Tree of Life: The Grace of God and Addiction Recovery

By Terry Webb

12-Step anonymous mutual help support groups form the basis for recovery from the disease of addiction. Dr. Webb chronicles their Christian Origins and how the steps work, comparing the process to one's Christian walk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9789966690135

Book preview

Kenya

Introduction

For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create; for behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing and her people a joy. (Is. 65: 17 & 18 NIV)

The healing process from the disease of addiction promises abundant life and a new beginning. The 12-Steps, written down by Bill Wilson in 1938 and then adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), constitute the core for the twentieth and twenty-first century phenomena known as 12-Step mutual help or recovery support groups. This book describes the anonymous mutual help group process of 12-Step recovery that draws deeply from the well of an evangelical English Christian renewal movement in the 1930s. The recovery philosophy, rooted in Christian religious traditions and biblical principles, has become the evidence-based treatment methodology for those suffering from alcohol and other drug dependencies beginning with AA.

Only a few church-going Christian lay persons and clergy know that the beginnings of AA were molded by devout Christian men, ordained ministers in their denominations. Many church-going Christians in Africa do not know much about this rich and varied recovery history and philosophy.

This book is not an attempt to rewrite AA history, so well documented by Nan Robertson, Ernest Kurtz, Dick B., and William White, but to recapture and reclaim the Christian roots and the significance of the 12-Step group process or philosophy of recovery. In 1955, in a talk given in St. Louis at the twentieth anniversary of AA the Rev. Sam Shoemaker, an Anglican priest, said that AA has received its inspiration and impetus indirectly from the insights and beliefs of the church.

Father Ed Dowling, a Roman Catholic priest, compares the process to that of Christianity: ¹

I believe that the 12-Step Movement, beginning with their use in Alcoholics Anonymous, is a story which is best described as a mighty work of the Holy Spirit to solve the problem of addiction in this century. I agree with Dr. Sam Shoemaker that God is the moving force, that inspires it and keeps it going, which is why the movement is having such a powerful impact on today’s world and has been the chief source of evangelism in this century.²

My hope is that African churches become familiar with the practices, principles, and philosophy of the A movement (AA and other anonymous fellowships that follow the 12-Steps). Consider this book to be Course 101 on how recovery from addiction can work with biblical spirituality and relationally in community.

I am attempting to address two very basic questions: What role can A groups have in African Christian churches today? How will this spiritual/social/psychological program be integrated into the disease model of addiction adopted now by the medical community who treat addiction as a relapse brain disease?

Crossroads Publishing Company published the first edition of this work in the United States and featured the influence of the New Age Movement on the A movement and the origins of AA in the former Soviet Union. This edition was then translated into Russian and made available to the recovering community in Russia and the former Soviet-block countries. The third edition captured the origins of AA in Romania with the text translated into Romanian. This edition has been especially rewritten for African Christians, hopefully to be translated into local African languages.

My vision for this book came in the form of a tree and, symbolically for Africans, an Acacia tree, whose roots draw inspiration and food from the earth, whose branches are 12-Steps and whose leaves and fruit are every recovering person, beginning with Bill W., Ebby T., Dr. Bob, and Fr. Peter Odhiambo. This tree’s roots thrust themselves into their biblical spiritual roots, their leaves reach for grace-based sunlight and need nourishment from Heaven. The tree risks disease, withering, and dying during seasons of Christian spiritual droughts.

I was born and raised in the Anglican tradition and the inspiration for this book came after I had attended an Anglican Fellowship of Prayer Conference which met in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at Chatham College in June, 1989. At that time, I had an opportunity to be a part of a group discussion on the 12-Steps with my friend, Sally. She described how her father and Bill W. spent hours behind closed doors examining how one could stay sober with basic Christian principles, that have come to be known as the 12-Steps. The day after the conference, I created the outline for this book.

Recovery or working the steps and their principles can be equated with following a rule of life in community. Evangelism spreads through personal story telling and sharing while sitting in a circle. Many anonymous individuals, some known only by God and some known only by their first names, are used by God for the purpose of giving new life to other hopeless, helpless addicts and their family members.

Alcoholics Anonymous, AA, the pioneer of the A movement began in Akron, Ohio and now brings healing and new life all over the world. I have been humbled that God chose me to be a part of this healing movement and to attempt to capture its essence. The phenomenal growth of the movement has occurred over an eighty year period.

In AA alone, there are over two million members in more than one hundred and fourteen thousand groups in over 180 different countries. Seeds have been planted in many African countries but some are struggling to survive. AA records some registered groups in Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Kenya – mostly in the big cities. In these African countries most of the groups who meet do so in populated areas in churches and rehabilitation centers. Groups in rural areas are few and transportation is an issue for regular attendance. However, in South Africa, AA has 370 AA groups. In Egypt there are now fifteen groups and over sixty-one meetings of NA. After the Arab spring, since drug abuse has exploded in Arab countries, planting new A seedlings everywhere in Africa is desperately needed to stop the violence and stabilize new democracies.

My own rebirth began in 1981 as my friend Polly and I sat together in a restaurant in the town of Sewickley, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while she introduced me to the 12-Steps. Soon after that I walked into my first Al-Anon meeting in the basement of the former church building where my father had been pastor for twenty years. I felt I had finally found a group of people who seemed to understand and accept me. These new friends showed me how to take my personal inventory and helped me work the 12-Steps.

Today, thirty years later, I find that the continual process of working the steps, allows God to prune the deadwood from my life, like the parable of the fig tree that Jesus told to his disciples. Working through the 12-Steps and attending 12-Step meetings has given me gifts of biblical insight, discernment, and indescribable experiences of peace and serenity. Not only have I been thus renewed but I have been empowered to a new way of living, a 12-Step kind of living, with each day a new beginning, that included attending Trinity Seminary down the road from that restaurant where I first listened to my friend Polly read the 12-Steps.

In December of 1989, I went for a retreat at an Orthodox Monastery near Ellwood City, Pennsylvania to dedicate this work to God. While there, I met and wrote down the steps for a fellow retreater and started her on her own A journey. My journey has many such God-moments of opportunities for 12fth step service (see www.marytheresawebb.com) around the world.

For many years treatment specialists have considered dependence on brain altering substances, such as alcohol, cocaine, bhang, heroin, and pain medicines, as a bio-psycho-social disease that can be prevented and treated. However, one does not want to neglect the spiritual component of this disease that I describe as follows: loss of a sense of God’s presence and a violation of one’s own moral principles, that may or may not include dropping out of attendance at worship services. This definition also does not include the following:

Uses rationalization and projection as defenses; angry when subject of usage is discussed

Mood swings and personality changes; the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome

Social and marital problems

Sexual functioning problems

Financial difficulties

Deteriorating job performance

In other words, addiction is a disease of mind, body, relationships, and spirit.

Dr. Gerald May, in his book Addiction and Grace, defines addiction as the most powerful psychic enemy of humanity’s desire for God and makes idolaters of us all, because it forces us to worship these objects of our attachment.³ Addiction conquers and destroys will power.

Medically and scientifically oriented western societies look for medical and scientific solutions to problems, particularly problems of disease. African societies, on the other hand, historically depended on witch craft, superstition, and spirits from their natural world to solve problems. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Africans have been introduced to the Triune God of Christianity and medical solutions to problems.

The disease of addiction in African countries has now become an epidemic that makes the bubonic plague and HIV/AIDS pale by comparison. NACADA, in a 2012 Rapid Situation Assessment Survey, provides statics that show that alcohol and other drug abuse pose significant health risks and social problems in Kenya. This disease strikes down children before they are born, destroys families, and wrecks havoc with nation states. Yet, government agencies spend far more money in trying to help persons recover from the HIV/AIDS than in combating addiction, especially alcohol and medication addiction. The efforts that UNODC, the international narcotics control board, has put in place are geared towards helping nations to reduce supply and accessibility of drugs. Until governments join churches to put addiction prevention and treatment first they will not eradicate HIV/AIDS because addiction adds fuel to the spread of the virus.

Chapter 1

TREE ROOTS

In my distress I called to the Lord and he answered me. From the depths of the grave I called for help, and you listened to my cry.

(Jonah 2:2 NIV)

Christian Spiritual Beginnings

AA is a spiritual program and a spiritual way of life,⁴ and the process of recovery or healing begins when an alcoholic cries out for help or when an addict recognizes that he is not God Almighty and cannot control his drinking.

The 12-Steps came as an inspiration of an alcoholic who had a conversion experience at the height of his despair and hopelessness in the early 1930s. The A movement evolved from the lifelong ministry of this man, Bill Wilson, a NYC stock broker, and Dr. Bob Smith, a proctologist physician, with the spiritual support of three pastors: the Rev. Sam Shoemaker, an Evangelical Episcopal minister, the Rev. Frank Buchman, a Lutheran pastor and founder of the Oxford Group Movement, and Father Ed Dowling, a Jesuit Roman Catholic priest.

The Spirit of the Triune Christian God, working through and among these men, as well as other recovering alcoholics and their spouses, has brought and is bringing new life and light to those diseased with addiction.

Bill Wilson’s conversion

One more time detoxing at Towns Hospital and this time he felt like he was at the very bottom of a pit. Bill Wilson cried out, If there is a God, let him show himself ! I am ready to do anything, anything!⁵

At that moment, a great white light filled the room and Bill felt an indescribable ecstasy while being carried up to a mountain top with a wind not of air but of spirit. He felt free of the bondage of his addiction to alcohol and sensed God’s Presence surrounding him.

His reputed theophany, or appearance of God to a human being, reminds one of the many such theophanies recorded in the Bible. Moses had such an experience upon hearing God’s voice in the burning bush and, again, when he wrote the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. Isaiah saw God’s Glory and had a glimpse of Heaven. Jacob saw the angels ascending and descending on a ladder to Heaven.

In spite of the fact that his physician, Dr. Silkworth, had tried to explain to Bill that he had a disease that when Bill drank alcohol the alcohol took control of his will, causing him blackouts and all kinds of problems, Bill Wilson was stubborn. He had promised his wife Lois he would stop drinking many times. Each