My sponsor has asked me to define God in three words or less. He wants a one-sentence summary of my views on my higher power. These are not unreasonable demands. They are the kind of demands that I make of my students, saying that if you cannot state precisely what you have in mind, then you don’t have a clear idea in mind.
My sponsor says that I need to have a more definite idea of my higher power, so that I can call upon Him/Her/It when I need to do. He fears, I think, that my thinking is too nebulous to provide the kind of help and support that we need from a higher power, the help and support necessary to remain sober. He fears, too, I think, that an over-intellectualized higher power won’t really be a higher power at all, but an elaborate denial mechanism, a way of thinking about and so not embracing my need for help, my need to give my life over to a higher power. David Foster Wallace characterizes this problem of giving the will over to something else as follows:
The bitch of the thing is you have to want to. If you don’t want to do as you’re told – I mean as it’s suggested you do – it means that your own personal will is still in control, and Eugenio Martinez over at Ennet House never tires of pointing out that your personal will is the web your Disease sits and spins in, still. The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who know how many Substance-drenched years ago. It’s now shot through with the spidered fibrosis of your Disease. His own experience’s term for the Disease is: The Spider. You have to Starve The Spider: you have to surrender your will. – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Back Bay Books, 1997), 357.
I have a number of sources of resistance to giving up my will to a higher power. First perhaps is my will itself, which of course experiences relinquishing its grasp on me as death. Also involved here is a fear of seeming stupid to others. I have a terrible fear that others will think me stupid for believing in some kind of God. And also there is my own critical doubt that questions the truth of any proposition about God or a higher power that I may consider. I think that these forces may be related. The ego is after all our psychological armor where a primary need for this armor is in the thorny world of social standing and opinion. My ego, however, is protecting not so much me as itself – typical among alcoholics, I understand, is the ego run rampant, egomania. So one way of the ego’s preserving itself may be a heightened experience of such fears as require its protection. If I fear seeming stupid to other, and if my intellect helps me to identify the potential logical weaknesses that faith would bring, where my stupidity would then show, then I would be likely to experience considerable resistance, in this form, to placing my faith in a higher power.
One thing that I am trying to do is to construct an account of the logic of faith and God that won’t, in fact, be vulnerable to intellectual doubt. I think in fact that there probably is such a logic. But as Kierkegaard reminds us, and as my sponsor fears, I don’t want to be in the position of placing my faith in the force of my logic. However good the logic may be, not only may it be vulnerable to the future discovery of error, but it does not by itself command the act of belief (– Hume saw this, too). I still have to take the vulnerable step of belief – Kierkegaard’s leap of faith.
It does help me to reflect on the source of the fear of commitment, so that I can see that for what it is, bring it down to size. That helps me to feel less fearful, if it doesn’t of course relieve me of the need to take the plunge myself.
Believe first. Ask questions later.
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