Easter time –the great awakening for Christians –seems like a good time to reflect on the phrase “spiritual awakening” of the 12th step. Christians believe that Easter is the answer to the questions: Is this life all that there is? Is death the end of life? For Christians, the resurrection of Jesus is the statement that there is a fullness of life waiting for us beyond death.
Sobriety makes everything different, but it takes more than just the passage of sober days to bring about change. The idea behind my book, “Being Sober and Becoming Happy” is that first we take the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous to get our drinking to stop. Then, if we keep taking those same Twelve Steps, in sobriety, and apply them to everything we do, we end up happy. I’ve had enough time to try this theory out, and to measure the results.
Recently in my home group, thanks to a brother’s presentation on the 7th step, I had the awareness of how the Divine comes alive for us as we work through the steps. We come into the community and land on the first step spiritually bankrupt and, for all intents and purposes, functioning atheists. As we climb to the second step, we at least acknowledge our wrongdoing to this Divine Power. On the third step we decide to turn ourselves over to a Higher Power, but only to a caring God, a God who is there for us.
When I was drinking I was always angry about something. I just got off the phone with the new car dealer. I dropped off my new car to have a plastic sealer applied to it, because there wasn’t time to do it on Saturday when I bought it. The service manager called to say there was a tiny dent in the bottom of the door, which needed a paint touching up. He said I must have hit something with the door. I don’t think I did. I think the dent must have been there when I got the car and I just didn’t see it when I looked it over.
I recently had the opportunity to present on Step Six in my home group and I was blessed with a way of presenting Defects of Character that were true to both our tradition and to my personal spirituality at this time.
We alcoholics tend to look down on New Year's Eve as “amateur night.” We often stay off the highways, believing them to be filled with dangerous, untrained, drinkers who have no tolerance for alcohol. We like to believe that when we drank and drove, we did it well. There is a little bit of truth in this, because we did develop a tolerance for alcohol, but mostly it is what the Big Book calls “gutter bravado.” Our tolerance just allowed us to drink more, and we were just as foolish as anyone else.
Tony DeMello, a great spiritual teacher, used to say that in the spiritual life only three things are necessary: “Awareness, awareness, awareness.”
He might as well have said that all we have to do to live spiritually is, “Wake up, wake up, wake up.”
"I've got to stop auctioning myself off to the low bidder."
Back in the early 1970’s, I had the opportunity to be summer pastor at a small church in Struble, Iowa, just north of LeMars. There was little to no night life and I quickly became the gathering place for the adolescents of the town. Night after night, as July gave way to August, they would appear, telling their tales of “walking the beans” or “walking the corn” that day. As a city boy, I had no idea what they were talking about until they actually took me out to a field and invited me to “walk the beans’ with them. I was amazed at the number and variety of weeds that were growing up with the crops. I was also surprised at how quickly the work became tedious and taxing, necessary as it was.
