The Spectrum of Belief

My wife came with me to my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and thought I’d get up and walk out when she heard the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions read with their references to God. I was a cynical agnostic and she thought: “This won’t work, it’s too religious.” But after my last binge a week before the meeting I’d tried to kill myself, so I was in no state to argue about “theological abstractions.”  I’d escaped death by a hair’s breadth and that made me as “open-minded as only the dying can be.” I listened with laser-like attention to what would keep me alive and filtered out things I heard that made no sense to me or with which I disagreed; I listened for the similarities, not the differences.