At the Gates of an AA Awakening

“Behold, this Child is destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign which will be spoken against (yes, a sword will pierce through your own soul also), that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed” (Luke 2:35-36).

I’m really not sure where to go from here. It’s almost one in the morning and my apartment keys weren’t waiting at the airport to drive me home. I’m staring at the conveyer belt at baggage claim as if I wait long enough a solution will pop out of the void. The conveyer just keeps going around in a circle, hypnotically inducing some sort of trance.

Have you ever been so tired that you feel high?

Anyway, I shake back awake and head out to the pick-up platform, no ride coming, nowhere to go, but anywhere is better than watching baggage claim as if it were a big roulette wheel.

This is as good of an analogy as any pointing at the Twelve Steps: When we’ve come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity and Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him we can’t stay there and live a full life, if anything the first three steps of the Twelve Steps program are meant to help us start becoming human.

We become a human being by taking stock of our hearts and minds so we might be cleansed of our fallen nature, freed of our self-deception, and purified. As gold is purified by the burning of its dross, “I will turn My hand against you,
And thoroughly purge away your dross,
And take away all your alloy.
[…] Afterward you shall be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city” (Isaiah 1:25-26).

The purification of our souls means seeing ourselves in a godly fashion—honest and loving—where the heart, hardened from a life lived in the world and attached to our addictions, begins softening. The heart softens and the mind truly grasps how sinful its behavior has been in relation to God and others. This is a lot to take for most of us… for all of us. It is difficult to see ourselves in the True Light because moving beyond our complexes and addictions through μετάνοια involves a rapturous grieving. 

People pray during turbulence, and that’s what we do when we’re disentangling ourselves from a false narrative and habitual harm, such as drinking to excess or using others in a bid to control our lives or feel in control of them. The turbulent feeling of seeing the difference between us and our sins, furthermore it is seeing the distance between us and others. Between us and God.

And it hurts.

Grief like this hurts, because it’s coming into right relation which is reality: True reality that can only be accessed via a humble spirit. Paradoxically, this is the type of grief that helps us come into humility.

The Orthodox church describes this type of mourning as compunction and St. Porphyrios the Athonite explains that “the root of the word κατάνυξις, ‘compunction,’ is the verb νύττω, ‘to puncture or pierce,’ κατανύττω, ‘to stab or wound repeatedly.’”  

When the heart starts softening the knee jerk is to reach for what hardens it because those stab wounds, loving as they are, hurt and our guilt and shame rise to the surface where, to see it, fills us with great sorrow and dejection.

The wounds need to be filled with what is familiar, because that is all we know; we are struggles against the healing properties of love. It is a part of our fallen nature to reject unconditional love; it is a part of our fallen nature to run from our God-given purpose and run from being opened to His love.  

We run from being vulnerable before Him, as Adam hid himself from God when he saw his own nakedness, so we hide ourselves from Him.

Eventually, though, we all stand before Him.

To reiterate, if we don’t do this work than we will never change and we will be stuck in our cyclical self-loathing which is death, ever spinning on the roulette wheel.

On that note, perhaps it is His love that feels like the hellfire that most of us are quite accustomed to hearing about, burning up before Him because we have hardened our heart to Him. The wounds that come from compunction are like a saving grace where one is accustomed to the all-consuming nature of God’s love. 

We’re on earth being tried as metal is tried, removing imperfections and becoming flawless, “perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

This is how we become human.

“The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). Salvation lies within, within the filth that we’d rather not inspect lies the heart which is our connection to God. Cleansing this is as difficult as it is rewarding (and necessary), because purifying the soul and νοῦς requires us to become something more than our base selves.

The process of θέωσις is entering into an alchemical process wherein our base metal is transmuted into something precious.

We are becoming like Christ, Who is The Way, therefore when we open ourselves up to God through this holy grief than we are taking real steps toward becoming The Way like Him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6). Narrow is the gate that leads to life, and few find it, because few accept the reality of a Power greater than ourselves and even fewer turn our will and our lives over to the care of the One Who depends on no one.

I believe this is because The Way that leads to life is difficult to attain to, it is not a theoretical understanding of Christ’s life that leads to salvation, but a real offering up of our lives to God with humility and repentance. Christ warns us of the egotistical and impenitent qualities that lead to destruction, continuing, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15-16).

The false prophet is one who gets lost in the turbulence; when the wounds of God’s all-consuming love appear during the first three steps of surrendering to a Power greater than ourselves the false prophet turns back in on themselves. They cannot handle seeing their actions and behaviors, they do not want to deal with the consequences of their cyclical self-loathing and usury. Outwardly, they go through the steps, and seem to be making progress, but at the smallest provocation they lash out like ravenous wolves, consuming their loved ones and their own life rather than being consumed by God’s love.

We always run the risk of becoming false prophets.

If we look at Christ as the physician of our souls than we can say this period of grief and opening up to God is like a course of treatment that, once begun, is dangerous not to finish. Instead of humility we walk away with an enlarged ego and, worst of all, we might think we’re better off than before and try helping others do what we (cannot admit that) we couldn’t do. Our venerable and God-bearing Father St. Isidore of Pelusium wrote, “Outward glory increases inward ignominy, and imaginary health, inspiring the thought in a man that he really is healthy, does not permit him to apply treatment.”

No, we cannot progress unless we can carry our cross because without it there will be no crucifixion of the self, nor will there be redemption. There will be us, living with resentment toward others and the world because we are back in our cycle of self-hatred, “‘First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye’” (Matthew 7:5).

The grief we experience cannot be circumvented or reasoned out of, because it is a necessary step toward fullness, “Now I rejoice, not that you were made sorry, but that your sorrow led to repentance. For you were made sorry in a godly manner, that you might suffer loss from us in nothing. For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death” (2 Corinthians 7:9-10).

The sorrow of the world is self-absorbed, embarrassed, and more concerned with getting others off our back—blaming others for our predicament. There will be no change unless we surrender to a God Who loves us, following His instruction, and growing in Wisdom, by putting off the old man and letting the fiery love of God consume us and cleanse us of our sins—purifying the νοῦς—destroying the boundary severing us from Him.