The Concept of God and Sin.

I love the fact that the Twelve Steps uses the term “God as we see him or her”, it makes the meetings accessible to anyone – except of course, when your view of God is judgmental, critical and demanding, which is where the concept fails.

The traditional view of sin is the same and it feeds into the idea of God being a kill joy or task master or some kind of warped Big Brother watching us and wanting to catch us out.

The early church saw sin as “punishing us” and stopping us from becoming who we can be. They saw sin as stopping us becoming present with the presence of God and came up with what are commonly known as the deadly sins, which is what the Enneagram is based on, as they became aware that we each had one particular area that stopped us from being present.

When Constantine converted to Christianity, he established the church as an institution that would become a way of keeping control, and the concept of sin went from “us being punished by our sin”, to “we need to be punished for our sin” which is a massive shift of understanding, not only of sin but of God too!

The Enneagram wakes us up to our weaknesses or addictions, but it is also a map that points us to our truer selves and gives us pointers to who we can become.

The Twelve Steps is also a well thought out tool that can help us to overcome the addictions of our ego and patterns of behaviour, and I love that they are called “steps”, because it makes the process more manageable. These steps also recognise that we can’t do this on our own but we need some kind of higher power that is outside of ourselves but who is also with us and for us, something that is loving, honest, pure and unselfish. Something that wants the best for us!

Some of us will call that higher power God, for others it might be the group or other people that inspire us, for others it might just be nature or using stillness, silence and solitude. Each of these point to something greater than us, but who is ultimately for us and with us.

I hope that this makes sense.

Please feel free to comment.