Another Step in the Dark

I have been tagged by Hank of In God’s Hands to comment on Step 2, which gives me a chance to look again very closely at how I began to recover from alcoholism and how I understand this Step today.

Step 2 Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

When I was 22 years old I converted to the Roman Catholic Church. I had lost my brother in the Chimurenga war of liberation or ‘bush war’ in what is now Zimbabwe and I thought perhaps God could help me find a way to go on living with my horror of war and my brother’s death. I didn’t really know how to go on. I had never been baptised, so Fr Guy R baptised me and I promised to ‘renounce Satan and all his pomp’. The phrase amused me. I had attended a Catholic convent for a few months wehn I was a little girl and I loved the singing in the chapel and the tall nuns waring their heavy black habits right through the dusty and hot summers. In those years we were staying in a small town near the Matopos Hills where Cecil John Rhoes lies buried, and each afternoon there would be bright green electrical thunderstorms. We could smell the rain approaching across the veld. Because I came from a Presbyterian family, the nuns did not talk to me about God very much, but I loved sitting with them when they were reading their breviaries under the marula trees in the playground. Their calm gentleness was in such contrast to my family life.

One of the nuns noticed one morning that I had blood on the back of my school uniform. I was six years old. She gave me a little soft cloth and told me to go to the bathroom and clean myself and rub salt onto the skirt.

She must have realised what she was seeing. It did not occur to her to report it.

Years later I found out more about the German Domincan and Franciscan missionary orders in that remote part of the country. Many of those nuns were young women who had entered religious life and fled to Africa after being raped by Russian soldiers advancing towards Berlin in 1945. They were women who believed silence would protect them, that speaking out or protesting would change nothing, that only God could heal the trauma of violation.

For many years I hoped that religion would save me, that God would do for me what i was unwilling to do for myself. I did not want to tell anyone I was alcoholic. I did not want to give up drinking. I just wanted God to take away the consequences of my drinking.

Alcoholism bankrupted my capacity for faith.

Step 2 Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

When I sobered up, I had no idea who God might be. I had no idea what might constitute a Higher Power. But I did know I was powerless, that I had no faith in myself any longer.

I also knew I was unable to think clearly about anything, that my mind was addled. Sometimes people forget the second part of this Step. I wanted to be restored to sanity.

There were bottles hidden all over the cottage. Empty bottles wedged behind bodice-ripping novels of sex and intrigue on the bookshelf. Half-jacks of vodka jammed behind rows of shoes at the back of my closets. Bottles of wine opened and souring behind wardrobes in the bedroom. Bottles thrown out of windows into bushes. Bottles of brandy that were in reality empty but cunningly filled with weak tea, so that they looked unbroached. To my eyes anyhow. Half-empty bottles, precautions against a dry day, tucked away behind jars of beans and flour. A glass of sweet red cough mixture concealed somewhere under or behind a cabinet or bookcase. I searched everywhere. It surfaced six months later, covered in white floating mould.

I knew I was not in my right mind.

And I simply surrendered. To whatever Power out there might be able to help me come through this hell and not die of alcoholism. To whatever Power had saved other alcoholic women before me. To the Power found in AA.

I was ready to do anything, believe anything, go to any lengths in order to get sober. I did not believe in the God I had constructed for myself as an alcoholic, the God I had manipulated and tried to placate for so long. I knew that I was as incapable of relating to the Divine as I was incapable of relating to any living human being. I was all defect and no character.

Step 2 Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

That gift of desperation saved me. I surrendered with no qualms or reservation. Today I know that there is a Power out there greater than myself. I’m not sure I know much more. As I slowly heal and begin to become human, ordinary and capable of authentic choices and the kind of love known as selfless eros, that Power may reveal more of life’s great mystery to me. In the fellowship of AA I have experienced tremendous love and been given the opportunity to serve others. My life and sanity has not just been restored but renewed. I did not have much of a life before I sobered up.

When we sing together in AA it is nearly always the song Amazing Grace, composed by the former slave trader who had thought himself beyond redemption. I choke up each time at the same line in that hymn. The phrase there says it all, the restoration that is like coming home.

‘I once was lost but now am found’.

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