Posts
The Fourth Step is one of the two that really scare newcomers looking at the Steps. The other is, of course, the Ninth. In both cases it strikes me that the fear stems from pride, from a failure to see my place in things. Probably the best way to test whether we have done Steps 1, 2 and 3 well is to check whether we are still afraid of 4.
I am reading William A Barry's Finding God in All Things, a Companion to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. He points out that saints consistently say that they feel more and more sinful the closer they come to God, but that far from finding that depressing, they find joy in it. What gives?
Once again, the issue is humility. When Ignatius first decided to reform his life he moved completely under his own power. He exercised "the same ambition that led him to daydream of doing great knightly deeds in imitation of the heroes of the trashy romances he loved to read" and tried to imitate all the austerities of the saints he was now reading about. It was the same deal: a lone adventurer off on a heroic quest, only now the quest was not for noble combat and the hand of a fair maiden but for spiritual glory. He was still trying to live a heroic life at the center of the universe. This led him to a despairing, near- suicidal obsession with his sins.
I firmly believe that in practice people are polytheists. I, for example, acknowledge one fundamental power underlying reality, call it Tao, Creativity, Being, the Good, the Laws of Reality, God... whatever, but I think my major problems come with some of the lesser gods -- the economy, employers, Congress pissing around with unemployment extensions, the approval of others and, yeah, myself. I acknowledge and pay homage to all of them. But it is crucial (and I think the main point of Step 3) to distinguish the Higher Power(s) that you want to turn your will and your life over to from the idols. Acknowledging that there are forces in the world you cannot control is very healthy, but idolatry leads to confusion and unhappiness. It's all part of letting go, growing in humility, seeing your place in reality, and moving toward willingness to be changed. When Ignatius went off to strive for spiritual heroism through fasting, self-flagellation and all that other fun stuff he was worshiping several false gods, including fame, glory, and himself.
When we see ourselves as small components of The Good, God's Creation, the great process of a creative universe, whatever you want to call it, we gain perspective. We feel sorrow for many of the things we have done, but we see them as missing the mark we are really aiming for, like an archer missing a target (this is the original meaning of the Greek word that "sin" is derived from). Our shortcomings are just that: they are not defined by some standard of evil, some list of Seven Naughty Things, but by the good, the contribution to the universe that we should have made and should be making. We fall short of making the full contribution we are capable of. The good we are capable of is, in fact, a very tough standard. We can't be satisfied if we merely avoid the list of Naughties; we have to positively strive to move the moral universe forward. Barry puts it in Christian terms:
I am reading William A Barry's Finding God in All Things, a Companion to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. He points out that saints consistently say that they feel more and more sinful the closer they come to God, but that far from finding that depressing, they find joy in it. What gives?
Once again, the issue is humility. When Ignatius first decided to reform his life he moved completely under his own power. He exercised "the same ambition that led him to daydream of doing great knightly deeds in imitation of the heroes of the trashy romances he loved to read" and tried to imitate all the austerities of the saints he was now reading about. It was the same deal: a lone adventurer off on a heroic quest, only now the quest was not for noble combat and the hand of a fair maiden but for spiritual glory. He was still trying to live a heroic life at the center of the universe. This led him to a despairing, near- suicidal obsession with his sins.
I firmly believe that in practice people are polytheists. I, for example, acknowledge one fundamental power underlying reality, call it Tao, Creativity, Being, the Good, the Laws of Reality, God... whatever, but I think my major problems come with some of the lesser gods -- the economy, employers, Congress pissing around with unemployment extensions, the approval of others and, yeah, myself. I acknowledge and pay homage to all of them. But it is crucial (and I think the main point of Step 3) to distinguish the Higher Power(s) that you want to turn your will and your life over to from the idols. Acknowledging that there are forces in the world you cannot control is very healthy, but idolatry leads to confusion and unhappiness. It's all part of letting go, growing in humility, seeing your place in reality, and moving toward willingness to be changed. When Ignatius went off to strive for spiritual heroism through fasting, self-flagellation and all that other fun stuff he was worshiping several false gods, including fame, glory, and himself.
When we see ourselves as small components of The Good, God's Creation, the great process of a creative universe, whatever you want to call it, we gain perspective. We feel sorrow for many of the things we have done, but we see them as missing the mark we are really aiming for, like an archer missing a target (this is the original meaning of the Greek word that "sin" is derived from). Our shortcomings are just that: they are not defined by some standard of evil, some list of Seven Naughty Things, but by the good, the contribution to the universe that we should have made and should be making. We fall short of making the full contribution we are capable of. The good we are capable of is, in fact, a very tough standard. We can't be satisfied if we merely avoid the list of Naughties; we have to positively strive to move the moral universe forward. Barry puts it in Christian terms:
When God reveals our sins and sinful tendencies to us, we may well feel deep sorrow and even tears for what we have done, but we do not feel that God is gloating over us and is making us feel unworthy of his love and friendship. God's revelation of sin and sinful tendencies is enabling; it gives us courage to pick ourselves up and reform our lives.Ultimately, this standpoint of humility before God is the only place from which we can see our sins. One characteristic of sin in general (and certainly for alcoholics) is denial. As Barry puts it:
When we are able to look at ourselves through the eyes of the Lord who loves us into existence, only then can we see ourselves as we really are, as loved sinners in a loved and sinful world. Both the adjective and the noun in the last sentence are important. We are enabled to see ourselves as sinners in a sinful world precisely because we are loved. It is for this reason that condemnations, whether for personal or public sins, have little or no good effect unless accompanied with the message of God's abiding love.We should look forward to the Fourth Step. It is an important part of the process of finding our way in the world. But in order to be able to look forward to the Fourth Step we have to pay a lot of attention to how thoroughly we do the Third.
My experience bears out the notion that people are excessively – needlessly – scared by the inventory-taking and amends-making steps. 4 and 5, as a package, seem to me to be special bogey-men. Presumably this is because of the fear not only of taking a “fearless and searching” look at the things we’ve done while drinking, but also the idea of being honest with someone else about some of our more heavily shame- and guilt-laden secrets.
ReplyDeleteI also think the problem is closely connected with a misunderstanding of humility and a blindness to the internal power it can convey (as in admitting powerlessness to feel spiritually-based power).
Brian does a great job of laying out how liberating it can feel to – using Bill’s concept of humility from the 12 and 12 – get a good handle on who one really is and become willing to become who one could be. But the AA literature and practice don’t. Much of what we read in the literature about humility, while paying lip service to the idea that it’s not humiliation, is really all about ego-deflation. While there is a general promise that the steps bring joy, in its the nitty-gritties the literature isn’t primarily about how the steps are liberation-supporting and joy-of-living-promoting.
Of course Bill and Bob’s experiences were such that ego-deflation and the beating back of pride had to play crucial roles in getting and keeping them sober. Bill’s continuing peccadilloes throughout his sober life can only have supported this rather punitive view of how to go about taking these steps, and thus of humility – as we see reflected in so much of the literature.
When I first got sober I was thrilled at the prospect of working with my (excellent, non-judging, wise, and wickedly-well-boundaried) sponsor on the 4th and 5th steps. In fact, since at 5 months I was off to Europe for a year of research in places where it wasn’t clear I’d be able to get to even a meeting a month, I pled with her to let me do steps four and five quite early, hoping I would thus feel more fully initiated in the program, which I thought would help me stay sober. She agreed; we did them; and I think that did help me stay sober.
Part of my enthusiasm to engage the process had to do with how wonderful and nonjudgmental my sponsor was; partly it was because at 4 ½ months I didn’t really have a sense of the kind of damage I’d done, and would reveal to the people I did later 5th steps with (that is, didn’t know how “bad” my secrets were, and therefore wasn’t that afraid of digging into and sharing them); and partly it was that I was so much happier when I joined AA.
Part 2 of the above comment:
ReplyDeleteI was indescribably happier in AA than I’d ever been before. My life so abruptly turned on a dime. I went from being more or less constantly depressed and morose to feeling more or less constantly joyful and connected to the human race, for the first time in my life. And it seemed to me self-evident that this was because I’d turned my will and life over to AA in some general sense. That is, I felt – probably without knowing it – that I’d “taken” the third step thoroughly, and that doing so was the very foundation of my new-found joy.
I’m not sure I was especially thorough in taking the 3rd step. I certainly felt like I’d taken it fully, and to fabulous effect. But how could I have been thorough at that early juncture? It seems to me, then, that to approach the 4th and 5th steps with eagerness, one doesn’t necessarily have to have an especially clear sense of what it means to turn one’s will and life over to the care of God as we (in my case, fail to) understand God.
In later years, not surprisingly, my understanding of God and what the 3rd step entails have changed dramatically. They have changed, in line with what Brian says, in ways that have allowed me to experience something of what the saints he references did: that becoming more humble is becoming more willing to acknowledge one’s essential weaknesses and – to use their vernacular – sins, and in the process to feel more joy as a result of what feels like a truer connection to God, and a more authentic grounding in an honest sense of myself. I still never really feared later fourth and fifth steps – once longer-sober, most likely because my earlier 4th and 5th steps had been at worst revealing and at best rewarding.
But back when I first approached the steps, all I brought with me was the knowledge that life sober in AA was wondrous, and offered undreamt-of possibilities, and thus the willingness to thrown myself into the steps with gusto. That is, early on, I didn’t need thoroughness in doing any of the steps to embrace all of them with great enthusiasm.
I think Kirsten makes some extremely important points in her comments above. For one, you don't really need to do as thorough and analytical a Third Step as I describe in my original post in order to do a valid (i.e. useful) Fourth. The general spirit of surrender and enthusiasm she describes is definitely enough.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I do think it is important that as an alcoholic progresses in recovery and continually revisits the steps he or she continually pays attention to deepening the experience of each step. Certainly most of us do 1, 2, and 3 daily and I think the kind of analysis I described can help in that. If I've got it right, we repeat steps 4 through 9 with our daily conscious application of Step 10, and 11 and 12 are obviously daily activities. Each time we touch a step we should try to do so with a little more depth and understanding than the previous time.
Rereading my original post with Kirsten's comments in mind is pretty amusing. Here I was sketching out what I was thinking of as general guidelines for approaching Step Four while blissfully ignoring the fact that I have formally done the steps several times and never prepared for Four in exactly that way. In fact, I'm pretty sure the first sponsor who guided me through the steps would find some of the ideas in my original post a bit strange. I guess I was just a smidge overly focused on my current concerns.
Picking up on one Brian’s comments above, I'm thinking about how I run my problems through what I call my "step mill" (as in coffee mill - that darling archaic old thing). In other words, when I'm jammed up about something, I take something between 60 seconds and 6 hours to ask myself and do something like the following:
ReplyDelete(1) OK, I give up; I'm powerless over this thing and how it's making me feel (unmanageable, to say the least) - annoying, but true.
(2) DO I IN FACT believe that a power greater can restore me to some sort of sanity with regard to this thing /set of feelings? Sometimes I need a few hours or even a day or two before I get to "yes" on this).
(3) OK so now I’m aligning myself (yoga? A walk? Just a thought or intention?) with the notion of higher power that feels comfortable and most powerful in this regard / at this instant.
(4) stop to consider where I've been wrong, or contributing somehow to whatever it is I'm jammed up about
(5) run it past someone else
(6) get feedback on what it is in me that plays this less-than-helpful-role ... in other words, nail down the specific character defect(s) at play here
(7) pray or meditate, or make plans for changing concrete behaviors to tackle that/those defect(s)
(8) obvious
(9) obvious once I run it past someone
(10) pay special attention, daily, at least for a while, to the step 6 material that arose here
(11) see above
(12) see above, and also get out of myself - STOP focusing on me, once I've gone through the mill ... try to look around for ways to engage in at least a little - if not a LOT - of joy of living.
As I said, this can be a matter of a few minutes, or a few hours - and as such is necessarily not deep in the way Brian suggests. HOWEVER, it's deep - or can be - in another way, viz., that it's an opportunity to focus on specific character defects - or even just ASPECTS of same - that come to play in certain kinds of situations / dynamics. In this way, this "quick and dirty" application of the steps, if done regularly (and I do get jammed up, and therefore do this, regularly), can be very illuminating about my general emotional tendencies, strengths, weaknesses, patterns, etc. And in this sense this approach is as deep and thorough as any lengthier 4th and 5th step (and associated), at least as I've done them.