by Elijah Lutz, Opinion Editor
My father is a recovering alcoholic. He is, as of this publication, 17 months and 15 days sober. He found his path to sobriety after a very long, arduous road of struggle and pain. Because of his addiction, I have become a para-alcoholic: someone at the side of an alcoholic. His addiction hurt me, my family and, most importantly, it hurt him. He needed a form of salvation, and it finally came for him in the form of Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA. Through AA, he has put his life back on track, our relationship is stronger than ever and he had a spiritual reawakening. I could not be any prouder to call myself his son.
It is that spiritual reawakening, though, that has admittedly intrigued me the most. For those who are unaware, AA is a very spiritual organization, though they take care not to identify with a particular religious entity. In the famous Twelve Steps, a heavy emphasis is placed upon the help that can be provided by God “as we understood Him.” There is a universal belief in AA that recovery is impossible unless one knows that help only comes from God as they understand Him, and they give themselves over to the plan He has for them. As I heard my father speak more about it, I wanted to know more.
I decided to ask him about his spirituality. He sat for a while and pondered, struggling to find the words he needed. “My relationship with God is hard to describe,” he said. “It’s pretty tough to describe something that isn’t human, isn’t physically present, but you know for a fact that it is present and influencing you.” His story began at the end of the last of five detox sessions, feeling “emotionally, psychologically and spiritually bankrupt.” He knew he was done drinking and that he needed direction. The following day, my father went to his randomly-selected therapist for the first time, who introduced himself as a recovering alcoholic. “And that is when I knew, you just don’t randomly get assigned [to] someone who is an alcoholic,” my father said. “Something else had a hand in it.”
Direction came at the second meeting of AA he attended; he understood that Step One meant that he could never EVER drink again. Then, he says, direction comes from Step Two: “I came to believe that a power greater than myself could return me to sanity.” He said that he struggled to identify what that power was. Having come from a Roman Catholic background, he said that his first instinct was to “know what God looked like, and identify the rules involved.” He said that this was an issue, combined with the fact that the several years prior to this, while drinking, his only prayer life was “foxhole praying: please God, I don’t want to die.” This bit of all take and no give did nothing for spiritual development.
Then it all came full circle. “It was God as I understand Him.” His understanding of God was far different now. It wasn’t the God he thought he knew, one that was about rules and feeling guilty when you did something wrong. It was something far simpler than that: it was just something greater than him. “I was devastated, and I needed help. Who could I ask for that? God. My heart was in love with alcohol, I needed to replace it with something, or else I would be empty! What else but God could fill that void. Something greater than me started my recovery; without it I would not be where I am, and I had to fully surrender to God in order to get there in the first place.”
My father went on to say that prayers have changed for him. “I have never once asked God to keep me sober, though he definitely has a hand in making sure I still am. Instead I pray for Him to stay close to me, to not hurt anyone and to recognize when I do so I can fix it.”
The point of this article isn’t to share my father’s story, though it is crucial to the theme. My point is to show that those of us who aren’t recovering alcoholics can take lessons in our faith from people like him. Those of us who don’t struggle with addiction or depravity don’t have such a keen understanding of the importance of God or faith. While I applaud those who fully surrender to God without any reason beyond just wanting to, many people find doing so difficult, myself included.
What is it that we are powerless over? Sin? Humanity? I could argue several different things, only to come to the conclusion that we are all powerless in general. Where do we get our power from? Who can help us when nobody else will or can? It is God, and it is how we understand him. At Asbury, that typically will come in the form of the Christian God, but for the sake of this article, the power can come from any form you think that God takes. It reminds me of a fact I was told my freshman year: “Nobody can define your faith but you and God.”
It also reminds me of my own spiritual awakening. God wants nothing more than to have a personal relationship with you; it is what he craves the most. Don’t let the rules blind you, don’t let the doctrines scare you away. God wants you, and he wants you to want him. Nothing short of that. After that, give into Him, give into others and give in less to yourself. “Being spiritual is an existence,” my father says, “and the focus is your relationship with God.”