Funny, or maybe not so funny, but I often contemplate on the subject of spirituality. After all, it is the foundation of the Twelve Steps and this program. It is what keeps us sober. Our sobriety is conditioned on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.
I suppose that almost all of us think that, when we talk about spirituality, it is all about, or mostly, prayer and meditation. It is true that prayer and meditation, the Eleventh Step is central to maintenance. Without trying to improve our conscious contact with the God of our understanding we might tend to drift away from this program. And to drift might lead us back to where we came. That means to end up drinking again.
I’ve often said and think that the most spiritual thing we can do each day is not to take a drink. Many years ago a member of the AA board in NY, speaking at the convention and recorded in AA Comes of Age, a non alcoholic himself, said how much he admired our members. He said that we were people, who tried to live a spiritual life in a material world.
And that to me is a key to what the spiritual life is about. Like the BB said, it has to be lived. We not only pray and meditate, we live. And it’s the living, based upon our primary purpose, not to drink alcohol and to try to help another alcoholic, which I often think about. To put it another way, the way the Twelfth Step tells us, to try to practice these principles in all of our affairs: Spiritual principles.
Trying to implement what I have learned in this program. The list could be long, and imperfect, but if I can learn to keep my mouth shut, mind my own business, and stay away from anger and resentment, as much as possible, relying on my higher power, and the help of other alcoholics like myself, at the end of any given day, I might just have possibly maintained my spiritual condition, and have lived another day sober.
As I thought about this today, I also thought about the gifts given to someone like me to help me along the way. For instance the spiritual awakening. To me it has not been just a one time thing. I think we have a number of these as we progress along this road we’re on. I know, that without realizing it, I probably had one the night I stopped drinking and asked God for help. There have been others, which, when I look back helped me to change my mind and my attitude. They opened my mind and my heart to what this program had to offer me and helped me to open myself to others in this program and out. All the result of working the Twelve Steps and applying this program to my life a day at a time.
Anyway, I was thinking about this today. Maybe I think about it more than I think I do. It helps me to center on staying sober.