A key theme in Lecture 2 of our 2026 Lenten book ‘The Suffering Of The Soul In Relationships’ is the on-ramp of powerlessness to an authentic dependence on God and communion with Him. Here’s a quote from the book that captures this:
Our most important task is to look at our powerlessness, accept it, and call God and receive Him in this very powerlessness. If we understand that we cannot be good without God, then this will suddenly take the weight off of our shoulders. We don’t have to be different. We are how we are, we are just not ready. This filth within me is the place where God comes to heal me, to sanctify me. As Fr. Nicolae Steinhardt from Rohia used to say: God makes saints with “the customer’s material”. And if I don’t give Him my material, what will He do? He will let me keep my sick mind. He came to lift up the sin of the world, which means all our psychological filth. By giving Him my sin, I give Him myself. I turn myself into “prosphora” and I offer it to Him, I ask Him to make me into the human being He meant me to be. This is the permanent Liturgy where we put our offering on the altar of our heart. In the beginning, this offering is our sin. As monks say, and it is not a metaphor: “I didn’t bring anything to God except my sins”. But I give them to God. And God lifts them up, and heals me.
Another thing that hampers our growth is that we have a wrong vision of sin. First of all, we look at sin juridically, and not as an illness. Then we are mistaken, considering that our sins are our thoughts, our words, our actions. We confess that “we sinned by word, deed, or thought” – which means that the word, the deed, the thought are the “flesh” of the sin, its “raw materials”, its symptoms. When we have a physical illness, we don’t say that we are sick of a headache….Sin is an illness, and this illness is within me, in my heart. If I treat the symptoms, I can die, because the illness remains unhealed. …Now I see clearly that without God, I wouldn’t be able to abandon sin. And so I feel in myself all human powerlessness, and I pray that everyone receives God’s mercy, as I received it. This is how love for enemies starts.’’
Saint Sophrony of Essex (†1993) taught that “the way down is the way up” by emphasizing humility and spiritual struggle. He understood and experienced the wisdom of St. Siluoan direction “Keep your mind in hell and despair not”. This means that acknowledging our brokenness and descending into humility (going down) leads to finding God’s grace and resurrection (going up), a path patterned after Christ’s own descent.
The example of St. Mary of Egypt described in this post by Father Stephen Freeman also explores this topic of accepting our powerlessness as the first step in repentance. This remainder of this articke explores some supplemental materials that may be helpful to further explore this important topic.
Powerlessness; We Learn By Doing It Wrong March 23rd 2023 Daily Meditation By Richard Rohr
Richard describes the futility of trying to “fix” ourselves:
The genius of Twelve Step programs is that they situate powerlessness and surrender right where they belong—at the beginning. They teach how sin or addiction are overcome not through willpower or by control, but much more by recognizing that we are powerless to overcome them.
For example, we don’t become charitable by willpower, by saying to ourselves, “Be charitable!” Rather, we recognize the moments when we were totally uncharitable, and we weep over them. That doesn’t feel like power at all, does it? No one wants to go there.
Any talk of growth, achievement, climbing, improving, and progress highly appeals to the ego. But the only way we stay on the path with any authenticity is to constantly experience our incapacity to do it, our failure at doing it. That’s what makes us, to use my language, fall upward. Otherwise, we’re really not climbing; we’re just thinking we’re climbing by saying to ourselves, “Look, I’m better today. Look, I’m holier than I was last week. Look, my prayer is improving.” That really doesn’t teach us anything or lead us anywhere new.
In contrast, it is recognizing, “Richard, you don’t know how to love at all” that keeps me on the path of love. Constant failure at loving is ironically and paradoxically what keeps us learning how to love. When we think we’re there, there’s nothing to learn.
This is the genius of what Paul calls “the folly of the cross” (1 Corinthians 1:18), the folly of failure: that it doesn’t give us the satisfaction that our egos want. I don’t know if I am growing. I don’t know if I am “deepening my relationship with God,” as Christians love to say. I hope I am, but any smug satisfaction in that is not going to do me any good. But every day, knowing that I have not yet begun to love? That constant experience of littleness is the Franciscan way.
It’s also the way of one of my other favorite saints, Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897). She called it her “Little Way.” She makes it very clear in small examples how it was failing to love every day that kept her on the path of love. She taught that remaining close to God requires “bearing in peace the trial of not pleasing yourself.” [1] Who would have thought that? That is so counterintuitive! Yet what it reveals is that a lot of us have sought—without knowing it—a certain self-satisfaction, a certain smugness.
..I congratulate Bill Wilson and Twelve-Step spirituality, because just like Thérèse of Lisieux, they named it. They said powerlessness is the beginning of the spiritual journey.
Regardless of the conditions we find ourselves in, we learn to navigate in the midst of our lack of control.
References:
[1] Thérèse to Sister Geneviève, December 24, 1896, in Thérèse of Lisieux: General Correspondence, vol. 2, 1890–1897, trans. John Clarke (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1988), 1038.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Breathing under Water (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation), online course.
The Grace of Powerlessness – Richard Rohr Daily Meditation July 15th 2024
I cannot understand my own behavior. I fail to carry out the very things I want to do and find myself doing the very things I hate … for although the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not. —Romans 7:15, 18
Admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
—Step 1 of the Twelve Steps
Richard affirms the essential and difficult task of admitting our own powerlessness:
As many teachers of the Twelve Steps have said, the first Step is probably the hardest, most denied, and most avoided. Letting go isn’t in anybody’s program for happiness, and yet all mature spirituality is about letting go and unlearning.
Jesus used the metaphors of a “grain of wheat” (John 12:24) or a “branch cut off from the vine” (John 15:2) to describe the arrogant ego. Paul used the unfortunate word “flesh,” which made most people think he was talking about the body. Yet both Jesus and Paul were pointing to the isolated and protected small self, and both said it has to go. Its concerns are too small and too selfish. An ego response is always an inadequate or even wrong response to the moment. It will not deepen or broaden life, love, or inner peace. Since it has no inner substance, our ego self is always attached to mere externals. The ego defines itself by its attachments and revulsions. The soul does not attach, nor does it hate; it desires and loves and lets go.
What the ego hates more than anything else is to change—even when the present situation isn’t working or is horrible. Instead, we do more and more of what does not work. The reason we do anything one more time is because the last time did not really satisfy us deeply. As English poet W. H. Auden wrote, “We would rather be ruined than changed, / We would rather die in our dread / Than climb the cross of the moment / And let our illusions die.” [1]
Rabbi Rami Shapiro names the paradox of powerlessness and surrender to God:
The fundamental and paradoxical premise of Twelve Step recovery as I experience it is this: The more clearly you realize your lack of control, the more powerless you discover yourself to be… [and] the more natural it is for you to be surrendered to God. The more surrendered to God you become, the less you struggle against the natural flow of life. The less you struggle against the flow of life, the freer you become. Radical powerlessness is radical freedom, liberating you from the need to control the ocean of life and freeing you to learn how best to navigate it.…
We are all addicted to control, and it is to this greater addiction that I wish to speak. The deepest truth of Step 1 requires us to admit that we are powerless over our lives, and that life itself is unmanageable. [2]
References:
[1] Selected from Richard Rohr, Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, 10th anniv. ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2011, 2021), 5–6; W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 105.
[2] Rami Shapiro, Recovery, the Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths, 2009), 3, 6.
Stinking Thinking: The Universal Addiction – Daily Meditation December 9th 2019 By Richard Rohr
The addiction and overdose crisis . . . does not so much reflect moral failings of individuals as it does reveal a sickness that has infected the country and our collective consciousness. —Timothy McMahan King [1]
Tim King fairly attributes the United States’ epidemic of addiction to “the failures of religion and of an anemic spirituality.” [2] Thankfully, I believe the Twelve-Step programs are a movement of the Spirit in our time. In creating Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, with typical American pragmatism, designed a truly practical program that really worked to change lives. Twelve-Step spirituality rediscovered the real transformative power in the spirituality of imperfection. Transformation has little to do with intelligence, willpower, or perfection. It has everything to do with honest humility, willingness, and surrender.
Here are four assumptions that I am making about addiction:
1. We are all addicts. Human beings are addictive by nature. King writes: “The question for each of us is not whether we are addicted but how we are addicted, and to what.Denial of the existence of addiction in your life is not a mark of moral accomplishment but a sign of blindness.” [3] Addiction is a modern name and honest description for what the biblical tradition called “sin” and medieval Christians called “passions” or “attachments.” They both recognized that serious measures or practices were needed to break us out of these illusions and entrapments.
2. “Stinking thinking” is the universal addiction. Substance addictions like alcohol and drugs are merely the most visible form of addiction, but we are addicted to our own habitual way of thinking and doing. These attachments are at first hidden to us. We cannot heal what we do not first acknowledge. We are all addicted to our own habitual way of doing anything, our own defenses, and, most especially, our patterned way of thinking, or how we process reality. The very fact that we have to say this shows how little we see it. By definition, we can never see or handle what we are addicted to. It is always “hidden” and disguised as something else.
3. All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions—because we have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and blind to the same problems.
4. Some form of alternative consciousness is the only freedom from this self and from cultural lies. Contemplation teaches us how to observe our own small mind and, frankly, to see how inadequate it is to the task in front of us. As Eckhart Tolle says, 98% of human thought is “repetitive and pointless.” How humiliating is that? When we see how self-serving, how petty, how narcissistic, and how compulsive our thinking is, we realize how trapped and unfree we truly are. We might even call it “possessed.”
St John’s Adult Education 