Father Richard Rohr connects lessons from the Gospels and the Twelve Steps as life-changing and healing messages that we can all benefit from. 

I am convinced that, on a practical level, the gospel message of Jesus and the Twelve Step message of Bill Wilson are largely the same message. The Twelve Step Program parallels, mirrors, and makes practical the same messages that Jesus gave us, but without as much danger of spiritualizing the message and pushing its effects into a future world.  

Here are four assumptions that I am making about addiction: 

We are all addicts. Human beings are addictive by nature. Addiction is a modern name and honest description for what the biblical tradition called “sin” and medieval Christians called “passions” or “attachments.” They both recognized that serious measures or practices were needed to break us out of these illusions and entrapments.  

“Stinking thinking” is the universal addiction. Substance addictions like alcohol and drugs are merely the most visible forms of addiction, but actually we are all addicted to our own habitual ways of doing anything, our own defenses, and most especially, our patterned way of thinking and processing reality. These attachments are at first hidden to us; by definition, we can never see or handle what we are addicted to, but we cannot heal what we do not first acknowledge. 

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions. We have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and unaware of the same problems. The gospel exposes those lies in every culture.  

Some form of alternative consciousness is the only freedom from the addicted self and from cultural lies. If the universal addiction is to our own pattern of thinking, which is invariably dualistic, the primary spiritual path must be some form of contemplative practice or prayer to break down this unhelpful binary system of either-or thinking and superiority thinking. Prayer is a form of non-dual resting in “what is.” Eventually, this contemplative practice changes our whole operating system!  

Let me sum up, then. These are the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the Twelve Steps of AA are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary:  

We suffer to get well.  
We surrender to win.  
We die to live.  
We give it away to keep it.  

This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted, denied, and avoided, until it’s forced upon us by some reality over which we are powerless—and, if we’re honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality.  

We are all spiritually powerless, not just those who are physically addicted to a substance. Alcoholics simply have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways, and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments. 

The Grace of Powerlessness

I cannot understand my own behavior. I fail to carry out the very things I want to do and find myself doing the very things I hate … for although the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not. —Romans 7:15, 18 

Admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
—Step 1 of the Twelve Steps 

Father Richard affirms the essential and difficult task of admitting our own powerlessness: 

As many teachers of the Twelve Steps have said, the first Step is probably the hardest, most denied, and most avoided. Letting go isn’t in anybody’s program for happiness, and yet all mature spirituality is about letting go and unlearning.  

Jesus used the metaphors of a “grain of wheat” (John 12:24) or a “branch cut off from the vine” (John 15:2) to describe the arrogant ego. Paul used the unfortunate word “flesh,” which made most people think he was talking about the body. Yet both Jesus and Paul were pointing to the isolated and protected small self, and both said it has to go. Its concerns are too small and too selfish. An ego response is always an inadequate or even wrong response to the moment. It will not deepen or broaden life, love, or inner peace. Since it has no inner substance, our ego self is always attached to mere externals. The ego defines itself by its attachments and revulsions. The soul does not attach, nor does it hate; it desires and loves and lets go.  

What the ego hates more than anything else is to change—even when the present situation isn’t working or is horrible. Instead, we do more and more of what does not work. The reason we do anything one more time is because the last time did not really satisfy us deeply. As English poet W. H. Auden wrote, “We would rather be ruined than changed, / We would rather die in our dread / Than climb the cross of the moment / And let our illusions die.” [1]  

Rabbi Rami Shapiro names the paradox of powerlessness and surrender to God: 

The fundamental and paradoxical premise of Twelve Step recovery as I experience it is this: The more clearly you realize your lack of control, the more powerless you discover yourself to be… [and] the more natural it is for you to be surrendered to God. The more surrendered to God you become, the less you struggle against the natural flow of life. The less you struggle against the flow of life, the freer you become. Radical powerlessness is radical freedom, liberating you from the need to control the ocean of life and freeing you to learn how best to navigate it.…  

We are all addicted to control, and it is to this greater addiction that I wish to speak. The deepest truth of Step 1 requires us to admit that we are powerless over our lives, and that life itself is unmanageable.

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God Does Not Play Chicken

Click Here for Audio The game of chicken is one of nerve, courage, and idiocy. Two racers speed toward each other on a collision course. The first person to turn away, and thereby save both from calamity, loses and is labeled a “chicken.” Some of us played this game as children on our bicycles, and most of us outgrew it—at least the physical version of the game. Sadly, some adults still engage in games of emotional chicken. Two people set themselves on a relational collision course, each refusing to change direction or give in to the other. The first one to flinch in the standoff relinquishes his power in the relationship. It’s incredibly childish and self-defeating, but some still believe that refusing to surrender or compromise is a mark of resolve and strength. They think their happiness requires the other person’s misery. This is the game the older son was playing in Jesus’ parable. He refused to enter the house and join the party celebrating the return of his younger brother. Instead, he had a pity party for himself out in the field waiting for his father to notice his absence. By standing his ground, the older son tried to show the father the intensity of his anger. For the son it was a standoff; a battle of wills. But the father didn’t play his game. He did not test his resolve. Rather, Jesus says, “The father came out to speak with him.” Despite being the elder, and despite being right, the father humbled himself and made the first move toward his arrogant son. This behavior shouldn’t surprise us. After all, the father acted similarly toward his younger son when he ran out to meet and embrace him. For the father, preserving his reputation was not nearly as important as reaching his children.If the gospels tell us anything it’s that our Lord is not afraid to appear weak. He is not preoccupied with what others think, with being taken seriously, or with being perceived as weak. In fact, it is precisely Christ’s strength that allowed him to endure the shame heaped upon him by the world. Like him, we are not to be stubborn when wronged or expect the other person to change before we engage. Instead, we are called to copy God and make the first move; to find the other person and seek reconciliation. The world says the “chicken” is the person who bends and the strong person is the one who stands his ground. In God’s kingdom, it is precisely the opposite. DAILY SCRIPTURE LUKE 15:11-32 MATTHEW 5:23-24 ROMANS 12:16-19 WEEKLY PRAYER By Thomas Dekker (1570 – 1623) O God, the true and only life, in whom and from whom and by whom are all good things that are good indeed; from whom to be turned is to fall, to whom to turn is to rise again; in whom to abide is to dwell forever, from whom to depart is to die; to whom to come again is to revive, and in whom to lodge is to live: take away from me whatever you will, so that you give me only yourself. Amen.

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