Two words loaded with religious undertones (and overtones!) are magic and miracle. My goal in writing this piece is to demystify the two terms and ground them in the secular context of addiction and mental health. Sounds weird, eh? Well, I have some help from a book I read a little while back, and I’d like to borrow some of its ideas and run with it.

(One term I need to get out of the way early is ‘spirituality’. From a secular perspective, it can mean the human journey of personal growth, seeking to feel right in one’s own skin and in the world, connectedness with others and non-human life and even the universe. It’s an open to individual meaning.)

Years ago, before I relapsed and spent nine years in the metaphorical wilderness, a book was circulating in the recovery community called The Spirituality of Imperfection written by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketchum (1993). I recently picked it up and read it for the first time, and it was perfect timing. I was barely a month back into my recovery, and I was looking for some inspiration. I’m not religious and was raised agnostic, but it feels right when spirituality is a big part of my life, and lately, and I mean for many years, it simply hasn’t. I want to focus on one chapter in the book, ‘Not Magic, but Miracle’.

The authors define miracle as

“involv[ing] openness to mystery, the welcoming of surprise, the acceptance of those realities over which we have no control.”,

while magic is

“the attempt to be in control, to manage everything—it is the claim to be, or to have a special relationship with, some kind of ‘god’.”

These are both secular understandings. Miracle makes no reference to deity or a spirit, while magic does mention ‘god’ but only in the colloquial sense of a person ‘playing god’. The authors use these terms to describe two very different approaches to spirituality. Let’s unpack the terms further.

Miracle

The key words in the above definition of miracle are ‘openness’, ‘welcoming’, and ‘acceptance’, all of which have a direct connection with ‘no control’. Those familiar with the Serenity Prayer would categorize this as among ‘the things we cannot change’.

Miracles are simply phenomena or occurrences that evoke a sense of wonder. They interrupt our sense of reason and force us to engage with mystery. They are effects of unknown or unobservable causes. We witness them happening; we have no hand in their creation. We have all experienced this sort of thing—we’re not talking walking on water level stuff here. Simply stopping in your tracks because you notice the same time on the clock three days in a row can be a little miracle. Of course, many would simply call it coincidence, and that’s fine. They don’t experience mystery from noticing that pattern. But for others, it could be a synchronicity and what stops them in their tracks is the witnessing of a small wonder. Others might demand a higher threshold of inexplicability to account for something to be a miracle. But the idea should be clear at this point: a phenomenon occurs that to remind a person that, “You are not in charge, and you don’t have the final say”. Is this not the basic message of spirituality?

In my own experience, when I was making the effort to live on a spiritual basis, I witnessed many miracles. After 35 years of using, the very fact that I had stopped using substances and lived my days and nights without any thought of using is a miracle. I did some things that were suggested to me to get well, and I focused on recovery. I didn’t spend each day measuring my obsessive desire to use, then work to carve it away one craving at a time. No, at some point early in my recovery, I witnessed the absence of the desire to use. It just went away. And I saw the same thing happen in others around me. It was like we all were living in self-destruction and then woke up one day in a different place, protected from a return.

For many, this is such a powerful spiritual release that they come to believe in God. My first time through recovery, I experienced just that. This time around, however, it is different. I remain agnostic, but my understanding that I cannot ‘play God’ is much clearer to me. As far as recovery goes, I think that’s very solid ground to stand on.

Magic

As with the understanding of miracle, we turn to a meaning of magic that is both secular and closer to the notion of a ‘magic trick’ as opposed to pagan religious practices. (The latter is sacred to many, and not the kind of magic being addressed here.) The etymology of magic goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root ‘magh-’, which means ‘to be able’ or ‘to have power’. Inherent in the root is the power of will. Where miracle demands a release of will, or willingness, magic takes control, but not in a healthy, productive, nor effective way. Magic creates the illusion that we can be in control. For a magician on stage, this is the desired effect: to convince the audience that the tricks are miracles. Magic reaches into the domain of the miraculous, and appears to be successful. It is through this phantom appearance of effectiveness where addiction thrives.

Dr. E. M. Jelinek wrote in 1977 that “Drunkenness can be a kind of shortcut to the higher life, the [attempt to] achieve a higher state without an emotional and intellectual effort”. Drinking and using substances is a magical technology to deliver a miraculous release from uncomfortable feelings and thoughts. Yet, it is that very discomfort that is the fuel for the spiritual journey, the irritant of sand within the oyster that creates the pearl. But drinking is a kind of illusory spiritual bypass around the struggles that produce growth.

Here is an example from my own experience with substance use. In my teens, I discovered that alcohol numbed my anxiety and lifted me into a place where I felt like I could ‘fit in’. I found human connection with alcohol in my system. I also found a feeling of oneness with all, something I craved even more than the dispelling of my social anxiety.

But the ‘zone of oneness’ wouldn’t last because I would eventually chase that feeling and continue drinking. I would eventually descend into a reclusive, paranoid state of separation and despair. I’d feel not only separated from everyone and everything around me but also dissociated from myself. The ‘zone’, over years of drinking and using, would gradually steadily shrink until it vanished forever. Booze and drugs stopped working.

The taking of shortcuts, trying to control the uncontrollable, and avoidance of the emotional and intellectual work that spiritual growth demands, are all born of the misuse of willpower. This becomes easily solvable by mapping out where we can and cannot productively exert our will.

Mapping the territory of things we can and cannot change

In The Spirituality of Imperfection, the authors bring in the work of Dr. Leslie Farber, who argues that our ability to choose—to exert our will—operates in two distinct realms.

The first is the domain of objects, which has to do with specific entities that we can directly choose. The second realm involves directions or goals, those realities that cannot be directly grasped or chosen; in fact, Farber warns, goals and directions are distorted, even destroyed, by attempts to control them.

Here are some examples of the two realms from Kurtz and Ketchum:

Chooseable objects	Un-chooseable goals/directions
knowledge	wisdom
pleasure	happiness
congratulations	admiration
going to bed	falling asleep
reading/listening	understanding
executing a play	winning the game
dryness	sobriety

One can use their will to learn and gain knowledge, but wisdom comes with experience. Notice that we say ‘comes’ because wisdom is received not seized through willpower. We experience pleasure when doing something pleasurable, but happiness is a state (of mind). A state is a goal, not a tool. We arrive at happiness before we notice that we are happy. My favourite example above is going to bed and falling asleep. Trying to force oneself to fall asleep produces a most undesired result! Lastly, a person can become dry from stopping drinking, but (emotional) sobriety is something that happens to a person when they do the work of recovery.

Mixing-up these two realms, and using willpower in vain attempts to influence goals and directions, causes ongoing distress that eventually will lead to addiction. It is the same as trying to change the things that cannot be changed. Again, I like the ‘trying to will oneself to sleep’ example, because it’s something everyone can relate to. And for this reason, we can all agree it is simply absurd to even try it. Nevertheless, it’s the very same transgression (from one realm into the other) at work behind all forms of addiction.

The agnostic recovering addict doesn’t need to find God to find emotional sobriety. They only need to clearly and deeply understand how their willpower is being misused on this map of the two realms. They just need to acknowledge that the realm of directions and goals is a power greater than themselves.

I drank and wrote in my journals at my local pub, believing I had altered my awareness to understand deep and profound spiritual laws and truths. Yes, sometimes the shift in my mood and awareness and the numbing of anxiety opened me up to higher awareness. Sometimes it didn’t. But I would chase that. And by chasing it, I grew more dependent on alcohol because it offered me “the illusion of healing that split (between the two realms of objects and goals)”. Real, lasting spiritual awareness arrives through emotional and intellectual work, not from drinking and channelling.

Other areas in which I used alcohol as a technology to try and being directions/goals under my control were: being more creative at work (form vs. resulting concept), going to meet new people (socializing vs. gaining acceptance), asking a girl on a date (reaching out v avoiding rejection), and no doubt many, many more. A persistent and painful example was I had the subconscious belief that alcohol could trigger ‘falling in love’ and even assist in helping the other to ‘fall in love’ with me. I was pretty shy, maybe even frightened, of making the first move with a girl I found attractive. Pour some booze in me, however, and I felt like I could charm anyone (in the bar). Pour even more booze in me, and suddenly any woman in the bar became the object of my desire. There are two addictions working together in this case: alcohol and love/sex.

We keep attempting to control the uncontrollable and expect to have our will be done, operate in the same ways and keep expecting ideal outcomes.

Does this all stem from how alcohol (or any other substance) makes us feel like sovereigns of our environment? It creates the illusion that we can directly will: buoyancy above problems, escape from grief and pain, elevate our attractiveness to others, strike inspiration in writing or creative work, running-out the pool table, etc.

So, in recovery, we learn to stop applying our will in areas that will cannot possibly influence. Step 3 of the Twelve Steps states: “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” ‘Turning it over’ is the training of the will to cede control of things we cannot directly will (goals/directions). A secular understanding of this step can be based on the preceding map of the two realms: know the limits of will, and use willingness for everything else. And especially stay the hell out of goals and directions!

References

Jelinek, E. M. (1977) “The Symbolism of Drinking: A Culture-Historical Approach.” (edited for publication by Robert E. Popham and Carole D. Yawney) Journal of Studies on Alcohol 38 (May 1977): 849-866.

Kurtz, Ernest and Ketchum, Katherine (1993) The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning. New York: Bantam.