No Need to Overthink This Issue

power greater than myself. I was the one in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (12&12) that tried religion and had found it wanting. I also read that, “even the militant atheist got through the hoop with room to spare.” I did not believe in the God of the religionist, but I did not think I was an atheist either.

The Alcoholics Anonymous program is open to anyone that has a desire to stop drinking. It makes no difference if you are an atheist, agnostic, Buddhist or a member of one of the vast numbers of religions in the world.

All of us have the same opportunity to get well through the steps. They were fashioned that way to ensure that no alcoholic is left out. We embrace everyone that walks through that door. If step two had been written to say, “Came to believe that God”, rather than, “a Power greater than ourselves” could restore me to sanity, I wonder if A.A. would have succeeded in the way that it has, especially when we consider the problems that the Oxford group had with this issue.

The Power Greater than myself option was a good start for me. Something happened to me within minutes after arriving at my first introduction to three people. Sitting on a bench in the front yard of a little house in Los Angeles, where they held their meetings, the obsession to drink was gone, and I have not had, nor wanted, a drink since then. You might call that a miracle, and you might be right, depending on your definition of a miracle, but it came to me as a profound Change of Perception brought about by the Love, Understanding and Compassion I sensed as they welcomed me.

I have seen people talking of religion, and others that were irritated with any talk of God, yet we still hold hands at the end of the meeting and say a prayer and everyone leaves the meeting feeling a little better. I personally know priests and ministers in the program, and they seem to adjust to the diversity of the landscape. I wish that it could be simpler for each person, but there are no two people that are identical in this matter.

These experiences were a great way for me to start, but, what about PRAYER? Who or what do I pray to? I heard about doorknobs and icons, the ocean, and other such things but that way of thinking did not sit well with me. I did not want to be too glib about such an important matter. Then I noticed that, in step two, it did not say that I had to believe in anything, only that I had to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.

Speaking for myself, if I wanted to be freed from the deadly obsession of alcoholism, I had to trust the guidance of the two books that are suggested, and the leadership of the more experienced members of the group, to come to terms with a concept of a

The collective wisdom of the A.A. programme and the people in it have been the framework for my faith in a higher power. The experience that I had in that front yard, fifty-one years ago, was all I needed to know to get on with the rest of the program. I pray to God every day to show me what to do and to give me the strength to do it and I still do not know for

sure, who or what God is. I use the word God, only to describe the spiritual influence that A.A. has had on this drunk. I pray to God as I understand God, and he expresses himself in my consciousness, the only thing left for me to do is to separate the wheat from the chaff.