On June 23 of next year, I’ll be celebrating 23 years in 12 Step recovery (with gratitude for many more to come).

In this series of 12 monthly reflections on the core teachings of the 12 Steps for the SoCal Illuman newsletter, I will have the humble honor to invite you, all my beautiful brothers, to explore the path of recovery with me. Recovering, yes for some of us, from a named addiction; but, surely, for all of us in ways large and small, recovering from the “core addiction of control.”

Today I’m not only accepting of, but also am deeply grateful for, my addiction. 

Not only for its rigorous reminders that I’m not (nor was, nor will ever be) in control, but also for leading me to a sacred and sustainable spirituality in the first place.

Grateful that it’s shown me, often searingly but sometimes softly, my soul’s “longing … desire … and deep dissatisfaction,” as our spiritual father in Illuman, Richard Rohr, puts it. And inviting me (well, let’s be honest, forcing me from rock bottom) into this essential human journey along the spiritual path … or, perhaps more accurately, this spiritual being’s journey on this all-too-brief human path:

“Addiction is a spiritual disease, a disease of the soul, an illness resulting from longing, frustrated desire, and deep dissatisfaction – which is ironically the necessary beginning of any spiritual path. The reason A.A. has been more successful than most churches in actually changing people and helping people is that it treats addiction both spiritually and as an illness, rather than as a moral failure or an issue of mere willpower.” ~ Breathing Underwater – Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, Richard Rohr (p. 115)

Prior to 6/23/03, my soul was ill, deeply dissatisfied and disastrously divided. Divided between the projected perfection of married life with 2 young sons and relative career success, and the shadow-self sexual addiction I’d carried since childhood, now raging out of control despite my repeated attempts to stop my “moral failure” with “mere willpower.”

The “unmanageability” of my life beforehand (per Step 1 of AA’s “Big Book”) was a symptom of my powerlessness over my illness, and even and especially the delusion that I had power over my life itself, much less over this specific disease. 

As Kurtz & Ketcham put it in their seminal (for me, anyway) The Spirituality of Imperfection (p. 120):

“The inherent, eternal, fundamental message of spirituality: You cannot control everything. You are a human being, and human beings make mistakes, and that’s okay – because you are a human being, not a God. […] Anxious determination to take control, to be in charge, reveals the failure of spirituality. Addiction represents the ultimate effort to control […] and the final failure of spirituality.”

For we brothers who have completed our MROP, we’ll be familiar with one of the 5 essential messages of the initiation rites: that “You are not in control.” And what a blessing this is! I am powerless over being an imperfect human being.

Powerlessness, from this perspective, is a gift that allows us to freely surrender our lives (more on this in Steps 2 & 3) to a “power greater than ourselves,” as we say in the sacred circles of both Program and our Illuman Councils. 

And perhaps the even greater blessing? What if God/Higher Power Her/Himself isn’t even in control? 

As Shapiro (p. xiv) suggests:

“God has nothing to do with control. God, at least as I understand God […], is reality itself, and reality cannot be controlled, for there is nothing outside reality to do the controlling. […] Our disease is the optical delusion that we are apart from, rather than a part of, the Whole that is God [Italics mine], coupled with the false idea that we need to control […] in order to be happy. Our longing for wholeness can only be met by the realization that we are already whole, but our imagination is too weak to see this. All we see is separation.”

Thank you for reading this far, brothers and hopefully I’ll catch some of you next month for Step 2, where we “came to believe” we could be restored to sanity.

Until then, a short poem on separation:

A part. Not apart.

That’s the best place to start,

In trying to divine the Divine in God’s art!

Held secure in the fold,

Being (here/now) never gets old,

As we long to belong. Our belonging? Foretold!

So next time we believe,

From Her nest we’ve been cleaved,

Know: “I’ve poorly conceived.” “Separation?” Deceived!

Refrain thinking “divorce.” 

Rather fly freely with Source!

Communing Union. United. Love’s Life Force

“But of course!”

                    ☺