Got a phone call from an old friend in this program. As he talked, I could see the burden he was carrying around on his shoulders. He was weighed down by all these character defects, which burden most of us. And the burden was guilt.
Later in the day, another alcoholic friend came and talked about the same thing. Weighed down by guilt. I remembered something Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk, who wrote about us making mistakes. His question was, what ever made us hope that we would never make a mistake? Of course we’re going to make mistakes. We all do. We’re human beings. Human beings, no matter how skilled or brilliant, are subject to making a mistake along the line.
The real problem is guilt. Guilt can cause a loss of confidence in ourselves. And in the alcoholic, it can cause much more than that. It can also cause a drink to suddenly appear on the bar in front of us. That’s probably because an alcoholic like myself seems to take a perverse pleasure in punishing myself for making mistakes. As much as I tell myself how much I hate feeling guilty, I keep playing reruns in my mind of the same stuff over and over.
I remember one famous spiritual director, who said that guilt is created within by us. We’re the source of our own troubles. That’s because we’ve never learned to forgive ourselves for our mistakes. Or as one other spiritual director says, we’ve missed the mark.
My sponsor told me that God forgave me, man forgave me, and my problem was I wanted to hang on to my “missed marks” and wouldn’t forgive myself.
The truth is that God and man understand my capacity for making mistakes. It’s me that doesn’t. It takes surrender and willingness, humility, which I lack, to achieve this kind of forgiveness. That’s a problem with resentments. I will probably never forgive others, until I forgive myself first. I’m no different than those I resent. When I finally forgive myself, others will follow.
It takes a willingness to be willing to get the ball rolling. A dependence on my higher power. A true faith in the God of my understanding. Making a decision to turn my life and my will over to the care of this God. Otherwise I’m putting my sobriety in jeopardy. And, if I really mean I never want to drink again, I’m going to have to find the faith and the willingness to do this. After all, like my sponsor said, God forgives me, man forgives me, why not me?