Friday Talk
Good morning. My name is Paul, and I am an alcoholic.
Monday I decided that I would talk about the eleventh principle: Awareness of God.
It was the best choice and the worst.
Awareness of God.
I have spent the last 4 days wrestling with it. And all of my resistance. My legendary resistance. To god, to higher power, to all of the concepts of god, to all of the religion to everything around God, to giving myself over to my higher power as I understand my higher power.
All of it. All of the resistance from the day I walked into my first meeting until today.
All those years ago, when my resistance was so high, I thought I should start a meeting for atheists. Turns out, I have just as much resistance to atheists as I do to theists.
All of the resistance.
And anyone who has been in our Saturday meeting when, three or four times a year, we read through “We Agnostics” in that big book meeting has suffered through all of my resistance. Time and time again for the last 9 years.
In the last year, I have even gotten tired of myself, of my resistance, of my arguments. Of my… I don’t know, tired of my defect around god. Finally
Am I willing to have my character defect removed?
(Thank you, [redacted] , for talking about willingness last week)
So, this week, I wrestled with Awareness of God.
I thought about willingness.
About my share last week when I said “willingness is meaningless until there is action”
About the line in the Big Book “We give up arguing with anything or anyone. We have to.”
I thought about doing the 2nd step with my first sponsor, a deeply catholic man, who for three weeks watched me struggle with it until he finally said, “Can we agree that you, Paul, are not God.?”
Yes, I said
Good, second step done.
I thought about these rooms. About sitting in these rooms. What I see in these rooms: The people who have an awareness of god, a spiritual practice, They appear to have a better than average chance of staying sober.
And I want what they have
Sobriety
Joy
Usefulness
I thought about awareness of god
I gave up arguing. I felt my resistance was centered on the words. On the word god, on the word religion on all those words.
I asked for that defect to be removed.
Then I dove into my spiritual practice. Which I have had before I walked into these rooms. I sat on my meditation cushion a little more. I read a little more in my zen books. I did more writing on it.
I went from willingness into action
Awareness of God
Was it god when my daughter was born not breathing and the doctors took her to a table and as I held her hand got her breathing?
Was it god when my son tumbled down 20 stairs as a toddler and was no injured?
Was it god when I was six weeks on the 7th floor of Ramsey county getting electroshock and people from my meeting, some of them in this room, visited me? When my brother took extra lunch to visit me every single day?
Was it god when the cherry tree I planted blossomed?
Was it god when the seal popped up next to my kayak?
Was it god when [redacted] persisted in asking me to call [redacted] and when I finally did and he took me to my first meeting?
Was it god when the zen priestess looked at me after an early morning meditation instruction, me hungover and possibly still drunk, and said, “we take this seriously?” And I heard.
Was it god when I kept coming back to this meetings?
Was it god when I spent an hour watching a moose in Maine?
Was it god…
Was it god…
I don’t know.
But with your help, maybe I can keep working on progress and stop worrying about perfection
With your help, maybe I can turn willingness into action.
With your help, maybe I can keep moving into more and more awareness of god in every motion of the universe
Thank you for rolling out of bed this morning and helping to keep me sober for one more day
I will try to do the same for you
Peace
Be well
Six Notebooks 
Leave a comment