The Bewildered Ones

TWELVE STEPS

AND

TWELVE TRADITIONS

STEP TWO

(p. 28)

Sometimes A.A. comes harder to those who have lost or rejected faith than those who never had any faith at all, for they think that they have tried faith and found it wanting. They have tried the way of faith and the way of no faith. Since both ways have proved to bitterly disappointing, they have concluded there is no place whatever for them to go. The roadblocks of indifference, fancied self-sufficiency, prejudice, and defiance often proved more solid and formidable for these people than any erected by the unconvinced agnostic or even the militant atheist. Religion says the existence of God can be proved; the agnostic says it can't be proved; and the atheist claims proof of the nonexistence of God. Obviously, the dilemma of the wanderer from faith is that of profound confusion. He thinks himself lost to the comfort of any conviction at all. He cannot attain in even a small degree the assurance of the believer, the agnostic, or the atheist. He is the bewildered one.

~

What a great name for a group: The Bewildered Ones. So many of us knew it was silly to accept the idea of any kind of God… especially the Western God of the holy work ethic that is our heritage of Protestantism. We came to places like AA, or listened to lectures from “The Course in Miracles”, only to see that some of the aspects of these are steeped in, or have an undercurrent of, the conviction that proof of our spirituality is the acquisition and accumulation of material goodies; the house; the cars; the wife or husband and perfect brood of kids; and so on and on.

            I see no harm in this attitude (materialism got me my computer) except that, when we fail, we feel as though this God, or spirituality business, is not for us and that we prefer a less demanding spiritual reality. We might even think that the spirituality which expresses itself best is in the East and, when we dabble in practices from there, we still find ourselves wanting because of the insistence on submission to a guru of one sort or another. We believe we are missing something vital and wonder if there is anything… anything at all beyond the material success that has eluded us.

            Beaten down by the demands of my disease, I finally came to surrender all of these concepts or opinions on the nature, or the will, of God and simply took the direction laid out in the Twelve Steps of AA. The freedom I found there was a wider road than I previously suspected. I took the First Step in its entirety and that opened the door to come to believe. It mattered nothing at all what my previous concepts of spiritual realities were.

           

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