Spiritual Direction

In AA we know the value of having a sponsor and being a sponsor. The standard advice is to “Find someone who has what you want and ask them to be your sponsor”. I always find that funny because when I was a few weeks into recovery I heard that very advice and I saw a woman in my home group who was tall and blonde (I am not), a published author (I was not) and who was well-dressed (always my aspiration) so I asked HER to be my sponsor!

This is also a God story because she turned out to also have things I had not yet seen: good recovery, a generous heart and a sassy way of living her recovery. We did the steps together, attended lots of meetings together and she also told me, “You didn’t get sober to wear sack cloth and ashes so go shopping.” Perfect.

So God is woven in and out. People talk about the “spiritual part” of the program and I remember another good sponsor telling me, “there is no spiritual PART—it’s all spiritual.”

Toward that end some of us add another layer of help to our recovery and work with a spiritual director. This can be someone else in a 12 step program who has the kind of spiritual life we’d like—and like sponsorship we can “ask them how they got it.” Some of us have gone to faith communities, inter-faith practitioners or retreat centers and worked with a spiritual director for a week, a month or a year.

I have done this three times over the years when I wanted to talk thru my conception of God, when I wanted to acquire some new spiritual practices and recently when step work bumped right into reservations I was holding about God and surrender.

So I’m interested in your experiences: Have you tried spiritual direction? What was your motive and did it help your recovery and growth?

Baseball, Recovery and Spiritual Life

The first thing I learned about baseball is this: If you raise your hand a man will bring you food. I learned this at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, and in my first year as a fan I spent most of the game facing the wrong way. Raise my hand, get ice cream, raise my hand, get popcorn, raise my hand, get peanuts. It was 1958.

Two years later I understood baseball was a game. On summer afternoons I’d beg my brothers to take me with them to the ball park. I was falling in love with baseball.

If baseball has taken hold of you too, you know it’s about more than your team winning. Sports, like religion, and like AA, offers consolations: A diversion from our daily routine, heroic examples to admire and emulate and a sense of drama and conflict in which nobody dies.

John Gregory Dunne wrote that, “Baseball is the couch on which we examine our psyches”. George Will said, “Baseball is the universe”. And catcher Wes Westrum said, “Baseball is like church, many attend but few understand.”

We have these sayings and many more because baseball is one of the greatest sources of metaphor in American life. And understanding metaphor is important because having and using metaphor is what allows us to talk about intangibles like spiritual life.

The historian, E.H. Gombrich, wrote, “Every culture has its favored sources of metaphor which facilitate communication among its members. Any cultures religion is what provides the central area of metaphor. The Olympus or Heaven of any nation will offer language and symbols of power and compassion, of good and evil, of menace and of consolation”.

Americans live so far inside the institution of baseball and so deeply in its metaphors that sometimes we can’t even see it. You may say you’re not a sports fan, but have you ever said: “She’s always in there pitching”. “You can’t even get to first base with him.” He’s out in left field.” “She was born with two strikes against her.” We talk baseball all day long.

Bart Giamatti, former President of Yale and former Commissioner of Baseball said, “Baseball has no clock and indeed moves counterclockwise, so anxious is it to establish its own rhythms independent of clock time.”

Baseball is one of the few sports that remain timeless. A game can be fast or slow. In this one area of our lives the clock isn’t driving; we surrender the clock to the event. But there is something else in this game that asserts the primordial and the spiritual: In baseball we begin and end at home. Home plate is not fourth base. The goal of the game is to get home and to be safe.

That is what we want. When we come to AA people say, “I felt safe and I was at home”. Home implies safety, accessibility, freedom, comfort. Home is where we learn to be both with others and separate. That’s what baseball players are: individual athletes with distinct areas of responsibility but also and always a team. Kind of like a home group.

The Tree of Life

In most forms of shamanism the sound of the drum generates the trance state in which the shaman travels back and forth among the three realms: The Heavens, the Earth and the Underworld. The interconnectedness of these three realms is universally represented by The Tree of Life, which is rooted in the underworld, bears fruit on the earth, and reaches with its topmost branches into the heavens.

--from “When Women Were Drummers” by Layne Redmond

Oswald Chambers

A friend who is not in AA recommended a book that she reads as a daily devotional. It is called “My Utmost for His Highest”, by Oswald Chambers. When I heard his name I had a recollection that I had come across him in AA history.

It’s true. I got the book from the library and did some research. Oswald Chambers was a Scottish minister and military chaplain popular in spiritual circles of the early 1930’s. His books and sermons were read by Bill and Bob and The Oxford Group members. His ideas are forerunners of concepts we know today: Surrender, “abandon yourself”, God’s will not my will. None, of course, are unique to Chambers—they are Christian ideas but reading Chambers you’ll recognize the echo in our Big Book language and you’ll feel the rhythms in Bill’s other writings.

It’s worth a look and your library will have an old copy. Try a few of the daily readings for this fall. Different language for familiar ideas. What this reading of Chambers reminds me is that our program does not have a spiritual component; rather it is a spiritual program.

The Great Fact

In The Big Book there is a chapter called “There is a Solution”. In this section we read the clear statement that recovery is about a relationship with God or a Higher Power:


There is a solution…there was nothing left for us but to pick up the simple kit of spiritual tools laid at our feet. We have found much of heaven and we have been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence of we had not even dreamed. The great fact is this, and nothing less: That we have had deep and effective spiritual experiences which have revolutionized our whole attitude toward life, toward our fellows and toward God’s Universe. The central fact of our lives today is the absolute certainty that our creator has entered into our hearts and lives in a way which is indeed miraculous.