by Martha Woodroof

I’m working on a new book on faith without religion, so I’ve been thinking about God a lot—that is, when I’m not thinking about whatever story I’m currently reporting or my cats or what’s for dinner.

I had lunch with a good friend yesterday, a guy who’s also in recovery. My friend is Jewish. He’d read my book-in-progress and pointed out that, according to my own precepts, I’ve set myself the task of defining the indefinable. Nope, I said, I have not. All I’m claiming to know about God is that God is. Everything else I write about concerns the trail of breadcrumbs left through my own sober past by my partnership with God, all those small, healthy things I intuitively knew how to do that were once beyond me.

I come from a family of four thinkers; all moralists, none religious. I was raised to rely on the life of the mind—to think, to question, to test limits, to experiment, to push for intellectual understanding. Which makes a fine modus operandi for somewhere other than in recovery.

In retrospect, I now see that my recovery and my partnership with God began at the same moment; that they are, perhaps, different names for the same adventure. I also see that, my recovery took a giant leap forward into simplicity when I stopped thinking so much about Alice God and just started enjoying Alice God’s company.

About my partnership with the Almighty? I don’t understand, at all, how it works; but, thankfully, I’m no longer so intellectually arrogant as to think I have to understand how it works in order to accept that it does. I can now allow myself the pleasure of quiet wonder at the power for kind, self-less change in me that’s been made available through this partnership. It’s a change, I believe, that I would never have achieved on my own through intellectual understanding—a change that came only through acceptance that there is a Higher Power and I’m not It.