“If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it—then you are ready to take certain steps.” (Chapter 5, Big Book)
“If what we have learned and felt and seen means anything at all, it means that all of us, whatever our race, creed, or color are the children of a living Creator with whom we may form a relationship upon simple and understandable terms as soon as we are willing and honest enough to try.” (Chapter 2, ibid.)
What we who have consistently applied the Twelve Steps to recover have is a relationship with God. Not a very evolved one, perhaps, but it’s there and it’s functioning.
Worse: the relationship is an asymmetrical one. I’m infinitesimally small. God is infinitely big. In that relationship, the goal is for the I to disappear, like a jigsaw puzzle piece in a jigsaw. No more me. No more stories. No more history. No more hysteria. No more “I want”. No more “But”. No more ‘pinions. And then, and then, not sitting on a cloud with a harp, singing Wesleyan hymns, but being super active in the world, working for God, and trying to be available for God to use one as a channel to reach a largely uninterested world. Self constantly pops up everywhere, like a swarm of gremlins, not to be gotten wet or fed after midnight, and they take a lot of swatting. So it’s a busy time.
One has to be really, really, really done for that to be attractive. I mean, really done.
If someone wants that, then they are ready for the steps, and I might be able to help.
If someone does not want a relationship with God, and specifically the above relationship, if someone doesn’t want their story, history, personality, and identity to be dissolved into nothing, I don’t know how to get someone to that position of wanting. It was external and internal disaster that got me to that position, not reading things like this or having someone in nice knitwear produce clear sentences in meetings and smiling at me hopefully. That made me back off, edgily.
Once I was done, done-dy, done-dy-, done-dy done, I was ready, and the message of the Big Book then seemed so obvious it barely needed explaining.