There is a Power whose care Teaches your way along that pathless coast. . .” William Cullen Bryant
BECAUSE I had so little belief when I came to AA, like many others I had to coast on hope for what seemed a long time. Like others, too, I have in my time solemnly told my fellow AAs right out in meeting: “Sorry, can’t make Step Two. All I can truthfully say is: I have come to hope that a Power greater than myself might restore me to sanity.”
Hope itself had not come immediately. Calling AA had been for me an act of desperation, almost without hope. To this day, when I go to make an AA talk my wife usually says to me: “Try to give them some hope, John. Remember when we had none.”
But upon me, as upon thousands of other AAs, the idea did bear in, fairly quickly, that here were men and women staying sober somehow, and that perhaps I might, too. So the first twitches of hope came quite early.
At my first meetings I was always on strings, taut, suspicious. My eye wormed inward upon myself. I discounted or rejected outright much of what I heard from the speakers, especially when they spoke of God, as they understood Him. But not everything. As a boy I had been something of an athlete. I had found it easy enough to take the say-so of my trainer. I hadn’t argued with him if he told me to make so many starts, to practice getting off the mark quickly, or to trot such and such distances to warm up.
Looking back, I think I went about the AA program somewhat as an athletic routine.
I didn’t accept some of the sales talk, but I did want the article itself, sobriety. I wanted a drink, desperately: but I wanted to stop drinking even more desperately. These AAs were sober. I would try to become sober by going through the motions they went through. Older members of course told me to go to lots of meetings, to ask help of some Higher Power in the morning and to say thanks at night, if I had stayed sober. I did these things as by rote, without conviction.
Even going about it as a drill I could not help coming up against this business of a Higher Power, and that was a sticking point. However, even if only as an amateur naturalist I had always admitted the existence of inexorable principles, such as evolution, and powerful forces such as those which govern migration in birds. Woe unto the bird which does not respond to the southward migration force when autumn comes, with winter fast behind. I said as little about it as I could, because I was inwardly ashamed even of this submission, but I accepted these forces rather sneakily for myself, without precise definition, as a sort of working hypothesis. Perhaps they would serve for “Higher Power.” Certainly they were greater than myself. And they helped me to get through “God, as we understood Him,” with a bit of a gulp.
Routinely, I asked for help. Less routinely, I learned to say thanks. At first the thanks were words only, mumbo-jumbo, “thanks very much” said with about as much grace as I had used in overtipping waiters when I was riding high on hooch and showing off. Yet, from the start, the recitations I heard at meetings and some of the reasons for gratitude given in AA literature made sense to me. I, too, had driven my car during alcoholic blackouts, yet I had killed nobody and I still had two hands, two feet and eyes.
I would look for reasons for being thankful. It was a fine day: a bird sang: I would be grateful for the song even if it came from one of the humdrum singers. And it also meant that I had two ears to hear with. In time I had moments of thankfulness without having to search for reasons. I remember walking in the woods with my wife on our first sober Christmas together–the first with me sober. Thankfulness came spontaneously. It was so poignant that it stabbed. The line between joy and pain is fine. So, when I began to feel thankful I began to have “twinges” of happiness, even.
Now my eye turned outwards, sometimes, to the other fellow rather than always into myself: to newcomers in AA, for example, fighting a bottle just as immediately as I was myself. Late in life I was beginning to discover a very old, open secret which I had long passed by, on the other side of the street. This was simply that there is more happiness to be had in trying to do something for somebody else than in seeking your own gratification. And, selfishly, there was more sobriety to be had in trying to help others to sobriety than in forever thinking only about your own.
Trying to be grateful and saying “thank you” every night did more to make me over into a human being, again, than anything else in the program. Certainly it made me readier to accept the program, when the time arrived.
Having so little belief during the first year, I found myself resorting to “dodges,” almost tricks to get myself to work AA. I had few prayers at that time, except the Serenity Prayer. But I did know the Lord’s Prayer and I used to recite those parts of it which seemed to fit my case. I was full of resentments and found it hard to forgive the comparatively few injuries done to me, in spite of the many injuries which I had done to others, most but not all through drinking. I found it helpful to underline these words of the prayer: “Forgive us ourtrespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Whether reciting this aloud or silently to myself I would “punch” the words I have italicized. I still do.
I work in a large building with long passageways and am often there at odd hours when the place is deserted. I soon found that the Lord’s Prayer goes marvelously to the sound of footsteps echoing down an empty corridor. As grasshoppers may be said to “sing with their legs,” so I was learning to pray with my heels.
Much of this was mumbo-jumbo still, like those early “thank-yous,” because I was still side-stepping Higher Power, gliding round the Second Step. But the words “Thy will be done” kept coming back. Thy will. What, or whose will? Anyway, not mine. And other words rang back to me: things would work out “in God’s good time”–not mine.
I had been in AA for about fourteen months, just dry for about half that time and more truly sober for the rest, when I experienced an eye-opener. I met a young taxi driver at his second AA meeting, went home with him and talked into the night. I found myself asking him some routine questions. The lad (I’ll call him Y.) was deeply troubled by what drink had done to him, and anxious for help. I was all the time wondering whether he would have the same difficulty with Step Two as I was having. To my relief he told me that he had had a “standard” upbringing, that he still believed in God and would have no difficulty in asking help from a Higher Power, whom he quite cheerfully named as God.
I was very happy about this. It meant that Y. would have far less trouble about accepting the program than I myself had had. I walked home feeling elated. As I crossed a bridge on my way I began to apply this line of thinking to my own case: “What a fool you are, John X. Here you are happy as a cricket because this young man is not going to have the difficulty you have had. He will find it easy to ask help of a Higher Power and this will help to keep him sober. God, as he understands Him, is good enough for Y. But what in thunder has been keeping you sober fourteen months, John X?” From there on I metaphorically kicked my own fanny, all the way home.
From that day I have stopped boggling at Step Two. I do not hesitate to identify my Higher Power with God. I recognize that my understanding of God might not be recognizable to some others as the God they understand. I have come a long way from that bridge, and doubtless I have a long way to go still.
That was over six years ago. Now, when I talk at AA meetings I skip that old pass “Sorry, I can’t make Step Two.”
Instead, I often end with this: “I have come, not only to hope and believe, but to knowthat God, as I understand Him, can restore and has restored me to sanity, up to today.”