"Came to believe that a Power greater than
ourselves could restore us to sanity."
The moment they read Step Two, most
A.A. newcomers are confronted with a dilemma, sometimes a serious one. How
often have we heard them cry out, "Look what you people have done to us!
You have convinced us that we are alcoholics and that our lives are
unmanageable. Having reduced us to a state of absolute helplessness, you now declare
that none but a Higher Power can remove our obsession. Some of us won't believe
in God, others can't, and still others who do believe that God exists have no
faith whatever He will perform this miracle. Yes, you've got us over the
barrel, all right--but where do we go from here?"
Let's look first at the case of the
one who says he won't believe--the belligerent one. He is in a state of mind,
which can be described, only as savage. His whole philosophy of life, in which
he so gloried, is threatened. It's bad enough, he thinks, to admit alcohol has
him down for keeps. But now,
Still
smarting from that admission, he is faced with something really impossible. How
he does cherish the thought that man, risen so majestically from a single cell
in the primordial ooze, is the spearhead of evolution and therefore the only
god that his universe knows! Must he renounce all this to save himself?
At this juncture, his A.A, sponsor
usually laughs. This, the newcomer thinks, is just about the last straw. This
is the beginning of the end. And so it is: the beginning of the end of his old
life, and the beginning of his emergence into a new one. His sponsor probably
says, "Take it easy. The hoop you have to jump through is a lot wider than
you think. At least I've found it so. So did a friend of mine who was a
one-time vice-president of the American Atheist Society, but he got through
with room to spare."
"Well," says the newcomer,
"I know you're telling me the truth. It's no doubt a fact that A.A, is
full of people who once believed as I do. But just how, in these circumstances,
does a fellow `take it easy'? That's what I want to know."
"That," agrees the
sponsor, "is a very good question indeed. I think I can tell you exactly
how to relax. You won't have to work at it very hard, either. Listen, if you
will, to these three statements. First, Alcoholics Anonymous does not demand
that you believe anything. All of its Twelve Steps are but suggestions. Second,
to get sober and to stay sober, you don't have to swallow all of Step Two right
now. Looking back, I find that I took it piecemeal myself. Third, all you
really need is a truly open mind. Just resign from the debating society and
quit bothering yourself with such deep questions as
whether
it was the hen or the egg that came first. Again I say, all you need is the
open mind."
The sponsor continues, "Take,
for example, my own case. I had a scientific schooling. Naturally I respected,
venerated, even worshipped science. As a matter of fact, I still do--all except
the worship part. Time after time, my instructors held up to me the basic
principle of all scientific progress:
search
and research, again and again, always with the open mind. When I first looked
at A.A, my reaction was just like yours. This A.A, business, I thought, is
totally unscientific. This I can't swallow. I simply won't consider such nonsense.
"Then I woke up. I had to admit
that A.A, showed results, prodigious results. I saw that my attitude regarding
these had been anything but scientific. It wasn't A.A, that had the closed
mind, it was me. The minute I stopped arguing, I could begin to see and feel.
Right there, Step Two gently and very gradually began to infiltrate my life. I
can't say upon what occasion or upon what day I came to believe in a Power
greater than myself, but I certainly have that belief now. To acquire it, I had
only to stop fighting and practice the rest of A.A.'s program as
enthusiastically as I could.
"This is only one man's opinion
based on his own experience, of course. I must quickly assure you that A.A.'s
tread innumerable paths in their quest for faith. If you don't care for the one
I've suggested, you'll be sure to discover one that suits if only you look and
listen. Many a man like you has begun to solve the problem by the method of
substitution. You can, if you wish, make A.A., itself your `higher power.'
Here's a very large group of people who have solved their alcohol problem. In
this respect they are certainly a power greater than you, who have not even
come close to a solution. Surely you can have faith in them. Even this minimum
of faith will be enough. You will find many members who have crossed the
threshold just this way. All of them will tell you that, once across, their
faith broadened and deepened. Relieved of the alcohol obsession, their lives
unaccountably transformed, they came to believe in a Higher Power, and most of
them began to talk of God."
Consider next the plight of those
who once had faith, but have lost it. There
will
be those who have drifted into indifference, those filled with self-sufficiency
who have cut themselves off, those who have become prejudiced against religion,
and those who are downright defiant because God has failed to fulfill their
demands. Can A.A, experience tell all these they may still find a faith that
works?
Sometimes A.A, comes harder to those
who have lost or rejected faith than to those who never had any faith at all,
for they think they have tried faith and found it wanting. They have tried the
way of faith and the way of no faith. Since both ways have proved bitterly
disappointing, they have concluded there is no place whatever for them to go.
The roadblocks of indifference, fancied self-sufficiency, prejudice, and
defiance often prove more solid and formidable for these people than any
erected by the unconvinced agnostic or even the militant atheist. Religion says
the existence of God can be proved; the agnostic says it can't be proved; and
the atheist claims proof of the nonexistence of God. Obviously, the dilemma of the
wanderer from faith is that of profound confusion. He thinks himself lost to
the comfort of any conviction at all. He cannot attain in even a small degree
the assurance of the believer, the agnostic, or the atheist. He is the
bewildered one.
Any number of A.A.'s can say to the
drifter, "Yes, we were diverted from our childhood faith, too. The
overconfidence of youth was too much for us. Of course, we were glad that good
home and religious training had given us certain values. We were still sure that
we ought to be fairly honest, tolerant, and just, that we ought to be ambitious
and hardworking. We became convinced that such simple rules of fair play and
decency would be enough.
"As material success founded
upon no more than these ordinary attributes began to come to us, we felt we
were winning at the game of life. This was exhilarating, and it made us happy.
Why should we be bothered with theological abstractions and religious duties,
or with the state of our souls here or hereafter? The here and now was good
enough for us. The will to win would carry us through. But then alcohol began
to have its way with us. Finally, when all our score cards read `zero,' and we
saw that one more strike would put us out of the game forever, we had to look
for our lost faith. It was in A.A, that we rediscovered it. And so can
you."
Now we come to another kind of
problem: the intellectually self-sufficient manor woman. To these, many A.A.'s
can say, "Yes, we were like you--far too smart for our own good. We loved
to have people call us precocious. We used our education to blow ourselves up
into prideful balloons, though we were careful to hide this from others.
Secretly, we felt we could float above the rest of the folks on our brainpower
alone. Scientific progress told us there was nothing man couldn't do. Knowledge
was all-powerful. Intellect could conquer nature. Since we were brighter than
most folks (so we thought), the spoils of victory would be ours for the
thinking. The god of intellect displaced the God of our fathers. But again John
Barleycorn had other ideas. We who had won so handsomely in a walk turned into
all-time losers. We saw that we had to reconsider or die. We found many in A.A,
who once thought as we did. They helped us to get down to our right size. By
their example they showed us that humility and intellect could be compatible,
provided we placed humility first. When we began to do that, we received the
gift of faith, a faith which works.This faith is for you, too."
Another crowd of A.A.'s says:
"We were plumb disgusted with religion and all its works. The Bible, we
said, was full of nonsense; we could cite it chapter and verse, and we couldn't
see the Beatitudes for the `begats.' In spots its morality was impossibly good;
in others it seemed impossibly bad. But it was the morality of the religionists
themselves that really got us down. We gloated over the hypocrisy, bigotry, and
crushing self-righteousness that clung to so many `believers' even in their
Sunday best. How we loved to shout the damaging fact that millions of the `good
men of religion' were still killing one another off in the name of God. This
all meant, of course, that we had substituted negative for positive thinking.
After we came to A.A,, we had to recognize that this trait had been an ego
feeding proposition. In belaboring the sins of some religious people, we could
feel superior to all of them. Moreover, we could avoid looking at some of our
own shortcomings. Self-righteousness, the very thing that we had contemptuously
condemned in others, was our own besetting evil. This phony form of
respectability was our undoing, so far as faith was concerned. But finally,
driven to A.A,, we learned better.
"As psychiatrists have often
observed, defiance is the outstanding characteristic of many an alcoholic. So
it's not strange that lots of us have had our day at defying God Himself.
Sometimes it's because God has not delivered us the good things of life which
we specified, as a greedy child makes an impossible list for Santa Claus. More
often, though, we had met up with some major calamity, and to our way of
thinking lost out because God deserted us. The girl we wanted to marry had
other notions; we prayed God that she'd change her mind, but she didn't. We
prayed for healthy children, and were presented with sick ones, or none at all.
We prayed for promotions at business, and none came. Loved ones, upon whom we
heartily depended, were taken from us by so-called acts of God. Then we became
drunkards, and asked God to stop that. But nothing happened. This was the
unkindest cut of all. `Damn this faith business!' we said.
"When we encountered A.A,, the
fallacy of our defiance was revealed. At no time had we asked what God's will
was for us; instead we had been telling Him what it ought to be. No man, we
saw, could believe in God and defy Him, too. Belief meant reliance, not;
defiance. In A.A, we saw the fruits of this belief: men and women spared from
alcohol's final catastrophe. We saw them meet and
transcend
their other pains and trials. We saw them calmly accept impossible situations,
seeking neither to run nor to recriminate. This was not only faith; it was
faith that worked under all conditions. We soon concluded that whatever price
in humility we must pay, we would pay." Now let's take the guy full of
faith, but still reeking of alcohol. He believes he is devout. His religious
observance is scrupulous. He's sure he still believes in God, but suspects that
God doesn't believe in him. He takes pledges and more pledges. Following each,
he not only drinks again, but acts worse than the last time. Valiantly he tries
to fight alcohol, imploring God's help, but the help doesn't come. What, then,
can be the matter?
To clergymen, doctors, friends, and
families, the alcoholic who means well and tries hard is a heartbreaking
riddle. To most A.A.'s, he is not. There are too many of us who have been just
like him, and have found the riddle's answer. This answer has to do with the
quality of faith rather than its quantity. This has been our blind spot. We
supposed we had humility when really we hadn't. We supposed we had been serious
about religious practices when, upon honest appraisal, we found we had been
only superficial. Or, going to the other extreme, we had wallowed in
emotionalism and had mistaken it for true religious feeling. In both cases, we
had been asking something for nothing. The fact was we really hadn't cleaned
house so that the grace of God could enter us and expel the obsession. In no
deep or meaningful sense had we ever taken stock of ourselves, made amends to
those we had harmed, or freely given to any other human being without any
demand for reward. We had not even prayed rightly. We had always said,
"Grant me my wishes" instead of "Thy will be done." The
love of God and man we understood not at all. Therefore we remained
self-deceived, and so incapable of receiving enough grace to restore us to
sanity.
Few indeed are the practicing
alcoholics who have any idea how irrational they are, or seeing their
irrationality, can bear to face it. Some will be willing to term themselves
"problem drinkers," but cannot endure the suggestion that they are in
fact mentally ill. They are abetted in this blindness by a world which does not
understand the difference between sane drinking and alcoholism.
"Sanity" is defined as "soundness of mind." Yet no
alcoholic, soberly analyzing his destructive behavior, whether the destruction
fell on the dining-room furniture or his own moral fiber, can claim
"soundness of mind" for himself.
Therefore, Step Two is the rallying
point for all of us. Whether agnostic, atheist, or former believer, we can
stand together on this Step. True humility and an open mind can lead us to
faith, and every A.A, meeting is an assurance that God will restore us to
sanity if we rightly relate ourselves to Him.
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