Individual and Collective Responsibility
Friday, June 27, 2025
Authors Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom reflect on the Alcoholics Anonymous community and the powerful lessons we can learn from them.
Starfish have an incredible quality to them: If you cut an arm off, most of these animals grow a new arm. And with some varieties, such as the Linckia, or long-armed starfish, the animal can replicate itself from just a single piece of an arm.… They can achieve this magical regeneration because in reality, a starfish is a neural network–basically a network of cells. Instead of having a head, like a spider, the starfish functions as a decentralized network….
Let’s look at one of the best-known starfish of them all. In 1935 Bill Wilson was clenching a can of beer; he’d been holding a beer, or an alcoholic variation thereof, for the better part of two decades. Finally, his doctor told him that unless he stopped drinking, he shouldn’t expect to live more than six months. That rattled Bill, but not enough to stop him. An addiction is hard to overcome….
Bill had a huge insight. He already knew that he couldn’t combat alcoholism all by himself. And experts were useless to him because he and other addicts like him were just too smart for their own good. As soon as someone told him what to do, Bill would rationalize away the advice and pick up a drink instead. It was on this point that the breakthrough came. Bill realized that he could get help from other people who were in the same predicament. Other people with the same problem would be equals. It’s easy to rebel against a [counselor]. It’s much harder to dismiss your peers. Alcoholics Anonymous was born.
The organization models how to be responsible for self and others:
At Alcoholics Anonymous, no one’s in charge. And yet, at the same time, everyone’s in charge…. The organization functions just like a starfish. You automatically become part of the leadership—an arm of the starfish, if you will—the moment you join. Thus, AA is constantly changing form as new members come in and others leave. The one thing that does remain constant is the recovery principle—the famous twelve steps. Because there is no one in charge, everyone is responsible for keeping themselves—and everyone else—on track.… There’s no application form, and nobody owns AA.
Nobody owns AA. Bill realized this when the group became a huge success and people from all over the world wanted to start their own chapters. Bill had a crucial decision to make. He could go with the spider option and control what the chapters could and couldn’t do. Under this scenario, he’d have had to manage the brand and train applicants in the AA methodology. Or he could go with the starfish approach and get out of the way. Bill chose the latter. He let go.
__________________________________________________________
John Chaffee 5 On Friday
1.
“I have come to think that care of the soul requires a high degree of resistance to the culture around us, simply because that culture is dedicated to values that have no concern for the soul.”
– Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk
There is something rebellious about taking faith seriously.
It is utterly counter-cultural.
This is NOT to say that it is against conservatism or liberalism. It does, however, seem to be against a whole culture that wants to separate things into broad binaries.
Not only that, but care of the soul probably includes being passionately against hurry, noise, and crowds, which are the three main societal obstacles to spiritual formation.
To follow the Christian faith seriously is not for those who wish to fit in. The Christian faith will put you at odds with everything that is not pulling humanity in the direction of health, holiness, compassion, welcome, forgiveness, hospitality, disarming nukes, putting down guns, ending violence, ending homelessness, caring for the orphan and the widow, treating the addict, hugging the leper and our cultural “lepers”, and so much more.
Merton is right.
To be Christian is to rebel.
2.
“God has a powerful thirst to draw all of humanity into himself.”
– Julian of Norwich, English Anchoress and Mystic
I have come to the position that the “powerful thirst” of God will one day be satiated.
3.
“He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world (Cosmos/Κοσμος).”
Here is yet another passage that I have never heard a sermon or a Bible study on.
As I have said elsewhere and before, there is an unconscious or even deliberate attempt to avoid these passages, which point rather overtly to a form of Christian universalism.
About two years ago, I was at a gas station when another member of the church pulled up whom I had not seen in a while. He seemed a bit of a gruff guy, but would flash a smile that was so playful it was disarming. While he was getting gas next to me, he asked me a question.
“You know, John, I’ve been thinking over that hell thing…”
Then, fascinatingly, he felt the need to whisper…
“It just doesn’t make sense. Jesus forgives everything, but then he will send the majority of humanity from the dawn of time to hell? He wouldn’t do that, would he?”
I smiled at him.
“Nope, it doesn’t make sense at all. Infinite love and mercy have a limit? That doesn’t make sense. God is like a Divine Lifeguard who will draw or drag all people back to himself. It is not that Jesus atoned for some; he atoned for the whole cosmos.” Right there, I wrote up a few other passages to look up on a slip of paper and handed it to him. “Don’t expect ever to hear a sermon or Bible study about these passages. The real Good News is better than we were told.”
We shook hands, smiled, said our well wishes, and each headed off on our own way that day.
Now, every time I drive past that gas station, I think about that interaction: an impromptu Bible study next to a pump of unleaded gasoline.
If God has already reconciled everything, the entire cosmos has already been atoned for, and we have a God of infinite love and mercy…
Let’s connect the obvious dots?
4.
“Christians hunger and thirst for righteousness and justice, but we are not utopians. Failing to achieve their ideals, utopians and idealists too easily become cynics who, in their frustration, are willing to kill in the name of a good cause. Christians are revolutionaries, but we believe the revolution has happened and we are it.”
– Stanley Hauerwas, American Theologian and Ethicist
There is a great deal of work to be done to help the world become a better place.
The Christian faith is not an excuse to passively sit back and applaud God for doing what is necessary to save the world.
No, there is more grit and grim to it all.
To not get one’s hands dirty is the exact opposite lesson of the Incarnation.
The idea that God would take a vested interest in a particular planet, with a whole human race who struggle to be human themselves, and how that negatively affects things around them… It is nigh unbelievable.
But if God chose to get God’s hands dirty, then it is probably past time for us to also put our hands to the plow.
5.
“For human beings, the most daunting challenge is to become fully human. For to become fully human is to become fully divine”
– Father Thomas Keating, Founder of Contemplative Outreach
This is relatively close to the teaching of Irenaeus of Lyons, who said, “The glory of God is man fully alive.”
Much of Western Christianity has little understanding of Theosis, or the process of becoming “like God.” It has been a long-standing aspect of the Christian faith to believe that one day we will “share in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Instead, we focus on the part about being forgiven for any faults we might have, which to me is not negated by Theosis but happens en route to Theosis. This means, I think, that we preach a truncated and smaller Gospel than we could.
The brilliance of the teaching of Theosis is that the problem is not that we are human; it is that we do not know how to be human, and therefore would benefit from learning how to be human from the God-man Jesus of Nazareth.
Humanity and Divinity are not opposed; it might be more that when the seed of Humanity is fully blossoming, it becomes Divine by participating in the life of God.
