The Philosophy of Courage - Alcoholics Anonymous. AA, Meeting ...

God, I remember, has been called Love and Lover, Health, Healing and Healer.Reflecting on this process of healing or changing, I get some comprehension ofanother common notion about God. By very many, though not by all, the powerwhich is God has been considered throughout the ages a unique power. Accordingto some He has at one time made, while according to others He is continuallymaking, everything there is. I may on many grounds come to believe either of theseassertions to be true. But as far as the physical and biological world is concernedit is not a fact which as yet I can say I have experienced. I can, however, say thatI have experienced God’s making of myself. For I have experienced this healing orchanging, and it is a process which I have every reason to describe not only as aremaking, but as the making, of me. It is “making” in the sense in which the word isused when we say “this will make a man of him” or “it will be the making of him.”The sense is a very deep one, for that phrase, like so many colloquial expressions,contains the germ of a whole philosophy and of a very sound one. God, we may sayin that sense, is the making of us.GOD AND THE CROSSGod, then, is power, which is patience, which is wisdom and love, which arethe healing and making of personality. The nature and degree of the power whichis God are most fully symbolised in the Crucifixion. The Crucifixion, it is true, isoften interpreted very negatively. By some it is regarded, though never officially orquite clearly, as something which was meant to make life easy for us: whatever weare and whatever we do, it is implied, we have been saved once and for all by it,provided that by a ritual act and by an assent of the intellect we acknowledge it andthe Crucified. By others, on the contrary, it is held up to us in order to urge us tothe acceptance of suffering, frustration and unpleasantness, while the sole reasonfor our accepting these appears to be, at any rate ever since harps and angels havegone out of fashion, that if we do so, we shall be able to consider ourselves goodboys or noble men. Because of the negativity or sheer meaninglessness into whichthe symbolism has in many minds degenerated, and also because through the powerof custom, even the Cross, however interpreted, has come to spell comfort, so thatits mention, like that of any familiar thing, serves only to keep the inactive believerasleep, one is tempted to omit all reference to it, hoping to give the substancewithout the word. But to denote the message of these pages in any other way thanby calling it the doctrine of the Cross would be to tell a lie. For that message theCross is a fact as undeniable that is to say, as inescapable as God and myself. Besides,dangerous as are the degenerative and soporific effects of any custom, there is alsoan advantage in linking up with what is sound in custom, and this we can do only byusing customary language. It is for us to guard against the danger and to profit fromthe soundness by making clear the meaning which we attach to the language, andthis is what I shall now endeavour to do in bringing the Cross into my definition of40