Asking for Directions

I’m not as upset about the world as it is today as many are. It’s not that I’m impervious to the fact that things I disagree with are offered as alternatives or that there seems to be a lack of rationality among many. I’m not upset because change is what life is all about. Some of that change is positive, and some of it is not. To be like Lear, raging against the storm, is not something I can afford. I’ll take on the smaller things, the things that I can manage, the things that are in front of me. 

What is God’s will for us? That’s what this following section addresses; how having that purpose in life makes life more reasonable.

There isn’t much of a space between Step Ten and Step Eleven. They fit together like interwoven fingers or tongue and groove flooring. It’s easy to segment Step Eleven and only pay attention to a part of it. It is the longest Step of the twelve at 32 words. It also contains a lot for us to consider. It does refer to “prayer,” and it does refer to “meditation,” but there is more to contemplate than those two actions.

If you take Step Eleven in its entirety, instead of segmenting it, the Step says that we are to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him. And we pray only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. So the Step says, “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.” That’s the whole Step. So taken in its entirety, it means one thing: we seek to gain understanding so that we may “be of maximum service to God and the people about us.” It says that in the book.

I go to a Step Eleven group. It’s a meditation group where we spend 20 minutes meditating and then talk about the Eleventh Step. Maybe it’s because the nature of the group is about meditation that the discussion tends to be about meditation. But meditation in and of itself is not the whole answer. It is a clearing; it is a centering that is often necessary. In my own life, I’ve discovered that the more strife I have and the more distress that comes my way — whether it’s the death of a spouse or difficulties with my job, or dealing with jerks in the things I volunteer to do — the more I need centering so that I may continue to function. However, if my life merely becomes a series of distressing activities countered by constant meditation, where’s the benefit to God and to others? That’s just beneficial to me.

At this stage of the process, Step Eleven is preparing me to do what Step Twelve says, and that’s “carry this message” of the Spiritual Awakening. We will need this in order to be free of our problem. It’s all problems, really, but for now, it’s the problem dogging me most at the point at which I decide to take these steps. In my case, it was alcoholism.

That was the problem that needed a solution. That was a spiritual solution, and at the point where I was doing Step Eleven. I used prayer and meditation to improve my understanding of this spiritual solution. Eventually, I was expected to carry a particular message to other alcoholics – people who still suffered from this problem.

I want to take a moment to express a fear I have for people who become so enamored with the idea of meditation, breathing, and finding closeness with something, who then find only that to be the answer they need and step away from that which introduced them to this way of life through the 12 Steps. Whether it’s AA or NA, the 12 Step program is what helped us navigate our way to the peace of meditation. If we haven’t done the other steps before jumping to Twelve or Eleven and starting to do what Eleven says, then we’re at a very precarious place.

I have more than once seen people slip off and return to use because they don’t understand that the answer to meditation is in the centering once the person has done all of the essential groundwork of the other steps. Then “sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God” makes sense. We’ve had a psychic change in the process of the actions that we took. We took the Fifth Step, we took the Seventh Step, and we took the Ninth Step. These were actions that we took that changed us. They changed the way we reacted, the way we navigated life, the way we viewed the day-to-day, and the way we behaved.

With those things altered, seeking through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God makes sense. The fact we’re doing it, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out, makes sense, especially when we move to Step Twelve.

Step Eleven is all about improving conscious contact. We’re attempting to be in a relationship with a power greater than ourselves in a way that allows us to understand, daily, what we should be doing next. What’s in front of us? Can we do it? Of course, we’ve asked for help that way; we’ve asked for the power to carry it out. So the actions we take, if we’re asking daily, are supported by a spiritual connection.