Contingent Promises, Learning to Play and Love

We are all familiar with 'the Promises' of AA from pages 83 - 84 of the Big Book:

If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.

Dave, the other principal author of this blog, absolutely hates it when this is read at the beginning of meetings. He points out that it is always taken out of context.

The passage comes at the end of the Big Book's treatment of Step 9, the 'amends' step that terrifies just about all newcomers when they first read it. The simple fact is that the promises can become realities only if we do the work. Dave's concern (if I understand him properly) is that just reading the Promises at the beginning of meetings can be taken to imply that they will happen by some magical process if you just come to meetings. If you take them that way they are very extravagant promises indeed.

Recently I have been seeing that, like most things in the spiritual journey, the realization of the promises is even more complicated than it first appears. Experiencing the Promises is only possible if we truly surrender and a big part of surrendering is learning to play. Thomas Merton viewed play as doing the ordinary while being absorbed in it, intensely and utterly. I like that. I personally much prefer 'play' to 'be here now' or the monastic 'agi quod agis' (do what you are doing). To me they sound like rather serious, unsmiling efforts that oblige you to frown and focus. Playing is fun. It requires a lot of effort but it isn't hard labor.

Now, in the last week or so it has been driven home to me that I have a lot to learn about play. My wife works about 100 miles from our home which, of course, means that she is away for at least 5 days of every week. For the last 10 days she has been at home on vacation and the change that has made in me has been remarkable. With my playmate around I have slipped into a playful attitude toward life without even noticing it. I naturally live in the moment and the Promises are very real. This is not just because she is here - after all, this is the same woman I was married to throughout my active alcoholism and there wasn't much play in that. It is that she triggers something that allows all the work I have done in recovery to flower. I'm a bit of a Dante fan and in my recovery I have been inspired by how Dante's admiration of Beatrice opened him to love, first to love of her and ultimately to "the Love which moves the sun and the other stars." And there you have it.

So, I do think that experiencing the Promises is only possible if we truly surrender and a big part of surrender is learning to play. But I am coming to realize (and not just think) that learning to play is a part of learning to love.

I now have to expand my playground and try to make all people my playmates. Again, I'll take some inspiration from Dante. As a recovering alkie I've certainly been through Hell and have been working away in Purgatory for 10 years. Now let's see if I can make it to Paradise. At that point the Promises should always be there instead of brightening and fading like the phases of the moon as they do now.