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a spiritual awakening...
i can always find the pea under my mattress, the fly in the ointment or the big **BUT** in every single reading, and most of the time i do. i know where the quote comes from and i know its history, and the one thing about the steps that has always bugged me was the tense. it was if those drunks who wrote them back in the 1930s, felt that 12 and done, <BOOM> one is cured. i cannot go back in time and ask them their intention, nor even back to the 1950s and ask why our fellowship did not update those same steps, other than to make a few, crucial changes to reflect the reality of our fellowship, Never Alone, Never Again. the very phrase “having, had” seems to imply one and done, and for me that hardly reflects the reality of my recovery journey.
i feel that i am always HAVING a spiritual awakening, that it is a process, rather than an event and that process is one i wish to foster. for me, this whole spiritual side of recovery is still quite opaque and left to be uncovered through the process of working the steps. having seen the result of my first sprint through the steps, relapse in all but the actual ingestion of a substance, i find that a deliberative and considered pace is far more beneficial to me. here is where , having had, plays well, because i was about to comment on the behaviors of one or more of my peers. bad enough i mentioned that was where i was going, and yet, as i consider the example i was going to give to illustrate my point about the pace one may work the steps, i stopped, as my example is good enough. i can say, that at the end of my first year clean, i had completed my very first set of steps. i was more in a state of compliance rather than any sort of recovery at twelve months and twelve steps clean. what i missed entirely in that journey was HOW to live the steps, as i took their being phrased in the past tense, an indication of “one and done.”
having reached that point, it was therefore time to move on with my life, and that was what i attempted to do. although i often dismiss events as miraculous, the fact that i arrived at the doors of the rooms of the fellowship i call home, was nothing short of a miracle. i wanted to comply and get my a$$ out of hot water, but self-will was driving towards behaviors that would jeopardize those plans. when it cam time to accept that yes, even i could be an addict and drugs were never the issue, i was floored. that was the spiritual awakening that kicked off my commitment to myself and to my life. that commitment, just for today, has brought me to this place, where i can gripe about the message that the grammar used in the steps, can lead one to jump to all sorts of wild and crazy notions, about the nature of ones-self and the recovery process.
this morning, i accept that i am more than a product of past experiences and appreciating the world around me today, is part of the spiritual journey i am currently fostering and enjoying. for me the steps are the means buy which to live, rather than gauge how well i am doing. so if ever asked, i would rewrite the 12TH step to say, having a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps…

∞ DT ∞