Not God

You, a drinking alcoholic, are not God, as I, a drinking alcoholic was not God. And I am not God even now, as a sober alcoholic. Precisely because I accept my alcoholism, my weakness, my limitation, I have found that I have something to give — something to give from that very limitation.
— Ernest Kurtz, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (1979)

When I first came into the rooms, I was fragile and uncertain, and I was listening carefully. People approached me quickly, with warmth and conviction, and told me how the program worked. Read the book. Get a sponsor. Work the Steps. Get involved in service. Do the next right thing. Most of it was offered generously, and much of it helped. I needed structure. I needed direction. I needed people who believed in something when I could not yet believe in myself.

But I also remember a tension rising in me when certain suggestions were delivered not simply as experience, but as something closer to certainty. I did not yet have the language to articulate that discomfort, I only knew that if staying in recovery required me to adopt someone else’s worldview wholesale, I might not last. Looking back, I can see that sometimes it wasn’t the principles I was resisting. It was the fear that belonging required uniformity. I confused conviction with certainty. I confused structure with conformity.

As Kurtz discusses, the breakthrough of AA was not theological precision but humility. “Not-God” was the discovery. Sobriety did not elevate anyone to authority; it revealed limitation. The problem was self-centredness, and the solution was displacement of that centre. Spirituality, in that light, is not about adopting the correct doctrine but about relinquishing control.

I love the Big Book. Its language carries gravity and history, and I understand why many members guard it carefully. It has saved lives, including mine. But the line near the end of the 164—”Our book is meant to be suggestive only. We realize we know only a little”—has become increasingly important to me. It is the founders admitting, in their own words, that even they were not God. Over time, I began to notice how easily suggestion becomes prescription. “This worked for me” can easily shift into “This is the way.” The difference is subtle but consequential. One opens a door. The other narrows it.

It seems to me the founders built flexibility into the program deliberately. “God as we understood Him” was radical language in the 1930s—a deliberate refusal to collapse something broad and human into a single theology. Willingness, honesty, and open-mindedness were understood from the beginning as the essentials of recovery. The principles woven through the Steps do not specify a tradition. They specify a direction.

I count myself as a secular member of the program. My own spiritual bearings draw largely from Buddhist thought and yogic traditions. I do not consider those religious, rather philosophical. I experience them as practices that keep me well and connected. I have friends in the rooms who are Christian, who live their faith with genuine integrity and compassion. They have helped me. I have grown to respect them deeply. We do not share the same worldview, and that difference is not a conflict. It is the program working as it was intended.

What I have had to keep learning is that fundamentalism—even when it arises from love, even when it comes with the best intentions—can become ego dressed in spiritual clothing. If the program begins with the admission that I am not God, then it must also include the admission that my interpretation is not final.

What I believe is there is one program, but many interpretations. I realize that some reading this may not agree with those words. And that is all right. That, to me, is the beauty of this way of life—that I can accept you exactly as you are, and hope, in return, that you might accept me.