Completely exposed before God with a wide open willingness for Him to take away her defects gave her a vital spiritual experience. 

I have been in SA for five years, and am three years sober. I have been working through the 12 Steps with my sponsor, from the Step Into Action book. I am well aware that there are other methods in practice in SA, but I can only relate my own story (which I guess is rigorous honesty). It is a very detailed, painstaking method, and very deeply soul-searching, often quite painful, but extremely rewarding and beautiful nevertheless, and highly literature-based. This article is about my most recent, and extremely intense, Step work on beginning with Step Seven. The title reflects the almost white light experience Bill W experienced, but which had never happened to me, until now.

Let me unpack this in the context of this edition’s theme of “Rigorous Honesty”. I gave my life to the God of my understanding when I was nine or ten years old. I have been in recovery a long time in another fellowship, in which I took Steps Six and Seven many years ago, and I have recited the Step Seven prayer the majority of mornings ever since. But I said it without sexual sobriety, and without the rigorous honesty that is an essential part of SA sobriety. I can sincerely assert that I was always doing my best with what light I then had. It was like standing in a dim room, with my back to the window. There would be some light. Then I turned around and stood looking at the sun! That is how I feel now.

What I did, in good SA style, was to make myself ready to receive this gift from the God of my understanding through painstaking Step work over time. Step Four was fairly easy. I already knew I was resentful, dishonest, selfish, and afraid. Step Five was painful and necessary. It was the beginning of rigorous honesty: as it says, “We must be entirely honest with somebody if we expect to live long or happily in this world” (AA 73-74). But it didn’t change me. I learned well and truly in Steps Four and Five the famous line, “It’s Not Them.” It impressed me more deeply than ever as to who I am and what urgently needed removing. It convinced me that “it is truly awful to admit that, glass in hand, we have warped ourselves into such an obsession for destructive drinking that only an act of Providence can remove it from us” (12&12 21).  

This was cemented for me in my Step Six work, which rubbed in deeply what needed removing, and strengthened my absolute willingness to have it removed, but only at an initial stage, largely theoretically. It gave me a list of the prayers we wrote together to have the defects removed, which was the beginning of actual change, rather than study and reflection.

This week, I did my initial work on Step Seven: reading the introductory part in Step Into Action, and as far as I could, members’ shares. I managed the first two. It was the most galvanising, real, profound, spiritual experience of my entire life! And I have been doing my best to have a relationship with God since I was nine or ten! But this was when the penny dropped. I underlined almost every single word in those sections.

This passage was the very epitome of rigorous honesty: every little trick, cogwheel, and rationalisation I have used to get by in life was laid bare in glorious technicolour. Nowhere to hide or excuse myself, I stood in front of God, totally exposed, with the two questions burning: Is this really me? and Am I now willing for my Newfound Friend to take it all away, root and branch?

Truly, truly, “when the pupil is ready, the Master appears.” My “roots grasp a new soil.” Indeed, “when I have nothing left but God, I find that God is enough.”