“The only concept of god that I believed in at all, when I got here, was the God of Unintended Consequences,” Robert said, sitting across the table from me eating burritos at a taco stand at one o’clock in the morning. “Every time I drank bad stuff happened. I wasn’t trying to wreck my car, or sleep with my friend’s girlfriend, or get arrested. I wasn’t trying to lose my job or get beaten up. It just happened.”

The nature of consciousness is to sort, order, categorize, label, associate, attribute, and differentiate sensory and cognitive information. Our very brains are structurally designed for this purpose. Look at the picture above, and see if it is possible for you to forget the name of the thing, it’s purpose, it’s form. Try to disassociate this object from every other object like it you’ve ever seen. Try to consider that you have never seen another object like it. You see what I mean? Raceseh at Cbimargde Uisnetvisy sgugtses taht msot of us are so good at tihs taht we sohlud be albe to raed tihs.

The simple act of placing a name on a higher power can cause problems for anyone trying to embrace a ’spiritual’ recovery program. Virtually all of us, socialized in the western cultural paradigm, have known an idea of god, and found it to be lacking. Most of us abandoned that idea of god long before we got sober. In The Higher Power of the 12 Step Program, Glen F. Chesnut observes, “[T]hat no one — absolutely no one — learns to work the twelve-step program well, who has not cut the umbilical cord connecting them with their childhood religious beliefs. As an adult, you cannot truly go back to your childhood religious beliefs. . . The sermons and the worship services and the traditional language simply throw them back into their childhood religious beliefs, which contain major errors and misunderstandings. The emotions they start to feel, and the attitudes which they once again take up, put them into intolerable emotional states or drive them into unconsciously self-destructive behavioral patterns once again, and they finally go out and get drunk again (or whatever their addiction is) to relieve the pressure.”

I live in a fairly evangelical community in one of the most conservative states in the U.S. Meetings around here closely mirror the general ideology of our town. It is a very interesting place for a gay drug addict with significant religious baggage to try to recover in. Meetings are replete with references to God, Lord, Jesus, and Heavenly Father; words which immediately associate with the erroneous and insufficient idea of god.

For me to have a spiritual experience I had to stop using the name “god” and lean on some of the other names the program suggests, like “higher power”, “spirit of the universe”, and “creator”. I had to do that in much the same way my friend used “the God of Unintended Consequences”. It was only a starting point. As we grew in sobriety our concept of a higher power grew.

What did you have to start with? What did you have to put aside? What did you do to get a new concept? What has changed over time?