Finding God
When You Don’t Believe in God
Jack Erdmann with Larry
Kearney
Hazelden, 177 pages
Those in recovery programs speak of “the 12-Step
waltz,” meaning a one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three
repetition of the first three steps. It describes the hesitancy of
persons who find it necessary to back up and start over as time and
again they confront the enormity of Step Three: “Made a decision to
turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood
him.”
There’s a lot of latitude in “as we understood him,” a
flexibility which has given millions of alcoholics the elbow room
they needed to stay the same rooms with other people who were
talking about the importance of a Higher Power. The authors have
personal experience with that. Jack Erdmann is a salesman and
businessman, Larry Kearney a poet who has authored 11 books. They
teamed on two earlier books about recovery and spirituality,
Whiskey’s Children and
A Bar on Every Corner.
Their third collaboration was written for a wider
audience than alcoholics and their families. “While the alcoholic
may have a particular and deep knowledge of what it means to search
for a Higher Power, the process is everyone’s and is at the core of
what it means to be human,” they write. Their insights are combined
with the insights of 11 others in a montage of spiritual diversity.
It poignantly illustrates how it is possible for a person to have an
experience of God when he or she won’t even accept the idea of the
existence of God.
The first perspective comes from Annabelle, who
states, “AA uses the words Higher
Power, but it’s always just been God to me. I don’t go to
church. I don’t consider myself much of a Catholic, but every day my
life is filled with knowing that when I find myself lost or empty,
there’s a place I can go that holds nothing but love, a safe place
that doesn’t guarantee me anything but the strength to go on. It
doesn’t have to. The certainty of the love is everything.”
The last is Alfred, who observes: “I have not said
things consecutively. Neither have I spoken well, but if this
happens to help or inform anyone who reads this book, I’m glad.
Maybe someone will stop to think, ‘Well, I’m kind of like that. I
sort of understand what he’s talking about. Maybe I should just stop
all the (b.s.) and just get simple, try and deal with people.’ I
mean, if a word here touches another’s consciousness of heart, soul,
or being, that’ll be worth it all.”
Journey Into Healing
Awakening the Wisdom Within You
Deepak Chopra
Harmony Books, 159
pages
A skeptic who leafs through this slim work might be
tempted to dismiss it as too simple, too short on content to offer
much of substance. As measured by word count, it’s certainly short.
And its message truly is simple, though decidedly not simplistic.
Those familiar with the healing philosophies of Chopra
and others of similar bent won’t be surprised by the dust jacket’s
observation that “what we think and feel can actually change our
biology.” Chopra, who holds an M.D., is
known as a leader in the field of mind body medicine. He is Director
of Educational Programs, CEO and co-founder of the Chopra Center for
Wellbeing in Carlsbad, Calif. His healing approach integrates
Western medicine with natural healing traditions.
“Of
all the experiences we can have, the experience of our inner self is
the most important,” Chopra teaches. “The body is the objective
experience of our ideas, while the mind is the subjective experience
of them … (but) they are not the experiencer. The one who is having
the experience is beyond time and space, it is the real you.”
Most of the book is
given over to brief insights, some as few as eight words, related to
the achievement of inner peace and perfect health. (Example: “We are
not the body. We are not the mind. We are the ones who have mind and
body.”) Do not assume brevity precludes depth. Insight as defined by
Chopra is a profound, life-changing experience. “When a flash of
insight first comes, it is not verbal, not linguistically structured
– it is a feeling of sudden knowledge and it is liberating, because
without words we know it as truth.”
Just as the “experiencer” is beyond time and space,
our conscious insights emanate from an indefinable field of
potentiality that resides in the gaps between our thoughts. Though
it can’t be grasped by the conscious mind, Chopra sees it as more
real than anything we can touch or imagine.
“The real you cannot be squeezed into the
volume of a body or the span of a lifetime,” Chopra encourages the
reader. Through that infinite potential it is possible to express an
unlimited capacity for healing. Everything needed for that journey
already exists within.
The
dust jacket promises, “By the final pages of this book, the reader’s
consciousness will have been altered by the experience of the
journey itself.”
