A Power Greater Than Ourselves - for everyone

The second Step of the Twelve Step programme says that we "came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity".

That Power is usually conceived as being God, or, as AA puts it - knowing that alcoholics are incredibly stubborn and self-willed - the "God of our understanding". This phrase, of course, allows the recovering alcoholic (and anyone else with a problem of addiction, which is most of us) to think of God in a way that makes sense to him or her. The saying is, "You can always tell an alcoholic, but you can't tell him much". And that's so true! AA is full of mavericks, men and women who find it very hard to accept anything another person tells them. And this includes advice about God. So, although AA was founded on Christian principles, it doesn't insist that our Higher Power has to fit any Christian denomination's idea of God.

But our Higher Power does have to be a Power that is on our side, that loves us unconditionally and wants only the very best for us. To me, only the Christian and Jewish God, God described as an infinitely loving Father, fits the bill. The Christian God has the added advantage in having the person of Jesus Christ, a real, living human being as well as God, as a model for our behaviour and our ideas about God. Nobody could be more loving, more concerned with our wellbeing, than Jesus. For those of us who believe in Him, including this writer, He is the God of my understanding who's always with me, who will never leave me or forsake me, who was there in my after-death experience and who emanated love, compassion, and understanding as He allowed me to return to life to look after my children.

Jesus shows us the knowable side of the unknowable Great Creator. He tells us, "He who has seen Me has seen the Father". And we can all see Him with our spiritual sight, if we wish to; all we need do is ask Him to show Himself to us.

But not everyone can bring themselves to even try to believe in this God. Many people have had a harsh religious upbringing, which portrayed God as the great magistrate in the sky, ready to impose fines and punishments at the slightest infringement of his rules. Others, in perhaps an even worse situation, grew up without any religious education at all. They don't know the Bible, the Koran, the Hindu texts or Buddhism. They think men and women are lonely beings, set adrift in an uncaring universe. There is no help and no hope for us in this picture. Thank God it isn't true.

Some think of God as an ineffable force, so far above us that we can't conceive of him or understand His ways. There is some truth in this. God the Creator is that unknown, unknowable energy, of whom nothing can be said, who can be defined only in negative terms - not this, not that. In the Work, the Ray of Creation shows the whole ladder of being, with, at the very top, the Absolute, His Endlessness, the great force beyond all knowing.

But thanks to the work of Jesus Christ, who created the Side Octave to the Sun for us, we have a picture of God as a perfect human being to whom we can truly relate and who offers a way through our struggles and temptations. He helps us at every step of the way, because He wants only our highest and best good. He is always there for us, if we call on Him. The Catholic and Orthodox Christian traditions speak of a "treasury of merit" stored up from the sacrifice and suffering of Jesus and all the saints, the great men and women who have heroically imitated Him and contributed their own sacred efforts to renew and repair the world through the ages. Many are known, many more are anonymous.

In the Work, we speak of higher hydrogens, special particles of energy created by this type of effort, that we can make as we remember ourselves, sacrifice our self-will, our False Personality, and suffer the remorse of conscience that comes from seeing ourselves as we truly are.

When I came into AA after many years in the Work, I had no problem at all with thinking of God as Jesus, and understanding the operation of grace and mercy that had preserved my life and enable me to reach the point of recovery.

But for those suffering alcoholics and addicts who want to work the Steps but who can't find a God they can believe in, then - at least at first - the idea of the AA group, or AA as a whole, as their Higher Power will work very well. AA, a group of recovering alcoholics who've found a way to sanity, has much more power than the newly-dry drunk. The wisdom and knowledge that AA has accumulated are available to anyone who asks, and a personal, individual sponsor can offer specific advice and recommendations as the alcoholic begins to climb the ladder of the steps.

Some ideas of the "Higher Power" are bizarre, however. There's one story - possibly apocryphal - of the just-sobered-up alcoholic in my home town of Bournemouth who claimed that her higher power was a yellow double-decker bus! She really believed it at the time. She justified her choice by saying the bus was much bigger than she was, had a lot of horse-power, and would kill her if she didn't get out of the way! Fortunately, it was not long before someone offered to be her temporary sponsor and quickly set her right.

Another new recruit to AA saw "nature" as his higher power. He thought of the healing work of nature, repairing our wounds and fostering young animals. But someone pointed out that nature was also heartless and cruel, and the tsunami that killed 250,000 people early in this century proved how accurate that was. So the new recruit, and the girl who'd come up with the "yellow bus" idea, were persuaded to take the group as their higher power, and listen to the advice that others gave.

We certainly need a Higher Power if we are to recover and stay sober. We need to be able to draw on a fund of wisdom greater than our own very limited experiences, and we also need to feel the love and caring of a kind, compassionate God. This love, this caring, is often felt in an AA or NA group. It is felt there more often than in many churches. It is the beginning of the true Christian community, or the society of the Friends of God, as the Sufis put it.

And everyone, whether alcoholic or addict or just a normal person trying to live according to their conscience, needs that.