I am not God--or Am I?

You have heard the saying, “All I need to know about God is that I’m not It.” It’s one of those newcomer “keep it simple things”, and we often hear it told as in, “When I asked my first sponsor about God he told me, “All you need to know is…”

And fair enough. Before recovery and in early recovery we acted like bad gods—ruining our lives, trying to run other people’s lives, so we needed that jerk to the back of our collar.

But then we enter a spiritual path and begin the long, long journey to a personal Higher Power and there are some surprises along the way. We start to discover the still, small voice within—and realize it is, in fact, within us. We re-read the literature and there is Dr. Bob and Bill W. talking about meditation to hear our Higher Power by listening inside ourselves.

Then maybe we join a faith community or we begin to read and learn that ancient spiritual teachers like Saint Augustine in his autobiography says that he searched everywhere for God only to realize that, “You were more inward than my inmost self, and superior to my highest being.”

And the Franciscan theologian, Saint Bonaventure, wrote in his Soliloquy, “God is the One who is closer to you than you are to yourself.”

Or you discover a modern theologian like Ilia Delio who writes, “If the will of God is God’s love for us, then we would have to admit that the will of God is not outside us but first and foremost within us.”  She also writes, “We do not have to search high and low to find God’s love. We we simply have to look in a mirror to see who we are, because in who we are God also is.”

And so you begin to ask again, “What about God?” And now, in later recovery the answer may truly be, “All you need to know about God is that you are (in)  Him.”

Hope is...

I have always loved words like Joy and Peace but recently the word Hope has come to me again and again.

“Hope is a waking dream.,” wrote Aristotle, and maybe from that I assumed hope was a weak word, something that could alight like a bird but then equally take flight like a bird. Too iffy for me.

But I have always loved this quote from the former Czech president and playwright, Vaclav Havel:

“Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

That, it turns out, is close to what Thomas Aquinas meant when he wrote about Hope. Aquinas studied all of the virtues, Faith, Hope, Charity…etc. and when he described hope he said “Hope is located in the will.” Which means that he believed that hope is a choice; that we make a decision to have hope. Having hope is within our will, within our choice.

Because of his belief about hope, Aquinas also said that there are two sins against hope. They are despair—having no hope—or making the choice to not hope, and interestingly, he said that the other sin against hope is presumption—the stance that, “I can do this myself.”

Isn’t that fascinating? Doesn’t it resonate with “Made a decision…” and “Our will and our life.” It’s a choice. Not dependent on mood or emotion or circumstances. Hmmmmm. And it is also giving up ego, “I can do this myself.”

So here is what I am doing with hope this week: I am practicing gratitude as much of the day as I can. I am teaching my will. It seems that a life of gratitude is oriented toward hope. Practicing gratitude is a way to teach the will to choose hope.