Ray A.'s Blog, page 5
May 7, 2016
Practice These Principles: The Virtue of Temperance
Alcoholism is a disease of more. We simply never had enough of what we wanted. Not of booze and not of anything else. Excess was our defining characteristic. We couldn’t countenance any limits, boundaries, or restraints. If there was a line, we had to cross it. If there was a rule, we had to break it. “Self-will run riot,” says the Big Book; “instinct run wild” and “on rampage,” adds the 12&12. We were rebels by nature, courting disorder in much of what we did.
No wonder our lives became unmanageable. Driven to excess and disorder, we lost control over the bottle. We became powerless over alcohol. That made us even more powerless over ourselves. We “couldn’t control our emotional natures,” our wants and desires, our appetites and passions. Indeed, we often got high so we could heighten them more.
Once we stop drinking, our lives regain a semblance of normalcy. The natural restraints which the booze had loosened return to some working order. We gain relief from the worst of our excesses—the kind that would destroy our relationship with a loved one, for instance, or get us summarily fired from a job, or land us in the street, a hospital, or a prison.
But while the alcohol is out of our system, the ism isn’t. We are still selfish and self-centered to the core. That is the nature of the beast in us. Self-serving attitudes continue to dominate our lives, if now in ways that are less dramatic but for that very reason more difficult to detect.
Detecting excess and disorder in our drinking past is the job of Step 4. According to the 12&12, much of that Step is geared to finding out where our instincts, drives, and natural desires went out of control and came to “exceed their proper functions.” For it is when these get “out of joint” that they turn into “physical and mental liabilities,” causing “practically all the trouble there is.”
Detecting ongoing excess and disorder in recovery is the job of Step 10. The Big Book urges us to “continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear,” all symptoms of desires which often get out of whack in us. The 12&12 stresses the need to develop “self-restrain” and exercise “self-control” in all areas of our lives, a principle most of us will associate with the expression “restraint of pen and tongue.”
This is the principle traditionally known as temperance, and sometimes as moderation. Of course, what we need to temper or moderate is not exactly our pen or our tongue, but the passions and emotions which cause us to misuse them in “quick-tempered criticism and furious, power-driven argument,” as we read in Step 10.
Moderating such emotions, especially those which can be strongly felt physically, such as anger, fear, and grief, is one of the tasks of the virtue of temperance. So is moderating bodily cravings, urgings or appetites involving food, drink, and sex, its classical role in the virtues tradition. More broadly, temperance moderates our desires, longings, and passions for natural goods in general, such as those highlighted in the 12&12 quote below: emotional security, power, wealth, personal prestige, romance and family satisfactions.
All of these things are good, and all of them can be pursued well, reasonably, following “good orderly direction,” as we say in the rooms. When we do, we enjoy them and we flourish. They only become harmful when we want them too much, and we want them too much when they become too important to us, when we attach an inordinate value to them. When we do that, we become dependent on them. We don’t just want them, we demand them. We've got to have them to feel good and be happy. They drive us the way the bottle drove us when we drank. In the process we sacrifice things of greater value to our real happiness and wellbeing.
Temperance is an ordering virtue. As we write in PTP, It is the virtue that orders our desires and passions, restrains our instinctual drives, and moderates our enjoyment of pleasures so that we may avoid the excess that can distort them and turn them to ill. “For we can neither think nor act to good purpose until the habit of self-restraint has become automatic,” as the 12&12 reminds us.
Turning it into a habit so that it becomes automatic is what makes temperance a virtue. This is defining of the concept of virtue: a trait that is so rooted in our character that it has become second nature to us, enabling us to see, to feel, and to act in the ways typical of that trait habitually and automatically, almost effortlessly, and with pleasure.
That obviously requires a lot of practice over a long period of time: the kind of practice that enables a person to gain mastery over anything, whether using a tool, learning another language, or playing a sport or a musical instrument—except a lot more and a lot longer. That is why the virtue comes up in Step 10, where we continue to take personal inventory, a practice that goes on for the rest of our lives.
Becoming temperate involves a process which goes through four stages. Let us take sex (which Step 4 of the Big Book says is a God-given good), and its use in an extra-marital affair (which it suggests is selfish). At the first stage (intemperance, out of control) we see such an affair as a good thing, we desire it, and we act on it. At the second stage (incontinence, no control) we see the affair as bad, but we still desire it and we act on it. At the third stage (continence, self-control), we see the affair as bad, we still desire it, but we don’t act on it. At the fourth stage (temperance), we see the affair as bad, we don’t desire it, and thus we don’t have it.
As this illustration shows, self-control is a stage in the development of temperance (involving willpower). It is not the virtue itself. As we come to AA and go through a spiritual awakening, our outlook changes and we begin to develop a right concern for the good in many areas of our lives. We know what really matters. We just can’t live up to it consistently. We are not in stage one anymore, but neither do we go straight to stage four. Instead, we fluctuate between stages two and three, sometimes doing the wrong we desire to do and sometimes resisting the desire and not doing it. Or to put it positively, doing the right thing sometimes, and sometimes not.
As the illustration also shows, temperance is not only about moderation. It is not just about avoiding excess but about restoring order. The goal is not to have occasional as opposed to frequent affairs. The goal is not to have any because we deem it wrong and we no longer want it. The idea of temperance then is not that we feel like doing X but control ourselves and refrain from doing it. The idea is that we don’t feel like doing it, period. We no longer have the desire. It is gone, just like our desire to drink is gone. In the case of the defects which involve temperance (as with all other defects), this is the work of willingness and surrender in Steps 6 and 7.
As with sex, so with other areas of our lives where excess and disorder is a problem. For some of us it is food and drink—not just how much but what we eat and drink. For some of us it is work. We work ourselves to death chasing after emotional and financial security, approval, prestige, achievement, and self-fulfillment, meanwhile sacrificing our health and neglecting our family and other important areas of our lives, including our recovery.
As we have seen, then, the terms “self-control” and “moderation” do not accurately reflect the meaning of temperance as a virtue. At the same time, the latter term doesn’t resonate with the modern ear. If anything, it might have a negative association with the Temperance Movement and Prohibition, about which we read with reference to the Washingtonians (a predecessor of AA) in Tradition 10 in the 12&12. This probably accounts for AA avoiding the term.
In this connection we need to underscore the fact that the virtue, by whatever name we call it, is of absolutely no use in helping us to stop drinking. No virtue is. Ours is a threefold disease whose solution is a spiritual awakening. We can neither moderate nor control our drinking. That’s what makes us alcoholics as AA understands the term. What the virtue can do—what all the virtues can do—is to help us grow along spiritual lines so that we can stay stopped and make steady progress toward a full recovery and a meaningful sobriety.
We are sober by the grace of God and we grow by the grace of God as we practice the spiritual principles in the Steps—virtues and disciplines. Otherwise we remain dry drunks at best, still at the mercy of our instincts and drives, our impulses, compulsions, and obsessions. Temperance helps us to temper them. It integrates right outlook, right concern, and right desire into right action.
Posted 04/20/16 in “Practice These” at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook... . For full post, including related quotes and other resources, please click on link, where you will also find other posts no longer showing on this Goodreads blog.
No wonder our lives became unmanageable. Driven to excess and disorder, we lost control over the bottle. We became powerless over alcohol. That made us even more powerless over ourselves. We “couldn’t control our emotional natures,” our wants and desires, our appetites and passions. Indeed, we often got high so we could heighten them more.
Once we stop drinking, our lives regain a semblance of normalcy. The natural restraints which the booze had loosened return to some working order. We gain relief from the worst of our excesses—the kind that would destroy our relationship with a loved one, for instance, or get us summarily fired from a job, or land us in the street, a hospital, or a prison.
But while the alcohol is out of our system, the ism isn’t. We are still selfish and self-centered to the core. That is the nature of the beast in us. Self-serving attitudes continue to dominate our lives, if now in ways that are less dramatic but for that very reason more difficult to detect.
Detecting excess and disorder in our drinking past is the job of Step 4. According to the 12&12, much of that Step is geared to finding out where our instincts, drives, and natural desires went out of control and came to “exceed their proper functions.” For it is when these get “out of joint” that they turn into “physical and mental liabilities,” causing “practically all the trouble there is.”
Detecting ongoing excess and disorder in recovery is the job of Step 10. The Big Book urges us to “continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear,” all symptoms of desires which often get out of whack in us. The 12&12 stresses the need to develop “self-restrain” and exercise “self-control” in all areas of our lives, a principle most of us will associate with the expression “restraint of pen and tongue.”
This is the principle traditionally known as temperance, and sometimes as moderation. Of course, what we need to temper or moderate is not exactly our pen or our tongue, but the passions and emotions which cause us to misuse them in “quick-tempered criticism and furious, power-driven argument,” as we read in Step 10.
Moderating such emotions, especially those which can be strongly felt physically, such as anger, fear, and grief, is one of the tasks of the virtue of temperance. So is moderating bodily cravings, urgings or appetites involving food, drink, and sex, its classical role in the virtues tradition. More broadly, temperance moderates our desires, longings, and passions for natural goods in general, such as those highlighted in the 12&12 quote below: emotional security, power, wealth, personal prestige, romance and family satisfactions.
All of these things are good, and all of them can be pursued well, reasonably, following “good orderly direction,” as we say in the rooms. When we do, we enjoy them and we flourish. They only become harmful when we want them too much, and we want them too much when they become too important to us, when we attach an inordinate value to them. When we do that, we become dependent on them. We don’t just want them, we demand them. We've got to have them to feel good and be happy. They drive us the way the bottle drove us when we drank. In the process we sacrifice things of greater value to our real happiness and wellbeing.
Temperance is an ordering virtue. As we write in PTP, It is the virtue that orders our desires and passions, restrains our instinctual drives, and moderates our enjoyment of pleasures so that we may avoid the excess that can distort them and turn them to ill. “For we can neither think nor act to good purpose until the habit of self-restraint has become automatic,” as the 12&12 reminds us.
Turning it into a habit so that it becomes automatic is what makes temperance a virtue. This is defining of the concept of virtue: a trait that is so rooted in our character that it has become second nature to us, enabling us to see, to feel, and to act in the ways typical of that trait habitually and automatically, almost effortlessly, and with pleasure.
That obviously requires a lot of practice over a long period of time: the kind of practice that enables a person to gain mastery over anything, whether using a tool, learning another language, or playing a sport or a musical instrument—except a lot more and a lot longer. That is why the virtue comes up in Step 10, where we continue to take personal inventory, a practice that goes on for the rest of our lives.
Becoming temperate involves a process which goes through four stages. Let us take sex (which Step 4 of the Big Book says is a God-given good), and its use in an extra-marital affair (which it suggests is selfish). At the first stage (intemperance, out of control) we see such an affair as a good thing, we desire it, and we act on it. At the second stage (incontinence, no control) we see the affair as bad, but we still desire it and we act on it. At the third stage (continence, self-control), we see the affair as bad, we still desire it, but we don’t act on it. At the fourth stage (temperance), we see the affair as bad, we don’t desire it, and thus we don’t have it.
As this illustration shows, self-control is a stage in the development of temperance (involving willpower). It is not the virtue itself. As we come to AA and go through a spiritual awakening, our outlook changes and we begin to develop a right concern for the good in many areas of our lives. We know what really matters. We just can’t live up to it consistently. We are not in stage one anymore, but neither do we go straight to stage four. Instead, we fluctuate between stages two and three, sometimes doing the wrong we desire to do and sometimes resisting the desire and not doing it. Or to put it positively, doing the right thing sometimes, and sometimes not.
As the illustration also shows, temperance is not only about moderation. It is not just about avoiding excess but about restoring order. The goal is not to have occasional as opposed to frequent affairs. The goal is not to have any because we deem it wrong and we no longer want it. The idea of temperance then is not that we feel like doing X but control ourselves and refrain from doing it. The idea is that we don’t feel like doing it, period. We no longer have the desire. It is gone, just like our desire to drink is gone. In the case of the defects which involve temperance (as with all other defects), this is the work of willingness and surrender in Steps 6 and 7.
As with sex, so with other areas of our lives where excess and disorder is a problem. For some of us it is food and drink—not just how much but what we eat and drink. For some of us it is work. We work ourselves to death chasing after emotional and financial security, approval, prestige, achievement, and self-fulfillment, meanwhile sacrificing our health and neglecting our family and other important areas of our lives, including our recovery.
As we have seen, then, the terms “self-control” and “moderation” do not accurately reflect the meaning of temperance as a virtue. At the same time, the latter term doesn’t resonate with the modern ear. If anything, it might have a negative association with the Temperance Movement and Prohibition, about which we read with reference to the Washingtonians (a predecessor of AA) in Tradition 10 in the 12&12. This probably accounts for AA avoiding the term.
In this connection we need to underscore the fact that the virtue, by whatever name we call it, is of absolutely no use in helping us to stop drinking. No virtue is. Ours is a threefold disease whose solution is a spiritual awakening. We can neither moderate nor control our drinking. That’s what makes us alcoholics as AA understands the term. What the virtue can do—what all the virtues can do—is to help us grow along spiritual lines so that we can stay stopped and make steady progress toward a full recovery and a meaningful sobriety.
We are sober by the grace of God and we grow by the grace of God as we practice the spiritual principles in the Steps—virtues and disciplines. Otherwise we remain dry drunks at best, still at the mercy of our instincts and drives, our impulses, compulsions, and obsessions. Temperance helps us to temper them. It integrates right outlook, right concern, and right desire into right action.
Posted 04/20/16 in “Practice These” at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook... . For full post, including related quotes and other resources, please click on link, where you will also find other posts no longer showing on this Goodreads blog.
April 18, 2016
One Pedal at a Time
I ran two marathons, one while I was still drinking, and another when I was sober. The first was a little like Harold Abraham’s race in “Chariots of Fire.” It was a way of proving myself. The second was not quite like Eric Liddell’s, but it wasn’t about me anymore. I no longer had to proof I wasn’t a bum, as another character would say in another movie. Held near my 11th anniversary, the race was now a way to celebrate a gift.
By the time of my 22nd anniversary, running had taken its toll on my knees and I had to call it quits. I switched to biking. It wasn’t the same, but it was the next best thing. The challenge was diminished further by the fact that, for a very long time, I had to ride my bicycle on a very flat course in a very flat state. Still, I was grateful. In the retirement community where I lived then, being able to ride a bike was no small feat.
Three years ago I moved to my present home in a mountainous area of another state. My 29th anniversary found me biking up some pretty steep hills. One of these hills was particularly daunting. This is because the road leading up to it was very straight, presenting me with a long and unobstructed view of the steady ascent and the sudden, sharp upturn at the end.
Looking ahead from about 100 yards away, I would start to get uneasy. Psyching myself up, I would start to pedal faster. The last 50 feet or so I would get anxious and pedal really fast. As I struggled to reach the top, I was totally out of breath and completely exhausted. It was like that every time I went up that hill. Each time I wondered whether I would make it.
It wasn’t until the next year that I realized what was happening. I was scaring myself. By focusing so intently on the steepness of the hill, I was anticipating failure. It was like running up Heartbreak Hill in the marathon. The more I looked at the hill, the bigger it seemed. The more I feared I couldn’t do it, the harder it became to do it. My attempt to compensate by pedaling faster made it even worse. It would just make breathing harder, wear me out, and make me even more anxious, reducing further my chances of success.
Once I saw the problem, the solution was obvious. I had to stop focusing on the hill. Rather than looking hundreds of feet in front of me, I would focus my attention on the next ten feet or so. There was no question I could make it that far. All I had to do was relax, pedal steadily, and breathe easily. One stretch of ten feet didn’t look any harder than the next. Before I knew it, I had reached the top, with not a trace of anxiety or fatigue.
My strategy here was to apply one of our AA slogans to my particular situation. That slogan of course is “one day at a time,” translated into one step and, in this case, one pedal at a time. The main principle in the slogan is simplicity. The idea is to enable ourselves to achieve a long-term goal or complete a difficult task by simplifying it and breaking it into smaller and more manageable parts.
The reason it works has to do with the nature of emotions. My problem was not the hill but my perception of the hill. By focusing on the steepness of the climb, I was sharpening my perception of the difficulty I faced, making failure look more likely and thus triggering my anxiety. By averting my eyes from the hill, I was diverting my attention from the difficulty, thereby reducing it.
Though this involved external and sensory perception, I found that it worked for internal, non-sensory perception as well. When I diverted my internal attention from the climb and thought about something else, I would become less aware of how hard it was and, before I realized it, I had made it over the top.
I don’t normally start riding my bike till sometime in April, the month of my anniversary. With the weather warmer than usual this year (and the Magnolia buds beginning to burst), I went out on my first ride last week. I headed for my local Heartbreak Hill, the high point (literally and figuratively), of my regular run. Almost 6 months had elapsed since my last run. I was out of shape. Still, I had no doubt I would make it, one pedal at a time. The program works, even in the pedestrian parts of life.
“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot. I saw it that way too—when I drank. It was Shelley upside down: If spring comes, can winter be that far behind? There was the promise of a new life outside, and so much death inside. I see it differently now. April is a month of thanksgiving. It’s when I was given a new life. And so, though I can no longer run, I can ride. When the time comes to celebrate my 32nd anniversary, I will get up on my bike and head for the hill.
Posted 03/31/16 in "Reflections" at http://practicetheseprinciplesthebook....
By the time of my 22nd anniversary, running had taken its toll on my knees and I had to call it quits. I switched to biking. It wasn’t the same, but it was the next best thing. The challenge was diminished further by the fact that, for a very long time, I had to ride my bicycle on a very flat course in a very flat state. Still, I was grateful. In the retirement community where I lived then, being able to ride a bike was no small feat.
Three years ago I moved to my present home in a mountainous area of another state. My 29th anniversary found me biking up some pretty steep hills. One of these hills was particularly daunting. This is because the road leading up to it was very straight, presenting me with a long and unobstructed view of the steady ascent and the sudden, sharp upturn at the end.
Looking ahead from about 100 yards away, I would start to get uneasy. Psyching myself up, I would start to pedal faster. The last 50 feet or so I would get anxious and pedal really fast. As I struggled to reach the top, I was totally out of breath and completely exhausted. It was like that every time I went up that hill. Each time I wondered whether I would make it.
It wasn’t until the next year that I realized what was happening. I was scaring myself. By focusing so intently on the steepness of the hill, I was anticipating failure. It was like running up Heartbreak Hill in the marathon. The more I looked at the hill, the bigger it seemed. The more I feared I couldn’t do it, the harder it became to do it. My attempt to compensate by pedaling faster made it even worse. It would just make breathing harder, wear me out, and make me even more anxious, reducing further my chances of success.
Once I saw the problem, the solution was obvious. I had to stop focusing on the hill. Rather than looking hundreds of feet in front of me, I would focus my attention on the next ten feet or so. There was no question I could make it that far. All I had to do was relax, pedal steadily, and breathe easily. One stretch of ten feet didn’t look any harder than the next. Before I knew it, I had reached the top, with not a trace of anxiety or fatigue.
My strategy here was to apply one of our AA slogans to my particular situation. That slogan of course is “one day at a time,” translated into one step and, in this case, one pedal at a time. The main principle in the slogan is simplicity. The idea is to enable ourselves to achieve a long-term goal or complete a difficult task by simplifying it and breaking it into smaller and more manageable parts.
The reason it works has to do with the nature of emotions. My problem was not the hill but my perception of the hill. By focusing on the steepness of the climb, I was sharpening my perception of the difficulty I faced, making failure look more likely and thus triggering my anxiety. By averting my eyes from the hill, I was diverting my attention from the difficulty, thereby reducing it.
Though this involved external and sensory perception, I found that it worked for internal, non-sensory perception as well. When I diverted my internal attention from the climb and thought about something else, I would become less aware of how hard it was and, before I realized it, I had made it over the top.
I don’t normally start riding my bike till sometime in April, the month of my anniversary. With the weather warmer than usual this year (and the Magnolia buds beginning to burst), I went out on my first ride last week. I headed for my local Heartbreak Hill, the high point (literally and figuratively), of my regular run. Almost 6 months had elapsed since my last run. I was out of shape. Still, I had no doubt I would make it, one pedal at a time. The program works, even in the pedestrian parts of life.
“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot. I saw it that way too—when I drank. It was Shelley upside down: If spring comes, can winter be that far behind? There was the promise of a new life outside, and so much death inside. I see it differently now. April is a month of thanksgiving. It’s when I was given a new life. And so, though I can no longer run, I can ride. When the time comes to celebrate my 32nd anniversary, I will get up on my bike and head for the hill.
Posted 03/31/16 in "Reflections" at http://practicetheseprinciplesthebook....
March 5, 2016
Attraction Rather Than Promotion
I first went to church when I was a teenager. I went because I was desperate and needed help. I was homeless, deeply depressed, and scared. A kindly priest took me under his wing and, inspired by his example, I went off to college to study for the priesthood. Unfortunately, I had a different experience there. I rebelled, turned to atheism, and became an alcoholic. For the next 23 years I would have nothing to do with God and religion. When I finally hit bottom and came to AA, I ran into the deity in the most unlikely of places: a room full of drunks. AA made God accessible and appealing, while the experience of recovery made him meaningful. Like most of us, I gradually came to believe.
The story of losing God in the church and finding him again in the rooms is common at our meetings, especially when we discuss Steps 2 and 3, as we recently did in my home group. Some people identify themselves as “recovering Catholics,” and we identify with that. Even when our experience was with a different tradition, in the end it was still largely negative. Worse, it had the same effect—it drove us away from God.
Many of us are still recovering from that experience. Some of us wouldn’t darken the threshold of a church. Others visit on occasion. Still others who attend regularly struggle. Were it not for the tools we’ve learned in AA, we probably wouldn’t stay.
Talking about these things the last time around reminded me of the “spiritual but not religious” distinction we make in AA, a distinction which grew out of our early experience and which is now part of the cultural mainstream. Some religious people dismiss that distinction, dismissing those who make it. They use such terms of opprobrium as “platitude” and “cliché.” But dismissing people doesn’t help the religious cause. It may even be perceived as being, well, unspiritual. Nor does it help to dismiss facts. We call that denial. And the fact is that increasing numbers of people are opting for “spiritual” over “religious.” We don’t identify ourselves as religious because we don’t identify with the religious. They speaks at us, not to us. We need help, spiritual help (for psychology has failed us) but religion doesn't seem to offer any.
Alcoholics find that help in AA, and countless others in various 12-Step groups. Spirituality of course means different things to different people. This is the case even within the rooms. Yet when we say that AA is a spiritual but not a religious program we are not making some vague or spurious claim. AA spirituality grows out of concrete principles and practices which in significant ways set it apart from religion.
One of these is the principle of “attraction rather than promotion.” We generally associate this principle with Tradition 11. But it is also a key underlying principle of Step 12. In both, it governs the way we carry the message: in the sphere of public relations in the one case, and in the sphere of personal relations in the other, starting with the rooms and fellow alcoholics but extending by implication to all of our fellows and to all of our affairs. The principle was arrived at as the result of much painful experience. Most AAs were by temperament “irrepressible promoters.” Many were in fact salesmen, and they naturally came to see “carrying the message” as a sales job. They wanted to sell recovery, and in the process also sell themselves.
Indeed, the principle is one of the distinctive marks of AA spirituality and is closely linked to anonymity and the idea of “principles before personalities.” When we say that it sets it apart from religion, we mean religion not as expounded by the theologian, but as perceived and experienced by the average person through the medium of organized religion, or religion as an institution. The italics are necessary because, as we explain in PTP, religion emerges out of the spiritual and encompasses the spiritual. We are innately spiritual beings and are naturally attracted to the spiritual, to that which, in the most minimalist of terms, transcends our merely material existence. But we are also innately defective beings, and in our organized pursuit of the spiritual we end up making it not so attractive. Spiritual need gives way to the needs of the institution, of which the first is its own advancement. That imperative feeds the promotional urge.
Hence AA’s avoidance of all institutional hierarchies, regulations, and trappings. A program that is spiritual but not religious seeks to build a spiritual fellowship rather than a religious organization. Such a fellowship seeks to nurture our natural attraction to the spiritual while protecting it from the promoter instinct present in all of us. It confirms us in our intuition that there is a Power greater than ourselves, and it creates an environment where we can connect with that Power. Rather than promote that Power, it attracts us to it by letting us alcoholics show each other how it is working in our lives, how it is relieving us of our disease and bringing about a truly miraculous transformation in us. The attraction is to a faith that works, to a distinctively practical spirituality that bears fruit and has concrete results.
Because it is by nature proselytizing, religion in its organized form tends toward promotion. Using AA terminology we may say that its “primary purpose” is to win adherents to its institutional creed. Its primary message is that if you believe X, Y, and Z, you will have a “spiritual awakening” (find salvation, enlightenment, Nirvana). Its primary means of carrying this message is to preach, a mode of address which is generally characterized by proclamation, injunction, and exhortation and which seeks to convince and convert.
By contrast, AA’s primary purpose is to maintain a condition (sobriety) we have already attained and to help others do the same. Its primary message is that we had a spiritual awakening (and became sober) as the result of having done certain things. Its primary means of carrying that message is to tell our story of what we were like, what happened, and what we are like now, a mode of address which is characterized by the sharing of our experience, strength, and hope and which seeks mutual recognition and identification.
The accent in religion is on belief; the accent in spirituality on action. One stresses ideas and tries to advance those ideas; the other stresses experience and tries to share that experience. One presents arguments; the other tells a story. One seeks agreement; the other seeks empathy. One draws differences; the other finds commonality. One speaks of “you;” the other speaks of “we.” One says “this is what you must do;” the other says “this is what we did.”
One promotes through words, the other attracts through deeds. Not that religion is not interested in attraction, but that its main thrust is toward promotion. That this is the case, and that the thrust ought to be in the opposite direction, is apparently what lies behind a saying attributed to a man who was as spiritual as he was religious. “Preach all the time,” St. Francis is reported to have told his fellow monks, “when necessary, use words.” Some dispute the attribution to Francis, finding that it diminishes the value of preaching. But of course what Francis was saying was to put first things first, a key spiritual principle of his faith and one which not incidentally AA shares with him. Show, he was saying, show through what you do and how you live, and then tell. What diminishes the value of words is to tell and not show. It’s what turns religion into a primarily promotional enterprise.
Of course preaching is sometimes accompanied by exhortations to apply the lessons being taught, and chapter and verse are cited to this effect. And that’s very good. But to cite and exhort still is not to show. It is still promotion, not attraction. It pushes; it doesn’t pull.
Because it must proselytize, religion must promote. That is its job. It must tell us who and what: who God is as it understands God, and what we must do in light of that understanding. But if it is to attract, it must also show us how, and it must do so not only by precept, but by example: personal example, the immediate and living example of the preacher (by which we mean anybody trying to carry the religious message) and not only that of the historical and distant religious exemplar. And that, in the view of many who consider ourselves spiritual but not religious, is where religion falls short.
In the worst of cases, this disconnect between word and deed results in hypocrisy, the bane of religion and certainly one of its most aversive features. Less obviously but equally fatally, this disconnect produces a sense of irrelevancy in some of us. What goes on in church just doesn’t seem to connect very much with what’s going on in our lives out in the real world. This is in sharp contrast with what goes on at meetings, where we can speak from the heart and share our struggles honestly, openly, and safely with each other; where we can help each other understand and practice the spiritual principles than can help us with those struggles; where we can bear witness to the transformative power of God’s grace in our lives, concretely, on the basis of our daily experience.
The spiritual life is not a theory, we say in the rooms, we have to live it. We go to those rooms to learn how to do that. That practical, real-life spirituality is what attracts us to AA. It’s one of the reasons why some of us identify ourselves as spiritual but not religious.
Some of us go back to church because we need more spiritual help and we hope to find it there. We often don’t and we become disillusioned. Yet we are called to practice the spiritual principles of the program in all our affairs, and that includes church. For me that means first of all surrender and acceptance: the church is what the church is and I’m not going to change it. It means practicing the principle of attraction rather than promotion: sharing rather than preaching, showing how I’m living out my faith rather than telling others how to live theirs. It means trying to help rather than trying to convert. It means connecting with other AAs in church and being supportive of them. It means bringing theory and theology down to earth and making it practical. It means above all practicing the principles of love and service in Step 12 and seeing the church experience as an opportunity to give more than to receive.
AA spirituality doesn’t conflict with religion. Instead, it can help us return to the origins of religion in the spiritual and restore the spirituality which much of our religion has lost and which sometimes may seem so lacking in church. Seeing church through the principles of the program can help us to make spiritual sense of it. It can help us to make it relevant to our life. That in turn can help us to practice those principles better.
Posted 01/28/16 in “Reflections” at http://practicetheseprinciplesthebook..., where you can also find related post "Religion and Spirituality: The Matter of Obedience." For more on spirituality and religion, see "Religion, Spirituality, and Faith," in Practice These Principles, pp. 125 - 132.
The story of losing God in the church and finding him again in the rooms is common at our meetings, especially when we discuss Steps 2 and 3, as we recently did in my home group. Some people identify themselves as “recovering Catholics,” and we identify with that. Even when our experience was with a different tradition, in the end it was still largely negative. Worse, it had the same effect—it drove us away from God.
Many of us are still recovering from that experience. Some of us wouldn’t darken the threshold of a church. Others visit on occasion. Still others who attend regularly struggle. Were it not for the tools we’ve learned in AA, we probably wouldn’t stay.
Talking about these things the last time around reminded me of the “spiritual but not religious” distinction we make in AA, a distinction which grew out of our early experience and which is now part of the cultural mainstream. Some religious people dismiss that distinction, dismissing those who make it. They use such terms of opprobrium as “platitude” and “cliché.” But dismissing people doesn’t help the religious cause. It may even be perceived as being, well, unspiritual. Nor does it help to dismiss facts. We call that denial. And the fact is that increasing numbers of people are opting for “spiritual” over “religious.” We don’t identify ourselves as religious because we don’t identify with the religious. They speaks at us, not to us. We need help, spiritual help (for psychology has failed us) but religion doesn't seem to offer any.
Alcoholics find that help in AA, and countless others in various 12-Step groups. Spirituality of course means different things to different people. This is the case even within the rooms. Yet when we say that AA is a spiritual but not a religious program we are not making some vague or spurious claim. AA spirituality grows out of concrete principles and practices which in significant ways set it apart from religion.
One of these is the principle of “attraction rather than promotion.” We generally associate this principle with Tradition 11. But it is also a key underlying principle of Step 12. In both, it governs the way we carry the message: in the sphere of public relations in the one case, and in the sphere of personal relations in the other, starting with the rooms and fellow alcoholics but extending by implication to all of our fellows and to all of our affairs. The principle was arrived at as the result of much painful experience. Most AAs were by temperament “irrepressible promoters.” Many were in fact salesmen, and they naturally came to see “carrying the message” as a sales job. They wanted to sell recovery, and in the process also sell themselves.
Indeed, the principle is one of the distinctive marks of AA spirituality and is closely linked to anonymity and the idea of “principles before personalities.” When we say that it sets it apart from religion, we mean religion not as expounded by the theologian, but as perceived and experienced by the average person through the medium of organized religion, or religion as an institution. The italics are necessary because, as we explain in PTP, religion emerges out of the spiritual and encompasses the spiritual. We are innately spiritual beings and are naturally attracted to the spiritual, to that which, in the most minimalist of terms, transcends our merely material existence. But we are also innately defective beings, and in our organized pursuit of the spiritual we end up making it not so attractive. Spiritual need gives way to the needs of the institution, of which the first is its own advancement. That imperative feeds the promotional urge.
Hence AA’s avoidance of all institutional hierarchies, regulations, and trappings. A program that is spiritual but not religious seeks to build a spiritual fellowship rather than a religious organization. Such a fellowship seeks to nurture our natural attraction to the spiritual while protecting it from the promoter instinct present in all of us. It confirms us in our intuition that there is a Power greater than ourselves, and it creates an environment where we can connect with that Power. Rather than promote that Power, it attracts us to it by letting us alcoholics show each other how it is working in our lives, how it is relieving us of our disease and bringing about a truly miraculous transformation in us. The attraction is to a faith that works, to a distinctively practical spirituality that bears fruit and has concrete results.
Because it is by nature proselytizing, religion in its organized form tends toward promotion. Using AA terminology we may say that its “primary purpose” is to win adherents to its institutional creed. Its primary message is that if you believe X, Y, and Z, you will have a “spiritual awakening” (find salvation, enlightenment, Nirvana). Its primary means of carrying this message is to preach, a mode of address which is generally characterized by proclamation, injunction, and exhortation and which seeks to convince and convert.
By contrast, AA’s primary purpose is to maintain a condition (sobriety) we have already attained and to help others do the same. Its primary message is that we had a spiritual awakening (and became sober) as the result of having done certain things. Its primary means of carrying that message is to tell our story of what we were like, what happened, and what we are like now, a mode of address which is characterized by the sharing of our experience, strength, and hope and which seeks mutual recognition and identification.
The accent in religion is on belief; the accent in spirituality on action. One stresses ideas and tries to advance those ideas; the other stresses experience and tries to share that experience. One presents arguments; the other tells a story. One seeks agreement; the other seeks empathy. One draws differences; the other finds commonality. One speaks of “you;” the other speaks of “we.” One says “this is what you must do;” the other says “this is what we did.”
One promotes through words, the other attracts through deeds. Not that religion is not interested in attraction, but that its main thrust is toward promotion. That this is the case, and that the thrust ought to be in the opposite direction, is apparently what lies behind a saying attributed to a man who was as spiritual as he was religious. “Preach all the time,” St. Francis is reported to have told his fellow monks, “when necessary, use words.” Some dispute the attribution to Francis, finding that it diminishes the value of preaching. But of course what Francis was saying was to put first things first, a key spiritual principle of his faith and one which not incidentally AA shares with him. Show, he was saying, show through what you do and how you live, and then tell. What diminishes the value of words is to tell and not show. It’s what turns religion into a primarily promotional enterprise.
Of course preaching is sometimes accompanied by exhortations to apply the lessons being taught, and chapter and verse are cited to this effect. And that’s very good. But to cite and exhort still is not to show. It is still promotion, not attraction. It pushes; it doesn’t pull.
Because it must proselytize, religion must promote. That is its job. It must tell us who and what: who God is as it understands God, and what we must do in light of that understanding. But if it is to attract, it must also show us how, and it must do so not only by precept, but by example: personal example, the immediate and living example of the preacher (by which we mean anybody trying to carry the religious message) and not only that of the historical and distant religious exemplar. And that, in the view of many who consider ourselves spiritual but not religious, is where religion falls short.
In the worst of cases, this disconnect between word and deed results in hypocrisy, the bane of religion and certainly one of its most aversive features. Less obviously but equally fatally, this disconnect produces a sense of irrelevancy in some of us. What goes on in church just doesn’t seem to connect very much with what’s going on in our lives out in the real world. This is in sharp contrast with what goes on at meetings, where we can speak from the heart and share our struggles honestly, openly, and safely with each other; where we can help each other understand and practice the spiritual principles than can help us with those struggles; where we can bear witness to the transformative power of God’s grace in our lives, concretely, on the basis of our daily experience.
The spiritual life is not a theory, we say in the rooms, we have to live it. We go to those rooms to learn how to do that. That practical, real-life spirituality is what attracts us to AA. It’s one of the reasons why some of us identify ourselves as spiritual but not religious.
Some of us go back to church because we need more spiritual help and we hope to find it there. We often don’t and we become disillusioned. Yet we are called to practice the spiritual principles of the program in all our affairs, and that includes church. For me that means first of all surrender and acceptance: the church is what the church is and I’m not going to change it. It means practicing the principle of attraction rather than promotion: sharing rather than preaching, showing how I’m living out my faith rather than telling others how to live theirs. It means trying to help rather than trying to convert. It means connecting with other AAs in church and being supportive of them. It means bringing theory and theology down to earth and making it practical. It means above all practicing the principles of love and service in Step 12 and seeing the church experience as an opportunity to give more than to receive.
AA spirituality doesn’t conflict with religion. Instead, it can help us return to the origins of religion in the spiritual and restore the spirituality which much of our religion has lost and which sometimes may seem so lacking in church. Seeing church through the principles of the program can help us to make spiritual sense of it. It can help us to make it relevant to our life. That in turn can help us to practice those principles better.
Posted 01/28/16 in “Reflections” at http://practicetheseprinciplesthebook..., where you can also find related post "Religion and Spirituality: The Matter of Obedience." For more on spirituality and religion, see "Religion, Spirituality, and Faith," in Practice These Principles, pp. 125 - 132.
December 20, 2015
The Virtue of Simplicity
Simplicity is the operating principle of the program and fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. Without it neither would work. Hence Dr. Bob’s last words to Bill.
The need for simplicity arises from the fact that what we are dealing with is not simple. Life is not simple. People and relationships are not simple. God is not simple. So when we say that AA is a simple program, we need to be clear on what we are saying.
AA is a simple program in that it gives us a set of simple tools to deal with what are in fact complicated matters. We use them to work our way through the real complexities of life and in the process simplify it and come out on the other side.
The program’s simplicity is written into the very concept of steps. The 12 Steps represent a gradual process of growth one step and one principle at a time. From a simple admission of powerlessness we move to a minimal belief in a Higher Power to a plain willingness to let that Power help us.
Simplicity extends to the rest of the Steps. Step 4 may look very complicated, for we are taking inventory of our entire lives. But we do it one emotion, one defect, one relationship, one situation at a time. Prayer may seem to present all kinds of difficulties, but we can start by simply asking for help in the morning and giving thanks at night. Meditation may sound even harder, but we can begin by reflecting on a simple daily reading, or even just a phrase from that reading.
Always aiming for the greatest simplicity possible, we come up with all kinds of maxims and slogans which make the abstract concrete and the conceptual practical. The first three Steps are distilled into three succinct sentences: “I can’t. He can. I’ll let Him.” The “how” of the program is explained with a handy acronym which spells out the bottom-line, essential, indispensable principles: honesty, open-mindedness, willingness (HOW). Indeed, the whole program is summed up in a straightforward formula: “Don’t drink. Clean house. Help another alcoholic.”
“First things first,” “Live and let live,” “Easy does it,” “One day at a Time,” “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” “Do what’s in front of you,” “Put one foot in front of another,” and “Utilize, don’t analyze” are among the other sayings which seek to simplify the process of recovery.
Simplicity is also written into the very concept of traditions, which are handed down to us for the very simple reason that they work. As with the Steps, the simplicity of the Traditions also was achieved by working our way through a lot of complications, in this case the task of trying to get a bunch of self-seeking and generally disorderly drunks to work together for the common good. Out of that experience came such policies as sticking to one primary purpose, having but one membership requirement, acknowledging one sole Authority, and other policies which sought to avoid all the complexities intrinsic to organizations and keep the alcoholic ego at bay.
As we can gather from these few examples, simplicity seeks to dispense with the extraneous and the superfluous, the unnecessary and the unessential. It favors the plain, the minimal, the ordinary, the unassuming, that which is down-to-earth. It is the opposite of duplicity, complexity, and multiplicity. It works together with such virtues as humility and modesty, and stands against such defects as pride. Pride or ego is among the biggest obstacle to simplicity, for it conflates it with simple-mindedness and sees complexity as a sign of superiority.
Yet keeping it simple does not mean being simplistic or simple-minded, shallow or superficial. It does not mean we avoid exploring, inquiring, and digging deeper into things. Simplicity is not opposed to thinking. It is opposed to “stinking” thinking. Our ability to think is a gift from God and a grateful response implies treasuring that gift and using it to serve and to honor him.
When we say that AA is a simple program, we sometimes add “for complicated people.” Of course, we drunks are no more complicated than anybody else. But when we drank, we had a definite tendency to complicate our lives. That’s why they became unmanageable. Drinking exacerbated our defects and thus compounded our difficulties. We were naturally predisposed to excess, and excess creates chaos and disorder.
As we grow in recovery, it becomes increasingly evident to us that the good life is the simple life. We work toward it by working on the defects of character and emotion which complicate it. Where before we wanted more, we are now content with less. We appreciate the little things. We make fewer demands of people. We don’t seek the limelight. We avoid excess. We keep it simple.
Posted 12/16/15 in “Practice These” at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook... . For full post, including quotes and other resources, please click on link, where you will also find other posts no longer showing on this Goodreads blog.
The need for simplicity arises from the fact that what we are dealing with is not simple. Life is not simple. People and relationships are not simple. God is not simple. So when we say that AA is a simple program, we need to be clear on what we are saying.
AA is a simple program in that it gives us a set of simple tools to deal with what are in fact complicated matters. We use them to work our way through the real complexities of life and in the process simplify it and come out on the other side.
The program’s simplicity is written into the very concept of steps. The 12 Steps represent a gradual process of growth one step and one principle at a time. From a simple admission of powerlessness we move to a minimal belief in a Higher Power to a plain willingness to let that Power help us.
Simplicity extends to the rest of the Steps. Step 4 may look very complicated, for we are taking inventory of our entire lives. But we do it one emotion, one defect, one relationship, one situation at a time. Prayer may seem to present all kinds of difficulties, but we can start by simply asking for help in the morning and giving thanks at night. Meditation may sound even harder, but we can begin by reflecting on a simple daily reading, or even just a phrase from that reading.
Always aiming for the greatest simplicity possible, we come up with all kinds of maxims and slogans which make the abstract concrete and the conceptual practical. The first three Steps are distilled into three succinct sentences: “I can’t. He can. I’ll let Him.” The “how” of the program is explained with a handy acronym which spells out the bottom-line, essential, indispensable principles: honesty, open-mindedness, willingness (HOW). Indeed, the whole program is summed up in a straightforward formula: “Don’t drink. Clean house. Help another alcoholic.”
“First things first,” “Live and let live,” “Easy does it,” “One day at a Time,” “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” “Do what’s in front of you,” “Put one foot in front of another,” and “Utilize, don’t analyze” are among the other sayings which seek to simplify the process of recovery.
Simplicity is also written into the very concept of traditions, which are handed down to us for the very simple reason that they work. As with the Steps, the simplicity of the Traditions also was achieved by working our way through a lot of complications, in this case the task of trying to get a bunch of self-seeking and generally disorderly drunks to work together for the common good. Out of that experience came such policies as sticking to one primary purpose, having but one membership requirement, acknowledging one sole Authority, and other policies which sought to avoid all the complexities intrinsic to organizations and keep the alcoholic ego at bay.
As we can gather from these few examples, simplicity seeks to dispense with the extraneous and the superfluous, the unnecessary and the unessential. It favors the plain, the minimal, the ordinary, the unassuming, that which is down-to-earth. It is the opposite of duplicity, complexity, and multiplicity. It works together with such virtues as humility and modesty, and stands against such defects as pride. Pride or ego is among the biggest obstacle to simplicity, for it conflates it with simple-mindedness and sees complexity as a sign of superiority.
Yet keeping it simple does not mean being simplistic or simple-minded, shallow or superficial. It does not mean we avoid exploring, inquiring, and digging deeper into things. Simplicity is not opposed to thinking. It is opposed to “stinking” thinking. Our ability to think is a gift from God and a grateful response implies treasuring that gift and using it to serve and to honor him.
When we say that AA is a simple program, we sometimes add “for complicated people.” Of course, we drunks are no more complicated than anybody else. But when we drank, we had a definite tendency to complicate our lives. That’s why they became unmanageable. Drinking exacerbated our defects and thus compounded our difficulties. We were naturally predisposed to excess, and excess creates chaos and disorder.
As we grow in recovery, it becomes increasingly evident to us that the good life is the simple life. We work toward it by working on the defects of character and emotion which complicate it. Where before we wanted more, we are now content with less. We appreciate the little things. We make fewer demands of people. We don’t seek the limelight. We avoid excess. We keep it simple.
Posted 12/16/15 in “Practice These” at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook... . For full post, including quotes and other resources, please click on link, where you will also find other posts no longer showing on this Goodreads blog.
October 31, 2015
Practice These Principles: The Virtue of Compassion
The word compassion doesn’t appear anywhere in the first 164 pages of the Big Book. Nor will we find it in the 12&12. It’s not even listed in the index to As Bill Sees It. Yet the concept is at the very heart of the program and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.
To see this we may start by recalling the literal meaning of the term. This is “to suffer with” (Latin com, with, + passio, suffer). The term references a character trait or virtue, and also an emotion. As an emotion, to feel compassion is to suffer with those who suffer. Its three distinguishing marks are to see the suffering of another, to share in that suffering, and to wish to relieve it. As a virtue, compassion is a natural disposition to do these things—and thus to feel the emotion—whenever and wherever suffering is present.
Compassion is central to our program of recovery because that program is based on a view of the alcoholic as someone who is in fact suffering: suffering from a disease, and from the consequences of that disease. We are afflicted with a physical, mental, and spiritual illness. Moreover, a defining characteristic of that illness is that it causes us to act in compulsively self-destructive ways which inevitably bring about further anguish and pain. When alcoholism is thus seen as an illness (rather than, say, a sin or moral weakness), the alcoholic becomes a natural object of compassion (instead of, say, condemnation or punishment).
Compassion is central to our fellowship because that fellowship is based on the view that we suffer from a common malady. We share the same sickness and the same suffering. We are fellow sufferers, and we come together for the purpose of helping each other to relieve that suffering. We do that when others share at a meeting and we identify with them. We see their pain as our own because it is our own. We too have experienced it, for we too are alcoholic. That moves us to voice our identification, admit the same illness, and share the same pain. And when we do that in the context of the program’s spiritual solution, when to experience we add the strength and the hope that comes with our spiritual awakening, we begin to relieve that pain. We begin to carry the message of recovery to the suffering alcoholic.
Hence, though the term is never used in our basic texts, compassion is nevertheless an animating principle of program and fellowship—indeed, an essential principle, for no recovery is possible without it. The AA meeting is compassion’s training ground; sharing and identifying its distinctive practice.
The long-term goal of that practice is to grow in compassion and become compassionate people. That’s the task of character building which starts with Step 4 and by which, through repeated practice, compassion becomes a habit, i.e., a virtue. We become sensitive to all suffering; we readily see its presence, identify with it, and experience a desire to alleviate it.
AA can help us to grow in compassion because its view of the sick and suffering alcoholic transcends alcoholism and the meeting room. When we identify ourselves as and with alcoholics, we are identifying with a condition that is not limited to physical suffering. We are identifying with an illness that spreads to the whole person and manifests itself in a diseased character and diseased emotions.
We suffer from “irritability, anxiety, remorse and depression” (Big Book). We suffer from “pride, greed, anger, lust, gluttony, envy, and sloth” (12&12). We suffer from selfishness and self-centeredness, from self-justification and dishonesty, from jealousy, impatience, intolerance, and a whole slew of other handicaps.
These afflictions are all parts of the disease, and we identify with those who suffer from them as well. In the process we can grow and extend our identification beyond our fellow alcoholic to our fellow human being. For what AA is suggesting is that those afflictions are part of the same spiritual disease that affects all of humanity, that suffering thus broadly conceived is characteristic of the human condition.
AA sets no limit on the suffering that qualifies for compassion because there is no such limit. As a virtue, compassion is not conditional. AA membership includes “all who suffer.” So does the circle of compassion. It includes those we don’t like, those who belong to groups we don’t favor, and those with whom we may disagree on issues of vital importance to us. It includes even those who have caused us to suffer.
Using “pity” to express what today we would be more likely to call compassion, the Big Book tells us that compassion can help us to let go of our anger and resentment toward those who have wronged us. This is because through compassion we can see those wrongs as the product of an illness from which we also suffer, and as mirrors of the wrongs we too have done. Compassion helps us to see that we need to forgive because we too need forgiveness; that we need to be patient and tolerant because we need others to be patient and tolerant with us.
That is why compassion emerges as a goal in Step 4. We need to know the exact nature of the illness we are suffering from if we are to recognize it in others, identify with them, and wish to relieve it. And we can only do that if we examine all of its symptoms—the full scope of the defects of character and emotion which that illness generates.
That will gradually humble us, widen our vision, and enlarge our heart. As it does, it will help us to practice the virtue intentionally and consistently, making it increasingly natural for us to experience the emotion and to respond compassionately to the sufferer, whoever that sufferer may be.
Posted 10/23/15 in “Practice These” at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook... . For full post, including quotes and other resources, please click on link, where you will also find other posts no longer showing on this Goodreads blog.
To see this we may start by recalling the literal meaning of the term. This is “to suffer with” (Latin com, with, + passio, suffer). The term references a character trait or virtue, and also an emotion. As an emotion, to feel compassion is to suffer with those who suffer. Its three distinguishing marks are to see the suffering of another, to share in that suffering, and to wish to relieve it. As a virtue, compassion is a natural disposition to do these things—and thus to feel the emotion—whenever and wherever suffering is present.
Compassion is central to our program of recovery because that program is based on a view of the alcoholic as someone who is in fact suffering: suffering from a disease, and from the consequences of that disease. We are afflicted with a physical, mental, and spiritual illness. Moreover, a defining characteristic of that illness is that it causes us to act in compulsively self-destructive ways which inevitably bring about further anguish and pain. When alcoholism is thus seen as an illness (rather than, say, a sin or moral weakness), the alcoholic becomes a natural object of compassion (instead of, say, condemnation or punishment).
Compassion is central to our fellowship because that fellowship is based on the view that we suffer from a common malady. We share the same sickness and the same suffering. We are fellow sufferers, and we come together for the purpose of helping each other to relieve that suffering. We do that when others share at a meeting and we identify with them. We see their pain as our own because it is our own. We too have experienced it, for we too are alcoholic. That moves us to voice our identification, admit the same illness, and share the same pain. And when we do that in the context of the program’s spiritual solution, when to experience we add the strength and the hope that comes with our spiritual awakening, we begin to relieve that pain. We begin to carry the message of recovery to the suffering alcoholic.
Hence, though the term is never used in our basic texts, compassion is nevertheless an animating principle of program and fellowship—indeed, an essential principle, for no recovery is possible without it. The AA meeting is compassion’s training ground; sharing and identifying its distinctive practice.
The long-term goal of that practice is to grow in compassion and become compassionate people. That’s the task of character building which starts with Step 4 and by which, through repeated practice, compassion becomes a habit, i.e., a virtue. We become sensitive to all suffering; we readily see its presence, identify with it, and experience a desire to alleviate it.
AA can help us to grow in compassion because its view of the sick and suffering alcoholic transcends alcoholism and the meeting room. When we identify ourselves as and with alcoholics, we are identifying with a condition that is not limited to physical suffering. We are identifying with an illness that spreads to the whole person and manifests itself in a diseased character and diseased emotions.
We suffer from “irritability, anxiety, remorse and depression” (Big Book). We suffer from “pride, greed, anger, lust, gluttony, envy, and sloth” (12&12). We suffer from selfishness and self-centeredness, from self-justification and dishonesty, from jealousy, impatience, intolerance, and a whole slew of other handicaps.
These afflictions are all parts of the disease, and we identify with those who suffer from them as well. In the process we can grow and extend our identification beyond our fellow alcoholic to our fellow human being. For what AA is suggesting is that those afflictions are part of the same spiritual disease that affects all of humanity, that suffering thus broadly conceived is characteristic of the human condition.
AA sets no limit on the suffering that qualifies for compassion because there is no such limit. As a virtue, compassion is not conditional. AA membership includes “all who suffer.” So does the circle of compassion. It includes those we don’t like, those who belong to groups we don’t favor, and those with whom we may disagree on issues of vital importance to us. It includes even those who have caused us to suffer.
Using “pity” to express what today we would be more likely to call compassion, the Big Book tells us that compassion can help us to let go of our anger and resentment toward those who have wronged us. This is because through compassion we can see those wrongs as the product of an illness from which we also suffer, and as mirrors of the wrongs we too have done. Compassion helps us to see that we need to forgive because we too need forgiveness; that we need to be patient and tolerant because we need others to be patient and tolerant with us.
That is why compassion emerges as a goal in Step 4. We need to know the exact nature of the illness we are suffering from if we are to recognize it in others, identify with them, and wish to relieve it. And we can only do that if we examine all of its symptoms—the full scope of the defects of character and emotion which that illness generates.
That will gradually humble us, widen our vision, and enlarge our heart. As it does, it will help us to practice the virtue intentionally and consistently, making it increasingly natural for us to experience the emotion and to respond compassionately to the sufferer, whoever that sufferer may be.
Posted 10/23/15 in “Practice These” at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook... . For full post, including quotes and other resources, please click on link, where you will also find other posts no longer showing on this Goodreads blog.
September 10, 2015
Emotional Sobriety: Freedom from Guilt
Guilt is not an emotion we examine directly in Step 4. That is, we don’t focus on why we feel guilty. Instead, we examine the facts underlying the feeling. We look at all the harm we did when we drank, at all the ways in which we were actually guilty of wrongdoing, and we try to identify the defects in us which caused us to do such harm. The whole inventory is about the wrong we did and what was wrong with us, about the fact of our guilt. “Where were we at fault?” asks the Big Book, “Where were we to blame?” “Whom had we hurt?”
Guilt is not just a feeling but a fact. The fact is that, if we are alcoholic, our disease led us to hurt a lot of people and cause a lot of damage. The feeling is based on that unpalatable but undeniable truth. We stress this point because the ascendant view in our culture is the opposite, that guilt is not a fact but a feeling, that there is no objective basis for the emotion and therefore no reason we should feel it. Guilt is bad, we are told. Don’t feel guilty.
The Big Book and the 12&12 do not deny our guilt. But neither do they dwell on it. Instead, they provide us with a program of action which, if rigorously followed, is guaranteed to free us from guilt—the fact and the feeling. In telling us to focus on where we are at fault, where we are to blame, and whom we have hurt, they are pointing us toward a proper understanding of guilt.
Seeing ourselves as being at fault, as being worthy of blame, is a defining characteristic of the emotion. The perception is based on a second defining characteristic of guilt. This is a concern to be a good person, to do good, to do no harm. If this were not important to us, we would lie, cheat, and steal and otherwise do wrong and we wouldn’t feel any guilt. We wouldn’t see ourselves as doing wrong, we wouldn’t see our actions as representing moral failure or as reflecting poorly on the kind of person we are.
Because goodness is important to us, we feel guilty when we act against it. The feeling, however, is accompanied by another concern which is its third defining characteristic: the desire to be free from the guilt.
Thus guilt serves two positive and necessary functions. It alerts us to the possibility that we are acting against our better selves and doing what is wrong in our own eyes and perhaps harming someone. And it moves us to corrective action.
Guilt, however, can go wrong and become a defective emotion. We can feel guilty when we are not actually guilty, or we can feel guiltier than we actually are. This happens when our concern to be good and do the right thing becomes distorted. This in turn distorts our vision. The result is that our guilt is unwarranted and false. It doesn’t fit the facts. In our desire to be free from it, such guilt can drive us to wrong action—such as getting wasted to drown out the feeling.
Behind defective emotions there are usually defects of character, and behind most of these pride. In the first quote below Bill W. asks an alcoholic who is overwhelmed with guilt over his relapse whether his “excessive guilt” might not be a case of “reverse pride.” In this sort of pride we don’t feel we are superior, but we feel bad that we are not; we don’t feel we are better than others, but we feel we ought to be. We fail to recognize our fundamental imperfection and flawedness. The desire to be good is not tempered by the humble acceptance of our human condition.
Discerning true guilt from false guilt can be challenging. The starting point is willingness, humility, and honesty. If we have that, we can start at the very simplest level, which is what we do the first time we take inventory in Step 4. We start with the questions our two texts suggest: Where were we at fault? Where were we to blame? Whom have we hurt?
The purpose of the first two questions is to help us answer the third. Because if we actually have harmed someone, that is fairly objective evidence that our guilt is true and justified, that we have done wrong, are at fault, and are rightly to blame. This won’t hold in every single instance, but it will in the overwhelming majority of the cases we would examine. It’s only a start, but it is the right start.
If we have done a thorough job the first time around Steps 4-10, we will find that most of our guilt is gone. If we are still wracked with guilt, however, we may have to question the quality of our first journey through those Steps. We may have to do them all over again.
Perhaps this time we may have to zero in directly on our feelings of guilt and take full inventory of the emotion itself, going over all the situations and the people, places, and things which continue to arouse the guilt in us, examining the defects in us which lie behind it, and practicing the principles which will relieve us of those defects and with them of our guilt.
Sometimes, unforgiveness (a form of pride) is the hardest of these defects to surrender, and its opposite, forgiveness (a form of humility), the hardest of the virtues to practice. If we are still guilty, we haven’t forgiven ourselves. God and those we hurt may have, but we haven’t.
If that is the case, we may need to work self-examination more closely with prayer and meditation in Step 11, as the 12&12 recommends. We may have to ask God for the grace to make his will for us our standard of right and wrong, the foundation of what it means to be and to do good. We may have to ask for the grace to see ourselves and the people and situations surrounding our guilt through his eyes rather than our own. To the degree that we are able to do that, to that extent we will surrender and guilt and be free from it.
Posted 06/17/15 in "Emotional Sobriety" at http://practicetheseprinciplesthebook.... For full post, including quotes and other resources on guilt, please click on link, where you will also find other posts no longer showing on this Goodreads blog.
Guilt is not just a feeling but a fact. The fact is that, if we are alcoholic, our disease led us to hurt a lot of people and cause a lot of damage. The feeling is based on that unpalatable but undeniable truth. We stress this point because the ascendant view in our culture is the opposite, that guilt is not a fact but a feeling, that there is no objective basis for the emotion and therefore no reason we should feel it. Guilt is bad, we are told. Don’t feel guilty.
The Big Book and the 12&12 do not deny our guilt. But neither do they dwell on it. Instead, they provide us with a program of action which, if rigorously followed, is guaranteed to free us from guilt—the fact and the feeling. In telling us to focus on where we are at fault, where we are to blame, and whom we have hurt, they are pointing us toward a proper understanding of guilt.
Seeing ourselves as being at fault, as being worthy of blame, is a defining characteristic of the emotion. The perception is based on a second defining characteristic of guilt. This is a concern to be a good person, to do good, to do no harm. If this were not important to us, we would lie, cheat, and steal and otherwise do wrong and we wouldn’t feel any guilt. We wouldn’t see ourselves as doing wrong, we wouldn’t see our actions as representing moral failure or as reflecting poorly on the kind of person we are.
Because goodness is important to us, we feel guilty when we act against it. The feeling, however, is accompanied by another concern which is its third defining characteristic: the desire to be free from the guilt.
Thus guilt serves two positive and necessary functions. It alerts us to the possibility that we are acting against our better selves and doing what is wrong in our own eyes and perhaps harming someone. And it moves us to corrective action.
Guilt, however, can go wrong and become a defective emotion. We can feel guilty when we are not actually guilty, or we can feel guiltier than we actually are. This happens when our concern to be good and do the right thing becomes distorted. This in turn distorts our vision. The result is that our guilt is unwarranted and false. It doesn’t fit the facts. In our desire to be free from it, such guilt can drive us to wrong action—such as getting wasted to drown out the feeling.
Behind defective emotions there are usually defects of character, and behind most of these pride. In the first quote below Bill W. asks an alcoholic who is overwhelmed with guilt over his relapse whether his “excessive guilt” might not be a case of “reverse pride.” In this sort of pride we don’t feel we are superior, but we feel bad that we are not; we don’t feel we are better than others, but we feel we ought to be. We fail to recognize our fundamental imperfection and flawedness. The desire to be good is not tempered by the humble acceptance of our human condition.
Discerning true guilt from false guilt can be challenging. The starting point is willingness, humility, and honesty. If we have that, we can start at the very simplest level, which is what we do the first time we take inventory in Step 4. We start with the questions our two texts suggest: Where were we at fault? Where were we to blame? Whom have we hurt?
The purpose of the first two questions is to help us answer the third. Because if we actually have harmed someone, that is fairly objective evidence that our guilt is true and justified, that we have done wrong, are at fault, and are rightly to blame. This won’t hold in every single instance, but it will in the overwhelming majority of the cases we would examine. It’s only a start, but it is the right start.
If we have done a thorough job the first time around Steps 4-10, we will find that most of our guilt is gone. If we are still wracked with guilt, however, we may have to question the quality of our first journey through those Steps. We may have to do them all over again.
Perhaps this time we may have to zero in directly on our feelings of guilt and take full inventory of the emotion itself, going over all the situations and the people, places, and things which continue to arouse the guilt in us, examining the defects in us which lie behind it, and practicing the principles which will relieve us of those defects and with them of our guilt.
Sometimes, unforgiveness (a form of pride) is the hardest of these defects to surrender, and its opposite, forgiveness (a form of humility), the hardest of the virtues to practice. If we are still guilty, we haven’t forgiven ourselves. God and those we hurt may have, but we haven’t.
If that is the case, we may need to work self-examination more closely with prayer and meditation in Step 11, as the 12&12 recommends. We may have to ask God for the grace to make his will for us our standard of right and wrong, the foundation of what it means to be and to do good. We may have to ask for the grace to see ourselves and the people and situations surrounding our guilt through his eyes rather than our own. To the degree that we are able to do that, to that extent we will surrender and guilt and be free from it.
Posted 06/17/15 in "Emotional Sobriety" at http://practicetheseprinciplesthebook.... For full post, including quotes and other resources on guilt, please click on link, where you will also find other posts no longer showing on this Goodreads blog.
July 20, 2015
The Virtue of Courage
When we say the Serenity Prayer at every meeting, we ask for the courage to change the things we can. We pray for courage because change is hard. It holds the possibility of failure and of loss. We fear it, and we avoid it. Yet we live in time, and so change is inevitable. Hence the need for courage.
Courage is the natural antidote to fear. It is the virtue which enables us to face difficulties well in the preservation or pursuit of the good. Such difficulties constitute perceived threats to the things that we care about, arousing what the 12&12 describes as our fear of losing or failing to get them. The threat may be of physical injury or the loss of life. Meeting such a threat calls for physical courage. Or the threat may involve other adverse circumstances: challenges, obstacles, opposition, risks, hardships, pain, suffering. Acting in the face of these requires a different kind of courage. This is moral courage.
Ours is a program of change. Because they involve change, all of our 12 Steps involve difficulty. Indeed, they involve changing what is arguably hardest to change: ourselves. They all thus call for courage, and specifically for moral courage, for changing who we are and the way we live. But because of the effort that is necessary and the challenges they present, perhaps none require more of this sort of courage than Steps 4, 5, 9, and 10.
That working Step 4 requires moral courage is made explicit in its very wording. It calls for a fearless, moral inventory. Looking at our whole life and examining what is wrong with us, the wrongs we have done, and the people we have injured, is certainly no easy task. It presents us with a number of practical, emotional, and psychological challenges. It can be scary, daunting, and overwhelming. If nothing else, we fear the hard work that it requires. Some of us avoid it for years. Some of us do it half-heartedly and superficially, sidestepping the “searching” and the “moral” part.
Avoidance, both of the procrastinating and of the circumventing kind, is behavior defining of fear. It easily leads to dishonesty, one of the many character defects of which the 12&12 tells us fear is “the chief activator.” Dishonesty, we often emphasize, is the biggest obstacle to taking inventory. But the dishonesty is often rooted in fear. We “dare not look,” afraid of what we might find, afraid to know the truth about ourselves.
The fear may spill over into Step 5, so that we are not totally honest with the person who hears our admission of wrongs in that Step. It may carry into Step 9, so that we dread going back and facing those we’ve hurt. Deceiving ourselves with all kinds of rationales, we put off making prompt or direct amends to all of them; nor are we fully honest with those we do. If fear has marred these Steps, it will continue to mar our work with Step 10, which is their extension into our daily lives. It will continue to mar our recovery, which is an ongoing process of change and of growth.
Courage, we have said, is the antidote to fear. It is not its absence. Courage presupposes the presence of fear. If there’s nothing to fear there is nothing to be courageous about. Though courage opposes fear, therefore it is not its opposite. It is its corrective. The opposite of courage is cowardice and rashness. In cowardice, we fear too much; in rashness, not enough. Both result from a wrong construal of the danger or difficulty and the goods that are at stake.
Courage requires a right perception of these. In moral courage we surmount a rightly perceived difficulty and do the morally right thing in spite of it. In cowardice, by contrast, we do not surmount the difficulty. Instead, it scares us away from morally right or into morally wrong conduct. In rashness, we do overcome the difficulty and take action, but our action is typically hasty, ill-considered, or excessive. We act without due regard to the risks, thus endangering the moral good.
Moral courage, then, requires right moral perception, motivation, and action. The fact that we may overcome a difficulty and act in spite of our fear does not necessarily make our action morally courageous. People overcome fear and take all sorts of risks for all sorts of reasons, including anger, pride, envy, greed, lust, and other selfish and self-centered motives. Most of us did when we drank, as a truly fearless and moral inventory will show. Alcohol numbed our fear and gave us the false courage we needed.
In AA, the moral is grounded in the spiritual. A right understanding of the moral dimensions of courage is anchored in a spiritual understanding of this character trait. This is what distinguishes the view of courage we find in the program from the secular view we find in the culture at large, where, it ought to be noted, courage is very popular. All sorts of people are held up daily as exemplars of this virtue, secularly conceived.
The secular view of courage stresses the overcoming of odds. To be brave is to be daring, to act boldly notwithstanding the obstacles or opposition. It stresses in particular the overcoming of odds that stand in the way of self-fulfillment. Doing what will make us happy—whatever that is—becomes the highest good. On this view, there’s no greater courage than the courage to be “yourself.” This makes courage a matter of self-will, a function of the will in the service of the self. Its underlying attitude is often one of defiance. It tends to court, if not the rash, the brash, and sometimes even the brazen.
The courage we seek to practice through the Steps is a different sort of courage. It is neither self-willed, nor self-serving. When we pray for courage in the Serenity Prayer, we are recognizing in God its spiritual source and nature. When we pray for courage to change the things we can, we do so in a specifically spiritual context: in the context of our decision to entrust our will and our lives to the care of God in Step 3, where the Prayer first appears. What we are praying for is for the courage to carry out that decision, whatever the circumstances—in all our affairs.
Carrying it out begins with the next Step. God’s will for us begins with Step 4. A fearless moral inventory is the start of our practice of moral courage. It continues with Steps 5 and 9, and becomes a part of our daily life with Step 10. Together these Steps are the program’s training ground in courage, a courage born of faith.
The courage we ask for, and the courage we practice, is the courage to live the way God wants us to live and become the person he wants us to be. To the extent that his will becomes our will and highest good, and to the extent that we rely on the power of his grace to carry it out, to that extent courage becomes a spiritual virtue, founded entirely on the grace of God.
[The above text is part of a larger post, including quotations and additional resources, in "Practice These" at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook... ]
Courage is the natural antidote to fear. It is the virtue which enables us to face difficulties well in the preservation or pursuit of the good. Such difficulties constitute perceived threats to the things that we care about, arousing what the 12&12 describes as our fear of losing or failing to get them. The threat may be of physical injury or the loss of life. Meeting such a threat calls for physical courage. Or the threat may involve other adverse circumstances: challenges, obstacles, opposition, risks, hardships, pain, suffering. Acting in the face of these requires a different kind of courage. This is moral courage.
Ours is a program of change. Because they involve change, all of our 12 Steps involve difficulty. Indeed, they involve changing what is arguably hardest to change: ourselves. They all thus call for courage, and specifically for moral courage, for changing who we are and the way we live. But because of the effort that is necessary and the challenges they present, perhaps none require more of this sort of courage than Steps 4, 5, 9, and 10.
That working Step 4 requires moral courage is made explicit in its very wording. It calls for a fearless, moral inventory. Looking at our whole life and examining what is wrong with us, the wrongs we have done, and the people we have injured, is certainly no easy task. It presents us with a number of practical, emotional, and psychological challenges. It can be scary, daunting, and overwhelming. If nothing else, we fear the hard work that it requires. Some of us avoid it for years. Some of us do it half-heartedly and superficially, sidestepping the “searching” and the “moral” part.
Avoidance, both of the procrastinating and of the circumventing kind, is behavior defining of fear. It easily leads to dishonesty, one of the many character defects of which the 12&12 tells us fear is “the chief activator.” Dishonesty, we often emphasize, is the biggest obstacle to taking inventory. But the dishonesty is often rooted in fear. We “dare not look,” afraid of what we might find, afraid to know the truth about ourselves.
The fear may spill over into Step 5, so that we are not totally honest with the person who hears our admission of wrongs in that Step. It may carry into Step 9, so that we dread going back and facing those we’ve hurt. Deceiving ourselves with all kinds of rationales, we put off making prompt or direct amends to all of them; nor are we fully honest with those we do. If fear has marred these Steps, it will continue to mar our work with Step 10, which is their extension into our daily lives. It will continue to mar our recovery, which is an ongoing process of change and of growth.
Courage, we have said, is the antidote to fear. It is not its absence. Courage presupposes the presence of fear. If there’s nothing to fear there is nothing to be courageous about. Though courage opposes fear, therefore it is not its opposite. It is its corrective. The opposite of courage is cowardice and rashness. In cowardice, we fear too much; in rashness, not enough. Both result from a wrong construal of the danger or difficulty and the goods that are at stake.
Courage requires a right perception of these. In moral courage we surmount a rightly perceived difficulty and do the morally right thing in spite of it. In cowardice, by contrast, we do not surmount the difficulty. Instead, it scares us away from morally right or into morally wrong conduct. In rashness, we do overcome the difficulty and take action, but our action is typically hasty, ill-considered, or excessive. We act without due regard to the risks, thus endangering the moral good.
Moral courage, then, requires right moral perception, motivation, and action. The fact that we may overcome a difficulty and act in spite of our fear does not necessarily make our action morally courageous. People overcome fear and take all sorts of risks for all sorts of reasons, including anger, pride, envy, greed, lust, and other selfish and self-centered motives. Most of us did when we drank, as a truly fearless and moral inventory will show. Alcohol numbed our fear and gave us the false courage we needed.
In AA, the moral is grounded in the spiritual. A right understanding of the moral dimensions of courage is anchored in a spiritual understanding of this character trait. This is what distinguishes the view of courage we find in the program from the secular view we find in the culture at large, where, it ought to be noted, courage is very popular. All sorts of people are held up daily as exemplars of this virtue, secularly conceived.
The secular view of courage stresses the overcoming of odds. To be brave is to be daring, to act boldly notwithstanding the obstacles or opposition. It stresses in particular the overcoming of odds that stand in the way of self-fulfillment. Doing what will make us happy—whatever that is—becomes the highest good. On this view, there’s no greater courage than the courage to be “yourself.” This makes courage a matter of self-will, a function of the will in the service of the self. Its underlying attitude is often one of defiance. It tends to court, if not the rash, the brash, and sometimes even the brazen.
The courage we seek to practice through the Steps is a different sort of courage. It is neither self-willed, nor self-serving. When we pray for courage in the Serenity Prayer, we are recognizing in God its spiritual source and nature. When we pray for courage to change the things we can, we do so in a specifically spiritual context: in the context of our decision to entrust our will and our lives to the care of God in Step 3, where the Prayer first appears. What we are praying for is for the courage to carry out that decision, whatever the circumstances—in all our affairs.
Carrying it out begins with the next Step. God’s will for us begins with Step 4. A fearless moral inventory is the start of our practice of moral courage. It continues with Steps 5 and 9, and becomes a part of our daily life with Step 10. Together these Steps are the program’s training ground in courage, a courage born of faith.
The courage we ask for, and the courage we practice, is the courage to live the way God wants us to live and become the person he wants us to be. To the extent that his will becomes our will and highest good, and to the extent that we rely on the power of his grace to carry it out, to that extent courage becomes a spiritual virtue, founded entirely on the grace of God.
[The above text is part of a larger post, including quotations and additional resources, in "Practice These" at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook... ]
May 19, 2015
The Discipline of Self-examination
The discipline of self-examination begins with Step 4, where we make a “searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” While various terms are used to designate this discipline (including self-appraisal and self-survey), the Big Book’s emphasis on “inventory” is meant to highlight a practical, no-nonsense, business-like approach to this traditional spiritual practice. Our inventory is a “fact-finding and a fact-facing” enterprise. It is not an exercise in religious breast-beating, gnostic enlightenment, or psychoanalytical probes of our unconscious.
Juxtaposing “moral” with inventory further underscores the practical nature of our undertaking. For the facts that we set out to find and to face are the facts about the way we have lived and the kind of people we have become. A moral inventory takes stock of our character and how the defects that have warped it have also warped our emotions and our conduct, causing us to hurt ourselves as well as to harm others.
Practical and moral, our inventory is fundamentally spiritual. It is part and parcel of the spiritual awakening through which we change. It is designed to help us get rid of those items that “block” us from God and which keep us from the freedom and the flourishing that he intended for us. Hence the practicality of our inventory differs also from the kind of practicality associated with secular therapeutic approaches, which generally tend to deemphasize if not completely ignore the moral and the spiritual nature of our problems.
Though usually associated only with Steps 4 and 10, the 12&12 shows that self-examination is a continuous process that runs through the intervening Steps as well. In Step 4 we make a preliminary examination of our defects of character and emotion. In Step 5 we admit to their exact nature, but in doing so we don’t just engage in a mindless recitation of wrongs, but honestly and sincerely recall them to mind. Nor are mindlessness and formality characteristics of Steps 6 and 7. We need to take a look at those defects again if we are to become entirely willing to surrender them and humbly ask God to remove them.
In Step 8 we again take account of those defects, but this time in order to consider the specific ways in which, as a result of them, we have harmed others. If we are to make sincere and meaningful amends for those harms in Step 9 and not just make some hollow apology, we have to go back and look at those defects again, considering not only what we did wrong, but the wrong that was festering in us. In each one of these subsequent Steps we look at our defects for a different purpose, seeing them from a different angle and in a different light. In some cases this may help us to see defects that we hadn’t seen in Step 4.
Step 10 repeats the entire process of the preceding six Steps. But unlike Step 4, which focuses primarily on our past life before we got sober (assuming it’s done in early sobriety as intended) and is therefore quite comprehensive, Step 10 spotlights our present and the more recent past and is therefore more focused and more limited. It takes two main forms: the spot-check inventory we take in the midst or immediate wake of a difficulty, and the nightly inventory at the end of each day. Two additional forms are the periodic inventory, where we review how we’ve done since the last inventory, and the special-issue inventory, where we focus on a particular area of life (such as work, sex, or finances) and examine what defects of character and emotion may account for our difficulties there.
Through all of these seven Steps, self-examination works together with a number of other principles, both disciplines and virtues. This interaction is readily apparent with the discipline of confession in Step 5, of surrender in Step 6, of prayer in Step 7, and of restitution in Step 9. But surrender and prayer, for instance, may be necessary from the very beginning of the process in Step 4, where they may also connect with a number of virtues. Thus we may have to ask God to help us let go of the fear, the unwillingness, and just the plain and ordinary sloth that often stands in the way of a really searching inventory. We may have to ask for the willingness to get started, to get honest with ourselves, to persevere in our search despite the arduousness of the task, and to humbly accept our findings.
Once we have worked through the 12 Steps the first time around, the lifeblood of our continuing growth in recovery is the self-examination that we conduct every day as part of our work with Step 11. That’s where self-examination is combined with prayer and meditation as we search for God’s will for us and the power to carry that out. When these three “are logically related and interwoven,” we read in the 12&12, “the result is an unshakeable foundation for life.”
[The above text is part of a larger post, including quotations and additional resources, in "Practice These" at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook... ]
Juxtaposing “moral” with inventory further underscores the practical nature of our undertaking. For the facts that we set out to find and to face are the facts about the way we have lived and the kind of people we have become. A moral inventory takes stock of our character and how the defects that have warped it have also warped our emotions and our conduct, causing us to hurt ourselves as well as to harm others.
Practical and moral, our inventory is fundamentally spiritual. It is part and parcel of the spiritual awakening through which we change. It is designed to help us get rid of those items that “block” us from God and which keep us from the freedom and the flourishing that he intended for us. Hence the practicality of our inventory differs also from the kind of practicality associated with secular therapeutic approaches, which generally tend to deemphasize if not completely ignore the moral and the spiritual nature of our problems.
Though usually associated only with Steps 4 and 10, the 12&12 shows that self-examination is a continuous process that runs through the intervening Steps as well. In Step 4 we make a preliminary examination of our defects of character and emotion. In Step 5 we admit to their exact nature, but in doing so we don’t just engage in a mindless recitation of wrongs, but honestly and sincerely recall them to mind. Nor are mindlessness and formality characteristics of Steps 6 and 7. We need to take a look at those defects again if we are to become entirely willing to surrender them and humbly ask God to remove them.
In Step 8 we again take account of those defects, but this time in order to consider the specific ways in which, as a result of them, we have harmed others. If we are to make sincere and meaningful amends for those harms in Step 9 and not just make some hollow apology, we have to go back and look at those defects again, considering not only what we did wrong, but the wrong that was festering in us. In each one of these subsequent Steps we look at our defects for a different purpose, seeing them from a different angle and in a different light. In some cases this may help us to see defects that we hadn’t seen in Step 4.
Step 10 repeats the entire process of the preceding six Steps. But unlike Step 4, which focuses primarily on our past life before we got sober (assuming it’s done in early sobriety as intended) and is therefore quite comprehensive, Step 10 spotlights our present and the more recent past and is therefore more focused and more limited. It takes two main forms: the spot-check inventory we take in the midst or immediate wake of a difficulty, and the nightly inventory at the end of each day. Two additional forms are the periodic inventory, where we review how we’ve done since the last inventory, and the special-issue inventory, where we focus on a particular area of life (such as work, sex, or finances) and examine what defects of character and emotion may account for our difficulties there.
Through all of these seven Steps, self-examination works together with a number of other principles, both disciplines and virtues. This interaction is readily apparent with the discipline of confession in Step 5, of surrender in Step 6, of prayer in Step 7, and of restitution in Step 9. But surrender and prayer, for instance, may be necessary from the very beginning of the process in Step 4, where they may also connect with a number of virtues. Thus we may have to ask God to help us let go of the fear, the unwillingness, and just the plain and ordinary sloth that often stands in the way of a really searching inventory. We may have to ask for the willingness to get started, to get honest with ourselves, to persevere in our search despite the arduousness of the task, and to humbly accept our findings.
Once we have worked through the 12 Steps the first time around, the lifeblood of our continuing growth in recovery is the self-examination that we conduct every day as part of our work with Step 11. That’s where self-examination is combined with prayer and meditation as we search for God’s will for us and the power to carry that out. When these three “are logically related and interwoven,” we read in the 12&12, “the result is an unshakeable foundation for life.”
[The above text is part of a larger post, including quotations and additional resources, in "Practice These" at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook... ]
March 6, 2015
Truth? What Is Truth?
At a meeting I attend we read a Step from the 12&12 and do a round-robin discussion. We recently discussed Step 11, which uses the St. Francis Prayer as an aid to meditation. The prayer is widely admired inside and outside of AA. It expresses like no other prayer the meaning of “practice these principles in all our affairs.”
One of the people who spoke, however, voiced his discomfort with a particular line: “that where there is error I may bring truth.” It’s a discomfort that is shared by many. Some years ago I came across a book on St. Francis at a New Age bookstore in Delray Beach and, as I read through the prayer, I noticed they had edited that line out.
People are just not comfortable with the idea of truth. Peace, love, forgiveness, harmony, hope, and all the other things the prayer asks for—even faith—are ok. But truth? Not so much. Especially if there is any implication, as there is in St. Francis, that some may have a truth that others lack and they should try to bring to them.
We are more comfortable with the sentiment expressed in a related line in Max Ehrmann’s prose poem "Desiderata," another inspirational favorite of self-help bookstores: “speak your truth quietly and clearly.” The operative word is “your.” The implication is that truth is subjective and relative. I have mine, you have yours.
That idea has become an article of faith of the contemporary postmodernist ethos. For most of history people thought otherwise. Truth was about objective reality, not personal preference. It said something real about the world. There were always some who thought otherwise, in both East and West. One was the man who posed the question in our title. Reality is what you deem it to be, they said. There is no such thing as absolute truth. Yet they were only a tiny minority within the tiny minority composing society’s ruling elite.
By the end of the 20th century, they were the majority, at least in the West. As many as 66% of Americans, according to a Gallup poll of the times, believed there was no such thing as objective truth. That trend has only accelerated since then. The attitude now prevalent in our culture is that truth is relative and that there is no objective, absolute truth that applies equally to all.
It’s an attitude that affects all of us. Hence our friend’s unease at the AA meeting. Many of us identify with him. We too struggle with the question of truth—just like we struggle with the question of God. The two are related. Absolute truth presupposes an absolute reality, the “Great Reality,” as the Big Book calls it.
Thus our struggle is not with truth in general. Few of us would deny that there is such a thing as truth. We live our lives every day on the basis of truth assumptions about what is real and what is not, what we can and cannot do, what works and what doesn’t. If we gave it any thought, we would readily see that the denial of truth is a logical impossibility. The claim that there is no absolute truth is itself a claim to absolute truth, and is thus self-refuting.
Our difficulty is really with religious truth. Religion is ultimately about the truth of who God is and who we are in relation to him. That truth has consequences for how we ought to live our lives. Our problem therefore is also with moral truth, with what is right and wrong, what we should and should not do.
Some of us may be able to trace our difficulty with questions of moral and religious truths to our bad experience with religion. The “truth” was often used as a weapon to hurt us rather than to help us. It was also laced with hypocrisy. It was a “truth” that those who tried to impose it on us didn’t live themselves.
As a result of those experiences, we may have given up on God and on the truth. AA may have helped us to recover from the damage to a great extent, and we may be on one stage or another of our journey back to God. Still, we struggle. We see what some people do in the name of God and of the truth and we get discouraged.
But we don’t have to. One of the first things we learn in AA is that we don’t have to drink. We know that that’s the absolute truth. There is a corollary to that truth. And it is that we don’t have to let anything anybody does drive us away from God—or from the truth.
AA spirituality is about both. It is about “a manner of living that demands rigorous honesty.” And honesty is about the truth. So is open-mindedness. And so is the third of “the essentials of recovery,” which is willingness. For we have to be willing to go to any lengths to find the truth about ourselves and about God’s will for our lives and experience the spiritual awakening that finally will set us free.
When we drank we lived in error. About ourselves, about God, about most things, really. When we came to AA those who preceded us brought the truth of the program to us and we began to recover. Since then we have tried to pass that truth, as we understand it and try to live it to the best of our ability, to other recovering alcoholics.
In his prayer, St. Francis asks God to help him do the same thing, to make him a channel of his peace so that he may bring that peace to others. In the context of the prayer error involves hatred, wrongdoing, discord, doubt, despair, shadows, sadness. In the context of the prayer truth involves peace, love, forgiveness, harmony, faith, hope, light, joy. Why would we not ask God to help us go and do likewise?
“The moment we catch even a glimpse of God’s will,” we read in the 12&12, “the moment we begin to see truth, justice, and love as the real and eternal things in life, we are no longer deeply disturbed by all the evidence to the contrary that surround us in purely human affairs.”
That truth, real and eternal, is what we would wish to speak “quietly and clearly.” And humbly, knowing that is not our truth but his, and that we have only but the slightest glimpse and the most imperfect understanding of it.
Posted 02/29/15 in “Reflections,” at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook...
One of the people who spoke, however, voiced his discomfort with a particular line: “that where there is error I may bring truth.” It’s a discomfort that is shared by many. Some years ago I came across a book on St. Francis at a New Age bookstore in Delray Beach and, as I read through the prayer, I noticed they had edited that line out.
People are just not comfortable with the idea of truth. Peace, love, forgiveness, harmony, hope, and all the other things the prayer asks for—even faith—are ok. But truth? Not so much. Especially if there is any implication, as there is in St. Francis, that some may have a truth that others lack and they should try to bring to them.
We are more comfortable with the sentiment expressed in a related line in Max Ehrmann’s prose poem "Desiderata," another inspirational favorite of self-help bookstores: “speak your truth quietly and clearly.” The operative word is “your.” The implication is that truth is subjective and relative. I have mine, you have yours.
That idea has become an article of faith of the contemporary postmodernist ethos. For most of history people thought otherwise. Truth was about objective reality, not personal preference. It said something real about the world. There were always some who thought otherwise, in both East and West. One was the man who posed the question in our title. Reality is what you deem it to be, they said. There is no such thing as absolute truth. Yet they were only a tiny minority within the tiny minority composing society’s ruling elite.
By the end of the 20th century, they were the majority, at least in the West. As many as 66% of Americans, according to a Gallup poll of the times, believed there was no such thing as objective truth. That trend has only accelerated since then. The attitude now prevalent in our culture is that truth is relative and that there is no objective, absolute truth that applies equally to all.
It’s an attitude that affects all of us. Hence our friend’s unease at the AA meeting. Many of us identify with him. We too struggle with the question of truth—just like we struggle with the question of God. The two are related. Absolute truth presupposes an absolute reality, the “Great Reality,” as the Big Book calls it.
Thus our struggle is not with truth in general. Few of us would deny that there is such a thing as truth. We live our lives every day on the basis of truth assumptions about what is real and what is not, what we can and cannot do, what works and what doesn’t. If we gave it any thought, we would readily see that the denial of truth is a logical impossibility. The claim that there is no absolute truth is itself a claim to absolute truth, and is thus self-refuting.
Our difficulty is really with religious truth. Religion is ultimately about the truth of who God is and who we are in relation to him. That truth has consequences for how we ought to live our lives. Our problem therefore is also with moral truth, with what is right and wrong, what we should and should not do.
Some of us may be able to trace our difficulty with questions of moral and religious truths to our bad experience with religion. The “truth” was often used as a weapon to hurt us rather than to help us. It was also laced with hypocrisy. It was a “truth” that those who tried to impose it on us didn’t live themselves.
As a result of those experiences, we may have given up on God and on the truth. AA may have helped us to recover from the damage to a great extent, and we may be on one stage or another of our journey back to God. Still, we struggle. We see what some people do in the name of God and of the truth and we get discouraged.
But we don’t have to. One of the first things we learn in AA is that we don’t have to drink. We know that that’s the absolute truth. There is a corollary to that truth. And it is that we don’t have to let anything anybody does drive us away from God—or from the truth.
AA spirituality is about both. It is about “a manner of living that demands rigorous honesty.” And honesty is about the truth. So is open-mindedness. And so is the third of “the essentials of recovery,” which is willingness. For we have to be willing to go to any lengths to find the truth about ourselves and about God’s will for our lives and experience the spiritual awakening that finally will set us free.
When we drank we lived in error. About ourselves, about God, about most things, really. When we came to AA those who preceded us brought the truth of the program to us and we began to recover. Since then we have tried to pass that truth, as we understand it and try to live it to the best of our ability, to other recovering alcoholics.
In his prayer, St. Francis asks God to help him do the same thing, to make him a channel of his peace so that he may bring that peace to others. In the context of the prayer error involves hatred, wrongdoing, discord, doubt, despair, shadows, sadness. In the context of the prayer truth involves peace, love, forgiveness, harmony, faith, hope, light, joy. Why would we not ask God to help us go and do likewise?
“The moment we catch even a glimpse of God’s will,” we read in the 12&12, “the moment we begin to see truth, justice, and love as the real and eternal things in life, we are no longer deeply disturbed by all the evidence to the contrary that surround us in purely human affairs.”
That truth, real and eternal, is what we would wish to speak “quietly and clearly.” And humbly, knowing that is not our truth but his, and that we have only but the slightest glimpse and the most imperfect understanding of it.
Posted 02/29/15 in “Reflections,” at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook...
February 9, 2015
Fear
Fear, anger, and resentment cause the alcoholic (and probably everyone else) the most trouble. It is for this reason that the Big Book suggests we start our 4th Step inventory with these emotions.
Fear and anger are said to be primal, protective emotions. They are the twin sides of a fight-or-flight response built into our nervous system to insure our physical survival. When triggered, it automatically generates a defensive reaction. Faced with an attack, we fight back to counter an injury. Faced with danger, we retreat that we may avoid harm.
Fear exists because danger exists. Danger is an objective fact of life. It is real. Fear alerts us to the possible existence of peril and enables us to defend ourselves against potential harm. It is a necessary internal alarm system.
Thus when AA tells us that our goal is to be free from fear, it is not suggesting that we will cease to experience fear. What it is suggesting is that we can be free from a certain kind of fear, the fear which is “an evil and corroding thread” running through human existence. This is “self-centered fear,” the fear of losing what we have or not getting what we want.
This fear arises not just because we have and we want, but because we “possess” and “demand.” It becomes a self-centered and a disabling emotion because what we have and what we want means too much to us. It is too important. We have to have it. We can’t do without it.
And so we become too dependent on it. We base our happiness on it. And because it is so valuable to us, we become too sensitive to any potential threat to it. We see risk and danger everywhere. We become prey to fear, anticipating loss and failure.
This perception of a threat to something I value is what characterizes fear. As an emotion, fear is a mental response to a situation that I construe as posing some difficulty, risk, or danger to me with regards to something I value.
The perceived threat can be to life and limb or my physical security, as in its primal form. Or, more typically, it can be to my self-worth or anything that I invest my emotional security in: a relationship, a job, wealth, status, power, or a whole host of other things through which I hope to find meaning and purpose. The fear is a function of the value and the perceived threat to it. The higher the value and the stronger the perception, the greater the fear.
Self-centered fear results from a distortion of value and perception as regards what I have and what I want. We take inventory of fear because, as self-centered fear, the emotion is a prime manifestation of our spiritual disease.
It is, we are told, the chief activator of our character defects. We want what we want and we want it so badly that we are blinded to what we do to get it or keep it and the resulting collateral damage. We cheat, lie, steal, and otherwise do ill. Then we fear the consequences. It becomes a vicious cycle. Fear drives us to do wrong, and doing wrong drives us to fear.
As we work the Steps and grow in our recovery, we are promised that “fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.” Not because the risks involved in relationships or in the facts of economic life will cease to exist. Those things may not necessarily change. But we will. And central to that change is that we will see people and money differently; they will take on a different meaning for us.
As we grow spiritually, we come to see everything that we have and everything we may get in entirely different terms. As blessings. We value them as the gifts of a loving and a gracious God. The giver becomes more important than the gifts. We depend on him for our own value, not on them.
We are not fearful of not getting what we want, for we trust we will be given what we need. We are not fearful of losing what we are given, but grateful for having received it. And when we lose it, as we will, for we will lose each and everything that we have, we will be grateful for having had it.
There are other spiritual principles that help us to become progressively free from fear. But they all work with gratitude, grounded in faith and in humility.
[The above text is part of a larger post, including quotations and additional resources, in "Emotions" at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook...]
Fear and anger are said to be primal, protective emotions. They are the twin sides of a fight-or-flight response built into our nervous system to insure our physical survival. When triggered, it automatically generates a defensive reaction. Faced with an attack, we fight back to counter an injury. Faced with danger, we retreat that we may avoid harm.
Fear exists because danger exists. Danger is an objective fact of life. It is real. Fear alerts us to the possible existence of peril and enables us to defend ourselves against potential harm. It is a necessary internal alarm system.
Thus when AA tells us that our goal is to be free from fear, it is not suggesting that we will cease to experience fear. What it is suggesting is that we can be free from a certain kind of fear, the fear which is “an evil and corroding thread” running through human existence. This is “self-centered fear,” the fear of losing what we have or not getting what we want.
This fear arises not just because we have and we want, but because we “possess” and “demand.” It becomes a self-centered and a disabling emotion because what we have and what we want means too much to us. It is too important. We have to have it. We can’t do without it.
And so we become too dependent on it. We base our happiness on it. And because it is so valuable to us, we become too sensitive to any potential threat to it. We see risk and danger everywhere. We become prey to fear, anticipating loss and failure.
This perception of a threat to something I value is what characterizes fear. As an emotion, fear is a mental response to a situation that I construe as posing some difficulty, risk, or danger to me with regards to something I value.
The perceived threat can be to life and limb or my physical security, as in its primal form. Or, more typically, it can be to my self-worth or anything that I invest my emotional security in: a relationship, a job, wealth, status, power, or a whole host of other things through which I hope to find meaning and purpose. The fear is a function of the value and the perceived threat to it. The higher the value and the stronger the perception, the greater the fear.
Self-centered fear results from a distortion of value and perception as regards what I have and what I want. We take inventory of fear because, as self-centered fear, the emotion is a prime manifestation of our spiritual disease.
It is, we are told, the chief activator of our character defects. We want what we want and we want it so badly that we are blinded to what we do to get it or keep it and the resulting collateral damage. We cheat, lie, steal, and otherwise do ill. Then we fear the consequences. It becomes a vicious cycle. Fear drives us to do wrong, and doing wrong drives us to fear.
As we work the Steps and grow in our recovery, we are promised that “fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.” Not because the risks involved in relationships or in the facts of economic life will cease to exist. Those things may not necessarily change. But we will. And central to that change is that we will see people and money differently; they will take on a different meaning for us.
As we grow spiritually, we come to see everything that we have and everything we may get in entirely different terms. As blessings. We value them as the gifts of a loving and a gracious God. The giver becomes more important than the gifts. We depend on him for our own value, not on them.
We are not fearful of not getting what we want, for we trust we will be given what we need. We are not fearful of losing what we are given, but grateful for having received it. And when we lose it, as we will, for we will lose each and everything that we have, we will be grateful for having had it.
There are other spiritual principles that help us to become progressively free from fear. But they all work with gratitude, grounded in faith and in humility.
[The above text is part of a larger post, including quotations and additional resources, in "Emotions" at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook...]
