Molly Monahan - Seeds of Grace

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcoholthat our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. 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.

1. Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends on A.A. unity.
2. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authoritya loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.
3. The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.
4. Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole.
5. Each group has but one primary purposeto carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.
6. An A.A. group ought never endorse, finance or lend the A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.
7. Every A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.
8. Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.
9. A.A., as such, ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.
10. Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy.
11. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of the press, radio and films.
12. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.

I ONCE HEARD A Jesuit assert that when the history of twentieth-century American spirituality is written, Alcoholics Anonymous will be judged the most significant spiritual movement of the era. I am quite sure that he was not a member of A.A. I am, and have been for over seventeen years. I am also a Roman Catholic nun, and have been for over forty years. I am inclined to agree with that Jesuit.

Like him, I was called to a way of life devoted in very specific ways to the spiritual development of its followers. I was trained in the Ignatian method of prayer, and have made week-long retreats every year of my religious life. I have read countless books on spirituality, listened to numerous lectures on every facet of the spiritual life, and have a graduate degree in theology. I have been immersed in the rich Roman Catholic sacramental tradition and am a member of a community of women dedicated to the love of God and of neighbor. I feel privileged to have had these opportunities. They strengthened and refined my faith and my understanding of the spiritual life, of Catholic dogma, and, in graduate studies at a nondenominational divinity school, of other religious traditions.

But none of this prevented me from becoming an alcoholic. And I am certain that without Alcoholics Anonymous, a spiritual program as we call it, not only would I not be in recovery, I would be spiritually bereft. If that puzzles you, it has puzzled me too. This book is an exploration of that puzzlement. Besides the precious gift of sobriety, what is it that I find in A.A. that I have not found elsewhere? And how is it that my participation in this fellowship has brought me to realizations about my Christian faith that I never had before?

As I began to look for answers to these questions, I recognized that in my alcoholism I experienced myself as being utterly lost and unable to help (save) myself in a way that I never had before. And in the fellowship of A.A. I have experienced a uniquely (for me) rescuing and empowering community. On the heels of these experiences, I became aware that, as God has made us, there are some things that we just cannot do alone, that a kind of reciprocity, the kind espoused by A.A., is crucial to my salvation, and in surprising ways. To put it another way, the disease of alcoholism, for me, reveals some basic truths about human nature itself in its sad, lost, and sinful state, and Alcoholics Anonymous reveals some things about what God desires for all of us, alcoholics or not.

Given these premises, I hope that what I have written may be helpful for spiritual seekers of any stripe. I offer here my own reflections on my own experience as an alcoholic and as a believing, practicing Christian. But you dont have to be either to accept my invitation to reflect on your own experience, using this book as a guide to that reflection.

In the first part of the book, I try to present A.A. spirituality, nondenominational and nondogmatic as it is, the way you might experience it if you became a member. What is it about A.A. meetings that makes them essential for attaining sobriety, and what spiritual benefits do they offer? What is it like to go through the Twelve Steps? How do the (corny?) slogans that you see on bumper stickersEasy Does It, A Day at a Timefunction as spiritual tools? Is it true that feelings dont count, as my novice mistress said, or do they play a large part in sobriety and in our spiritual lives? How does sponsorship work? Is a sponsor a kind of spiritual director? What does A.A. have to say about prayer and meditation? What is the spiritual awakening that A.A. promises its members in the Twelve Steps? What are the Twelve Traditions, and how do they safeguard the mission and the unity of the fellowship? How is anonymity understood to be the spiritual foundation of all our traditions?

Inevitably, given my background, elements of Catholic belief and practice have implicitly informed my answers to these questions. In the sections called Meditations, however, I explicitly look at A.A. through the lens of the language and concepts of the Christian tradition. For instance, I have explored the Twelve Steps using the ancient threefold division of the spiritual life into the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways. I hope that these sections clarify A.A. spirituality for the reader as they have for me. They also, in my opinion, give warrant for it as being grounded in long-standing spiritual thought and practice. Far from offering spirituality lite to its members, or encouraging self-indulgent navel gazingas I sometimes see Twelve-Step programs caricatured in the mediaI have found that A.A. fosters a solid and selfless spirituality.