“I believe; help my unbelief!”

It’s a wild thing to say, really. “I can run!; Help me in my paralysis!” or “I can breathe; help my suffocation!” or “I can see; help my blindness!”. It’s paradoxical and true. The great both/and of a father who both believes healing is possible for his son and recognizes the improbability of it. Belief is a sticky thing.

Belief is the second step in The Twelve Steps, right after admitting that we’re powerless against addiction. After that crucial recognition of self-frailty, belief steps in to recognize that there is something other than our self. In other words, the first step is recognizing that I can’t fix it and the second is that a higher power can. The recognition of the first step is the end of self, the cliff at the edge of self-reliance falling into the sea of a higher power, able to see the limits of “I” and the beginning of the limitless “I Am.”

Sometimes I don’t recognize that edge. I imagine that the “I” goes on forever, like the cliff and the ocean beyond were the same thing. That I can build my belief up and up, never having to worry about the cliff crumbling because I wrongly believe cliff and sea, earth and water, are the same. When the ocean rages, as oceans do, and when God moves, as God does, it erodes that false belief about my own limitlessness. When that belief I built up comes crashing down, was what I built belief or unbelief? Is belief even built? Belief is a sticky thing.

When the father asks for help in his unbelief Mark, he has finally recognized the edge of his cliff, his own limits, his own experience. He has the humility to recognize that his belief is flawed, that on its own, belief will never be enough. Just as light proposes the existence of darkness, love-hate, joy-fear, construction-destruction, so belief yields unbelief.

The real question of the second step is not whether or not we can build our belief up so as to be accurate, but whether we, like the father in Mark 9, are willing to leave belief entirely. To take the plunge from our self-reliant vantage point into a state of unbelief. It is not whether we can build a Babel-esque tower tall enough to see the entirety of the ocean, but whether we can move past the walls of “I” to be fully submerged in the “I Am.”

The conversation between Jesus and his disciples at the end of the passage is illustrative. “Why could we not cast it out?” “This kind can only come out through prayer.” In other words, we have limits, prayer does not because prayer is an acknowledgement of our own limitation and a move towards reliance upon God. 

Thus in recovery (which is really just any kind of “stuck” that I might find myself in regardless if it’s clinically diagnosable or not), we learn to acknowledge our limits first and foremost (Step 1) and then we acknowledge the need for the limitlessness of the Higher Power (Step 2). A right understanding of self leads to a deeper understanding of the need for God. Lord, may it be so.