Someone today wanted to talk about spirituality. Our spiritual condition. Hmmm. That makes me pause. All my thoughts go back to when I came in here. Not only did I lack anything spiritual, but I was reminded of what they called the “God Hole” within me. An empty, dark black pit.
Then I have to stop and think about what my sponsor and others told me. That I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I only thought I did. And that would multiply when it came to spirituality. So no matter what I’ve read and practiced I’m still one of those people who struggles with things like this.
I can definitely go down the list of what goes on in my spiritual life. Not always enhanced in one way or another. I was glancing through a book last night by a monk on the spiritual life and saw a question someone asked him about the resistance he was struggling with in trying to live a spiritual life. My first thought was that sounds like me.
You’d think that after all these years I’d be done with that kind of thinking or feelings. Yet there it is. I can find myself waking up and starting my day and sometimes in a state of resistance. Not happy at doing God’s will for me. Or cooperating. Or whatever.
What I have found out over time is that I suffer from a condition. It’s called the human condition. That same monk later wrote that no matter what we are really not spiritual. Basically we are not saints. We’re human. That doesn’t mean that we aren’t part of the divine picture. We are, but at the moment we happen to be human beings and we end up suffering from human defects. And it’s that kind of suffering which brings us into reality of where we are at any given moment in our day.
I don’t like going down this road on this subject because I’m as about ill informed as I can be. But just having to stop and think about it made me back up. I know what it is I have done and what it is I need to do. Back in my “early days” in this program, and I’m talking a few years, I think I found myself caught up in the spiritual picture. I believe there was time I found myself in a state or condition called “cloud nine”. Things were rosy and I felt lifted up and “being carried along” in spite of myself. Pleasant to say the least.
However, like my sponsor told me, if I was on a pink cloud I would one day hit the pavement. I did. And I found myself back in some struggles with my faith and my willingness to follow what I was told. There was a period of time I was able to take time out to practice all kinds of meditation I was studying. But eventually things began to change in my life and sometimes they threw me off balance and I found myself stumbling. Fortunately my sponsor and other members were there to help me get up and keep going in spite of how I thought or felt.
What I’m talking about is many years in this program and a lot of changes. But the amazing thing about all of this are those moments of “spiritual awakenings”, which often occurred in spite of myself. And then the awareness that I was in a “spiritual state” I still don’t understand. I know that each and everyday that I wake up that it’s up to me to begin my day with prayer, thanksgiving for what I have been given, attempts at meditation trying to improve my contact with my Higher Power. To go to meetings, to not take a drink, to stay sober no matter what. Then to end my day with thanks and to forgive and forget and ask for forgiveness. To ask for help and go to sleep and start the next day, when it comes in the same way.
In other words I have learned there’s nothing special about me. When I am offered those opportunities to reach out and help someone else to take them. I have found it offers me an opportunity to extend compassion to others. I know that by doing this, without knowing or understanding I’m often the person who is helped. It’s part of practicing these principles in all of my affairs.
I just remembered a man I heard many years back, who at the time was almost forty years sober. He was talking almost about the same thing. He said that the longer he stayed sober the less he knew. Amen to that. And that the spiritual life was a mystery to him.
Now that I have arrived at this point I realize that what I’m talking about is the program, as I have come to understand it. The whole program is spiritual from the beginning to the end, whenever that is. All I know is that no matter what I am grateful for all that I have been given. Doesn’t matter how I experienced it. Then comes that prayer of thanksgiving by that spiritual man. For all that’s happened, Thanks. And his offer of his willingness. For all that will happen, Yes.