The spirituality behind the Twelve Steps is a “low Church” approach to evangelization and healing that is probably our only hope in a suffering world of six-and-a-half billion people. Do we really need to verify belief in atonement doctrines and the Immaculate Conception when most of God’s physical, animal and human world is on the verge of mass suicide and extinction?
Our suffering is psychological, relational and addictive: the suffering of people who are comfortable on the outside but oppressed and empty within. It is a crisis of meaninglessness and the false self, which had tried to find meaning in possessions, prestige and power. It doesn’t work. So we turn to ingesting and buying to fill our empty souls.
The Twelve Steps walk us back out of our addictive society. Like all steps toward truth, they lead downward.
Bill Wilson and his A.A. movement have shown us that the real power is when we no longer seek, need or abuse power. Real power is not at the top but at the bottom. Those who admit they are powerless have the only power that matters in the world or in the Church….
from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 315, day 327
(Source: Radical Grace, “The Twelve Steps: An Amazing Gift of the Spirit”)
