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.”
“I suppose there is only one ultimate human tragedy and that is not to live to the full the gift of life that is given to us, and in meditation we seek to respond to that gift of life at the very depth of our own being. Why do we build these protective defences around ourselves?
It is I suppose because we are not sure people will accept us as we are and probably the reason for this is because we do not accept ourselves as we are. So our fears about ourselves must be dissolved. This is the importance of meditation for us. In the first place it is the re-direction of our energy beyond ourselves to ultimate reality, to God. In other words, meditation is a putting of ourselves in touch with the source of all the energy of creation.
What does this mean in practical terms for us? It means that we learn to abandon our self-protectiveness, our self-assertiveness, our self-obsession, and to enter into the reality of God. The marvel of the Christian revelation is that God is love and that is what our meditation is about: getting into touch with that basic energy of creation flowing in the depths of our own heart, our own being, the energy who is God, who is love. This is an astonishing truth.
In the hearts of each one of us, in the depths of our own being, is to be found the source of endless, infinite love and this is the love which casts out all our fear and in casting it out enables us to become ourselves, to be the person we are called to be. To abandon all our energies and all our defences and to become ourselves, we have simply to put ourselves in full contact with this power, with this energy that we call love.”
The Door to Silence Fr. John Main, OSB
“Lack of power, that was our dilemma.” Alcoholics Anonymous p.45
“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 Article Bill Wilson 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.
