“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”I see three parts to this important Step.
- To believe
- That a Power
- Could restore me to sanity
As I started coming out of my alcoholic haze, I pretty much overlooked this important Step. I read it, I understood it, (I thought) and I moved on to the next Step.
I was not interested in believing in anything, especially not a Power greater than me, and I knew for a fact I was insane. It wasn’t until the haze began to clear that I realized my alcoholic condition had rendered me totally insane.
At the time, the only thing I truly believed in was that another drink would keep me sane, The “hair of the dog” was a belief I could take to the bank. Another drink would keep me from going over the edge. My addiction was out of control, I just didn’t know it. Until I did.
Believing in anything except my SELF was foreign to me. I only believed in ME! God and I had been estranged for a very long time. He/She was only out to get me and I wanted nothing to do with God. In retrospect I realize that the idea that there was a God I wanted nothing to do with meant that I did BELIEVE in God.
And what about insanity? I read the definition of sanity this morning. I read, “The ability to think and behave in a normal, rational, manner; sound mental health.” And conversely, the definition of insanity, “The state of being seriously mentally ill; madness.”
Those definitions leave a lot to the imagination. I think most of us in recovery have our own definition of insanity. The insanity temporarily rendered to us by our own alcoholism. When we realized the hold that alcohol had on our lives, our minds, our hearts, our emotions, we were seriously insane. For me, it was about fear and anger. They overpowered my thought processes and reigned over all of my emotions.
A friend to many of us in AA, Janice Rea, who passed away suddenly several years ago used to openly talk about her insanity, inside and out of sobriety. She joked about her insane way of living and yet was an icon of what it was like to live fearlessly. She involved herself in everything and anything that interested her. She had found a new life in AA and she enjoyed living freely with what she referred to as “an insane lifestyle. And those of who knew her gravitated to her and listened to her wisdom. Janice died doing what she loved to do. She fell off a cliff while practicing her search and rescue work. All these years later I still embrace her wisdom and her insanity.
If sanity is what Janice had in sobriety, I want some of it. Finding my physical sobriety, my spiritual sobriety, and my emotional sobriety is the journey I am on. And the journey has been exciting.
As I work this Step, I have found new freedoms. I have found a Higher Power I call God but that God was discovered when I entered the halls of Alcoholics Anonymous. My God is no longer a God who requires dogmatic adherence to certain behaviors or types of worship. My Higher Power is a God of love who accepts me as perfect in spite of my imperfections. My God no longer judges me! And I do my best to stay away from judging others.
I have been re-reading a book I read many years ago entitled, “Conversations with God” by Neale Donald Walsh. I found a few paragraphs that explained who I was and what I was. This is God’s response to a question posed by Walsh:
“I have not said your values are wrong. But neither are they right. They are simply judgment. Assessments. Decisions. For the most part, they are decisions made not by you, but by someone else. Your parents, perhaps. Your religion. Your teachers., historians, politicians.”
“Very few of your value judgments you have incorporated into your truth are judgments, you, yourself, have made based upon your own experience. Yet experience is what you came here for – and out of your experience were you to create yourself. You have created yourself out of the experience of others.”
“If there were such a thing as sin, this would be it: to allow yourself to become what you are because of the experience of others. This is the ‘sin’ you have committed. All of you. You do not await your own experience, you accept the experience of others as gospel (literally), and then, when you encounter the actual experience for the first time, you overlay what you think you already know onto the encounter.”
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