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    God Is at the Meeting: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
    God Is at the Meeting: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
    God Is at the Meeting: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
    Ebook150 pages3 hours

    God Is at the Meeting: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps

    By Maurice C.

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    About this ebook

    Maurice C. received the gift of sobriety more than twenty-five years ago through membership in Alcoholics Anonymous. Through AA, Maurice found the ability to let go of the past and let God take the future. In God Is at the Meeting, Maurice gives insight into a world where hurt and shame lead people to feel that they are less than and that they must build walls to protect themselves. Those walls get higher and higher until alcohol or drugs seem to be the only relief. Once enslaved, the alcoholic tries desperately to maintain and strengthen the walls of self-protection, to do it all on his or her own until, finally, the effort becomes too exhausting.

    If this is youlisten. You dont have to live that way any longer. There is a way out, and this way out has worked for thousands of people just like you for more than seventy-five years. If you will let Him, God will walk with you through the twelve steps to sobriety and a life without walls.

    This book is not meant in any way to replace the time-tested books of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is one mans insight into finding, leaning on and growing into a stronger relationship with God as you work through the steps.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWestBow Press
    Release dateSep 20, 2011
    ISBN9781449726225
    God Is at the Meeting: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
    Author

    Maurice C.

    Maurice C. was born and raised in New York and has lived in several states. He worked in the financial services industry for thirty-nine years, spending many of those years traveling throughout the United States. Maurice is married with three sons and ten grandchildren. He and his wife live in Texas. Maurice has been an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous for more than twenty-five years. During that time, he has been honored to serve as sponsor to more than twenty-five men. Now retired, Maurice spends time as an AA volunteer attending meetings in jails and prisons. He is an avid golfer and grandchild spoiler.

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      Book preview

      God Is at the Meeting - Maurice C.

      God Is at the

      Meeting

      Spirituality and the Twelve Steps

      Maurice C.

      missing image file

      Copyright © 2011 Maurice C.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      WestBow Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      WestBow Press

      A Division of Thomas Nelson

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.westbowpress.com

      1-(866) 928-1240

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      ISBN: 978-1-4497-2622-5 (e)

      ISBN: 978-1-4497-2623-2 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4497-2624-9 (hc)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2011915521

      Printed in the United States of America

      WestBow Press rev. date: 10/18/2011

      Contents

      Dedication

      Preface:

      Spirituality in the Twelve Steps

      How Did We Get into

      This Sorry Situation?

      God Is at the Meeting

      Step One

      We Admitted We Were Powerless

      Over Alcohol – That Our Lives

      Had Become Unmanageable

      Step Two

      Came to Believe That a Power Greater than Ourselves Could Restore Us to Sanity

      Step Three

      Made a Decision to Turn Our

      Will and Our Lives Over to the

      Care of God as We Understood Him

      Step Four

      Made a Searching and Fearless

      Moral Inventory of Ourselves

      Step Five

      Admitted to God, to Ourselves,

      and to Another Human Being

      the Exact Nature of Our Wrongs.

      Step Six

      Were Entirely Ready to Have God Remove All These Defects of Character.

      Step Seven

      Humbly Asked Him to Remove

      Our Shortcomings.

      Step Eight

      Made a List of All Persons

      We Had Harmed and Became

      Willing to Make Amends to Them All.

      Step Nine

      Made Direct Amends to Such People Wherever Possible, Except When to

      Do So Would Injure Them or Others.

      Step Ten

      Continued to Take Personal Inventory,

      and When We Were Wrong,

      Promptly Admitted It.

      Step Eleven

      Sought Through Prayer and Meditation

      to Improve Our Conscious Contact

      With God, as We Understood Him,

      Praying Only for the Knowledge of His Will for Us and the Power to Carry That Out.

      Step Twelve

      Having Had a Spiritual Awakening as

      The Result of These Steps, We Tried to Carry This Message to Alcoholics, and to Practice These Principles in All Our Affairs.

      AA in Jail and Prison

      Christianity and Alcoholics

      Anonymous

      Final Thoughts

      Dedication

      This book is dedicated to all my brothers and sisters who suffer from alcohol addiction, especially those who are incarcerated. I have learned a vast amount about our disease from Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings and from visits to jails and prisons. My purpose in writing this book is to relate real experiences of men and women who have recovered and to suggest that the AA way of life is available to anyone who wants it. The stories are true. I have frequently changed the names to protect the guilty. The anecdotes come from people who reach that point in their addiction where they finally called out for help. These notes are written to support all of us who have surrendered to our addiction as we attempt to better understand the spiritual solution to that addiction while standing firm with the Power who provides the solution.

      Over the years, I have been blessed to be called sponsor by some wonderful men. Their confiding in me has humbled me, and their love and consideration of the few words I offered them is a gift immeasurable. Working with them has kept my nose in the AA literature and my feet on the right path for a lot of years. It is an honor to walk through life with these men; I love them and thank them for all the blessings they have brought into my life. While I have worked with these men, I have no power to confer sobriety on them. In AA, we all have the opportunity to share the Higher Power, the author of sobriety, with our fellows. The alcoholic has to take hold of the opportunity. Sponsors take the small steps as God’s messenger, and He does the work.

      I want to thank the men at the Thursday-evening meeting The Last Man Standing at the Wynne Unit in Huntsville, Texas. Their encouragement kept me going when I doubted the value of this effort. In addition, I need to thank Claudia Amen for her proofreading and Cheri Tillman for her many hours of editing my wandering words. Both of these women were employed with me during my first days in AA and were good enough not to shoot me back then. They worked with me for almost twenty years, and after all that, were still willing to volunteer their time to help me with this book.

      Most importantly, I want to say thank you to my wife and children, who suffered the most from the insanity of my addiction. I thank them for their patience, encouragement, and support. I love them and respect them. By trying to live the principles of AA, I am better able to love and serve them today. I will never be able to take back all the harm and discomfort I brought to my family. The only thing I can do is make daily amends by living the life God has given me through AA. My sons have taught me how to be a father. They have been, and are, loving and generous. I am proud of them and who they have become without a lot of help from me. When I was a young father, my addiction interfered with my ability to love them unconditionally. I didn’t fully understand the meaning of unconditional love until my sons had children. Now I know the love of a grandparent for a grandchild can be unbelievably spontaneous and unconditional. I can only say thank you to my sons and their children for teaching me something I never knew or experienced as a child. My deepest thanks go to my wife, who, through the years of my addiction, kept our family together and is primarily responsible for raising our sons to be the men they are today.

      Preface:

      Spirituality in the Twelve Steps

      Simply put, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) saved my life. It can do the same for you.

      Like many others addicted to alcohol, I was on the road to slowly killing myself while unwittingly hurting those around me, especially my family. Through a number of circumstances and with help from people I didn’t even know, I found myself at the doors of my first AA meeting in 1985. Thank God, I have never left. We will talk more about the process of AA meetings and what you can expect in a later chapter, but suffice it to say that when I first went, I had little knowledge of AA or its practices. As time went by, I learned to do what was suggested to me: go to meetings, read the literature, get a sponsor, and learn and work the Twelve Steps. I laugh now when I remember thinking that AA would teach me how to either slow down or better handle my drinking. My life was going downhill fast and I was desperate to do something—anything—to stop the slide. I had reached my moment of clarity and asked for help.

      I went to my first AA meeting thinking that if these people could show me how not to drink by some form of self-denial or discipline, I would go for it. As with most alcoholics, I believed the answer to my problem lay in me—what I had to do, what I would deny myself, or what discipline I could undertake. I was ready for a course in how not to drink, and I was greatly surprised that that was not the case at all.

      By watching others in the program, coming to believe in the process, and truly listening to my fellows at meetings, aided by the grace of God, I did stop drinking. I thought that would be impossible, but it worked. It really did. I didn’t think I could live without alcohol until I saw the program work for others.

      As I learned the Steps, I had another pleasant shock—they made sense! Actually, they made a lot of common sense! The Twelfth Step, however, caught me off guard. While I had believed that AA would involve self-denial, tough discipline, and long days of just saying no, the words of the Twelfth Step brought great relief. The Twelfth Step, found on page 60 of Alcoholics Anonymous (also referred to as the Big Book) says, Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. The idea of a spiritual solution took a great weight off my shoulders. I didn’t have to do this by myself, and it wasn’t going to be painful. I found that AA is not a program of discipline and self-denial; rather, it is a roadmap to a full life based on practical and proven spiritual facts. What I thought would be a non-drinking group turned out to be a wonderful, spiritually motivated group seeking sobriety by living a better life—a life where drinking and drugging are not necessary and where service to God and fellow man, especially other alcoholics, can be fun. In this AA crowd—a bunch of rummies, liars, thieves, and worse—I found a calling to a spiritual way of life.

      So, how do we in AA define a spiritual way of life? The word spirituality is used so much today that it is hard to grasp its meaning. A good friend of mine recently told me that she doesn’t even like the word because it has lost its meaning. It has become too Hollywoodish, with many in the celebrity universe saying that they are spiritual or seeking a spiritual path. They never define their path in a way I can understand. My observation is that if you have to go somewhere or get onto a plane or train to find spirituality, you are probably traveling too far.

      People also frequently say that they are not religious, they are spiritual. This means, I suppose, that they don’t need a religion to know God or live a spiritual life. My friend who dislikes the word spiritual believes they are just too lazy to figure out what they really believe. These folks learn about God in other settings rather than in a religious setting. I went to an internet search engine and to Webster’s dictionary to find current definitions of spirituality. I think the founders of AA would be laughing out loud if they read what I found, especially at some of the politically correct explanations I found on the Internet. There is a concept of secular spirituality and even a concept of green spirituality, but I think that neither is what the AA founders were talking about. The spirituality of AA is based on Judeo-Christian thought and experience, but rather than getting involved in a debate, let’s agree that the spirituality embodied in AA works for alcoholics and addicts—period. That is the operative principle, and it works—it really does.

      Spirituality, as found in the AA literature and traditions, is simple to define, and it

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