I consider myself lucky in that I have an understanding of spirituality that is reinforced within my 12 Step program. “But the Steps all say, ‘God’ this and ‘His’ that, how is that pagan or polytheistic?” you might say. True. But the Twelve Step program is a spiritual program, one teaches us to connect to and rely on guidance from a divine power (literally any divine power, even the ones that haven’t been invented yet). Each time I go to a meeting, I get to hear exactly what I needed to hear from Freya that day. I just never know whose mouth that message is going to come out of.
This quote came from a round-robin meeting I went to about six month ago. It struck me then, as it does now, as an honest statement of the type of spiritual growth that many of us in the program go through. I’ve been wanting to restart my Love Notes from Freya, and She recommended starting with this first.
My understanding of “Higher Power” changed daily. My extreme thinking encouraged only two possibilities: a Higher Power who abandoned me, and a Higher Power who engulfed me. Any images of God between these extremes changed, altered, and slipped away. I longed to take Step Three [“Made the decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him”] with a clear belief in a healthy, positive, trustworthy Higher Power, but I found myself unable to hold on to any one image. I believed that I could not work Step Three unless I understood who or what my Higher Power was.
Eventually I gave up trying to control, and surrendered my lack of understanding. Instead, I sought a relationship with the God of my not understanding, whom I call “You”. I prayed by talking to “You”. When I meditated on the Twelve Steps, I thought of my Higher Power as “You”. As I allowed my relationship with “You” to develop and change–to be fuzzy and unfinished, I relaxed into an understanding of my Higher Power that carries me through my days.
I find that if I am beating myself up about doing journeywork, or not be able making this whole polytheistic/Twelve Step thing work perfectly, or getting behind on devotional work or something–if I just let myself relax, I find that She’s just sitting here, watching me stress and loving me despite myself. Any angst that I feel about theology is all about me; it’s never really about Her or anything She stands for. The Gods all reveal what they want to reveal when they want to reveal it. I think that the best that we can hope for some days is to not get in the way of that understanding when it comes.