DAILY PONDERABLES
Together WE Trudge The Road OF Happy Destiny
Daily Reflections
A DAILY REPRIEVE
What we have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 85
Maintaining my spiritual condition is like working out every day, planning for the marathon, swimming laps, jogging. It's staying in good shape spiritually, and that requires prayer and meditation. The single most important way for me to improve my conscious contact with a Higher Power is to pray and meditate. I am as powerless over alcohol as I am to turn back the waves of the sea; no human force had the power to overcome my alcoholism. Now I am able to breathe the air of joy, happiness and wisdom. I have the power to love and react to events around me with the eyes of a faith in things that are not readily apparent. My daily reprieve means that, no matter how difficult or painful things appear today, I can draw on the power of the program to stay liberated from my cunning, baffling and powerful illness.
From the book Daily Reflections
© Copyright 1990 by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Twenty-Four Hours A Day
A.A. Thought for the Day
I have got rid of most of my inner conflicts. I was always at war with myself. I was doing things that I did not want to do. I was waking up in strange places and wondering how I got there. I was full of recklessness when I was drunk and full of remorse when I was sober. My life didn't make sense. It was full of broken resolves and frustrated hopes and plans. I was getting nowhere fast. No wonder my nerves were all shot. I was bumping up against a blank wall and I was dizzy from it. A.A. taught me how to get organized and to stop fighting against myself. Have I got rid of inner conflicts?
Meditation for the Day
"When two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them." The spirit of God comes upon His followers when they are all together at one time, in one place, and with one accord. When two or three consecrated souls are together at a meeting place, the spirit of God is there to help and guide them. Where any sincere group of people are together, reverently seeking the help of God, His power and His spirit are there to inspire them.
Prayer for the Day
I pray that I may be in accord with the members of my group. I pray that I may feel the strength of a consecrated group.
From the book Twenty-Four Hours a Day
© Copyright 1975 by Hazelden Foundation
NA - Just for Today
Alone No More
"We gradually and carefully pull ourselves out of the isolation and loneliness of addiction and into the mainstream of life."
Basic Text p. 35
Many of us spent much of our using time alone, avoiding other people - especially people who were not using - at all costs. After years of isolation, trying to find a place for ourselves in a bustling, sometimes boisterous fellowship is not always easy. We may still feel isolated, focusing on our differences rather than our similarities. The overwhelming feelings that often arise in early recovery-feelings of fear, anger, and mistrust-can also keep us isolated. We may feel like aliens but we must remember, the alienation is ours, not NA's.
In Narcotics Anonymous, we are offered a very special opportunity for friendship. We are brought together with people who understand us like no one else can. We are encouraged to share with these people our feelings, our problems, our triumphs, and our failures. Slowly, the recognition and identification we find in NA bridge the lonely gap of alienation in our hearts. As we've heard it said - the program works, if we let it.
Just for today: The friendship of other members of the fellowship is a life-sustaining gift. I will reach out for the friendship that's offered in NA, and accept it.
pg. 334
From the book Just for Today
© Copyright 1991-2013 by Narcotics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Thought for Today
"Be willing to be a beginner every single morning." -- Meister Eckhart
If you change your thinking you will change your actions, If you change your actions you will change your thinking. -- Anonymous
The Lord of Song … AA Grapevine April 2002
(thanks Ronny H.)
When I had been in AA only a few weeks, I dared talk with an old-timer about that amazing concept of a power greater than myself. "Please, tell me," I asked, "Am I completely free to choose? You see, I need this program even if it requires a kind of conversion or something. Please, tell me the truth, because I'm ready to do anything!"
He smiled. Then he spoke compassionately: "You maybe think we are evangelists?"
"I'm not really sure."
He was still smiling. Then he put on his glasses and handed me his Big Book. "Bill's Story, page 12," he said. Read aloud the words in italics."
I did. He repeated after me: "Your own conception of God . . . Only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself."
"My own conception of God is silly," I almost screamed.
"But it's yours," he said. "And in this program, we're not supposed to believe as others do; we're simply encouraged to believe as we do ourselves."
At last, I was convinced. And I began working the program with my own conception of God. I was happy because now I was released.
In those days, the only God I was able to believe in was a God of songs. Perhaps this was a naive idea from my early childhood, but this was the only God I could love and believe in with all my heart.
AA was really very open-minded on this subject: "A power greater than myself," said the Step. Just this. The Fellowship didn't care how I define it.
Thereafter, I've never been judgmental about my own conception of God and worked the program as effectively as the members who belong to a particular religious body, I suppose. And with time, my conception of Higher Power developed and took more mature forms with every book I read on the subject.
Much later in my sobriety, thanks to a visitor, I came to know that there is a holy book called Bhagavad Gita (Holy Song, or Lord's Song). This visitor was an old-timer and like Dr. Earle, the author of "Physician, Heal Thyself" in the Big Book, he had been to India. After the meeting, I invited him to dinner, and we talked at length about the spiritual side of the program. He was a yogi and had been sober for more than ten years.
David (not his real name) told me that he understood the meaning of the first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, which is called the Despondency of Arjuna, to be the conviction of hopelessness. Arjuna was the name of the hero and a whole chapter, the very first chapter, was dedicated to describing in detail the hopelessness of a hero in the middle of a battlefield that symbolizes life itself.
"I'm not a scholar," he said. "I'm just a recovering alcoholic. But I've met scholars who cannot understand the teaching of this sacred book simply because they are not familiar with something like the First Step of our AA program.
I've also met people who think the AA program is purely Christian, simply because this is the only religion they are familiar with. My philosophy has concepts such as reincarnation, karma or dharma, which may seem hard to accept for many Americans. But you know alcoholism is no respecter of nation or religion. In America or Europe, we may be mostly Christian. But in other parts of the world, billions of people believe and think differently. To them, religion, holiness, and the sacred mean different things.
"I think that our program is universal. It is universal because, besides Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians, we also include agnostics and atheists and we mean it. And I'm very grateful for this open-mindedness."
I am very grateful to David. He helped me see that my own conception of God in my early sobriety wasn't unique, and something much more important: the program gave me full freedom on this matter.
In AA, I've met people who believe in a goddess or in extra-terrestrials as well as people who believe their Higher Power is a state of awareness or consciousness. I've even met a Freemason who understands the program as an extraordinary tool for building what he calls "the temple in man" out of the wreckage of the past.
To me, these were simply other alcoholics. Personally, I don't like labels. "Alcoholic" is the only label I can accept easily in an AA meeting. Every religion or belief system has its own language, terms, and definitions. I don't have to think about such things when working the program. In AA, I've found a freedom I'd been longing for since my childhood.
The program, I think, requires a little more than how we think or believe. We're not dealing with religion, but with spirituality. As said in the Big Book, "The spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it." And as Bill W. put it in the June 1961 Grapevine: "We cannot grow very much unless we constantly try to envision what the eternal spiritual values are."
Ercan A.
Izmir
Buddha/Zen Thoughts
Everywhere, truly, those of integrity stand apart.
They, the good, don't chatter in hopes of favor or gains.
When touched now by pleasure, now pain,the wise give no sign
of high or low.
Native American
"We do not want riches, but we want to train our children right. Riches would do us no good. We could not take them with us to the other world. We do not want riches, we want peace and love."
--Red Cloud, OGLALA LAKOTA
The Elders say that what is important is peace and love. To have material things is okay, but if not, that's okay too. To have peace and love is more important than anything material. Our children will see the value of peace and love only if adults show they are a priority. Too often we think we can offer material things and they will replace the time spent with our children. But the most important way to give our children peace and love is to spend time with them.
My Creator, give me Your peace and love today.
Keep It Simple
Pray for powers equal to your task. --- Phillips Brooks
Our task is to stay sober and to help others who still suffer from addiction. We will need patience and understanding. We will need much love. Most of all, we’ll need to work a strong program.
Pray that you come to know the Steps well. Pray that you’ll want to help others---always. Pray for these things, and you’ll have a strong program. In the program, we learn that prayer works. We see prayer change our lives and the lives of those around us. We came to know the power of prayer.
Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, I pray for knowledge of Your will for me and the power to carry it out.
Action for the Day: Today, I’ll admit my needs by praying for help from my Higher Power.
TWELVESTEPS
and
TWELVE TRADITIONS
Tradition Ten (pgs 176-177)
“Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy.”
NEVER since it began has Alcoholics Anonymous been divided by a major controversial issue. Nor has our Fellowship ever publicly taken sides on any question in an embattled world. This, however, has been no earned virtue. It could almost be said that we were born with it, for, as one oldtimer recently declared, “Practically never have I heard a heated religious, political, or reform argument among A.A. members. So long as we don’t argue these matters privately, it’s a cinch we never shall publicly.
As by some deep instinct, we A.A.’s have known from the very beginning that we must never, no matter what the provocation, publicly take sides in any fight, even a worthy one. All history affords us the spectacle of striving nations and groups finally torn asunder because they were designed for, or tempted into, controversy. Others fell apart because of sheer self-righteousness while trying to enforce upon the rest of mankind some millennium of their own specification. In our own times, we have seen millions die in political and economic wars often spurred by religious and racial difference. We live in the imminent possibility of a fresh holocaust to determine how men shall be governed, and how the products of nature and toil shall be divided among them. That is the spiritual climate in which A.A. was born, and by God’s grace has nevertheless flourished.
Let us reemphasize that this reluctance to fight one another or anybody else is not counted as some special virtue which makes us feel superior to other people. Nor does it mean that the members of Alcoholics Anonymous, now restored as citizens of the world, are going to back away from their individual responsibilities to act as they see the right upon issues of our time. But when it comes to A.A. as a whole, that’s quite a different matter. In this respect, we do not enter into public controversy, because we know that our Society will perish if it does. We conceive the survival and spread of Alcoholics Anonymous to be something of far greater importance than the weight we could collectively throw back of any other cause. Since recovery from alcoholism is life itself to us, it is imperative that we preserve in full strength our means of survival.
Big Book
"Assuming we are spiritually fit, we can do all sorts of things
alcoholics are not supposed to do. People have said we must not go
where liquor is served; we must not have it in our homes; we must
shun friends who drink; we must avoid moving pictures which show
drinking scenes; we must not go into bars; our friends must hide
their bottles if we go to their houses; we mustn't think or be
reminded about alcohol at all. Our experience shows that this is not
necessarily so.
We meet these conditions every day. An alcoholic who cannot meet
them, still has an alcoholic mind; there is something the matter with
his spiritual status."
~Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition, Working With Others, pg. 100~
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Excerpts from pgs 26-27 “A Member's Eye View of Alcoholics Anonymous”
by Allen McG.**
…… “ Ladies and gentlemen, who would dare attempt to analyze a phenomenon, diagram a wonder, or parse a miracle? The answer is: only a fool. And I trust that tonight I have not been such a fool. All I have tried to do is tell you where I have been these past 16 years and some things I have come to believe because of my journeying.
This coming Sunday, in the churches of many of us, there will be read that portion of the Gospel of Matthew which recounts the time when John The Baptist was languishing in the prison of Herod, and, hearing of the works of his cousin Jesus, he sent two of his disciples to say to Him, “Art thou He who is to come, or shall we look for another?” And Christ did as He so often did. He did not answer them directly, but wanted John to decide for himself. And so, He said to the disciples: “Go and report to John what you have heard and what you have seen: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise, the poor have the gospel preached to them” Back in my childhood catechism days, I was taught that the “poor” in this instance did not mean only the poor in the material sense, but also meant the “poor in spirit,” those who burned with an inner hunger and an inner thirst, and the word “gospel” meant quite literally “the good news.”
More than 16 years ago, four men – my boss, my physician, my pastor, and the one friend I had left – working singly and together, maneuvered me into A.A.
Tonight, if they were to ask me, “Tell us what did you find?’ I would say to them what I now say to you:
“I can tell you only what I have heard and seen: It seems the blind do see, the lame do walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise, and over and over again, in the middle of the longest day or darkest night, the poor in spirit have the good news told to them.”
God grant that it may always be so. “
** Allen McG. is also the author of "The Rest of Your Life"
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