“as we understood Him”
[“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him” (Bill Wilson, “Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous” [#3], EA).]
O Lover,
My early encounters with the AA Twelve Step program were superficial at best, my responses largely negative. In particular, I was snagged by the phrase “as we understood Him” insofar as it seemed to be the camel’s nose entering the tent of relativism and, worse, syncretism. Besides, I was not an alcoholic.
Now it is clear that much has changed. I am now more aware that, whether as children or as adults, we all travel holding a vast array of understandings or images of what/who is beyond yet permeating our creaturehood. I encounter this profusion across faith traditions, ideologies, political boundaries, genderal categories, and Meyers-Briggs personality types. Furthermore, I see this plentitude embodied within myself in my movement over the decades from literalistic theism toward reverential agnosticism, apophatic mysticism and whatever will be at my transit. Oh yes, and by now I have had my own decades-long experience with alcohol.
But now cutting to the chase, O Lover, what is said profusion of depictions to You? Do you require a shibboleth, a prescriptive credo, or the proper ancestry so as to enter into Your “care” (step #3)? Is Your entanglement with our sort restricted to those having representations of You which are Christian or monotheist, religious or moralistic, theist or whatever? Is there not, in the words of the hymn, “a wideness in [Your] mercy like the wideness of the sea”? Just how vast, how universal, how catholic is Your Self-disclosure, Your mercy, Your “care”?
This multiplicity notwithstanding, amid the fissures and fractures of our planet, nation, and persons I encounter a growing awareness of an underlying commonality of our desires, longings, and yearnings for what/who transcends our senses, understandings, and images. In our variableness we together face in the direction of seeking and wanting what/who we cannot represent, seize or name. But the starting point is where we actually are, not what could or should be. Where else might or would one begin or resume but “as we understood Him”?
As Aquinas implies in his question in the Summa Theologiae (“why are there so many things?” [#47]), do You not generate proliferation, multiplicity, variety throughout Your creation? And does not this predilection for profusion extend to understandings and images of You, however superficially and inadequately they reference You, Goodness Itself? Are You not an equal opportunity responder to thirsty gropings for You, however artless and compromised they might be? Is not The Story far more about Your lavish gravity-like drawing of whoever than about whose starting point is sufficiently theologically correct? Are You not promiscuous in extending Your profuse compassion? Thus when we “turn our will and our lives over to the care of [You] as we understood [You],” are we not received sans qualification or condition? Is not the decisive matter here that the one with whom we principally have to do is none less than You: extravagant Tsunami of khésed (“loving kindness”)?
For me, O Lover, allowing myself to be drawn gravity-like into the abyss of Your khésed both offends and bedazzles me. Your disposition batters my pretentiousness and strips bare my bent toward judging others. Your intrinsic disposition is for me an acquired taste at best, an unheeded one at worst. It is when I stumble upon and name this resistance to “as we understood [You]” within myself that a door is further opened to who You are and how much I long for who you are. O Lover, let it be.
