Faith and The Miraculous in a Secular Sense

You can call it 'God' if it helps you, but you don't have to

12 step meetings have a famous ritual-ish exchange whereby anybody who opens their mouth to talk starts by saying “Hi, I’m [name] and I’m an alcoholic”. After that everyone else in the room responds with “Hi, [name]”. This exchange is a ritual in the sense that it opens people up to some sort of saving presence that exceeds any individual’s perception and power - you could call it God, if you wanted to, but I think it’s fine to call this power “community identity”. 

Active addiction is a devastating and overwhelming force in a person’s life, very difficult to truly get if you haven’t lived through it yourself, almost impossible to overcome through some sort of individual act of will. At least for people who wind up at 12-step meetings. People tend to arrive at the end of their ropes - maybe wanting to end their lives, certainly in desperate search of a new one, and so the community identity of “I’m an alcoholic” helps provide the outlines of that new life and give some hope of getting there. People say “I’m an alcoholic” regardless of how long they’ve remained sober, and so even if you are completely overwhelmed and lost when you arrive you can see that a) people there understand your situation like nobody else can, b) those people who were once in your situation now lead lives that are a thousand times healthier and happier, and c) that they are very uniquely positioned to help you achieve such a life for yourself. 

It’s generally good to critically examine your life and have it such that you understand yourself and lead your life intentionally - it’s also true that some things in life have to be lived before they can be understood, that sometimes you have to take suggestions as a matter of trust in someone else. In recovery you might not be able to fully comprehend the value of what someone recommends you do, and indeed may face relentless internal resistance to doing so, and also have it be true that it’s a good idea to do anyway. 

This is what “faith” looks like in this context - a choice to trust in the advice of people you admire, a choice to believe that a better future is ahead even when it seems impossible from where you now stand. 

This, also, is what the word “miracle” can mean - a “miracle” is just an event that is utterly unpredictable and unprecedented from an individual’s point of view. You can add a divine explanation to it if it serves you to do so, but you don’t have to. My recovery is a “miracle” to me in that it once seemed certain that I’d drink myself to death and it also seemed certain that there was no hope of my ever stopping. Neither of those things were true, but there’s no way I could have found that out in isolation - it took talking to other people and picking up that community identity for me to find my way out of it. 

My favorite part of the ritual of introducing oneself as an alcoholic is that it’s always the individual themselves who does so - it isn’t the case that the room makes the first move by saying “Hi, [name], you’re an alcoholic” in unison and then the individual says “yeah I guess I am”. Every time the individual goes to a meeting and makes that introduction they get to personally reaffirm their partaking in that collective identity, freely. It’s another way of saying “Hi, I’m [name] and I belong here, dammit!” and everyone else saying “why yes you do!”

There are no requirements for doing so besides a sincere desire to stop drinking - being an alcoholic looks like a lot of different things for a lot of different people,, but everyone gets to participate if they choose to do so. No matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, no matter how you feel, you belong as soon as you say you do, and nobody can kick you out.