May 21, 2004

• HERESY

  noun:   any opinions or doctrines at variance with the official or orthodox position

  (onelook)

  I’m an eccentric until I open my mouth.  As soon as I say a word,
  I’m a heretic.  Funny how I didn’t think of myself that way until
  recently.  A week or so ago, at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, I’d
  gotten up to go to the toilet about the time Greyfox started to
  “share”.  (For the uninitiated, these meetings are a series of
  monologues  in which members either vent their feelings or share
  their experiences, usually all on the same general topic during any
  given meeting.)  As I went back down the stairs to the meeting
  room I heard him say, “Like Kathy, I’m a 12-Step heretic.” 
  Huh!?  What?!?  Me? …a heretic?  Visions of the rack,
  the stake, the Albigensian massacre, flitted through my mind. 
  Okay, as much as I’d like to deny it due to some residual fears
  leftover from past lives, I’m still a heretic.

  If it’s patently and blatantly untrue, I’m not going to spout the party
  line just because a bunch of guys bigger, stronger, richer and/or more
  powerful than I will give me a hard time if I don’t.  In 12-Step
  groups, my heresy takes the form of disputing the contentions of some
  of those members who would, contrary to the founders’ intent, turn the
  programs into cults.  I speak right up and say the programs work
  more than one way, that I never needed a sponsor or a meeting to lead or drive me
  through the steps, that “conscious contact with God” does not mean
  faith, dammit, it means gnosis. 

  All right, I do acknowledge that gnosis requires a leap of faith to get
  to it.  If you do not believe that there is or could be a divine
  presence in the universe, you are not going to reach out and ask it a
  question and listen to the answer that comes into your mind.  It’s
  easy for me, whether in those 12-Step meetings, in a church, or
  clicking my way through my sub list here, to tell who is parroting the
  party line about Faith and Religion, and who has actually taken that
  leap of faith and ended up in gnosis.  There are Believers who
  believe what they’ve been told and profess to having Faith because
  that’s the Right thing to do.  And then there are divinely aware,
  spiritual people who understand that they don’t need their faith any
  more because what’s the use of believing in something you already
  know.  Belief is for those things you don’t know, that  maybe
  you want to believe are true but just can’t convince yourself
  entirely.  Belief is not Faith.  Belief is talking yourself
  into something.  Faith is accepting the truth.  Once you do
  that, you’ve got it, you KNOW.

  I’ve sat quietly through several repetitions of the monologue of one
  particular member in which he repeats, each time he speaks, that his
  Higher Power is the God of the Bible.  Then he quotes the Book, not the
  Deity.  I look around and see other members rolling their eyes,
  pointedly not making eye contact with the Believer.  Then, when it is
  our turn to speak, one of them or Greyfox or I will talk about what our
  Higher Power says TO US,
  directly, personally.  To the majority of Religious Believers,
  that orthodoxy within the 12-Step groups is heresy.  I call it
  orthodoxy not because it is the way with every one or even most of the
  members of AA or NA or FAA or the other Anonymous groups.  It is
  what the founders wrote in the Steps:  conscious contact with
  God.  So, who’s the heretic?  I dunno.  It’s Greyfox’s
  word, not mine.

  I also try to point out from time to time at meetings that eighty-some
  years ago
  when AA was founded, and even fifty years ago at the founding of NA,
  they didn’t know that alcoholism or addiction was rooted in
  imbalances of brain chemistry.  They didn’t even have names then
  for all the neurotransmitters.  Old AA literature talks about the
  “X-factor”, the unknown cause of alcoholism.  It’s not unknown any
  more,
  but unfortunately there are Believers within those programs who refuse
  to listen to reason and inform themselves on “recent” scientific
  discoveries.  They cling to an orthodoxy that at least one of the
  founders, Bill Wilson, would be appalled to know is still hanging
  on. 

  Before Bill W.’s death, he’d begun taking niacin, and he talked a few
  other alcoholics into taking it.  They observed that it helped
  them in their recovery.  They had begun to get a handle on the
  brain chemistry angle, but the organization was already out of Bill’s
  hands and the Central Committee, or whatever the clique of high poobahs
  was called, ruled that they did not want nutritional supplementation to
  be part of the program.  So now, the A’s are obsolescent and there
  are growing, flourishing, groups such as The 101 Program,
  which are effective at helping addicts abstain, without such a great
  emphasis on spiritual values.  Whatever works, works, but I’d like
  to see the whole thing under one roof, so to speak.

  Wow, I’ve gone far afield here, worn out my fingers and used up a lot
  of words, without even getting to Pelagius or Celestius, two of my
  favorite heretics, or to Augustine, Jerome, or Paul (AKA Saul of
  Tarsus), three of the greatest miscreants of all time whose delusions
  and fears have by gross mischance become orthodoxy.  I suppose
  there will be time, later on, for that heresy.
  

  • 4:53 pm
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