I found this short reflection on ‘Honesty’ by the outstanding poet and author David Whyte in his book Consolations very useful in helping understand the challenge of rigorous honesty which ‘How It Works’(BB p.58) identifies as a ‘demand’ for a sustainable recovery. His reflection also helps to connect us to the experience of the powerlessness, uncertainty and vulnerability when we honestly face what we have avoided and denied for so long. It also speaks clearly about the essential of humility in accepting myself, my alcoholism and my life as it is ; not as I might want it to be.
This reflection also adds a powerful perspective to the concluding paragraphs of the Big Book text (BB p.164). The final two paragraphs acknowledge that ‘we realize we know only a little’ as perhaps an enduring aspiration that empowers us to ‘abandon yourself to God as you understand God’. – Bruce M.
HONESTY is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, with the world, or with our self. The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties: all of us are afraid of loss, in all its forms; all of us, at times, are haunted or overwhelmed by the possibility of a disappearance; and all of us, therefore, are one short step away from dishonesty. Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through. Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.
The ability to speak the truth is as much the ability to describe what it is like to stand in trepidation at this door as it is to actually go through it and become that beautifully honest spiritual warrior, equal to all circumstances, we would like to become. Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another, or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing, and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.
Honesty is grounded in humility, and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is, in effect, to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story, we do not know where we are in the story; we do not know who is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. Honesty is not a weapon to keep loss and heartbreak at bay; honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all, the place where we actually dwell. The living, breathing frontier, where there is no realistic choice between gain or loss.