Twelve Steps for Catholics ~ part 20

Step Eleven

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."

Continuation of the chapter on Step Eleven from
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

First part of chapter

Second part of chapter

Third part of chapter

Emphasis mine. My comments in red

As beginners in meditation, we might now reread this prayer (prayer of St. Francis/see previous post) several times very slowly, savoring every word and trying to take in the deep meaning of each phrase and idea. It will help if we can drop all resistance to what our friend says. For in meditation, debate has no place. We rest quietly with the thoughts of someone who knows, so that we may experience and learn.

As though lying upon a sunlit beach, let us relax and breathe deeply of the spiritual atmosphere with which the grace of this prayer surrounds us. Let us become willing to partake and be strengthened and lifted up by the sheer spiritual power, beauty, and love of which these magnificent words are the carriers. Let us look now upon the sea and ponder what its mystery is; and let us lift our eyes to the far horizon, beyond which we shall seek all those wonders still unseen.

"Shucks!" says somebody. "This is nonsense. It isn't practical."

When such thoughts break in, we might recall, a little ruefully, how much store we used to set by imagination as it tried to create reality out of bottles. Yes, we reveled in that sort of thinking, didn't we? I spent 30 years of my life living in the alcoholic haze of my imagination. It was not very constructive. And though sober nowadays, don't we often try to do much the same thing? Well, sure. It's what I call my "drunk" days. Perhaps our trouble was not that we used our imagination. Perhaps the real trouble was our almost total inability to point imagination toward the right objectives. There's nothing the matter with constructive imagination; all sound achievement rests upon it. After all, no man can build a house until he first envisions a plan for it. Well, meditation is like that , too; it helps to envision our spiritual objective before we try to move toward it. So let's get back to that sunlit beach - or to the plains or to the mountains, if you prefer.

When, by such simple devices, we have placed ourselves in a mood in which we can focus undisturbed on constructive imagination, we might proceed like this:

Once more we read our prayer, and again try to see what its inner essence is. We'll think now about the man who first uttered the prayer. First of all, he wanted to become a "channel." Then he asked for the grace to bring love, forgiveness, harmony, truth, faith, hope, light, and joy to every human being he could.

Next came the expression of an aspiration and a hope for himself. He hoped, God willing, that he might be able to find some of these treasures, too. This he would try to do by what he called self-forgetting. What did he mean by "self-forgetting," and how did he propose to accomplish that?

He thought it better to give comfort than to receive it; better to understand than to be understood; better to forgive than to be forgiven.

I am disturbed and upset by the recent statements made by some of our leading politicians. In particular, those that call themselves Catholic make me the saddest. But it also saddens me to see journalists, bloggers, and political commentators lower themselves to write with a degree of ugliness and anger that takes my breath away. I doubt this is the channel St. Francis had in mind when he wrote his prayer.

I'm just as guilty and am quite capable of whiling away many an hour at the dining room table ripping into any and everybody that doesn't meet my expectations. As an alcoholic I am well aware of the dangers of this wallowing in anger. I love the old saying that to harbor anger and resentments is like taking poison and waiting for the other guy to die. Little by little we die inside and block the grace of God when we persist in this attitude.

Now, more than ever, we need to pray for our politicians, bishops, priests, and ourselves.

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