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.
Sometimes my faith in a Higher Power slips. I look at the people, places, and things around me and ask, “Is this reallywhat you had in mind for me? Is this what I sobered up for? Is this all there is?” And I sometimes get the silent treatment. That’s only fair. My mouth has usually been running overtime, anyway.
Who is God? I don’t need to know. I only need to have faith in a power greater than myself. What matters is what works, not my opinion of what works.
It took me years to figure that out, years in which I did mental and emotional battle with other people’s conception of God, years in which I managed only to make myself miserable, cringing or scoffing whenever someone mentioned Step Three or Eleven. It took me a while sober to realize that it’s a waste of time to take God’s inventory.
So I don’t pretend to know God well. And I really don’t claim to pray respectably. I say the words “Thy will, not mine, be done” as if they were magic, as if they could help me stop yammering so much to have my will done. My prayers are usually brief and to the point. “Help!” is one I use often.
Often in sobriety, I’ve prayed when I needed to meditate. I’ve yammered at God so much that God can’t get a word in edgewise. (What I practice with people, I cannot help but practice with God.) To me, meditation is simply being quiet and listening for a change. It is buttoning up my lip–and my mind that yaps even when my mouth is shut.
Meditation is the path by which I cease being caught up in my own mental “garbage in/garbage out” recycling. It is the path by which I walk out of the turmoil, trouble, pain, depression, and frustration that I create in and around me.
Meditation is when I learn to be a child again. Not a noisy brat, but a child of the sort I always admired but rarely was as a child–quiet, serene, loving, trusting, teachable.
To meditate means I have to become willing to sit alone in silence–and endure silence patiently. It means trusting the silence around me for a while, as if it were an answer I had long sought. This is simple but not easy for me to do. I don’t meditate to hear God’s voice inside me, but merely to allow some space and time for the awareness of something higher than myself to grow more strongly within me.
I began doing meditation when I gave up my childish habit of expecting God to part the Red Sea and save me from myself once again, when I gave up my spoiled-brat routine of expecting God to show me a burning bush to prove that God really does care about me.
Practicing meditation means I open up for spiritual contact before disaster strikes, before even the need for prayer becomes desperately obvious. It’s the brand of spiritual contact with God that I practice early enough in the day that I have nothing to tell God and nothing to ask God about in prayer.
Meditation is the only time when I can be absolutely sure that I am not running on self-will.
In the beginning, while admitting I didn’t know the first thing about how to meditate, I turned my ignorance into a major case of self-confusion by reading various books on meditation and trying to follow all the guidelines they presented.
Then simplicity mercifully struck. I found I didn’t need to learn how to meditate before meditating. It turned out to be one of those learn-as-you-go things–just as learning how to stay sober is part of staying sober a day at a time. Meditation is something like showing up on a new job I don’t know how to do, only to find out that by merely showing up on a regular basis and doing what is placed before me, I’m automatically doing what at first I did not know how to do and was sure I could never do.
When I practice listening in AA meetings, I am learning something I can use in private meditation practice. It took me a while to learn how to really listen to others in AA, to have my mind solely on what the speaker was saying, instead of hearing only the part that plugged me into my own preferred thinking. What I do in meetings is called listening. When I listen alone with God, it is called meditating. When I can listen completely to what you have to say without having to change or criticize it to meet my expectations, then I have a better chance of being able to do the same thing with God the next time I pray or meditate.
The hardest thing for me to do is listen honestly when I’ve asked God in prayer for direction regarding a particular person, place, or thing. I tend to put words in God’s mouth–the ones I want to hear. After years of misunderstanding God, I’ve devised for myself a simple test for reliability in prayer: If the answer is the one I want to hear–or the one that lets me sit back amid my complacency, laziness, or fear and let someone else do all the work in solving my problem for me–it probably isn’t God’s answer. What God wants me to do is rarely what I want to do.
For instance, if I want to avoid or leave, God wants me to stay and handle. If I want to be understood or accepted by others, God wants me to try to understand or accept others a bit more. If I want to forget, God wants me to forgive. If I want to point the finger of blame at someone else, God wants me to see my part in creating the disaster. If I want to dislike someone because of a grating character defect he or she has, God wants me to see the same defect in myself.
Meditation not only helps me hear God and others better, it also helps me see how even the tiny things I do daily for others strengthen me in my ability to cooperate with God. For I am one of those hardheaded alcoholics who had to practice cooperating with others for a while to learn how to cooperate with God, so that “turning it over” could become almost as easy and often as automatic as not taking the first drink.
In the last year, I’ve heard more silence than messages from God while praying or meditating. At this stage in my development, I think God is trying to teach me something I could not learn otherwise about patience and trust. What I’m now learning is how to apply to myself a bit of Native American wisdom that my sponsor shared with me over a decade ago: “If someone comes to you who is hungry and you give that person a fish, that person will expect to get a fish from you every time hunger strikes. But if, when the person comes to you the first time, you teach her or him to fish, that person will never be hungry again.” So the messages I receive during meditation or prayer aren’t anything like a fish from God. Instead, the messages are like God’s lessons in fishing.
Whatever I learn during meditation applies to me in my life, not necessarily to anyone else. The messages are usually what I need to hear at a particular time, whether I agree or not. For example:
Help yourself by helping someone else first.
When in doubt, be silent.
Grow where you are planted