"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 God 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 those who say they won't believe -- the belligerent
ones.  They are in a state of mind which can be described only as savage.  Their whole
philosophy  of life, in which they so gloried, is threatened.  It's bad enough, they think, to
admit  alcohol has them down for keeps.  But now, still smarting from that admission, they
are faced with something really  impossible.  How they do cherish the thought  that 
humanity,  risen so majestically  from a single cell in the primordial ooze, is the spearhead
of evolution and therefore the only god that this universe knows!  Must they renounce all
this to save themselves?
	At this juncture, the 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 the old life, and the beginning of an emergence into a new one.  The 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 and 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 person '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 person's opinion based on individual  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 person 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 wanderers from faith is that of profound confusion.
They think themselves lost to the comfort of any conviction at all. They cannot attain in
even a small degree the assurance of the believer, the agnostic, or the atheist. They are the
bewildered ones. 
	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  woman
or man.  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 people 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 ancestors.  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 people 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 even
God.  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 man or woman we wanted to marry had other notions;  we prayed 
they'd change their minds, but they  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 God what it ought 
to be.  No one, we saw, could believe in God and defy God, too.  Belief meant reliance,
not defiance.  In A.A. we saw the fruits of this belief:  women and men 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 those folks full of faith, but still reeking of alcohol.  They believe
they are  devout.  Their  religious observance is scrupulous.  They're sure they still believe 
in God, but suspect  that God doesn't believe in them.  They take  pledges and more
pledges.  Following each, they not only drink again, but act worse than the last time. 
Valiantly they try to fight alcohol, imploring Divine  help, but the help doesn't come. 
What, then, can be the matter?
	To clergy, doctors, friends, and families, the alcoholics who mean well and try hard
are a heartbreaking riddle.  To most A.A.'s, they are not.  There are too many of us who
have been just like them, 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 humanity 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 their destructive behavior, whether the
destruction fell on the dining-room furniture or their own moral fiber, can claim
"soundness of mind" for themselves.
	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 God.

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