God Is Anonymous

We often introduce ourselves through the things that make us recognizable. We mention our work, our families, where we come from, what we believe, and perhaps something about what we have accomplished. These details can be important, and they help others understand something about our lives. Yet they can also become the familiar descriptions through which we believe ourselves to be known. Someone becomes the successful professional, the responsible parent, the recovering alcoholic, or the person whose faith has always been strong. We may begin organizing ourselves around these identities until we can scarcely imagine who we would be without them.

Anonymity offers an interesting interruption to this arrangement. In a recovery meeting, people arrive carrying their histories, reputations, social standing, and the various categories through which others recognize them. None of these things disappears, and their effects upon a person's life remain real. But the room may offer an opportunity to speak without first establishing why we deserve to be heard. A respected professional can acknowledge serious difficulty. Someone who has spent years being regarded as irresponsible can describe an experience with remarkable honesty. We discover something about the possibility of belonging without requiring our familiar identities to provide the final account of who we are.

We usually think of anonymity as a way of protecting private information. But there may be something more significant involved. Privacy concerns what other people are permitted to know about us. Anonymity can begin loosening our dependence upon the descriptions through which we have become recognizable. Even the name alcoholic, however meaningful it may be within recovery, does not exhaust the person who speaks it. Someone can acknowledge an addiction without becoming nothing more than an addict. A person can recognize a history of harm without being permanently identical with the worst thing they have done.

The third Step of Alcoholics Anonymous introduces the decision to turn our will and lives over to the care of God as we understand God. This can be difficult language, particularly for people who have experienced religion as a demand for obedience or submission. Someone may have spent much of their life attempting to become what a parent, religious community, or other authority expected. Being asked to surrender again may sound less like freedom than a return to an old arrangement.

But the Step contains a peculiar openness. God is encountered through our understanding without being reduced to that understanding. Whatever picture we carry of God remains our picture, shaped by history, relationships, expectations, fears, and desires. We may imagine God as a demanding parent, a reassuring protector, a distant authority, or someone whose approval we must continually earn. These images can become deeply meaningful, but they can also become ways of securing our own identities. We begin believing that we know precisely what God requires because we have already decided who we must become.

What would it mean to encounter God without requiring God to confirm the person we believe ourselves to be?

This is what makes the possibility of an anonymous God interesting. If God cannot be contained within the image we have constructed, then our relationship with God need not become another exercise in maintaining a completed version of ourselves. The believer does not have to become the flawless example of faith. The recovering person does not have to possess the correct understanding of spirituality. We may remain uncertain, dependent, and sometimes contradictory without requiring these experiences to settle the question of who we are.

Surrender then becomes quite different from submission. Submission may demand that I become the person another requires me to be. Surrender can involve relinquishing the demand that I already know who I must become. I may be able to trust without possessing certainty, receive help without becoming passive, and remain in a relationship without making my identity dependent upon another person's approval.

This has important implications for recovery. A person may enter treatment believing that their task is to exchange one identity for another. They want to stop being the alcoholic and become the recovered person, stop being irresponsible and become dependable, or stop being ashamed and become spiritually confident. These changes may describe meaningful developments, but they can also become new images that must be defended. The person may continue suffering under the demand to become someone rather than discovering what it means to live differently.

Anonymity makes room for a life that has not yet been fully described. We can recognize what is true about our histories without treating those truths as final verdicts. We can belong to a community without requiring everyone to become alike. We can pray without imagining that prayer must give us complete certainty about either God or ourselves.

God is anonymous not because God is absent, but because our understanding cannot finally contain what we hope to encounter. Something similar may be true of ourselves. We are known through relationships, language, memory, and recognition, yet none of these exhausts the person who continues living. Perhaps surrender begins when we become willing to remain in relation without requiring a finished picture of either the one who desires or the one who is desired.