An old, old friend came by today and we went to a meeting together. We sat and talked and he brought up a thought, which made me stop and think. I had mentioned something Carl Jung had once said and he talked about Jung’s theory of the collective unconcious. He said it’s why we do what we do. He said we all run around doing things without a second thought of what we’re doing. We all are busy with so much and don’t even notice it. It reminded me of the spiritual life.
One monk once wrote that if a bunch of monks raced out of the monastary and chopped down all the trees in a forest and went back into the monastary exhausted, he said, they’d probably believe they had done something spiritual. They were busy and had accomplished something.
Why bring this up? Today, at the meeting, we were talking about the last part of the 12th step and the maintenance of our spiritual condition. What I was thinking about was the words that we tried to practice these principles in all of our affairs. It doesn’t say we accomplished something. Merely that we tried.
What I was thinking is that when we continually try and maybe fail, and we will fail from time to time. That’s what our spiritual condition is all about. The trying, regardless of whether we succeeed or not. Anyway, that’s my take on it. It’s kind of like what the tenth step says. When we were wrong. Not if we were wrong, but when. That tells me that spiritual life we’re pursuing is one of imperfection. The results of what we do is not as important as the discipline we acquire in this program of perseverance. We don’t stop trying to do the next right thing.
Our sobriety, we’re told, is dependent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition. Sometimes I get discouraged, because I don’t feel spiritual at all. Mainly because I find myself messing up so badly on any given day. I find myself failing to be tolerant or understanding of others. I feel cranky and may go off at someone at the drop of the hat. I find myself full of regret for my actions. But, at the end of the day, when I stop and take stock of myself, if I’m truly honest with me, I probably will find that I probably had forgotten that my character defects were ever present and that I failed to be aware of the help that was at hand all along. On the one hand I probably was trying to do God’s will for me, but my imperfections took over. How I still love some of those. Particularly my pride, as I was reminded by my friend.
By the same token, I find at the end of the day, I haven’t yet picked up a drink. Nor was I tempted to do so. I can be grateful for that. I had done the most spiritual thing I could do that day. Not to take a drink. That should tell me something about the spiritual condition I’m supposed to maintain on a daily basis. My sponsor would often remind me of this. When I would be complaining about the awful day I had just gone through, he would ask me a question. Had I taken a drink? I would say no. He would then say, “well, then, you had a good day”.