1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

All great spirituality is about letting go. Indeed you have to start this way. Otherwise spirituality or religion is just one more ego accomplishment, as if you have God in your back pocket, so to speak. Recovery begins with a true surrender.

Boy Cutting Grass with a Sickle – Vincent van Gogh, 1881

Surrender is a very unappetizing word. Little wonder that we resist it past the point of denial. Strength, resilience, toughness, determination all employ the rallying cry, “Never surrender!” Adult success is synonymous with independence. You can take care it. You’ve got this!

So little and yet so much needs to be let go. This first step is not an abrogation of responsibility nor a switch to total passivity. It is a breaking of the ideal of self-sufficiency, a movement out of oneself. The accompanying feeling is humility, a word from the Latin humus, meaning ground, as in being grounded. Sobriety happens on the ground, not when you are “high.”

The added difficulty with the primary addictions (to the core programs for happiness) is that our lives do appear to be manageable – if only other people would behave and cooperate with us. It takes long, hard introspection to recognize that you have a problem. Folks will notice that you are insecure, or grandiose, or a control freak, but everybody has “defects of character,” right? This blindness is why the alcoholics et al are kinda fortunate. They are already attuned to the addictive process.

Therese of Lisieux, the Carmelite nun of the late 19th century nicknamed “The Little Flower,” is a good role model for humility. A teenager with little education, her spiritual intuition became known as “The Little Way.” She somehow knew that her divine daughtership was nothing to be earned or won through perfection.

“I will seek out a means of getting to Heaven by a little way—very short and very straight, a little way that is wholly new. We live in an age of inventions; nowadays the rich need not trouble to climb the stairs, they have elevators instead. Well, I mean to try and find an elevator by which I may be raised unto God, for I am too tiny to climb the steep stairway of perfection. […] To get there I need not grow; on the contrary, I must remain little, I must become still less.”

Therese of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul

Admitting that we are powerless is a defeat of the ego, not the soul. Indeed, the soul needs this posture to continue maturing into the second half of life, a time not only of sobriety, but of wonder and wisdom.