Latest / Sober Readings / Came To Believe - Chapter 8
Transcript
- Scott Hayes: Came to Believe, the spiritual adventure of AA as experienced by individual members. Hey, welcome to Sober Readings everyone. Today is Sunday and that means another chapter out of the Came to Believe book. This week we're on chapter eight. Chapter eight is titled, A Higher Power. And the intro goes like this. Our concepts of a higher power and God as we understand him. afford everyone a nearly unlimited choice of spiritual belief and action. And that was written by Bill W, one of our founders, in the AA grapevine and the article was dated April of 1961. So let's get right into the readings. The first reading is fairly short. It's titled, My Friend. I have recently made a friend of someone I wish everyone could know. This friend is never too busy to listen to me. my problems, my joys, and my sorrows. He gives me the courage to face life squarely and helps me conquer my fears. The counsel I get is always good, for this friend is wise, patient, and tolerant. Sometimes I do not heed his advice, and then I must ask for and be willing to accept additional advice very humbly and sincerely. Regardless of the mistakes I make, My friend is always there, available to me at any time, day or night. I can talk and he does not interrupt, no matter how I ramble on. Sometimes, while talking to him, I receive a solution to my problem. Other times, just by putting my problems into words, I see how petty and unimportant it is. I feel as if my friend is holding my hand and gently guiding me if I will listen. I feel that when I do not listen, My friend is hurt, but never angry. My friend is with me at work or at home, my constant companion wherever I go. He is my higher power as I understand it. He is the God I know. And that's from Colorado Springs, Colorado. The title of this next story is An Atheist's Journey. Four members of an AA group were called by a hospital as a last resort, a token gesture, to see a man who was in a nearly hopeless mental and physical state. He was due to be committed to a state institution as an incurable alcoholic. And almost certainly, that would be his final home. AA? Well, he decided... Nothing could be worse than what he was facing. So he agreed to listen on one condition. He didn't want any of that god stuff. He was a professed atheist, and on that one point he was clear. He had no intention of changing, no matter what the consequences. The four men talked, he listened, and when they had finished he was interested. There was still the big drawback, however, god. If that idea was part of program, AA was not for him. The four men thought and then suddenly one of them spoke, quietly at first, unsure of how his new approach would be received. He pointed out the plight of the patient, his helplessness, his illness. As he talked, he became more certain he was taking the right path. He pointed out that he and the other three were sober and had managed to stay that way. They were working. They were happy. Surely this made them stronger than the patient. The patient couldn't argue that point. Well then, couldn't they be considered a higher power of a sort? Who possibly could help restore his sanity? He thought about this and somewhere deep in the shadowy, confused recesses of his mind, there flashed a faint hope. Yes, he told them, they could represent his higher power. He could turn his life over to their care. The four men looked at one another. At least it was a place to start, but it wouldn't be easy. It was indeed a long, slow process, but gradually the cobwebs began to clear. As the patient read more and more about AA, he eagerly looked forward to the visits from his first four friends and from the other members of the group who were now coming to see him too. His body took much longer to heal than his mind. So it was a red-letter day when he was finally able to dress and say goodbye to the hospital and to all the doctors and nurses who had helped restore him to physical health. As he dressed, he kept thinking how different this was from the departure he had almost made to the state institution. His trust, his belief in foremen had made it possible. But could he stay sober outside these doors? Well, he'd do it today, anyhow. He threw himself into AA work with all the energy he could muster, attending several meetings a week. His body still tired quickly, but he was never too tired to answer a 12-step call. The memory of his first visit from AA and what it had meant to him would always be clear. One day, a call came for him to see someone who needed help. When he arrived, he discovered that fate had indeed dealt him a strange hand. The alcoholic he was visiting was a priest. He played that hand carefully and wisely, for it was a challenge unlike any he had ever faced or had ever imagined facing. He, who had shunned this man's god, must now find exactly the right words for communication. He fumbled for a start and then suddenly it became easy to talk to this priest, this fellow alcoholic. A warm friendship developed between the two. so it was a special joy when he became the priest's sponsor. They learned much from each other, or perhaps in each case the knowledge had been there all along, just waiting for the right person to bring it to the surface. In his remaining years this man was called upon many more times to help someone find the way to sobriety. Of these calls, two took him to the side of other men of the cloth who needed help. In these cases ministers. Twice more he was privileged to sponsor men of God. By now, his God as well. He left this world after seven years of uninterrupted sobriety, a man at peace with himself and his higher power. His legacy is the same as that left by A.A.' everywhere, the world over, more valuable than any earthly riches. It is a living legacy embodied in the men and women he has helped. and in the alcoholics to whom they, in turn, have extended a hand. And that's from Sioux City, Iowa. The next reading is very short, it's titled The Only Reality. I'm so tired of wandering around in my dreams, yet my eye keeps driving me back to them. For me, the only way out of it is through God. He is the only reality there is, and everything else must start from him. That's from AA Internationalists. The next reading's title is Reason or Conscience. When I first heard the advice, listen to God, I looked around to see who was present. People who listened to voices were, I supposed, kept in some place at the expense of the state. Since I was already in one of those places, I figured that if I tried listening and someone in the authority was watching me, I would not have a snowball's hope in the other place of ever getting out. Then one day, I did try listening to God, and found that he had been talking to me for some time. About those checks I had cashed, knowing that they would bounce. About those rotten lies I had told. About some relationships I would not have wanted made into a movie. About the selfishness of my ways and grievous hurt I had inflicted on my friends and relatives. That's right, God talked to me through my conscience. Of course, when I was knocking off the hooch in a manner calculated to create an acute shortage of the stuff, A higher power just did not exist for me, and the old conscience had a very thin one. When I came to believe, my conscience reasserted itself, and now, egged on by my conscience, I am endeavoring to make amends for all my wrongdoings in the past, as Step 9 suggests. Reason, or common sense if you prefer, is another method of finding out the will of God, but I prefer to rely on my conscience. During my drinking days, my reason told me that I was jeopardizing my health, my job, my bank balance, and a host of other things. Where did this ordinary human reasoning get me? It got me two slips of paper, one from my boss, saying that he thought he could manage without my services, the other from my bank manager, reminding me that, although he had lots of money, he thought I had had more than my fair share of it. My reason brought me to a mental and physical breakdown, which led me to that spell in an institution. Human wisdom had failed. I needed a wisdom greater, far greater than my own. This I found when I found a higher power in my conscience. All I have to do now is assemble all the facts as I see them and let him mold them to a conclusion. The conclusion at which I arrive is that God's power is shown through results. How many times have we followed a course of action on faith alone and then told ourselves when results verified the rightness of our action that we must be psychic? Psychic? Nonsense. Have you ever been of two or more minds when trying to arrive at a decision and then suddenly found something quite circumstantial popping up to show you the way? I have, and to me, This is just one more item to be added to the long list of God's accomplishments for me, guidance. I do not have to be guided to shave each morning, nor to have a bath, however occasionally, nor can I rely on a supernatural intervention to help me slosh a golf ball the way it ought to be sloshed. But I have been guided to know that I must make amends for the grief and worry I visited on my loved ones during the dark days, when in all humility, I try to pass our message on to other less fortunate alcoholics, I know that the plan of the higher power comes to us through the medium of people. To us alcoholics, this does not mean common or garden people, but special people, such as other alcoholics. And I am guided to include among those people from whom I might receive guidance, and to whom I must demonstrate the life of my conscience or higher power. those who married me, loved me, befriended me, and stuck by me, as others stuck by other alcoholics. It matters not whether reason or conscience showed me the way. I came to believe in a power greater than myself, and that has been my salvation." And that is from a small town, which I'm not going to pronounce, in Rhodesia. And the next one is again a very short reading. This one's titled Inner Voice. Long before nagging and pressures from others concerning my excessive use of alcohol made any impression on me, the nagging voice of conscience, my own inner voice of truth and right, apprised me of the irrevocable fact that I had lost control of alcohol, that I was powerless. I know now that the inner voice was God, as I understand him speaking. For as I had been taught from earliest memory and as AA has emphasized, God or good emanates from within each of us. And that was written in Lakewood, Ohio. and I'll read one more from chapter 8 before leaving the rest for next week. So this last one is titled, Faith in People. My parents gave me a faith that in later years I lost. No, it was not a religious faith, though I was exposed to the teachings of two sects. Neither was forced upon me. I simply drifted away through boredom, and my fragile, superficial belief in God vanished as soon as I tried thinking about it. It was a faith in people that my parents gave me, both by loving me and by respecting me as an individual. entitled to make my own choices. This love I accepted and returned unquestionably as a fact of nature. Out in the world on my own, I still had a feeling of being under benevolent protection. My immediate bosses of both sexes seemed to regard me as kindly as school teachers had. Oddly, my good fortune sometimes annoyed me. What is this? I asked myself. Do I arouse the maternal impulse? For there was inside me an element at war with faith and people. It was a furious, stiff-necked pride, an urge for total independence. With my contemporaries I was always painfully shy and even then I interpreted this handicap correctly as a symptom of egotism, a fear that others would not agree with my own valuation of myself. That valuation certainly did not include a picture of myself as a drunk. Often, I suspect that pride kills as many alcoholics as liquor does. I could very easily have been one of the victims, because my reaction to fast-progressing alcoholism was chiefly a frantic effort to hide it. Ask for help? What an idea. The day came when my pride was squashed flat, temporarily, and I did call for help. I called on people, strangers, but my pride, expanding as health returned, blocked my first two approaches to AA. During this interlude, non-alcoholic friends helped me too, unasked. After one failure to regain my skill as a social drinker, I was convinced and I began my AA membership in earnest. Fortunately, I joined a group that devotes its closest meetings to step discussions. Most of the members had their own concepts of a personal god. The atmosphere of faith surrounding me was so marked that I thought at times I was on the point of joining in it. I never did. And yet I found the steps revealing new depths of meaning with each discussion. In step two, the power greater than ourselves meant AA, but not just the members I knew. It meant all of us, everywhere, sharing a concern for each other and thereby creating a spiritual resource stronger than any one of us could provide. Another woman in my group believed that the souls of dead alcoholics, including those of times before AA, contributed to this fountainhead of goodwill. The thought was so beautiful that I wished I could believe it too. At first, step three was simply the way I felt on no hangover mornings of early sobriety, sitting by my window on days that always seemed sunny. having no immediate prospect of employment, and feeling perfectly happy and confident anyhow. Then the step became a cheerful acceptance of my place in the world. I have no idea who or what is running the show, but I know I'm not. And I could also see step three as a good attitude, an effective approach to life. If I am swimming in saltwater and I panic and start thrashing around and fighting it, it will drown me. but if I relax and have faith in it, it will hold me afloat. Though step four does not mention a higher power, to me the word moral carried an implication of sin, which in my book translates as an offense against God. So I regarded the inventory instead as an attempt at an honest description of my character on the red side when qualities that tended to hurt people. By trying to live in the world rather than escape from it, by trying to open myself up to other people and rather than withdraw from them, I hoped that this contract with my fellow human beings would somehow rub off the sharp, hurtful corners of my personality. Steps 6 and 7 I'm not sure that I was consciously working the steps, but they were surely working on me. In about the fourth year of sobriety, a trivial incident suddenly made me realize that my old bugaboo of shyness had disappeared. I feel at home in the world, I said to myself in astonishment. Now, some ten years later, I still do. In the whole measure of my life, the benefits of AA experience have far outweighed the damages of active alcoholism. What was it that overcame my pride, for the moment, and made me reachable? The best answer I can find is what my father used to call the life force. He was an old-fashioned family doctor. and he had seen that force springing up or failing many times. It is in all of us, I believe. It animates all living things. It keeps the galaxies wheeling. The saltwater metaphor applied to step three was not chosen by accident. For to me, the ocean is a symbol of this force. I come closest to step 11 when I can contemplate an unbroken horizon from the deck of a ship. I am cut down to size. I feel serenely that I am a small part of something vast and unknowable. But isn't the ocean rather a cold symbol? Yes. Do I think that its eye is on the minnow? That it is concerned about any individual's fate? Would I talk to it? No. Once, near the end of my drinking, I did address three words to something non-human. In the darkness before morning, I got out of bed, knelt, folded my hands, and said, Please help me. Then I shrugged and said, who am I talking to? And got back into bed. When I related that incident to one of my sponsors, she said, but he did answer your prayer. That may be, but I do not feel it. I didn't argue with her, nor do I attack the mystery with pure logic now. If you could prove to me logically that there is a personal God and I don't think you can, I still would not be inclined to talk to a presence I couldn't feel. If I could prove to you logically that there is no God, and I know I can't, your true faith would not be shaken. In other words, matters of faith lie entirely outside the realm of reason. Is there anything beyond the realm of human reason? Yes, I believe there is. Something. In the meantime, here we all are together. I mean all of us people, not just alcoholics. We need each other. And that is from New York, New York. And with that story, I will close this episode of Sober Readings. So join me next Sunday for the continuation of Chapter 8. If you'd like to be a guest reader next Sunday and help me read Chapter 8, just send me an email, soberreadingswithscott at gmail.com. Or you can simply go to my website, soberreadings.com, and fill out the short form. So thanks for listening to this came to believe episode of Sober Readings. Remember until next time, don't drink, go to a meeting, and keep coming back. Have a great day, and as my friend Larry says, best day ever.