Humility Makes Sense

Step Discussion > Step 7: Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings.

December 1966

By: T. P. Jr. | Hankins, New York

PEOPLE often think that the Eleventh Step is the only one which suggests prayer; but this isn’t so. The Seventh Step is a prayer Step. Although prayer is not mentioned as such in the Step, the word prayer is just a way of describing any attempt by man to converse with a Higher Power. One of the oldest forms of prayer is that in which he who prays asks something of God.

The Seventh Step is the shortest of the Twelve. Tucked away in the middle of the program, it seems to be much less demanding of time and attention than the “clean-up” Steps–Four, Five, Eight and Nine–which surround it.

Of all the Steps, perhaps the Seventh would be the easiest to pass over quickly and forget about. If you do, as I did at first, and then find yourself having trouble staying sober or dissatisfied with the quality of your sobriety–plagued by hostility, fear, guilt, despondency, self-pity or the like, turn back to the Seventh Step and you may well find the channel for strength that you have been missing.

The shortness of the Step in no way implies that it lacks depth and bite. All of us alcoholics, whether we be theists, agnostics or atheists, share the common history of having either abused or failed to use this petitionary or asking type of prayer. So we are all starting from the same position–scratch.

The first word of the Step tells us how to do the asking. Humbly. Not only is humility something we have all lacked, most of us don’t really know what it means or how to go about getting some of it.

First, a word about what humility is not, because the word is widely misunderstood and, as alcoholics, our lives may depend on changing some long-held misconceptions here. Humility does not mean being servile or scraping, nor does it mean becoming a doormat.

With many of us the word “humble” conjures up images of the character Uriah Heap from Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield, or some other equally spineless and loathsome fellow. Here is a strange situation. Dickens never intended to represent humility through Uriah Heap. He was trying to represent hypocrisy which is the very opposite of humility. There is, in reality, no conflict between humility and taking a strong stand against injustice or wrong–provided we are as quick to oppose the injustices and wrongs within ourselves as those without.

The Big Book says that “the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn’t think so.” The fact that most of us when we first come to the program don’t think we fit this category is the classic indication that we do fit it. Egotism is unable to see itself; humility, its opposite, is the ability to see one’s true position in the universe. It is the ability to see one’s good points without getting puffed up, and it is the blessed ability to see one’s shortcomings without becoming depressed, or bugged.

Humility for the alcoholic begins with admission and acceptance of the First Step. It develops in the decision made in the Third Step that God’s will is to come first in our lives–even and especially when we don’t much want it to. It bears fruit in action in the inventory and admission of wrongs in the Fourth and Fifth Steps. Why is the Fifth Step fought by those of us who come into AA with east-iron egos? Because it is humbling in the true sense of the word.

The first six Steps of the program, worked at carefully and honestly, bring us to a point where we can do what before, as alcoholics, we could not, no matter what our religious persuasions and training–humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings.

This is how we begin to be relieved of dishonesty, self-will, resentment and the rest. We ask God to remove them. We don’t ask once, but again and again as often as we see shortcomings in ourselves and have the grace to remember the Seventh Step.

This Step has worked in two different stages in my life on the program: first in follow-up to the Fourth and Fifth Steps and in preparation for setting out to make restitution for past wrongs, and second, as part of a regular daily program of dealing with character defects as they come up. As I have been able to remember it, it has made life easier and happier by working against my natural tendency to drift back into old patterns of thinking and acting which got me into so much trouble before.