Reading “We Agnostics” and Working Step 3

I decided to give chapter 4 in the big book another read-through.  I initially thought that the chapter “We Agnostics” was about disbelief in God. As I read the chapter, I came to realize that Bill W was writing about something more than that. He was trying to draw a parallel for the reader about people’s initial disbelief in science. and the alcoholic’s initial disbelief in sobriety. The author gives a couple of examples, such as the media’s inability to report on initial flight attempts, how electricity works, or how to explain the existence of the atoms that comprise a steel beam. Not understanding physics or flight dynamics would lead someone to believe that these things are impossible. Not understanding how the AA program works might lead someone to believe that the program would not get them sober.

And so it is with step three:

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Once we can believe that if we truly turn our lives over to the care of God, we believe in that God and we believe in what we’re doing, it will work. It might not necessarily be proven to us that it does work straight away, but it will work.

But there’s some work to be done.  First, we must decide that if this is what we truly want to do, then we must discard our ego and turn our decision-making process and our whole sense of logic over to God. We must have blind faith in what we’re doing.

In 1989’s Indiana Jones movie, The Last Crusade, our hero takes an incredible leap of faith in order to save Sean Connery. Harrison Ford meets his fear with faith.  He checks his big book, and then, after what I assume is praying, a sense of calm comes over him, as he steps out over the chasm and finds, much to his surprise, that what he thought was true, and what he wanted to be true, was, in fact, true. There was a passage forward. His life was spared, and he was able to walk across the chasm and save his father.

If we have faith in the program and ourselves, that the program works, then we can follow the program. If we do the work to follow to work the steps, the program will work. In every meeting that I go to, we all hold hands and pray, and then say, “It works if you work it”. So we must learn to actually work it. “Working it” is putting away those misconceptions and truly believing that it works. believing in ourselves — that we can do what we’re setting out to do and allowing it to happen. Just as Indy stepped over the chasm, we can step over our old habits and get to where we want to be.

So the title “we agnostics” is not aimed at people that don’t believe in God, “we agnostics” refers to people that don’t believe in all sorts of things, be it science, the AA recovery program, or in themselves. We agnostics have a lesson to learn. We need to learn to take the advice of this book. We need to learn to take the advice of our sponsor and our fellows in the program. We need to learn to have faith not only in our higher power, but also in ourselves — that we can do what we’re setting out to do.

Don’t skip Appendix II, when you read Chapter 4.  There’s some good stuff in there.  Especially, this:

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.” — Herbert Spencer

It’s about overcoming skepticism.  Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.  How do we do this?  We do this by choosing a higher power, something outside of ourselves that’s more powerful than ourselves. Something that can do what we cannot do.  We must have full faith in this higher power. We must have faith that can conquer the fear of that which we do not know or understand.

This new higher power can only do these things if we let it. We must let go of our past. We must let go of our will and our ego, and let the program work for us. Much as we were not in control of our drinking, let us be not in control of our recovery. The only thing we have to do is not drink. Our higher power does everything else, if we truly let it, if we believe in our higher power, our higher power will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.