Ferocious Francis's koan: too minor-league to save you
maybe anything minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn’t going to be major-league enough to save Gately’s addled ass from the well-dressed Sergeant at Arms, now, was it?
Context
The sponsor's answer to Gately's rage at not being able to comprehend the Higher Power that's saving him. Ferocious Francis reframes the incomprehensibility as a feature, not a defect: a Higher Power small enough for a wrecked burglar's mind to grasp would be too small to do the job, so the very unintelligibility Gately keeps beating his head against the table over is the evidence that the thing is big enough to work. The koan closes the loop on the whole conversion — you don't need to understand it, and if you did, it wouldn't be powerful enough to keep the Sergeant at Arms at bay. The theme's account of faith is entirely negative: what saves you is by definition beyond your understanding.