Arriving Where We Started
To ancient Hebrews, the number twelve signified the completion or perfection of earthly systems, rule, government. More than a literal number, this is the meaning being transmitted by the twelve patriarchs, tribes, apostles, every detail of the New Jerusalem. It symbolizes a complete cycle—twelve lunar orbits creating the twelve months of the solar year, the twelve constellations of the zodiac counting out the agricultural seasons. Even Gehenna, the word badly translated as hell, had a maximum stay of twelve months, a symbolic full cycle of purification.
Twelve reminds us that time is not a line, but a circle, that endings are beginnings, or in Eliot’s words: to make an end is to make a beginning; the end is where we start from. Like a snake eating its tail, we live endless circular cycles, arriving where we started in order to know the place and ourselves more and more deeply. To arrive at Step 12 of AA is a simultaneous ending and beginning, taking us back where we started with the wisdom and insight only a journey of serial surrender could give us.
The total surrender that is recovery, salvation, is too big to effect all at once. Step by step, cycle by cycle, the abrasion of our passage strips more and more of what is untrue from us, creating the spiritual awakening of Step 12 that gives us a message to carry to others and principles to practice in all our affairs. But coming full circle also reminds that we started in the humility of powerlessness…so how much more surrendered could we be? Powerlessness at Step 1 is rarely fully conscious. Not yet aware of its immensity, we use the concept to mark the end of resistance and beginning of submission that makes the rest of the steps possible.
The powerlessness of Step 1 is born of the desperation of an unmanageable life, the reality of our lack of control. It’s a painful, fearful admission that initiates the cycle of Steps leading to the spiritual awakening of Step 12—the realization of living in a world to which we finally know we belong. To which everything belongs. A belonging that makes powerless vulnerability in God’s embrace a joy to live.
