Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

This is a great book for everyone in recovery - a great start to the 21st century.  Check it out for yourself:

http://www.thefix.com/content/marya-hornbacher-takes-god9165?page=all

http://www.intherooms.com/addiction/a-perspective-on-waiting-a-nonbelievers-higher-power/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkLmnmWgdqA&feature=related

Here's some freebees from the book, but please read it and tell me what you like about it:

When we shut down in this way – by addiction, by fighting, by attempts to control, by what the Big Book aptly calls “self-will run riot” – we have no space in ourselves for spiritual growth or awareness.  And we need that space.  Without it, our spirits wither…Our hearts become rigid and cannot love.  We have no ability to really experience the life we are living.

It is a regrettable habit we have of thinking we are entitled to have all that we want.

I fight.  I resist.  It doesn’t even matter what I resist; their sis simply something in me that tends to resist things as they are.  I have been fighting since I was very small.  And I believe that my addiction was a response, in some measure, to the fact that the fight was futile, and I could not tolerate that fact.  I couldn’t tolerate the fact that I did not control the worlds.

Doubt is at the very heart of spiritual experience. Without it, we would never ask the hard questions about the nature of our existence: Why are we here: How did we get here? What are our origins?  What is our purpose and what are our ends?  These are spiritual questions asked by spiritual people and they lead to growth… When we doubt, we learn to accept that we may not ever know.  When we question, we learn to accept that there may be no answer.  We shout our doubt out into the universe, we learn to accept that we may be met with a silence we do not know how to read… to accept doubt, a lack of certainty, is to accept the very nature of life as it is.

…the Twelve Step program isn’t actually an attempt at religious conversion.  Really, it just tries to bring us to a place of new spiritual understanding that allows us to live differently in this world.  The Steps are not intended to get us to heaven or save us from hell.  This is not about life in another world, above or below.  This is about how we live here.