What does it mean to find a "Higher Power?"

The notion of finding your Higher Power as an essential component of the 12 Step AA program is perhaps its most controversial aspect.  What does it mean to apply the consummate abstraction of complex faith to the realm of fully practical, straightforward treatment?  How does an alcoholic truly recognize a force larger than her or his self in order to build a rock-hard foundation for actual, profound, positive daily change?

It is almost a cliche in AA and many other related groups that one's urgent, necessary Higher Power need not be the traditional God of most organized global religions.  Although many alcoholics define God in the standard sense of a benign, omnipotent deity, others choose to see their Higher Power in smaller, more humble terms- a single, ennobling feeling, a generalized spirit of inspiration, a metaphysical connection with an unknown known that can heal and regenerate.  Some drunks give a name to their Higher Power, much like one might name a favored pet; others prefer the stuffy, trite formality of God, in a way that makes a person know who they are talking about without further explanation.

I prefer to call, and describe, my Higher Power thusly: Transcendental, Unconditional Love.  This is the palpable feeling of overflowing emotional well-wishing that emanates from the small number of family and friends who have stuck by me, no matter what, through the darkest fevered hours of my past destructive drinking, in which bridges were often not burnt, as much as bombed.  This is the profound ray of sentimental illumination that, in the times when the bottom had fallen out to its lowest point, I could count on to lift me up to somewhere, anywhere, better, in that exact moment when I needed such uplift the most.

A person's unique, specific Higher Power should be explained and shared widely, as an essential step on the path to lifelong recovery. 

Transcendental, Unconditional Love is the stolid commitment made by a spouse/partner and child/ren to never give up on your own essential goodness, to acknowledge and proclaim that the seething fog of alcohol abuse is just that- a weak, shallow, manipulative mask in the way of confronting deeper-seated personal flaws and ingrained remembered tragedies. 

Transcendental, Unconditional Love is the staunch pact made by parents and siblings to recognize that the intense emotional pain, and perhaps spiritual inadequacy, that causes your alcoholism is a challenge that you can best, over a long period of time and with relentless integrity.   

Transcendental, Unconditional Love is the firm accord made by those friends, new and old, who see a current vision of you as a shattered glass whose sinister shards of old, bad feelings can be swept into the dustbin of a personal history best left behind.

Ultimately, the wisdom of having, and holding, a Higher Power is the notion that an overwhelming physical, emotional, moral, social, and spiritual disease cannot be cured through a normal, run of the mill faith in anything that is as shaky, as ephemeral, as some purely tangible, literal element.  To overcome the often unbearable heaviness of a legacy of perpetual inebriation, we drunks must, at all costs, invest our path to healing with an essential quality of something we cannot touch with our fingers, but can feel with our hearts.