surrender

The only requirement is…

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

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

http://store.cac.org/Breathing-Under-Water_p_15.htmlair-bubbles-diving-underwater-blow-62307.jpeg

Wait

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

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.