or coming back toward you.
(thank you, Deena)
The only requirement for membership in AA is a desire to stop drinking.
Let me sum up, then, the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the Twelve Steps of A.A. are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary:
We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.
This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted as true, denied, and avoided, until it is forced upon us – by some reality over which we are powerless – and if we are honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full reality. – Richard Rohr OFM, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
Wait – Galway Kinnell
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
Henri Nouwen –
Forgiving does not mean forgetting. When we forgive a person, the memory of the wound might stay with us for a long time, even throughout our lives. Sometimes we carry the memory in our bodies as a visible sign. But forgiveness changes the way we remember. It converts the curse into a blessing. When we forgive our parents for their divorce, our children for their lack of attention, our friends for their unfaithfulness in crisis, our doctors for their ill advice, we no longer have to experience ourselves as the victims of events we had no control over.
Forgiveness allows us to claim our own power and not let these events destroy us; it enables them to become events that deepen the wisdom of our hearts. Forgiveness indeed heals memories.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there. – Rumi
I go to this field most every day looking for the person who introduced me to this line of Rumi’s. And I’m alone.
I’ll continue to go.
Edge of Atlantic 