Step Two

"Came to believe a power greater than
ourselves could restore us to sanity."
THE moment they read Step Two, most A.A. newcomers are confronted with the 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 won't believe in God, others can't, and still others who do believe that
God exists have no faith whatever that he will preform this miracle. Yes, you've got us over the
barrel, all right - but where do we go from here?"

Lets 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 only be described 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 does he 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 usally 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 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 experience. 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 principles of all scientific progress:
search and research, again and again, always with an open mind. when I first looked at A.A. my
reaction was just like yours. this A.A. business, I thought, was 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
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 date 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 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 that
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 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 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 existance of God can be
proved; the agnostic says it can't be proved; 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 that 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.
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 of 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 us there was nothing man couldn't do. Knowledge
was all powerful. Intellect could conquer nature. Since we were brighter than most folks (or 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 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 their hypocrisy,
bigotry, and crushing self-rightousness 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
thinking 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-rightousness, the very
thing we contemptously condemned in others, was our own besetting evil. This phoney form of
respectibility 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 a 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 castrophe. We saw them meet and transcend their
other pains and trials. We saw them calmly accept impossible situations, seeking neither to run or
recriminate. This was not only faith; it was faith that worked well under all conditions.

We soon
concluded that whatever the price in humility we must pay we would pay."
Now consider 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 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 that have been just like him,
and have found the riddle's answer. This answer has to do with the quality of faith rather than the
quantity. This has been our blind spot. We supposed we had humility, when 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 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 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.