We invite you to reflect on the readings and how they may resonate in your journey of a spiritual awakening in the 12 steps of recovery, and in particular the 11th Step – “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”
“In the vision proclaimed by Jesus you begin to know what St John meant when he said, ‘God is love’. The extraordinary thing is (and this is again what I personally would like to be able to convey, to communicate, to everyone I meet) that love is to be found in your own heart.
This is an astonishing truth. In the hearts of each one of us, in the depths of our being, is to be found the source of endless, infinite love. This is the love that casts out all our fears. In casting it out, it enables us to become ourselves, to be the person we are called to be, to abandon all our images and all our defenses. To become ourselves, we have simply to put ourselves in full contact with this power, with this energy that we call love.
Our spirit is expanding. Our heart is opening, we are becoming more generous. And the change in us comes about because in meditation, we encounter the power to make this change possible. All of us would presumably like to be more kind, more understanding, more selfless, more sympathetic, more compassionate and so on. But at the same time, we recognize ourselves as weak, mortal, fallible, human beings.”
-The Hunger for Depth and Meaning – Learning to Meditate with Fr. John Main
“Plainly, I could not avail myself of God’s love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would have me. And I couldn’t possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies…
This seems to be the primary healing circuit: an outgoing love of God’s creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of His love for us. It is most clear that the current can’t flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken, and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is.”
-The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety A.A. Grapevine, Inc., January 1958
Passages from the Big Book Alcoholics Anonymous and the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions are reprinted with permission of A.A. World Services, Inc. The A.A. Preamble, copyright © The A.A. Grapevine, Inc., is reprinted with permission. Permission to reprint does not in any way imply affiliation with or endorsement by Alcoholics Anonymous or The A.A. Grapevine, Inc.
