I'm working on this. To be honest, it's kind of nice to have your own personal "God-In-My-Pocket" on your side. Most people in the program still have difficulty with their higher power, describing it, understanding it, but they do credit their sobriety to it and right now I'm willing to do almost anything to feel at peace in my own head.

So, call it God, Good Orderly Direction, Great Out Doors, a Higher Power, your conscience or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I need to keep working on my own understanding because it has worked, undoubtedly worked, for so many who came before me.