Who God Is, Is an Outside Issue

The Big Book calls itself our basic text, and a text teaches. One of its most overlooked lessons is how we share: "Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now." That instruction sits on the first page of "How It Works" — a page many of us have heard read a hundred times. And we hear it so often we can miss four words in the middle of it: in a general way. That's spiritual hospitality. It asks us to use broad strokes so other members can find their own reflection in our story, rather than getting blocked by the details that could separate us.

And "what happened" in Alcoholics Anonymous inevitably brings us to God, because the remedy this book offers is a spiritual one. But the book doesn't tell us how that God must look. Bill tells us in "We Agnostics" exactly what we will find in the personal stories: "In our personal stories you will find a wide variation in the way each teller approaches and conceives of the Power which is greater than himself."

Wide variation.

All of them tell us where they came from, what happened to them, how they approached a Power greater than themselves, and what their lives became. Their conception of God is part of the story because it is part of what happened. But something remarkable happens across all that variation: they tell us about their God without telling the rest of us who God must be. Whatever they believed individually, they wrote it down in the same common language. The stories use the word "God" more than two hundred times. "Higher Power" nearly fifty.

Not one of them tells us who God is.

Not one of them hands us a creed or insists on a name. They give us the transformation and leave the theology blank — so that the person sitting in the back of the room can write their own name in the space. They were taught how to share their story, and they showed us how to do it. Who God is seemed less important than what God did.

The lesson I have learned is that in Twelve Step fellowships, the word God is an umbrella term. To some, that lands like a hug; to others, like a slap. So let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying God doesn't matter. God is written into the Steps. I'm not saying we shouldn't have a God, or shouldn't be sure about Him, or shouldn't tell the whole world about Him. I'm saying that who God is, is a different matter. His name, whether He's a He at all, which book He wrote, what He thinks of nonbelievers — these things matter, some of them deeply, to many of us. But they are not the fellowship's business. God's identity is an outside issue. And when an outside issue gets brought into the group's business, it does what outside issues do. It splits the room.

Make no mistake: we talk about God in the rooms. A lot. He is all over the Big Book. But look at what He's doing there. He restores us to sanity. He does for us what we could not do for ourselves. He could and would if He were sought. Verbs, every time. What our literature consistently refuses to do is name Him. Which God? Which religion? Which creed? It says yours, wherever you are in the process. "We Agnostics" settles it in a single sentence: when we speak to you of God, we mean your own conception of God.

Our founders held deep spiritual and religious convictions of their own. They didn't abandon them. But when it came time to write the text, they had the discipline to write "God as we understood Him" and "a Power greater than ourselves." They left the name off on purpose. It didn't make the message any less powerful. Bill, in "We Agnostics," points straight at the fellowship: "When many hundreds of people are able to say that the consciousness of the Presence of God is today the most important fact of their lives, they present a powerful reason why one should have faith." The most important fact of their lives. Results like that, with freedoms like this: "He can choose any conception he likes, provided it makes sense to him." That was an extraordinary act of spiritual courage.

And it points to a single, inescapable boundary: Who God is, is an outside issue.

Tradition Ten addresses outside issues. In its long form it says: "No A.A. group or member should ever, in such a way as to implicate A.A., express any opinion on outside controversial issues — particularly those of politics, alcohol reform, or sectarian religion." Sectarian means my sect, my church, my creed. Nobody's sect is offered as the answer in our personal stories. They show us what the Tradition looks like in practice. The oldest stories predate Tradition Ten. The newest were written by people who had it. The Traditions saved what worked.

The message that saved Bill Wilson was built on this exact freedom. Ebby Thacher had a name for God, but when he sat across the kitchen table from Bill, he didn't demand that Bill adopt it. He simply suggested, "Why don't you choose your own conception of God?" Bill later wrote that those words melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow he had lived and shivered for years — and nothing more was required of him to begin. That is the message we are still asked to carry. Nowhere in our book, front or back, are we asked to define God to another member of our fellowship.

Tradition Ten is for everyone. The Christian who knows their Higher Power is Jesus. The Wiccan who knows She is the Goddess and would like to open with a blessing. The Buddhist who knows there's no He at all. The humanist who knows "God" is just a word for the group and would like it struck from the readings. The yogi who knows the Steps are really about breath and stillness. The spiritual-but-not-religious one who knows God is the universe. Every one of them is certain. But the moment any of us tells a room which God is the real one, we've stopped sharing what happened to us and started sharing what we believe ought to happen to you. Those are different things, and the room can feel the difference even when it can't name it.

So what do we say instead? The book already answered that. In "Working with Others," it tells us: tell him exactly what happened to you. Stress the spiritual feature freely. And then, in the very same breath, it tells us how: use everyday language to describe spiritual principles, avoid arousing whatever prejudices he carries against theological terms, and don't raise such issues, no matter what your own convictions are.

Freely, and in everyday language. Those two aren't in tension; together they're the instruction, and the personal stories in the back are the proof. And the everyday language is right there in the text: God. Higher Power. A Power greater than ourselves. Creator. Spirit of the Universe.

We bring that same freedom into sponsorship. When a sponsee struggles with the word "God," we tell them to just say "Higher Power." But almost inevitably, as they begin to understand how our fellowship uses the word, they settle into saying "God." The fellowship understands that word to mean your God, whoever or whatever that is, so that nobody has to stand outside. When we use that language in a share, we aren't hiding our faith. We are following the lead of every person whose story got us sober.

This piece may be read by a pastor, a priestess, a teacher, a friend who's very sure — and they might ask, "So how am I supposed to share what I've found?" The same way we always have. Over coffee. In our own lives. In our churches or our circles or our studios. In the parking lot with the person who asked us what we believe. Nobody is taking our God out of our lives. The Tradition doesn't tell a member what to believe. It tells us not to make our convictions the fellowship's convictions. In the share, we use the book's words, because the book does. We say we prayed. We say what happened. We don't have to use a name, and the newcomer who has been spiritually abused may need the freedom of not being handed one. The trouble begins when "this is the God who helped me" becomes "this is the God you need." The rooms are full of people who found their faith, or their practice, or their peace after they got sober, and almost none of them found it because someone at a meeting insisted on it. They found it because the room kept them alive long enough to go looking. The most persuasive thing any of us can do in a meeting is stay sober, stay kind, and let the newcomer wonder why.

Every outside issue we leave outside protects someone. Politics stays outside to protect the person on the other side of the aisle. Who God is stays outside to protect the one person in the room who can't yet believe in anybody's God — and who may walk out the door and never come back the moment we hand him ours.

That person needs room to begin. He does not need our definition of God in order to belong. If he gets sober, what happens next belongs to him. He may return to a faith he left, find one he never knew, change his conception a dozen times, or never give it a name at all. He might end up in our pew, or our circle, or our studio, or none of them. But the door he walks through has to be wide enough for him to get in. And it's all an outside issue ever asks of us: not that we stop believing, but that we keep the door open.

Who God is, is an outside issue. Tradition Ten covers it. It's the reason there's still a room.