Tuesday, July 23, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Jesus’ Gospel and the Twelve Steps
Shepherd your people with your staff, the flock of your inheritance.
God’s shepherding ways include gentleness and strength, sometimes turned against my strength, as a father turns his son away from evil and toward good.
Richard Rohr’s book on the twelve steps served as a starting point for his last week’s meditations. The book’s title, Breathing Under Water, insists on the impossibility of accomplishing the Twelve Steps on my own, just as Jesus’ Gospel message, however attractive, is also impossible to receive on my own.
Here are four paradoxes that probe this impossibility:
We suffer to get well.
We surrender to win.
We die to live.
We give it away to keep it.
This is what Jesus says. But how can I live this out? And what makes the Twelve Steps so effective, however impossible living out those truths might seem?
I think we can summarize the first three Steps with 11 words:
I can’t do it.
God can.
I think I’ll let him.
And that’s the truth. But these short aphorisms are accompanied by blood, sweat and tears.
It’s easy to know an alcoholic by his or her behavior and various forms of denial. Our spiritual powerlessness is harder to see, especially within ourselves. As Rohr says about himself, about me and you, about all of us:
This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted, denied, and avoided, until it’s forced upon us by some reality over which we are powerless—and, if we’re honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality.
Rohr makes four assumptions about addiction.
- We are all addicts, by fallen nature.
- “Stinking thinking” is the universal addiction, also called the thinking of our false self. This includes not just our obvious defensiveness and denial, but our very patterns of thinking and processing reality. We will be in charge, and that’s all there is to it. God, please wait your turn. We don’t say this, but we also don’t choose to learn (from God) how to avoid living this way.
- All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep co-dependency. We all agree to be compulsive about the same things and remain unaware of the same problems. “We’ve always done it this way!” Rohr says that “the gospel exposes those lies in every culture.”
- Addicted selves living in cultural lies won’t get free without “some form of alternative consciousness.” Prayer is that alternative, the place where we surrender our inflated false self egos at the door and ask for God to keep them forever, because they are no good to us. This prayer is contemplative and silent, and goes along with our more familiar verbal asking. When we wait for God to speak, He does, in his own language and his own time.
Rohr calls this prayer “a form of resting in ‘what is.’” That is to say – in words made famous by many and written centuries ago by Julian of Norwich – all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Julian, writing as the Black Death killed hundreds of thousands of people, continued, “God wishes to cure us of two kinds of sickness: impatience and despair.”
In this resting prayer I need for nothing to change. I have more than enough. There is no hurry. God is within me and all around me, and that is true in each of us. Now I do not need alcohol or cocaine, work or anxiety to cover over my fear that God isn’t quite listening, because there’s just something wrong with me. I still pray for healing and comfort and for more of whatever I don’t have enough of. But the prayers I pray for others and for myself become deeper, more peaceful, and finally real.
Show us, O Lord, your kindness, and grant us your salvation. Show us your mercy and your love.
When I don’t need to understand or change anything, then I know God as friend and companion rather than an extension of my ego, which no longer simply demands of God what I think I need. As my ego rests it becomes smaller, life-size and less desperate, and I can do what I’m made to do, co-creating in companionship with God.
Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him and we will come to him.
(Micah 7, Psalm 85, John 14, Matthew 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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