The dangers of sponsorship

Over the last 6 months or so a friend and I have grown into a 'co-sponsorship' relationship.  He had decided to go through the Steps again and wanted a fresh perspective on them and I need someone to slap me around a little when I let unemployment get me depressed.  It's funny, because we both have sponsors, but this sort of arrangement on these particular issues just seems to work.
This morning I sent my friend some comments on his working of the 3rd Step and it got me thinking about just how careful we have to be when sponsoring.

The Steps in Later Sobriety

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I am troubled by my lack of Gratitude.  The simple fact is that all life is a gift and I just have trouble seeing it that way.  Having a spiritual problem, I turned to the 12 Steps for help and looking at them with a problem like this in mind got me to thinking.  It strikes me that the Steps as outlined in the Big Book are fantastic tools identifying the presence of defects of character but they are less helpful in identifying the lack of character assets.  So I can assemble a pretty good list of my resentments, but not of my gratitudes.

This blog was started with a posting by Dave about how sponsorship changes in later sobriety.  I'm wondering if a discussion of how the steps might change in later sobriety would be useful.

Bill's Boomerang

Every Thursday my home group discusses a reading from As Bill Sees It. This week we read "Boomerang" on page 185, where Bill describes how after his grandfather told him no-one but Australian Bushmen knew how to make and throw boomerangs he resolved to be the first American to do it. He worked at it for 6 months and finally succeeded.
What strikes me about the story is that Bill had no real interest in boomerangs, only in the attention and glory that would result from making and throwing one.

Love and the Fourth Step

There is a fascinating article, The Rigor of Love, by Simon Critchley in the August 9 New York Times. The essay is about the question of whether non-believers in a transcendent God can have faith. I will probably deal with his central concern in a later post but for today I'd like to think about one of the stepping stones he uses to get to his conclusion: Soren Kierkegaard's (Danish philosopher, 1813 - 1855) concept of Christian Love.

Approaching the Fourth Step

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?