In the preceding chapters you have learned
something of alcoholism. we hope we have made clear the distinction between the
alcoholic and the non-alcoholic. If, when you honestly want to, you find you
cannot quit entirely, or if when drinking, you have little control over the
amount you take, you are probably alcoholic. If that be the case, you may be
suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer.
To one who feels he is an atheist or
agnostic such an experience seems impossible, but to continue as he is means
disaster, especially if he is an alcoholic of the hopeless variety. To be doomed
to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy
alternatives to face.
But it isn't so difficult. About half our
original fellowship were of exactly that type. At first some of us tried to
avoid the issue, hoping against hope we were not true alcoholics. But after a
while we had to face the fact that we must find a spiritual basis of life or
else. Perhaps it is going to be that way with you. But cheer up, something like
half of us thought we were atheists or agnostics. Our experience shows that you
need not be disconcerted.
If a mere code of morals or a better
philosophy of life were sufficient to overcome alcoholism, many of us would have
recovered long ago. But we found that such codes and philosophies did not save
us, no matter how much we tried. We could wish to be moral, we could wish to be
philosophically comforted, in fact, we could will these things with all our
might, but the needed power wasn't there. Our human resources, as marshalled by
the will, were not sufficient; they failed utterly.
Lack of power, that was our dilemma. we had
to find a power by which we could live, and it had to be a Power greater than
ourselves. Obviously. But where and how were we to find this Power?
Well, that's exactly what this book is
about. Its main object is to enable you to find a Power greater than yourself
which will solve your problem. That means we have written a book which we
believe to be spiritual as well as moral. And it means, of course, that we are
going to talk about God. Here difficulty arises with agnostics. Many times we
talk to a new man and watch his hope rise as we discuss his alcoholic problems
and explain our fellowship. But his face falls when we speak of spiritual
matters, especially when we mention God, for we have re-opened a subject which
our man thought he had neatly evaded or entirely ignored.
We know how he feels. We have shared his
honest doubt and prejudice. Some of us have been violently anti-religious. To
others, the word "God" brought up a particular idea of Him with which someone
had tried to impress them during childhood. Perhaps we rejected this particular
conception because it seemed inadequate. With that rejection we imagined we had
abandoned the God idea entirely. We were bothered with the thought that faith
and dependence upon a Power beyond ourselves was somewhat weak, even cowardly.
We looked upon this world of warring individuals, warring theological systems,
and inexplicable calamity, with deep skepticism. We looked askance at many
individuals who claimed to be godly. How could a Supreme Being have anything to
do with it all? And who could comprehend a Supreme Being anyhow? Yet, in other
moments, we found ourselves thinking, when enchanted by a starlit night, "Who,
then, make all this?" There was a feeling of awe and wonder, but it was fleeting
and soon lost.
Yes, we of agnostic temperament have had
these thoughts and experiences. Let us make haste to reassure you. We found that
as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to
believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results, even
though it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power,
which is God.
Much to our relief, we discovered we did
not need to consider another's conception of God. Our own conception, however
inadequate, was sufficient to make the approach and to effect a contact with
Him. As soon as we admitted the possible existence of a Creative Intelligence, a
Spirit of the Universe underlying the totality of things, we began to be
possessed of a new sense of power and direction, provided we took other simple
steps. We found that God does not make too hard terms with those who seek Him.
To us, the Realm of Spirit is broad, roomy, all inclusive; never exclusive or
forbidding to those who earnestly seek. It is open, we believe, to all men.
When, therefore, we speak to you of God, we
mean your own conception of God. This applies, too, to other spiritual
expressions which you find in this book. Do not let any prejudice you may have
against spiritual terms deter you from honestly asking yourself what they mean
to you. At the start, this was all we needed to commence spiritual growth, to
effect our first conscious relation with God as we understood Him. Afterward, we
found ourselves accepting many things which then seemed entirely out of reach.
That was growth, but if we wished to grow we had to begin somewhere. So we used
our own conception, however limited it was.
We needed to ask ourselves but one short
question. --"Do I now believe, or am I even willing to believe, that there is a
Power greater than myself?" As soon as a man can say that he does believe, or is
willing to believe, we emphatically assure him that he is on his way. It has
been repeatedly proven among us that upon this simple cornerstone a wonderfully
effective spiritual structure can be built.*
That was great news to us, for we had
assumed we could not make use of spiritual principles unless we accepted many
things on faith which seemed difficult to believe. When people presented us with
spiritual approaches, how frequently did we all say, "I wish I had what that man
has. I'm sure it would work if I could only believe as he believes. But I cannot
accept as surely true the many articles of faith which are so plain to him." So
it was comforting to learn that we could commence at a simpler level.
Besides a seeming inability to accept much
on faith, we often found ourselves handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and
unreasoning prejudice. Many of us have been so touchy that even casual reference
to spiritual things make us bristle with antagonism. This sort of thinking had
to be abandoned. Though some of us resisted, we found no great difficulty in
casting aside such feelings. Faced with alcoholic destruction, we soon became as
open minded on spiritual matters as we had tried to be on other questions. In
this respect alcohol was a great persuader. It finally beat us into a state of
reasonableness. Sometimes this was a tedious process; we hope no one else will
prejudiced for as long as some of us were.
The reader may still ask why he should
believe in a Power greater than himself. We think there are good reasons. Let us
have a look at some of them.
The practical individual of today is a
stickler for facts and results. Nevertheless, the twentieth century readily
accepts theories of all kinds, provided they are firmly grounded in fact. We
have numerous theories, for example, about electricity. Everybody believes them
without a murmur of doubt. Why this ready acceptance? Simply because it is
impossible to explain what we see, feel, direct, and use, without a reasonable
assumption as a starting point.
Everybody nowadays, believes in scores of
assumptions for which there is good evidence, but no perfect visual proof. And
does not science demonstrate that visual proof is the weakest proof? It is being
constantly revealed, as mankind studies the material world, that outward
appearances are not inward reality at all. To illustrate:
The prosaic steel girder is a mass of
electrons whirling around each other at incredible speed. These tiny bodies are
governed by precise laws, and these laws hold true throughout the material
world, Science tells us so. We have no reason to doubt it. When, however, the
perfectly logical assumption is suggested that underneath the material world and
life as we see it, there is an All Powerful, Guiding, Creative Intelligence,
right there our perverse streak comes to the surface and we laboriously set out
to convince ourselves it isn't so. We read wordy books and indulge in windy
arguments, thinking we believe this universe needs no God to explain it. Were
our contentions true, it would follow that life originated out of nothing, means
nothing, and proceeds nowhere.
Instead of regarding ourselves as
intelligent agents, spearheads of God's ever advancing Creation, we agnostics
and atheists chose to believe that our human intelligence was the last word, the
alpha and the omega, the beginning and end of all. Rather vain of us, wasn't it?
We, who have traveled this dubious path,
beg you to lay aside prejudice, even against organized religion. We have learned
that whatever the human frailties of various faiths may be, those faiths have
given purpose and direction to millions. People of faith have a logical idea of
what life is all about. Actually, we used to have no reasonable conception
whatever. We used to amuse ourselves by cynically dissecting spiritual beliefs
and practices when we might have observed that many spiritually-minded persons
of all races, colors, and creeds were demonstrating a degree of stability,
happiness and usefulness which we should have sought ourselves. Instead, we
looked at the human defects of these people, and sometimes used their
shortcomings as a basis of wholesale condemnation. We talked of intolerance,
while we were intolerant ourselves. We missed the reality and the beauty of the
forest because we were diverted by the ugliness of some its trees. We never gave
the spiritual side of life a fair hearing.
In our personal stories you will find a
wide variation in the way each teller approaches and conceives of the Power
which is greater than himself. Whether we agree with a particular approach or
conception seems to make little difference. Experience has taught us that these
are matters about which, for our purpose, we need not be worried. They are
questions for each individual to settle for himself.
On one proposition, however, these men and
women are strikingly agreed. Every one of them has gained access to, and believe
in, a Power greater than himself. This Power has in each case accomplished the
miraculous, the humanly impossible. As a celebrated American statesman put it,
"Let's look at the record."
Here are thousands of men and women,
worldly indeed. They flatly declare that since they have come to believe in a
Power greater than themselves, to take a certain attitude toward that Power, and
to do certain simple things. There has been a revolutionary change in their way
of living and thinking. In the face of collapse and despair, in the face of the
total failure of their human resources, they found that a new power, peace,
happiness, and sense of direction flowed into them. This happened soon after
they wholeheartedly met a few simple requirements. Once confused and baffled by
the seeming futility of existence, they show the underlying reasons why they
were making heavy going of life. Leaving aside the drink question, they tell why
living was so unsatisfactory. They show how the change came over them. When many
hundreds of people are able to say that the consciousness of the Presence of God
is today the most important fact of their lives, they present a powerful reason
why one should have faith.
This world of ours has made more material
progress in the last century than in all the millenniums which went before.
Almost everyone knows the reason. Students of ancient history tell us that the
intellect of men in those days was equal to the best of today. Yet in ancient
times, material progress was painfully slow. The spirit of modern scientific
inquiry, research and invention was almost unknown. In the realm of the
material, men's minds were fettered by superstition, tradition, and all sort of
fixed ideas. Some of the contemporaries of Columbus thought a round earth
preposterous. Others came near putting Galileo to death for his astronomical
heresies.
We asked ourselves this: Are not some of us
just as biased and unreasonable about the realm of the spirit as were the
ancients about the realm of the material? Even in the present century, American
newspapers were afraid to print an account of the Wright brothers' first
successful flight at Kittyhawk. Had not all efforts at flight failed before? Did
not Professor Langley's flying machine go to the bottom of the Potomac River?
Was it not true that the best mathematical minds had proved man could never fly?
Had not people said God had reserved this privilege to the birds? Only thirty
years later the conquest of the air was almost an old story and airplane travel
was in full swing.
But in most fields our generation has
witnessed complete liberation in thinking. Show any longshoreman a Sunday
supplement describing a proposal to explore the moon by means of a rocket and he
will say, "I bet they do it maybe not so long either." Is not our age
characterized by the ease with which we discard old ideas for new, by the
complete readiness with which we throw away the theory or gadget which does not
work for something new which does?
We had to ask ourselves why we shouldn't
apply to our human problems this same readiness to change our point of view. We
were having trouble with personal relationships, we couldn't control our
emotional natures, we were a prey to misery and depression, we couldn't make a
living, we had a feeling of uselessness, we were full of fear, we were unhappy,
we couldn't seem to be of real help to other people was not a basic solution of
these bedevilments more important than whether we should see newsreels of lunar
flight? Of course it was.
When we saw others solve their problems by
a simple reliance upon the Spirit of the Universe, we had to stop doubting the
power of God. Our ideas did not work. But the God idea did.
The Wright brothers' almost childish faith
that they could build a machine which would fly was the mainspring of their
accomplishment. Without that, nothing could have happened. We agnostics and
atheists were sticking to the idea that self- sufficiency would solve our
problems. When others showed us that "God-sufficiency worked with them, we began
to feel like those who had insisted the Wrights would never fly.
Logic is great stuff. We like it. We still
like it. It is not by chance we were given the power to reason, to examine the
evidence of our sense, and to draw conclusions. That is one of man's magnificent
attributes. We agnostically inclined would not feel satisfied with a proposal
which does not lend itself to reasonable approach and interpretation. Hence we
are at pains to tell why we think our present faith is reasonable, why we think
it more sane and logical to believe than not to believe, why we say our former
thinking was soft and mushy when we threw up our hands in doubt and said, "We
don't know."
When we became alcoholics, crushed by a
self-imposed crises we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face
the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either
is or He isn't. What was our choice to be?
Arrived at this point, we were squarely
confronted with the question of faith. We couldn't duck the issue. Some of us
had already walked far over the Bridge of Reason toward the desired shore of
faith. The outlines and the promise of the New Land had brought lustre to tired
eyes and fresh courage to flagging spirits. Friendly hands had stretched out in
welcome. We were grateful that Reason had brought us so far. But somehow, we
couldn't quite step ashore. Perhaps we had been leaning too heavily on reason
that last mile and we did not like to lose our support.
That was natural, but let us think a little
more closely. Without knowing it, had we not been brought to where we stood by a
certain kind of faith? For did we not believe in our own reasoning? did we not
have confidence in our ability to think? What was that but a sort of faith? Yes,
we had been faithful, abjectly faithful to the God of Reason. So, in one way or
another, we discovered that faith had been involved all the time!
We found, too, that we had been
worshippers. What a state of mental goose-flesh that used to bring on! Had we
not variously worshipped people, sentiment, things, money, and ourselves? And
then, with a better motive, had we not worshipfully beheld the sunset, the sea,
or a flower? Who of us had not loved something or somebody? How much did these
feelings, these loves, these worships, have to do with pure reason? Little or
nothing, we saw at last. Were not these things the tissue out of which our lives
were constructed? Did not these feelings, after all, determine the course of our
existence? It was impossible to say we had no capacity for faith, or love, or
worship. In one form or another we had been living by faith and little else.
Imagine life without faith! Were nothing
left but pure reason, it wouldn't be life. But we believed in life of course we
did. We could not prove life in the sense that you can prove a straight line is
the shortest distance between two points, yet, there it was. Could we still say
the whole thing was nothing but a mass of electrons, created out of nothing,
meaning nothing, whirling on to a destiny of nothingness? Or course we couldn't.
The electrons themselves seemed more intelligent than that. At least, so the
chemist said.
Hence, we saw that reason isn't everything.
Neither is reason, as most of us use it, entirely dependable, thought it emanate
from our best minds. What about people who proved that man could never fly? Yet
we had been seeing another kind of flight, a spiritual liberation from this
world, people who rose above their problems. They said God made these things
possible, and we only smiled. We had seen spiritual release, but liked to tell
ourselves it wasn't true.
Actually we were fooling ourselves, for
deep down in every man, woman, and child, is the fundamental idea of God. It may
be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form
or other it is there. For faith in a Power greater than ourselves, and
miraculous demonstrations of that power in human lives, are facts as old as man
himself.
We finally saw that faith in some kind of
God was a part of our make-up, just as much as the feeling we have for a friend.
Sometimes we had to search fearlessly, but He was there. He was as much a fact
as we were. We found the Great Reality deep down within us. In the last analysis
it is only there that He may be found. It was so with us.
We can only clear the ground a bit. If our
testimony helps sweep away prejudice, enables you to think honestly, encourages
you to search diligently within yourself, then, if you wish, you can join us on
the Broad Highway. With this attitude you cannot fail. the consciousness of your
belief is sure to come to you.
In this book you will read the experience
of a man who thought he was an atheist. His story is so interesting that some of
it should be told now. His change of heart was dramatic, convincing, and moving.
Our friend was a minister's son. He attended church school, where he became
rebellious at what he thought an overdose of religious education. For years
thereafter he was dogged by trouble and frustration. Business failure, insanity,
fatal illness, suicide these calamities in his immediate family embittered and
depressed him. Post-war disillusionment, ever more serious alcoholism, impending
mental and physical collapse, brought him to the point to self-destruction.
One night, when confined in a hospital, he
was approached by an alcoholic who had known a spiritual experience. Our
friend's gorge rose as he bitterly cried out: "If there is a God, He certainly
hasn't done anything for me!" But later, alone in his room, he asked himself
this question: "Is it possible that all the religious people I have known are
wrong?" While pondering the answer he felt as though he lived in hell. Then,
like a thunderbolt, a great thought came. It crowded out all else:
"Who are you to say there is no God?"
This man recounts that he tumbled out of
bed to his knees. In a few seconds he was overwhelmed by a conviction of the
Presence of God. It poured over and through him with the certainty and majesty
of a great tide at flood. The barriers he had built through the years were swept
away. He stood in the Presence of Infinite Power and Love. He had stepped from
bridge to shore. For the first time, he lived in conscious companionship with
his Creator.
Thus was our friend's cornerstone fixed in
place. No later vicissitude has shaken it. His alcoholic problem was taken away.
That very night, years ago, it disappeared. Save for a few brief moments of
temptation the though of drink has never returned; and at such times a great
revulsion has risen up in him. Seemingly he could not drink even if he would.
God had restored his sanity.
What is this but a miracle of healing? Yet
its elements are simple. Circumstances made him willing to believe. He humbly
offered himself to his Maker then he knew.
Even so has God restored us all to our
right minds. To this man, the revelation was sudden. Some of us grow into it
more slowly. But He has come to all who have honestly sought Him.
When we drew near to Him He disclosed
Himself to us!
