Step Three

Step Three

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

This is going to be an on-going challenge, for me, I think.  I have a regular practice in the mornings, now, in which I meditate on God and on how I can connect with and serve Him throughout the day.  And in general I think that I am doing a good job of this.

I continue however to face uncertainty and doubt as to God’s nature and existence.  This means, among other things, evidently, that I must renew my faith in God daily.  It is not something that I can do once and have done.  Perhaps then my morning ritual and its continuation through the day are sufficient for this step.

To elaborate on what I think that this means generally, I invoke my understanding of God as the moving principle of the divine.  (See DATE.)  Some of the features of this principle have been elucidated by others.  As James, Otto, and others have observed, the divine is ineffable but also it is felt, a form of experience, a passion.  And as Tillich asserts, the divine (our “ultimate concern”) comprehends all facets of our person – as well, we may add, as all facets of being generally:  Tillich’s account being strictly existential.  Again following Tillich, the divine involves full expression and satisfaction of one’s needs and potential.  To be blessed – a synonym of the divine – is to experience the realization of one’s full and possible self.  (Not, as discussed elsewhere, the ego-self, but the true self or soul.  This idea of course requires further development, especially in light of Nietzsche’s criticism that there is no single, independent core personal entity – in which view I concur.)

I have said that God is a moving principle of the divine, meaning that He is active, spontaneous in Kant’s sense (not a mechanism, an effect of prior causes).  (See again DATE.)  This means that God can express Himself through me.  That is, by my choosing and acting in certain ways, my will coincides with God’s, or, to put the point properly, I become the servant of God’s will.  I can do His work, both as I develop my person and as I influence other things, persons, around me.  The logical extension of this idea is the Kingdom of Heaven, in which all persons fully realize their potential for enacting God’s will.  This ideal represents the telos of human being.  It is the Song of Heaven, Feuerbach’s image of God, that for which Schiller wrote his Ode to Joy, for which Beethoven wrote his glorious chorale.  It’s a tall order, of course, but a concept by reference to which we orient ourselves and our behavior.  (Again shades of Nietzsche require attention.  But we needn’t mistake this image for a static conception of being in-itself or of social repression.)

A further expression of the idea is furnished in a personal meditation aid:

Molding your life means cutting and shaping your material world into something good, something that can express the spiritual.  All material things are the clay out of which we mold something spiritual.  You must first recognize the selfishness in your desires and motives, actions and words, and then mold that selfishness until it is sublimated into a spiritual weapon for good.  As the work of molding proceeds, you see more and more clearly what must be done to mold your life into something better.  (Twenty-Four Hours a Day, Hazelden Meditations.  2001:  978-1-59285-758-6.  June 4 entry.)

That is, where we find ourselves short of the divine ideal, we contemplate the task of development towards this ideal.  For me, this journey has recently begun again, as I reconsider the terms of my being.  Sobriety and the self-examination that it brings gives me the opportunity to re-begin the approach to the divine.  I may count myself fortunate, now, that I have a more mature set of experiences and tools on which to draw in this undertaking.  This includes a clearer understanding of the role and nature of selfishness.  I have the motivation that comes from serious spiritual failure – fear is always a good motivator:  thank you Mr. Ego.

And so I want to close with that banality, “It’s all good.”  Like those many other banalities so true and so despised by the unwitting lofty (cf. David Foster Wallace, discussed here DATE), this canard is true and especially difficult to achieve and especially in all of its humility.