Personally I believe in God but that is not true for all people in DA. I made an announcement asking for help from atheists and agnostics to share their spiritual journey in recovery. Here is one such story.

I was raised by atheist parents of Jewish heritage. I was, at best, turned off by religion, but as an ethnic Jew, I felt some particularly antipathy to Christianity’s persistent antisemitism. (I never thought this was true of all Christians – for one thing, I grew up loving the Christians in the civil rights and peace movements!). I was also acutely aware of the patriarchal authoritarianism of so much religion. Overall, I saw religion as a force of oppression.

I also have always considered myself to be scientific and logical. I have flirted with agnosticism during my life – there are certainly myriad phenomena and forces that are far beyond human understanding. But I have ended up believing that everything we currently don’t understand has some logical/scientific explanation at its root. The one exception is how everything came to be in the first place. That is simply not explainable and a deity doesn’t solve this for me, for I’m left wondering how that deity came to be. The bottom line is that I am indeed an atheist. And I determined that I was by no means spiritual, since that seemed like just another form of hokus pokus.

So, I came to my first 12-Step experience (DA) feeling suspicious of god and those who tout a particular, specific understanding of god. And, since this is a predominantly Christian country, I felt particular turned off by a religiosity that was bound to be largely Christian.

By the time I found DA, every other potential treatment for my depression had failed (and I had tried nearly all of them). I had no trouble at all with Step 1 – my desperation, my powerlessness, the unmanageability of my life were all apparent to me.

During my early weeks of DA engagement, others shared with me a variety of readings about the place for agnostics and atheists in the fellowship. Still, at times I recoiled and described DA to others as a cult. I resisted and kept coming back to my opposition to the idea of an anthropomorphic (male) god as a conscious decisionmaker for individual humans. I still hold that view (and the “thy will” portion of the Third Step prayer remains difficult for me).

I was glad to read that the higher power can take different forms for different people. But I was only “acting as if” as I tried to embrace that idea.

One of the readings (by Hugh?) talks about electricity as a mysterious phenomenon that we can’t understand. But I do understand electricity. Then, one day, I thought about gravity. This is a powerful, essential force that I absolutely do not understand. But would gravity be a force I could surrender to? Would it help relieve me of depression?

What has started to change for me is that I have begun to really feel spirituality. In the past couple of weeks, I have seen a coming together of elements of Buddhism (which I have just started to learn about) and meditation and words from my therapist (who is an atheist 12-Step alum). Even the Washington Post had an article in recent days about radical acceptance. No, I don’t believe that coincidence is the result of a conscious decision by a higher power. But I believe that a higher power is at work for me when I recognize these kinds of alignments.

One day recently, a DA member called me out of the blue. She was someone I’d had a little interaction with, but never any real one-on-one exchange. Her message to me was profound: that I was full of love and, therefore deeply spiritual. It hit home hard and I knew it to be true.

I have begun to feel the fellowship of the group in a new way. It’s more than comradery. Rather, it is deep compassion. And the service I was doing (I had started by being a timer in meetings and had progressed to chairing) was feeling so damn good. I could feel myself helping others by being there. One of my negative thought patterns has been not forgiving myself for doing almost no charitable work – but DA is giving me a true chance to serve.

Just last week, I stopped introducing myself as “Keith struggling with depression” and began saying “Keith, recovering from depression.” I don’t know that this will stick. My deep pain is still there. But I’m feeling better about myself and embracing love and DA as higher powers for me. I am a spiritual being and am hoping that this will alleviate my suffering.

Keith B.