You must step back from your compulsive identification and unquestioned attachment to yourself to be truly conscious.
People's willingness to find God in their own struggle with life-and let it change them-is their deepest and truest obedience to God's eternal will.
We stop depending on something outside of us to fill our needs inside. We reverse the flow and draw what we need from the inside, from our absolute union between God and the soul.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
"Spirituality and the Twelve Steps" (Part Two)
"Examination of Consciousness"
Wednesday, 25 June 2014
We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.(Step Ten of the Twelve Steps)
I come from a religious life practice where we learned from the Jesuits about a daily and personal “examination of conscience.” But I found that people with a mature conscience did this naturally anyway, and some way too much. Now many of the Jesuits recommend instead an “examination of consciousness” which to me feels much more fruitful. That is what I would recommend if I were teaching Step Ten.
You must step back from your compulsive identification and unquestioned attachment to yourself to be truly conscious. Pure consciousness cannot be “just me” but instead is able to watch “me” from a distance. It is aware of me seeing, knowing, and feeling. Most people do not understand this awareness, because they are totally identified with their own thoughts, feelings, and compulsive patterns of perception. They have no proper distance from themselves.
You see why so many of our mystics and saints emphasized detachment. Without it, people could not move to any deep level of consciousness, much less to the level of soul. Meister Eckhart said detachment was almost the whole spiritual path, and the early Franciscans seemed to talk about nothing else, although they called it “poverty.”
We do not live in a culture that much appreciates detachment or such poverty. We are consumers and capitalists by training and habit, which is exactly why we have such problems with addiction to begin with. We always think more is better, for some sad reason. For properly detached persons (read “non-addicted”), deeper consciousness comes rather naturally. They discover their own soul, which is their deepest self and thus have access to a Larger Knowing beyond themselves.
Adapted from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, pages 83-86 (also available as CD audiobook)
Gateway to Silence: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
-------
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
"Spirituality and the Twelve Steps" (Part Two)
Prayer and Power"
Thursday, 26 June 2014
We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood [God], praying only for knowledge of [God’s] will for us and the power to carry that out.(Step Eleven of the Twelve Steps)
I have heard that Step Eleven is the least followed of the Twelve Steps. This is probably why the Twelve Step Program often became a program for mere sobriety from a substance, and never moved many toward the “vital spiritual experience” that Bill W. deemed absolutely foundational for full recovery. If we can speak of the traditional Christian stages of the spiritual journey as (1) purgation, (2) illumination, and (3) union, too many addicts never seem to get to the second stage—any real spiritual illumination of the self—and even fewer get to the rich life of experienced union with God. In that, I am sad to say, they mirror many mainline Christians.
It is the prayer of quiet and self-surrender (“contemplation”) that will best allow us to follow Step Eleven, which Bill W. must have recognized by using the word meditation at a time when that word was not common in Christian circles. And he was right, because only contemplative prayer or meditation invades, touches, and heals the unconscious! This is where all the garbage lies—but also where God hides and reveals “in that secret place” (Matthew 6:6). “Do you not know,” Jesus says, “the kingdom of God is within you!” (Luke 17:21). Contemplation opens us to the absolute union and love between God and the soul.
Prayer is not about changing God (to do what we want), but being willing to let God change us, or as Step Eleven states, “praying only for knowledge of [God’s] will for us and for the power to carry it out” (actual inner empowerment and new motivation from a deeper Source). People’s willingness to find God in their own struggle with life—and let it change them—is their deepest and truest obedience to God’s eternal will.
Remember, always remember, that the heartfelt desire to do the will of God is, in fact, the truest will of God. At that point, God has won, the ego has lost, and your prayer has already been answered.
Adapted from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, pages 93, 96, 99, 102, 103 (also available as CD audiobook); How Do We Breathe Under Water?: The Gospel and 12-Step Spirituality (CD, DVD, MP3 download); and Emotional Sobriety: Rewiring Our Programs for “Happiness”
(CD, DVD, MP3 download)
Gateway to Silence: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
-------
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
"Spirituality and the Twelve Steps" (Part Two)
"Flowing Out"
Friday, 27 June 2014
Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.(Step Twelve of the Twelve Steps)
Step Twelve found a way to expose and transform people’s basic selfishness and egocentricity by telling us early on that we must serve others. We do not truly comprehend any spiritual thing until we ourselves give it away. Spiritual gifts increase only by using them.
Step Twelve is a karmic law of in and out, and what Jesus really meant when he sent the disciples out “to cast out devils, and to cure all kinds of diseases and sickness” (Matthew 10:1) or to “Go out to the world and proclaim the Gospel to all creation” (Mark 16:15). He knew we had to hand the message over before we really understood it or could appreciate it ourselves.
Bill Wilson described his experience of working with alcoholics during the first six months of his own sobriety. None of the alcoholics responded, but his very work kept him sober. Bill realized the alcoholics couldn’t meet his need for success or whatever it might be. Rather, his own stability came through giving and not demanding that they receive. I think that is the necessary crossover point to maturity for any minister.
Like St. Francis, Bill taught us that it is better to give than to receive. Once you get in contact with the flow and the ultimate Source that is within you, then your stability comes from the only stable Source there is, whom most of us call God. Then you know that “you must do what is yours to do,” and the flow outward is your security, not the dependence upon somebody else’s response. In other words, we stop depending on something outside of us to fill our needs inside. We reverse the flow and draw what we need from the inside, from our absolute union between God and the soul. We let God’s energy, God’s Spirit, flow out from us to others, and then we know on a cellular level that God dwells within us.
Adapted from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, pages 105, 107, 109 (also available as CD audiobook) and Emotional Sobriety: Rewiring Our Programs for “Happiness” (CD, DVD, MP3 download)
Gateway to Silence: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
-------
Center for Action and Contemplation
1705 Five Points Rd SW
Albuquerque, NM 87105 United States(physical)
PO Box 12464
Albuquerque, NM 87195-2464 United States(mailing)
(505) 242-9588
cac.org
-------
No comments:
Post a Comment