DID YOU KNOW?
This week’s Did You Know is excerpted from a South Bend History professor’s latest book, “Changed by Grace”…John Wesley talked about his inner feelings to a small group of people at Aldersgate. The idea of a group testimonial was a new item that was introduced by the eighteenth-century evangelical movement. Some portion of what the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous calls its private “fifth-step” confession—including discussing some of our old negative attitudes with a sponsor, and talking about some of the harm we did to others—needs eventually to be repeated before a home-group of people with compassion and acceptance, which for Wesley meant a small fellowship of Moravians and other devout Christians who met at Aldersgate.
Caution should still be used here, of course, since not all things are appropriate for this kind of context. Some things may need to be forever locked into the private confessional experience with a trusted sponsor, priest or spiritual advisor.
Eventually, people fully working and living the twelve steps will also need to stand up before a large group at an open meeting filled with strangers, and confess some of their old destructive behaviors. It will however, be equally necessary to talk at that time about the joys and satisfactions of the new way of living which came after they turned their will and their lives over to the care of God (as they understood Him).
In the evangelical tradition, witnessing to the group about the blessings of the new life (as Wesley did at Aldersgate after his spiritual experience), is even more important than the confession of misery and destructiveness of one’s old way of life.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, performing these confessional acts is the way the atonement process works. Remorse, guilt, and shame are eventually washed away a little bit more each time we tell the story of what we did, and how we have tried to make amends for the harms we did to others and the new basis for living which we have now discovered.
After the initial fifth step admission—where for the first time we finally get everything out into the open—the primary motive for talking about the bad parts of our past is actually not to make ourselves feel better (though it does), but to help other people who are suffering similar feelings of remorse, guilt and shame. It is a very effective method which the twelve step program uses for carrying out atonement, for there is a conversion process in which we learn to transform crippling remorse, guilt and shame into a tool for healing others, and thereby turn negative emotions into something positive, while also (as an added plus), gaining a healthy sense of humility.
But it is absolutely necessary that people in twelve step programs do this step because until we do, we remain locked inside the morass of our own minds. Praying to God, without telling another human being about something, does not get us out of our own subjectivity. We are not genuinely telling it to God the way it really was until we ourselves have learned how to look at what we did objectively. We cannot ever make a true full confession to God until we have performed this act of self-transcendence which allows us to look at our own deeds “from the outside” as it were and seeing how they look from the viewpoint of an external observer. Speaking about it to other human beings, however, puts the matter out into the external world where real objectivity can enter for the first time, as we hear ourselves speaking these words in the presence of fellow human souls, and see and hear our words mirrored in their response to what we have said.
Until we have done this, we will remain locked into our subjective feelings and fantasies about God, where the skeptics in the enlightenment crowd warned, “We could not tell the difference between reality and the illusionary products of an overactive imagination.”
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