Step 3: Surrender and Acceptance

Continuing our exploration of the 12 steps for addicts of all stripes (or, at a minimum, all of us addicted to our own thinking, and, through it, perceived power and control over reality. So, really … all of us!😊), we come to the crucial step of surrender. A loaded word, especially when conceived of as “abandoning ourselves utterly” (AA, p.63).

For as Rohr reminds us, “Surrender will always feel like dying, and yet it is the necessary path to liberation.” (Breathing Under Water, p.18). Deciding to surrender “our will and our lives,” especially to our American minds (even more so in this culture of increasingly toxic masculinity), sounds like not only dying, but dying a coward, a weasel, a wuss. However, what if “surrender is not ‘giving up’, as we tend to think, nearly as much as it is a ‘giving to’ the moment”? (Breathing, p.19) Not letting go, but letting be? Allowing us, as Rami Shapiro notes, “to fall into the arms of what is rather than into the addiction that promises to protect us from it.” (Recovery – The Sacred Art, p.35)

Because this surrender to reality is, really, falling into the arms of, “the care of”, “God as we understood God.” Not the punitive or neglectful or absent God of our upbringing. Not a religious God even (though certainly spiritual). But God as you “imagine God is; God [as] what you need God to be so that you can recover … an idea of God that allows you to trust in something greater than yourself.” (Recovery, p.40)

As we saw last month in Step 2, it is in hitting rock bottom that “this you is shattered, and with it your understanding of God. There is a moment of sheer panic as this you dies, followed by a breathless wonder as the bottom itself shatters and you enter the free fall of Divine Reality.” (Recovery, p.47). Or, as Richard puts more gently: “We have been graced for a truly sweet surrender, if we can radically accept being radically accepted – for nothing!” (Breathing, p.27).

The motto of my recovery program is “From Shame to Grace.” My sponsor early on relayed this acronym for SHAME: Should Have Already Mastered Everything, describing my survival instinct in a nutshell! Nowadays, I’m still gratefully growing into believing my own acronym for GRACE: God Radically Accepts Complicated Earthlings. When we hit rock bottom, our “howl for help” (Recovery, p.47) is, I truly believe, heard and held in the heart of this radically accepting God of Love.

As Gerald May puts it in his seminal Addiction and Grace (p.13): “The objects of our addictions become our false gods. These are what we worship, what we attend to, where we give our time and energy, instead of love. Addiction, then, displaces and supplants God’s love as the source and object of our deepest true desire.”

With grace, one day at a time, I make a decision to turn over my will and my life to this “deepest true desire.” I hope you’ll join me next month on this path as we start climbing the mountain of a “searching and fearless moral inventory.” Until then, sweet surrender!