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

GOD’S INFINITYInfinity is another notion by which God has commonly been defined. Here I amusing it in two senses.God is infinite in the number of His qualities—that is, in the number of waysin which the Oneness is manifested to the world. I have chosen power, patience,wisdom, love. But I could have pointed out that the absolute patience is absolutegentleness, that the absolute love is absolute generosity or—as casting out all fearand shrinking from nothing—absolute courage; and that the absolute power orcreativity—since it works by taking on utmost degradation and rottenness—isabsolute humility. Nor can I see any reason for bringing my analysis to an end.An account of the absolutes would be the Odyssey of that voyage of explorationwhich, I have said, begins when I allow the power of God to start working in me asa ferment, and that voyage has in it the promise of unendingness.Secondly, God is infinite because each manifestation—absolute power, absolutelove, absolute wisdom, etc—is infinite. In that same voyage I am discovering notonly absolute after absolute but more and more of the same absolute. In seeing thatthe exploration must in the nature of things be unending I see both that the numberof the absolutes is infinite and that the revelations of each absolute must be infinite.Also, just as I see that every absolute is the same as every other absolute, so I see thateach revelation of absolute love, or absolute wisdom, for example, is a revelation ofthe same love and wisdom, or comes from the same source.Reflecting on the change or evolution which has taken place in me since I let inthe power of God and also on the ideas suggested by the theory of evolution thatlife has developed from mere matter through the stages of vegetable and animal toman—I am led to sum up pictorially God’s infinity in relation to the world as theinfinite Cross lifting up an infinite number of worlds of inertia (death, sleep, defeat,arrested development and repetition, conflict and destruction) and changing theminto pure energy (absolute love, patience, wisdom, creativity, newness, harmony). Itis through His infinity, rather than through His absoluteness, that God is essentiallydistinguished from man. It is possible for me, with God’s help, to be absolutelyloving, wise, brave, etc. But even if I were this every time, I should still be onlybecoming and unfolding piecemeal the infinity which God is in its totality all thetime.PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF GODAbsolute and infinite power, wisdom, love, etc—we may sum all these up bycalling them perfection. I have drawn for the notions of all these upon the experienceof perfection—the experience of the changing or healing or making of personalityPower, Love, Wisdom, etc., and so should accustom themselves to think and speak of God as “He,”while those who are not used to abstract thinking should make a special effort to think and speak ofGod as Power, Love, Wisdom, etc.44