[We] Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

[We] Came to believe…

“Came to believe” is idiomatic.  Came is the past tense of come, meaning “arrived at in the course of time or progress.”  The destination is believe.  Native speakers of American English will conjugate come before select verbs to describe that time (and often effort) transpired before the action: “And that’s how I came to invent the sewing machine.” 

A similar idiom in parts of America is “come to find out,” meaning, “it was discovered—but not immediately.”  We may say, “I came to realize,” “she came to understand,” “they came to know….”  To know, or a synonymous verb, seems used more prevalently with came than perhaps any other with the exception of believe. 

Believe is tantamount to know in that it implies a confidence or conviction in the truth of something without the certain proof that know can provide.  Both verbs describe action in thought, rather than body.  Adding came—“arrived at in the course of time or progress”—presents the idea that there was no “lightning bolt,” that to know or even to believe the thing was a matter of stages, of effort, over time.

This distinction from the simple past tense that might have been used, we believed, also clears away some possible confusion: did you already believe this thing before you joined AA?  Did this belief come to you all of a sudden?  The phrase used makes it clear this is not the case.  The people describing their experience had previously admitted they were powerless over alcohol—that their lives had become unmanageable.  After that point, therefore, they “arrived in the course of time or progress” at belief.

Believe is unlike admit in that it carries with it a sense of the unproven—at least in the moment it is spoken—however, there is an inherent level of conviction, of confidence, in the truth or existence of the thing we believe.  Our lives are actually rife, daily, with things we believe, but have at hand no incontrovertible evidence for.  When we leave home for work, we believe we will arrive at work, we believe how long the commute will be, we believe we will be paid for our work.  Of all future events, we can only believe; time will prove or disprove.

“Where is your Big Book?”

“I believe it’s in that drawer.”

A moment later: “Ah, yes.  Here it is.”

Or, a moment later: “No.  It isn’t here.”

While grammarians may take issue with me, I assert that believe is never an intransitive verb.  One always believes something, though English allows the intransitive structure: “We believe.”

[We] Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves….

Power, the noun, conveys the sense of someone or something that possesses or exercises the ability to do, to act, to accomplish, or even influence. Again, since we understand that these Steps are not taken en masse, but individually, this Power does not necessarily possess or exercise ability, etc., greater than the group herein referenced, but at least greater than the individual.

It would be remiss not to mention a very subtle distinction about the power referred to: it is capitalized.  There is no usage error in writing the phrase, “a power greater than ourselves.”  Is it an error to write, “a Power greater than ourselves?”

In American English, capitalization is used for the first word of a sentence, the pronoun “I”, titles of written and art works and people, and proper nouns or names.  Only the last category could be applicable in this instance.  A proper noun or name designates a particular person or thing, as differentiated from one of many: Did you see the river?  Did you see the Hudson?  Also, words used in place of a proper noun or name are capitalized: Did you see New York?  Did you see the Big Apple?

Through capitalization, without having said so using other words, the “Power greater than ourselves” refers to a particular power among all those which are “greater than ourselves,” as though it were a name, a proper noun.  This is quite probably a subtle method of introducing the concept of “God as we understood Him,” since, by rules of usage in English, names and descriptions of Deity are capitalized: Allah, Brahma, King of All Worlds.  We might more properly write, “a Power Greater than Ourselves,” but we may see written, “the Creator of all life,” rather than, “the Creator of All Life,” and the distinction is slight, the meaning exactly the same.  Capitalization rules for English have never been completely hard and fast, and the entire language—as all languages— evolves, along with the rules of its use.

Long-experienced members often see that, for some of us—especially in the beginning—making that leap to believe in “a Power greater than ourselves” is too great when the Power is unseen, when there are too many gaps between the Power and Its result.  Many of us need to begin with a tangible Power greater than ourselves.  A group of people is more than tangible, it is completely similar to me: it is comprised of other human beings.  For some, this may be the easiest leap.  For others, it isn’t too distant to consider the ocean or the sun to be a Power greater than themselves.

In becoming disconnected from other human beings, I had lost the ability to see how so much of the world around me was the result of human beings working together to accomplish what none of them could do individually. 

The modern city is an outstanding example.  The buildings, the infrastructure, the products of factories…all the result of human beings working in groups large and small.  No person, working alone, builds a miles-long suspension bridge.  The paved and engineered road connected by that bridge is created and maintained by scores of people working together.  The thousands of vehicles traveling the road are the result of mass production undertaken by other countless groups of human beings toiling together, from those who bring metal ore from the ground and move it along its way to be fashioned into vehicle parts, to the research and design groups who devise the parts and their connections, to the groups who assemble the parts, and the amalgam of workers whose end product is the refined petroleum on which all those vehicles depend.

Any of these groups is a power greater than one person, a power greater than I am—but I no longer fathomed that.  All these surroundings simply existed, as they always had.  I could no sooner build an automobile by myself than I could fly to the moon (another achievement only possible by groups), but I was detached from humanity.  It was this detachment which permitted the belief that there was no greater power than myself.  I had become deluded, and delusion requires the deluded be ignorant of the delusion.  This delusion didn’t happen at once; it took hold over time: I “came to be deluded.”  Likewise, it dissolved in time, not in an instant.  We came to believe….

Whatever is revealed to the individual subsequently, merely admitting the existence of this Power permits the rest of the second Step:

[We] Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us….

Once we come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves exists, we may quickly understand there are many such Powers in our lives: each of these various groups of people are such a Power, as is the sun and the ocean.  Each of these does things I cannot, and I have no power to control any of them; Step Two, however, indicates a specific Power: one that could restore us….

Could is an auxiliary verb, here augmenting restore.  It may be argued that could is used in this case as the simple past tense of can.  That certainly fits the case and tense of all the Steps.  The meaning is, “was able to restore.”   Yet, “was able to restore” is not the phrase handed down.  “Could” has another shade of meaning beyond simple past tense: it  also may indicate conditional possibility, as subjunctive tense.  An “if” is involved.

“I could restore this automobile.”

“Why don’t you?”

“I don’t have the parts.”

“So, you could restore this automobile IF you had the parts?”

“Yes, I couldrestore it, IF I had the parts.”

Are there conditions to “could restore” in Step Two?  None are stated.  Whether the subjunctive case applies is open to debate.  Students of the Keep It Simple School will adhere to the simple past tense.

“I could restore a car when I was younger.”

“You could restore a car?”

“Yes, I could restore a car, back then.”

Restore carries with it the sense of bringing back to a former state, condition, or place.  The car is restored to a condition similar to when it was first made.  Restore does not have the sense of make; restore means nothing is being created that previously did not exist: on the contrary, something that did exist is being brought back to the state, condition, or place is was before.

Restore also carries the sense of return in the way of restitution or recompense: “My car was stolen, but it was found and restored to me.”

[We] Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

In Step Two, the thing being restored is the individual, and the former state, condition, or place to which that individual is restored is sanity.  This means that, prior to restoration, the individual is not in the condition of sanity—but once was.  If we posit that sanity/insanity is a dichotomy, immediately prior to restoration, the individual is in the state of insanity.  Is sanity/insanity a dichotomy?  To answer that, we need look at the definitions of both.

Among practitioners of the Twelve Steps, a favorite definition of insanity is, “doing the same thing over and over, again, but expecting different results,” or similar phrasing.  The quote has been variously attributed, but research seems to indicate its genesis within the recovery community.

Insanity is not a precise medical term; in fact, it is not a medical diagnosis, at all, as Dr. Ryan Howes writes in Psychology Today:

“To be clear, insanity is a legal term pertaining to a defendant’s ability to determine right from wrong when a crime is committed. Here’s the first sentence of law.com’s lengthy definition:

“Insanity. n. mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot conduct her/his affairs due to psychosis, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior.

“Insanity is a concept discussed in court to help distinguish guilt from innocence. It’s informed by mental health professionals, but the term today is primarily legal, not psychological. There’s no ‘insane’ diagnosis listed in the DSM [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association].”

While insanity can be inferred from its antonym in this Step, sanity is the actual term in place.  Sanity is a mind free from derangement, damage, defect, disease.  It conveys the sense of having reason and sound judgment, derived from the Latin sanus “healthy.”  While there may not presently be complete agreement on its nature or course as a disease, science and medicine are currently uncovering sufficient data about addiction to characterize its study as a pathology, the antithesis of health or well-being.  It is health and well-being, and not its opposite, which is here referred to.

I came to believe in a bit more than this Step reads.  Eventually, through practice and experience, I came to believe that this Power—which for me is often a recovery meeting—could restore me to more than sanity (or I came to see sanity as having these other attributes).  Although the word is used nowhere in the Twelve Steps, adherents of the Program will refer to—especially regarding Step One—“surrender” as a vital component.

What I learned about surrender, soft and gentle as it may sound, is that surrender presupposes a fight.  And, even if I surrendered this time, I may very well one day fight that same adversary, again.

I, personally, found it necessary to be restored to surrender, again, and again, and I came to believe a Power greater than myself could do that.  Sometimes, that process felt like restoring a dislocated shoulder: it wasn’t always entirely pleasant.

Fighting, at all, meant one thing had already happened to me: I had lost any serenity I possessed in the previous, peaceable state.  I also required restoration to serenity, or surrender again would be short-lived.  Time after time, it happened: a Power greater than myself restored me to serenity.

What led my return to the fight, whether I saw it or not, was invariably fear.  Fight was not the solution, however, since a fight is an intrinsically unsafe place.  Serenity comes with difficulty in an unsafe environment.  I had to feel safe.  I came to believe that this Power greater than myself could also restore me to safety.

So often, chip on my shoulder, circuits shorted, I wandered into a recovery meeting and found myself restored to safety, serenity, surrender…and sanity.