Feb 16
Recovery and Revolution
Journal Entry, February 11, 2022
This journal entry examines the February 11 spiritual exercise from the Narcotics Anonymous meditation book Just for Today.
A curse into a blessing
“We have become very grateful in the course of our recovery…. We have a disease, but we do recover.”
Basic Text, p. 8
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Active addiction was no picnic; many of us barely came out of it alive. But ranting against the disease, lamenting what it has done to us, pitying ourselves for the condition it has left us in — these things can only keep us locked in the spirit of bitterness and resentment. The path to freedom and spiritual growth begins where bitterness ends, with acceptance.
There is no denying the suffering brought by addiction. Yet it was this disease that brought us to Narcotics Anonymous; without it, we would neither have sought nor found the blessing of recovery. In isolating us, it forced us to seek fellowship. In causing us to suffer, it gave us the experience needed to help others, help no one else was so uniquely suited to offer. In forcing us to our knees, addiction gave us the opportunity to surrender to the care of a loving Higher Power.
We would not wish the disease of addiction on anyone. But the fact remains that we addicts already have this disease — and further, that without this disease we may never have embarked on our spiritual journey. Thousands of people search their whole lives for what we have found in Narcotics Anonymous: fellowship, a sense of purpose, and conscious contact with a Higher Power. Today, we are grateful for everything that has brought us this blessing.
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Just for today: I will accept the fact of my disease, and pursue the blessing of my recovery.
Copyright © 1991–2022 by Narcotics Anonymous World Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This is a lovely contribution to our understanding of ourselves, and we who take our recovery into the world with us believe there is much information to be added on to the subject addressed in this meditation: Narcotics Anonymous is a spiritually based program which relies on a spiritual solution to solve a spiritual disorder. The disease of addiction is the spiritual disorder of this society; it is the spiritual disorder of this social system, of this period in human history, and of this era in Western civilization — indeed the dying phase of Western civilization.
In this connection, the above adjuration insists to us: Thousands of people search their whole lives for what we have found in Narcotics Anonymous: fellowship, a sense of purpose, and conscious contact with a Higher Power.
This proclamation is true for a dying social order. It also needs to be mentioned that millions of people the world over, in indigenous societies, and other spiritually-based social orders, have lived their lives by spiritual principles, have had, and have today a sense of purpose — love for Mother Earth, for example, love for their people, love for humanity — and a conscious contact with a Power Greater than themselves. The peoples fighting for their national liberation, the Women’s Movements world-wide, each of these movements seeking freedom from oppression and seeking to be in harmony with the universe-in-great-order, indeed all of the people’s liberation movements are based in a power greater than the oppressive social order and the spiritual disorder of addiction.
These liberation movements — the Disabled People’s Liberation Movement, Womanism, The Recovery Movement (a People’s Health Care Liberation Movement), are mass movements whose adherents are living lives beyond the torture and death of this social order.
There are millions of people the world-over who do not participate in the debauchery of this social order, do not marinate in the social decay that is the dissolution of this social order, and who live their lives guided by spiritual principles.
Each of us knows people who are not in the recovery movement, but who live lives devoted to family-building, extended family building, community building, and devoted to making the world a better place to live. Each of us knows people whose lives are not mired in addiction, people who are also not in the Recovery Movement.
The Recovery Movement has no opinion on outside issues. In this connection, it is the responsibility of those of us who benefit from the Recovery Movement (everyone outside of the Recovery Movement benefits from the Recovery Movement) to make the connection between this instance of self-determined People’s Power in the area of healthcare and the rest of the positive movements for change, for overcoming the illness of the present regime. Real leadership does not beat its chest, and it is not the cross-to-bear of the Recovery Movement to announce how much it is contributing to society. It is the peoples who are positively affected by this movement who need to point out that this movement does not exist in isolation — it is in harmony with the rest of the efforts at substantive, fundamental social change. The Queer People’s Liberation Movement, socialism as a revolutionary social system and as a working-class revolutionary movement, the Indigenous People’s Liberation Movement, each of these movements support each other. To not speak on this is to leave each other in isolation. It is in our connections that we make progress and break down the walls of oppression.
Those of us who take our recovery to social change movements outside of the Recovery Movement do not want this offering by Narcotics Anonymous to give the impression that the only people who live by spiritual principles and are part of the way forward to a new social order, a social order that transcends the disease of addiction, are people who identify as drug addicts, alcoholics, sex and love addicts, compulsive gamblers, compulsive overeaters, and people who act on their obsessions for money and power-over.
And we do not want to give the impression that “the disease is our fault,” and that we recover in isolation from the society at large, a society that is sick and dying. No, recovery is an act of human liberation, and it is directly connected to we-the-people, liberating ourselves from the dominant dying social system. We are not responsible for our disease, but we are responsible for our recovery, and this is not an individual matter. We do not “recover from the disease,” and then enter a diseased society outside of our recovery. The peoples must recover a new social system together — one that mirrors our personal recovery in community.
Any of you who read these two entreaties, the February 11 offering of Just for Today (NA), and this response to that offering, who react by saying “I do not know too many people living the righteous lives you are describing,” are also making our point: By appropriating a disease as our identity on an individual level, we separate ourselves from the diseased social order, and also from the millions of people working day and night to move beyond the decay. The social system is accurately identified with the social/political/spiritual disorder.
By understanding ourselves as defined by our disease — in the same way that someone suffering from cancer would call themselves “cancer”: “My name is Allen and I am a cancer…” — we of the Recovery Movement, a movement which is making great strides in helping people who suffer from the spiritual disorder of this social system and of this time in the life of humanity, separate ourselves from the rest of humanity.
The last two forms of the disease of addiction mentioned above, the lust for money, and the compulsion to pursue oppressive power-over other humans, are probably the most egregious representations of a dying social order. Otherwise termed the capitalist economic system, the white supremacist political system, and the male supremacist social and ideological system, these two most egregious forms of this spiritually based disorder are defining of the social system under which the people in our millions are suffering.
The Recovery Movement is making a major contribution to the efforts of millions of people to find a way to live well as we move beyond oppression and exploitation. Are we who participate in the Recovery Movement the only ones who have found spiritual power and righteousness? None of us believes that, and nowhere does any Recovery Group or Association make such a claim. To propound such an idea would make us ideologues, religious dogmatists, sectarians.
No, early or late, all who make revolution merit equal treatment, including those people in the Recovery Movement who choose to call themselves addicts, alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, sex and love addicts, and compulsive overeaters. That such people name themselves by the condition they have — “I am breast cancer” — does not lessen the fact that they have chosen a spiritually based solution to address a spiritually based disorder. It also does not make their efforts superior to the millions of other people who righteously seek a way out of this sick society. Those of us in the Recovery Movement must counter any such sense of us coming from whatever quarter.
By allowing that there is more than one road to recovery and liberation, we avoid the social illness of isolation and sectarianism. A spiritual way cannot be sectarian.
