[bluidkiti]

"Monopoly"

"We have no monopoly on God; we merely have an approach that worked with us." ~Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition, Working With Others, pg. 95~

Monopoly is best defined for this correspondence as: Exclusive possession or control. We have no exclusive possession or control over God, or at least the God each and every one of us understands. That is the beauty of what this program provides for the alcoholic. Your are not told you must believe in this God, or that God, only a God you understand.

This is where it gets dicey for those who think religion is the only way for those that practice this program have to view a God. It is not so!!!! That is why the use of the words ?Higher Power? have made their way into more and more conversations about the entity named God in the text. It is in fear that a personal God might not be understood. It doesn't have to be! It's personal!!!!

It is very true that the pioneers of this program of recovery used the God in the Christian Bible as the God they used in talking about a God that they understood, but were very careful not to say that a Christian God was the key to recovery. They emphasized the need to "soul search" as stated in "We Agnostics" page 55 "We finally saw that faith in some kind of God was a part of our make up, just as much as the feeling we have for a friend. Sometimes we had to search fearlessly, but He was there." That "some kind of God" makes it possible for anyone to heal spiritually. All they have to do is "search fearlessly" for Him.

So for some of us the searching didn't go very far, but for the rest, we had to venture into a realm that virtually unknown to us. For some of us growing up in religion had left a bad taste in our mouths. We were told this and that about a God that we had to understand or not be relegated to the sanctity of the paradise He had waiting for us after this life. For others there was the idea that certain tragic events that had happened certainly proved that a loving God could not exist. And still for others they put self before everything else, including any God. Yet if we only put fear aside we found something that we could put our faith in.

In the wisdom of the pioneers, they understood that just the slightest idea of a God (No matter what that idea might be), gave us enough strength to pull out of the insanity we knew as alcoholic thinking. In "There Is A Solution" page 28 it states - "What seemed at first a flimsy reed, has proved to be the loving and powerful hand of God. A new life has been given us or, if you prefer, "a design for living" that really works." and later on that same page: "We have no desire to convince anyone that there is only one way by which faith can be acquired. If what we have learned and felt and seen means anything at all, it means that all of us, whatever our race, creed, or color are the children of a living Creator with whom we may form a relationship upon simple and understandable terms as soon as we are willing and honest enough to try." It's up to each and every one of us to figure out what that relationship must be.

It seems to me that this is possibly one of the biggest stepping stones in the recovery process. That is establishing a faith in some kind of God. If only one is to put aside the prejudice of others and themselves, and search deep with-in their soul, they will find that they do have an idea that will work. It is a very simple idea. One that has proven as an approach that has worked for millions and millions of people who have became and stayed sober.
--Ed C.