In the Steps, when we refer to how we think about God, the past tense is used. We talk about “God as we understood Him,” not “God as we understand Him.”
What genius Bill W. and the old timers possessed in writing the Big Book. That difference in tense, from present to past, is enormous. They could have said “understand” as easily as they said “understood”; but with that little change, they shifted the entire meaning.
My understooding of God is my past with God, my history with God. It is not my theories of God, my beliefs about God. As I meditate on God as I understood Him, I am directed to my personal history with God.
Newcomers sense this immediately. Listen to them talk about God in the early days. They talk about the power that saved them, the Power that rescued them from certain disaster or death, the Power that brought them to the Program. These are all stories from their past — stories of their history with God. This is their understooding of God.
Later in sobriety, we see the same thing. We talk about our stories, our histories, our personal histories with God. What it was like, what happened and what it is like now, with God.
If the Founders had used understand instead of understood, then the newcomer and their sponsor might have been tempted to chatter on about some metaphysical clap-trap like faith, the nature of being, theories of the divine, and such. Instead, we are driven to focus on our personal stories, our real-time experience of God. Not our theories and beliefs.
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