There are a few standard books of recovery that are fresh and life-changing every time they are met for the first time by someone in the depths of despair. The ones in this post are among the most popular ever, and their focus is on the spiritual life and how we thrive or suffer depending on whether we follow “Thine will or My Will.” So we need to say a little first about the God word and recovery.
The Spiritual Path of my Descent and Emergence in Recovery is one of those four main paths
I write about along with the physical/biological, the emotional/psychological, and the cultural.
Other people’s recovery stories are different, and they will define the spiritual differently and
apply different traditions and practices to it. Since I have heard and seen witnesses to the effect, I do believe that Secular Sobriety works for those who work it. I am open to their learnings and resources.
That kind of openness is important to my own spiritual focus in recovery, and to my own
Christian faith path. In fact, that openness to others’ paths helps my growth in humility that is a bedrock core in recovery. It is why I am not a recovery absolutist for any one kind of 12-step
program; I have been helped by different ones, admittedly some more than others, and if
someone’s recovery is working even without 12-step, without therapy, without medication, I
applaud them. The fruit tree will be known by its fruits.
I know that what I mean when I use the word God or Christ is likely different from what others
may mean when they use these terms. But I also know there is a wide spectrum of understanding on such things even within a given specific faith community; it is just something that often goes unexpressed. So I also try not to self-marginalize myself spiritually within recovery groups either. That can lead to a kind of victimhood or sense of uniqueness that is dangerous for one’s recovery too. What we talk about when we talk about God is one of my most engaging conversations, but it is not one that should divide us within the recovery movement or be an impediment to anyone’s recovery. God forbid.
Still, my story is one of a failure to follow deeply the spiritual wisdom and calling I knew. I let
other things in life become my idols too much of the time. My desires to manage my life by
myself and handle my problems myself replaced putting the desires of the God of my
understanding first. Those desires (or one might say those aims aligned with an Ever-Creating and Loving Relational Spirit I feel within and beyond me, an ultimate spirit I sense in the Nature of Nature) are for me to grow as a person who is a part of real relationships that matter most in life. My selfish desires came to rule much of my inner or secret life, even as I was overworking myself to boost the lives of others who were in the margins of life. That spiritual idolatry showed up in family life too. It was part of what contributed to the actions I took on that slippery slope that landed me in my personal hole EVEN before actual prison.
These resources that have become more like companions have taught me to see that such deep holes in life can be wombs instead of tombs. Here are some of my reflections on how a few basic and well-used texts intersected with my spiritual recovery.
The Big Book, particularly pages 1-66, and “The Text” of NA. The “AA Bible” to some, even
those who also use The Bible, The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous gave me the first mirror into addiction and much of its foundation in how addiction is a reaction to emotions we feel but don’t process. I could easily see myself in its pages: the role of the ego and belief in trying to manage alone, of wounds and self-medication attempts to those wounds that backfire, the progressively worsening nature of the behavior after each failure at staying stopped, how life's dis-ease feeds the mental disease which feeds the dis-ease behavior cycle of spiraling down. This is so even as you may seem to others to be spiraling upward and onward as you learn, you think, to better mask your addiction. As you seemingly have it all together all the more, you are actually coming apart inside.
My first going over these pages with a sponsor, just like the first talking with a therapist, helped reduce shame's negative side and its unhelpful power as in the book I read that I was not alone and people had suffered as I had for generations. It helped me to begin coming back into myself, at least back then enough to see how astray I had become. I think it prepared me also to face a little of what would lie ahead that I had no idea then that I would be facing.
I want to also give credit to “The Text” of Narcotics Anonymous. I used it while in an NA group while incarcerated. It, and the other group members, also spoke to my life and the extremes I would risk taking. I had my time trying to set a record for trying to smoke marijuana back in the early 70s in high school, while at school, but I ended up keeping with what I thought was a safer drug of choice route--masturbation and whatever media I could turn into porn in my mind, or what I could imagine and write for myself. I also could connect during a NA meeting when one addict described the many times he abstained while incarcerated but upon release if not chaperoned he could find drugs within ten
minutes of release no matter what city he was in. I was that way with sexual content online
especially, and as it proliferated. No matter the platform or program, however moderated it
claimed to be, I knew within a few moments I could connect with others in a chat room who
were into the same things as I was. And I resonated with one addict in NA’s program who semi-joked about how bad his desperation and drive for cocaine was that he would be crawling across the carpet picking at lint to see if it might be more of an accidentally dropped drug. In sex addiction groups we say, from experience, that “anything can be turned into porn” in our minds bent on it, even what otherwise is the most mundane material. This is another example of the adolescent-stuck brain when it comes to sex. The Text helped ground me in recovery when other recovery material was not available, as did the group.
I have also been immersed especially in the Green Book of SAA and the 12 Steps and 12
Traditions book and will write more on them later. Also the Celebrate Recovery Inside
workbook, for working the steps while incarcerated, and by Life Recovery Workbook and its
Devotional. These latter two are grounded in Christian spirituality along with the 12 step
tradition stemming originally from AA, but in my experience both were also welcoming of those seeking recovery who were not Christian but sought out the groups anyway for help. This may unfortunately be due to the lack of more secular sobriety groups, especially in prisons and jails; I was glad to see that the spirit of recovery led the group to being welcoming of individual difference and the individuals being able to do the important recovery and spiritual work of translation into concepts helpful to them. Generosity is the rising tide that lifts all boats.
The Bible, especially the Psalms; the Lectionary; and Prayerbooks.
The Psalms helped me gain footing and a focus in the first days of incarceration. A Bible and a not-so-good Vampire novel were all I had to read in the county jail at that point. Over the five months there, I grew my library, but the Bible, which I had studied, began to study me as I found myself in it in a new and deeper way. The Psalms have brought comfort and courage for millennia; I had helped others to connect with them in their times of trials. For the next four years in prison and halfway house, I focused on that for myself. I did the kind of biblical and broadly spiritual readings from different traditions and applied them to my life through daily journaling. Seminary had given me tools, but I hadn’t used them for my spiritual and emotional life as demanded by my covenants I broke, and so my inner life withered as my outer life seemed to prosper. Incarcerated, in shock and fear, I opened them up again as I opened up myself.
I had been taught the way the Psalms are structured to reflect real life. They often begin with
words of orientation and praise to life, then words of disorientation and despair from life, and finally words of reorientation and renewed gratitude to life. This mirrors the familiar narrative plot of Act One, Act Two, and Act Three. I read them deep in my own Act Two. I could see in them my acts of abandoning love and relationship and virtues and community. In the feeble way I was able in such an environment and with an addiction stunted mind, I meditated even on the not so familiar psalms I had skipped over before. Now these too were talking to me, now when I had no one else to talk with and was uncertain if any would again. As my time went on, as the shock diminished, I kept journaling on the Psalms with the desperation of hope for a future, an Act Three, I was trying to imagine.
That inner movement of many a Psalm is also, of course, the familiar arc of recovery. What we were like, the good and bad we were oriented toward. What happened as we fell into our hole and hit our bottom. What we are like now and who we are becoming. Our lives are our personal Psalm. We hope.
The Psalms are a major part of the Revised Common Lectionary, a three-year program of
reading biblical stories and passages connected to the Christian “church year” from one Advent season before Christmas to the next. I came home with all my reflections on each week’s passages for all three years, plus. I connected my experiences in prison with the biblical lectionary passages, and with what I was learning about myself in recovery group and personal study. The Lectionary was also a way I could “mark my time” and “stack my time” week to week moving toward the end of the three-year cycle and toward my release date. I hope soon to begin publishing this “prison and 12-step lectionary” work either in a section here or elsewhere.
For my Step 11 work to improve my conscious contact with God through prayer and meditation, I turned especially to a few prayerbooks I had been familiar with from the Anglican tradition. But I was fortunate in jail to find The Magnificat publication from the Roman Catholic tradition which sustained me and helped me form relationships with a few Catholics inside. I was grateful for the main inmate led church formed in my unit of the county jail. Its multi-ethnic diversity was amazing. Its evangelical prayer and worship was, however, not as fulfilling to me, and I was realizing I needed a more meditative expression, and more liturgical worship, for my recovery. I found that in jail and also in prison by connecting with Catholics, not surprising since I see myself as more a small c catholic or ecumenical Christian. This led me in prison to also journaling daily from the non-denominational more evangelical centered “Our Daily Bread” devotional.
In order to help my mind and spirit receive a different kind of "daily food", to help me survive the day and night with a semblance of peace and grace and shift my perspective to a hope for tomorrow, I relied on the Daily Office of prayers--when I wake up, when I have my three meals, at night before I sleep, and when I awake during the night. It is a new "tape" with new words, new images, a new rhythm to the day running through my mind instead of the treadmil of the ones--even good ones as well as bad--that had shaped the rhythm of life I had been on in my addictions. I mainly followed, and still follow, the daily office of prayers in the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer, and the King’s Chapel Book of Common Prayer. In my personal use I adapted some of the language to be more inclusive and easier for me to then memorize and use when I was most under stress. In a later blogpost specifically about my prayer life in my recovery life I will say more and give examples of what saved my spirit.
In a way, the discipline of using the prayerbooks allowed me in my isolated state to feel a part of the long tradition, and “alternative community” that produced them. Daily, too, I was and am connecting with all the communities around the world also saying the prayers, and back through time. It is a community I can step into 24-7.
A further guide to the prayerbooks themselves that was helpful to me was Carl Scovel's A Prayerbook Companion. In it at one point he writes, "we are born with a desire to enter a world that is something more...than the world we live in" and how this can lead to addictions and other unhealthy manifestations, but it can also lead us to prayer and a true center in our life. Also that the prayers themselves embody the story of life we experience--"fall, forgiveness, renewal, promise". When I first read his book I was feeling mostly the fall, but the prayers and the responses of loved ones and others were reminding me that another world was possible than the one I was inhabiting spiritually or here physically, and in the years since I have found my center moving through the trajectory of the prayers, toward renewal and promise.
So, both specifically 12 step focused materials and generally spiritual focused materials helps me to re-orient. I found ones that spoke to me. With all the resources available now on the internet I trust that others can find the materials that speak to them. Just be open to what comes your way. Treat the texts like they are others in your group. Let them speak their story from their background and experience but with kernels and gems of truth for you which you can translate for your recovery.
Engage, don’t turn away. Listen with a generous spirit. Be willing to be immersed in a different habitat of language. There is something to be said for recovery coming not just in the different company we keep, the different habits we follow, but also in the different language we hear, and different, timeless words we use.