One of the greatest gifts I received from this program was the gift of others. This was especially true in the gift of my sponsor. How else was I going to learn about this program and sobriety itself? How could I learn about honesty and some degree of humility? Opening up to another person and then listening to them and learning to follow directions, no matter how distasteful this seemed at first, was a new experience for me in the beginning.
I was glancing through the fifth step in the 12&12, when this sentence caught my eye. “Going it alone in spiritual matters is dangerous.” The need to talk to others about what I think is so important to me. I was thinking about what that sentence meant over the years.
I remember what one member said so long ago. He said that if we were to be so dependent on believing we had a direct pipeline to God that maybe someday that “god” would lean down and whisper in our ear, “It’s okay. Take a drink.”
My ability to rationalize is incredible. With an ego like mine, I could well imagine that I might conjure up all kinds of spiritual fantasies. I remember two stories I heard about this. One was about a group of religious brothers, who came to their spiritual leader and told him that they had seen the Virgin Mary. His response was, “The next time you see her, spit on her!” The same story was told about the Buddhists. “When you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
It’s like the doctor in the Doctor’s Opinion said, that we had lost the ability to distinguish the true from the false. How far away can that fault really be? Not very I don’t think. And like our other defects it’s part of our unmanageabillity.
I’ve had my struggles with false pride. I know what that’s about and can so easily fall back into that. But spiritual pride is something else. I was once accused of that early on and it made me scramble to find out what that was. I was a spiritual know it all. I couldn’t believe that man said that to me. But thank God that my sponsor was no slouch when it came to opening my mind up. He could punch my lights out in few words.
I was thinking this morning on how important it is for me to talk to a sponsor and others and then listen to what they had to say, before I delude myself into hearing those words, “It’s okay. Take a drink!”
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