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Step Two
"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 man or 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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