"The Power at the Bottom"

"The Power at the Bottom"

The spirituality behind the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions is very similar to the phenomenon of the base communities in Latin America. It is a “low Church” approach to evangelization and healing that is probably our only hope in a suffering world of five-and-a-half billion people. Do we really need to verify belief in atonement doctrines and the Immaculate Conception when most of God’s physical, animal and human world is on the verge of mass suicide and extinction?

The Twelve-Step meetings are probably the First World answer to Third World base communities. Our suffering is psychological, relational and addictive: the suffering of people who are comfortable on the outside but oppressed and empty within. It is a crisis of meaninglessness and the false self, which had tried to find meaning in possessions, prestige and power. It doesn’t work. Se we turn to ingesting and buying to fill our empty souls.

The Twelve Steps walk us back out of our addictive society. Like all steps toward truth, they lead downward.

Bill Wilson and his A.A. movement have shown us that the real power is not at the top but at the bottom. Those who admit they are powerless have the only power that matters in the world or in the Church. Saint Bill W., pray for us.

from Radical Grace, “The Twelve Steps: An Amazing Gift of the Spirit”