Tag Archives: sobriety

The Grace of Powerlessness

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Richard Rohr and Rami Shapiro offer more inverted wisdom about radical freedom and addiction recovery below.

The Grace of Powerlessness

cac.org/daily-meditations/the-grace-of-powerlessness/

Monday, July 15, 2024

I cannot understand my own behavior. I fail to carry out the very things I want to do and find myself doing the very things I hate … for although the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not. —Romans 7:15, 18 

Admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
—Step 1 of the Twelve Steps 

Father Richard affirms the essential and difficult task of admitting our own powerlessness: 

As many teachers of the Twelve Steps have said, the first Step is probably the hardest, most denied, and most avoided. Letting go isn’t in anybody’s program for happiness, and yet all mature spirituality is about letting go and unlearning.  

Jesus used the metaphors of a “grain of wheat” (John 12:24) or a “branch cut off from the vine” (John 15:2) to describe the arrogant ego. Paul used the unfortunate word “flesh,” which made most people think he was talking about the body. Yet both Jesus and Paul were pointing to the isolated and protected small self, and both said it has to go. Its concerns are too small and too selfish. An ego response is always an inadequate or even wrong response to the moment. It will not deepen or broaden life, love, or inner peace. Since it has no inner substance, our ego self is always attached to mere externals. The ego defines itself by its attachments and revulsions. The soul does not attach, nor does it hate; it desires and loves and lets go.  

What the ego hates more than anything else is to change—even when the present situation isn’t working or is horrible. Instead, we do more and more of what does not work. The reason we do anything one more time is because the last time did not really satisfy us deeply. As English poet W. H. Auden wrote, “We would rather be ruined than changed, / We would rather die in our dread / Than climb the cross of the moment / And let our illusions die.” [1]  

Rabbi Rami Shapiro names the paradox of powerlessness and surrender to God: 

The fundamental and paradoxical premise of Twelve Step recovery as I experience it is this: The more clearly you realize your lack of control, the more powerless you discover yourself to be… [and] the more natural it is for you to be surrendered to God. The more surrendered to God you become, the less you struggle against the natural flow of life. The less you struggle against the flow of life, the freer you become. Radical powerlessness is radical freedom, liberating you from the need to control the ocean of life and freeing you to learn how best to navigate it.…  

We are all addicted to control, and it is to this greater addiction that I wish to speak. The deepest truth of Step 1 requires us to admit that we are powerless over our lives, and that life itself is unmanageable. [2] 

References:  
[1] Selected from Richard Rohr, Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, 10th anniv. ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2011, 2021), 5–6; W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 105. 

[2] Rami Shapiro, Recovery, the Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths, 2009), 3, 6. 

A Counterintuitive Wisdom

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What’s your addiction?

Anne Wilson Schaef introduced the concept of societal addiction in her book When Society Becomes an Addict first published in 1987. Then came Richard Rohr in his book Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps first published in 2011. Together they help us understand how we can all benefit from identifying and addressing our addictions.

Check out their book covers and excerpts from today’s daily meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation below.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1431703.When_Society_Becomes_an_Addict

http://www.amazon.com/Breathing-Under-Water-Spirituality-Twelve/dp/1616361573

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations from the Center for Action and Contemplation

 
“A Counterintuitive Wisdom 

I am convinced that, on a practical level, the gospel message of Jesus and the Twelve Step message of Bill Wilson are largely the same message.

Here are four assumptions that I am making about addiction: 

We are all addicts.

“Stinking thinking” is the universal addiction.

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency. 

Some form of alternative consciousness is the only freedom from the addicted self and from cultural lies.

Let me sum up, then. These are the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the Twelve Steps of AA are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary:  

We suffer to get well.  
We surrender to win.  
We die to live.  
We give it away to keep it.  

We are all spiritually powerless, not just those who are physically addicted to a substance. Alcoholics simply have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments. 


Read this meditation in full at cac.org/daily-meditations/a-counterintuitive-wisdom/  
 
Selected from Richard Rohr, introduction to Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, 10th anniv. ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2011, 2021), xix, xxii–xxiii, xxviii, xxix–xxx, xxv.