Step 12 of the 12 Steps: The Point of the Journey, So Far

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all of our daily living.

Ever since the Greek writer Homer wrote about the wanderings of his mythic hero Ulysses in the Odyssey, the idea of a journey has been an often used metaphor for understanding life. We are able to understand and know Abraham, for instance, because in Chapter 12 of Genesis, it was written: “Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.,” and he did. If he’d have stayed in his father’s land where everything was familiar and comfortable, all the episodes of Abraham’s life which added up to his being the father of Judaism, would never have happened.

In Genesis, the journeys of others are used to describe spiritual as well as geographical change: the journeys of Noah, Jacob and Esau, then of Joseph, then another wandering journey: the 40 year journey of Moses from Egypt to the Promised Land.

We fit Jesus’ life into a journey, from the stable to the cross. Dante’s Inferno later described a journey, into hell. Mark Twain in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, described the maturing of a boy and the maturing of a nation after the Civil War, by describing a journey on a raft down the Mississippi. Jonathon Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley. Jack Keroauc, On the Road.

Humans have an understanding of journeys; we understand, unlike any other life-form on earth, we understand beginning and ends, filled with chapters and plot twists and revelations. Reading about the journeys of others is an easy, but also deep and meaningful way of understanding our own journeys through life.

You may have been able to see by now, as I’ve talked about the Twelve Steps, that there is a very real journey involved in moving from Step One to the Twelfth and final step. The alcoholic or addict, or the person whose personal identity has been lost in the compulsive behavior of chemicals or culture, comes to a determination and begins again to move: “We admitted we were powerless; that our lives had become unmanageable.” They begin, by saying those words, to leave a place of powerlessness, yes, and of unmanageability, yes, but most of all, they begin to work up the gumption, based on their own life’s messes and based on the testimony of others at this point, they begin to move from a place of hopelessness.

If you have never been there, to that place, where life has been reduced to mere need, where your best friends are the clerk at the liquor store, or the pharmacist, or whoever it is that has sent you yet another Mastercard application; that place where you cannot see clearly into the next hour, let alone the next day, or year; if you have never been there, Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

If you have, there is no need for my trying to describe it further, because hopelessness is everything so inhumane and so ungodly, that my words cannot begin to describe it for you and it would be insulting of me to even try.

To move from that place of hopelessness, to begin to take that very first step outward, involves strength and courage that can only come from outside of ourselves. It’s not within us anymore to go on. Admitting that out loud to another person, or to God, or to just scream it into the darkness- is where everything begins to be made new. It may feel, at the time, like it is trying to light a candle on a windy seashore, but it is, in fact, the very first light of a new dawn.

It’s the beginning of a journey- a journey which will turn us inside out. It will really hurt. It’s a journey that will force us from our sickbed of terminal uniqueism, into a community where we will find people who are just as screwed up as we are, but who are also, we will find, as beloved of God as we are.

It’s a journey from certain early death to life, through ten more steps after that first one, until we arrive at this one, Number 12: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all of our daily living.”

Journeys have beginnings, and journeys have destinations. This is the destination of the Twelve Steps. It is not merely a destination though; it is a rest-of-our lives place of continued and continual healing; of giving away as often and as much as possible what we have been given and, in so doing, becoming wealthy in the knowledge of our place in God.

Bill W., a drunk insurance agent in Akron, Ohio- the founder, along with Dr. Bob, of AA, wrote this in a letter, years after he had enabled tens of thousands of others to become sober:

“Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance, urges quite appropriate to age seventeen, prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty-seven and fifty-seven.

”Since AA began, I've taken immense wallops in all these areas because of my failure to grow up emotionally and spiritually. I kept asking myself "Why can't the twelve steps work to release depression?" By the hour, I stared at the St. Francis Prayer ... "it's better to comfort than to be comforted". Here was the formula, all right, but why didn't it work?

”Suddenly, I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence, almost absolute dependence, on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security, and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them. And when defeat came, so did my depression.

“Because I had over the years undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before been so starkly revealed. Reinforced by what grace I could secure in prayer, I found I had to exert every ounce of will and action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon AA, indeed upon any act of circumstance whatsoever.

”Then only could I be free to love as Francis did. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing love appropriate to each relation of life.

”Plainly, I could not avail myself to God's love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would have me. And I couldn't possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies.”

If we’re going to begin to be whole, if we going to have a chance at continued sobriety; if we’re going to, any of us, have a chance at a life that reflects the God-image in us; if we’re going to, any of us, give up the culture-driven, ego-driven drives within us that keep us from our Promised Land, then, we, too, must give up what is false, to make room for that which is true.

And the best way to do that- the only way to that- is to give away all of that false pride, those false emotional dependencies on others.

The best example I can think of is one I’ve told you about before, but it’s an image that defines me, and you feel free to borrow it. Etta was a 65 year old Lakotah Sioux woman that my wife and I worked with in South Dakota. Born in 1910, she had been of that generation that was forcibly removed from her parents to go to white man’s boarding school. After that, she was relocated, also by the government, from the reservation to Chicago, to become assimilated, which, in government jargon meant, to become white.

She tried; they all tried. But Etta failed and ended up at the bottom of a bottle for many years. She made her way back to the reservation in the 50s, married a man 30 years her senior- her third marriage. But this time she married a man who had never stopped being Indian, and who knew Jesus. Together, John and Jesus brought Etta home.

It meant an end to the false pride forced upon her. She came to the end of dependency on others, so unlike her, for approval. In the acceptance of her people as she was, Etta could accept herself, as she was becoming.

There are so many incidents and stories of being around someone who served others in the name of Jesus, without ever considering it an obligation to do so. One late afternoon, I was with her when she got a call that an old man, a neighbor of hers, needed a ride home. He been found by the road, by the police, passed out. “David and I will be there,” she said to whoever it was on the phone, while she was making it impossible for me to say “No.”

We drove into the country, got _____ into the car, where he fell into the back seat and promptly threw up, all over Etta’s floor. Etta laughed while I cringed. “Smoke a cigarette,” she said, “so that you can’t smell it.” And she drove _____ home. Without a single complaint. No preaching. No condemnation of _____. Only acceptance. Only service. Only Jesus.

Back to Bill W.’s letter: “This seems to be the primary healing circuit: an outgoing love of God's creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of His love for us. It is most clear that the real current can't flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken, and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what real love really is.

”If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependence and its consequent demand. Let us, with God's help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love: we may then be able to gain emotional sobriety.”

And that’s where we are going in this journey of the 12 Steps, and in this journey of Life. “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all of our daily living.”

Which means, by the way, carrying this message- this message of spiritual growth and human wholeness- not only to addicts, but to everyone. Daily living includes people who all around us who are living in various degrees of hopelessness. We may outwardly believe, if we are still buying into the false pride and false emotional dependencies of the world, we might make the mistake of assuming that the guy across the street is nothing more than a loud-mouth show-off. Or that “her” sister is just a gold-digging little tramp. Or that the guy with the new car every year has “got it made.” Or that the drunk passed out beside the road is just another drunk Indian, let him lay there and sleep it off.

But each of them, bottom line, is far more like us, than they are unlike us. Having done a spiritual and moral inventory of ourselves back in Steps 4, 5, 6, and 7, it is forever impossible to see anyone again only through the narrow-focused lenses of our own egos. We can begin to see others in the light of mistakes they’ve made, and their regrets, and in the knowledge that they, too, are involved, like we were, in actions of self-deception and denial. We can see them, and know them, for the fragile creatures they and we are.

And that makes all the difference. It is the point where, as Paul said, “Behold! All things become new.”

When Jesus stood up in the synagogue and publicly announced his ministry, he didn’t turn to Isaiah 61, he picked up the scroll and read from that place where it said:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
²to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
³to provide for those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.

Later on, Jesus said that “those who come after me will do even greater things than I have done.” That’s the responsibility being handed on to us by Jesus, by Bill W., Doctor Bob, and Etta. We are the ones on this planet, right now, we are the ones to bring good news to the oppressed. We are the only ones- those of us who can see beyond ourselves into the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Continuing Creation- we are the only ones Jesus has right now, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.

We are the only ones with any inclination at all to have a sick guy in the back seat of our car and be able to imagine at all that God sees him, that guy who just messed up the back seat, as an “oak of righteousness, planted by the Lord, to display his glory.”

A final word from Bill W., at the end of his letter: “Nowadays, my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity or depression. I have been given a quiet place in bright sunshine"

Step 12- that’s all you need to remember about it; it’s the destination of all of our journeys: “a quiet place in the bright sunshine” where the belovedness by God of all persons can finally be seen.

(An AA chip) This was given to me this earlier this week, by a brother in Christ who’s also a brother of the 12 step table. I show it to you not because it has a single thing to do with me, it absolutely does not. This is a thirteen year medal of sobriety. It belongs to Etta, to my wife, to my family, to the hundreds of people around tables as I was going to 90 meetings in 90 days back in 1993 and 1994, and to the people I sit with now on Wednesdays, and the people I stand in front of today. It belongs to Jesus, who really, really does continue to do great things.

Amen..