A Week of Virtues - Day 6 - Love

Love is the emotion of strong affection and personal attachment.[1] In philosophical context, love is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection. In religious context, love is not just a virtue, but the basis for all being ("God is love"[2]), and the foundation for all divine law (Golden Rule). (wikipedia citation.)

Love is a virtue that I know little about. Love of self (different than self-centeredness, which I have plenty of), love of others, and love of God are experiences I have only just begun. I read poetry and other writings describing the experiences others have with love in their life and I have a hard time relating at a core-deep level. I asked God to help me experience this type of love and I believe his answer was that I first must experience it in my relationship with him and with myself before my soul can connect with another's in a deep experience of love. I have faith that if I continue to enlarge my spiritual life, I will come to love God, myself, and others in a way I have never known. For this I am so hopeful and grateful.

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Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor. 13:4–7, 13 NIV)

A Week of Virtues - Day 4 - Faith

Faith Definition:  Complete confidence in a person, plan, or set of beliefs, etc.

"Faith is daring the soul to go beyond what the eyes can see."   ~  William Newton Clark

Before entering recovery, I would have told you that I had faith but what I really had was a belief in God.  Others in recovery suggested that I look up words as I studied and practiced recovery principles even if I thought I knew what they meant because quite often I don't.  Faith is a belief in the trustworthiness or having confidence in someone or something.  Belief is merely an opinion or conviction that something is true or factual.  So, while I believed that God was real, I did not have faith or trust in him.

Before the program, my faith was in the "God of Reason," as the Big Book of AA states.  I often find that my faith still gets stuck in my intellect when I become obsessed with understanding my diseases of alcoholism and depression in an attempt to manage them. When knowledge is my higher power, God is not and then my insanity begins.

Step 3, which asks me to" make a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understand him," invites me to give up my attempts to control life.  But, I won't make this decision if I don't first "come to believe in a power greater than myself who can restore me to sanity (i.e., Step 2)."  This Step is hard for me because, while I believe that God can restore me to sanity, I don't always have the faith or confidence that he will.  Why wouldn't he?  I don't know.  Why don't I have faith that he will?  Well, this probably calls for some Step 4 work, but my first guess is because I don't think I deserve to be sane let alone happy.  Anyone, ever feel that way? 

Another barrier to turning my will over to God is believing that I have power over my diseases, events and people in my life, etc.  When this is the case, I am back at Step 1 - "admitting I am powerless over alcohol (or fill in the blank) and that my life has become unmanageable."

Power, belief, faith...I have no power, I believe in God, and I have been given a "faith that works" (a faith in God versus a faith in intellect, reason, knowledge, or my own power.)  My only job is to make the decision to use it.  Simple, but not easy.   

"Faith is a bird that feels dawn breaking and sings while it is still dark."  ~  Rabindranath Tagoret

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A Week of Virtues - Day 3 - Humility

*Humility–noun
the quality or condition of being humble; modest opinion or estimate of one's own importance, rank, etc

*Humility definition from a Bible Dictionary
a prominent Christian grace (Rom. 12:3; 15:17, 18; 1 Cor. 3:5-7; 2 Cor. 3:5; Phil. 4:11-13). It is a state of mind well pleasing to God (1 Pet. 3:4); it preserves the soul in tranquillity (Ps. 69:32, 33), and makes us patient under trials (Job 1:22). Christ has set us an example of humility (Phil. 2:6-8). We should be led thereto by a remembrance of our sins (Lam. 3:39), and by the thought that it is the way to honour (Prov. 16:18), and that the greatest promises are made to the humble (Ps. 147:6; Isa. 57:15; 66:2; 1 Pet. 5:5). It is a "great paradox in Christianity that it makes humility the avenue to glory."
*http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/humility


For me humility means:

• accepting the reality of my powerlessness over most everything in my life, including my alcoholism, other people's alcoholism, and others' actions, attitudes, and basically all people, places, and things (including the technical difficulties that kept me from posting this until late tonight! :)

• giving credit for all that is good and positive in my life and inside of me to the one who has all power, whom I call God

Thanks to the God, whom I found through working 12 Step programs, the following statements (also referenced above from the Bible Dictionary) are absolute truths that I have personally experienced:

~  humility preserves my soul in tranquillity (Ps. 69:32, 33)

~  humility makes me patient under trials (Job 1:22)

Above photo is a flower from the Mimosa pudica, a.k.a. the Humble Plant.  This plant is a creeping annual or perennial herb often grown for its curiosity value: the compound leaves fold inward and droop when touched or shaken, re-opening minutes later.  See video below.

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After watching the way the Humble Plant responds to touch in the above video, I reflected a bit on the way I respond when God touches my life.  Do I stand firm and refuse to yield to His will for me?  Or, like this interesting plant, do I allow myself to bend to the hand of God knowing that He knows what is best for me and my life?  Honestly, I do both.  Even more honestly, I do the former much more frequently than the latter. 

How do I know which one I am doing?  When I am resisting God's will for me I am mostly like going to find myself in emotional and mental discomfort, pain, anguish, and eventually, in insanity.  When I humbly accept and act in line with God's will, I experience a peace like no other.  Simple but not easy...

A Week of Virtues - Day 2 - Honesty

Honesty Definition:  Truthful; sincere; not lieing or cheating.

There's one way to find out if a man is honest - ask him. If he says, "Yes," you know he is a crook.

~Groucho Marx

In recovery, the hardest truth I have had to face thus far, and by face I mean admit to and accept (not like), is that I am selfish and self-centered in most everything that I do and think.  There is not one action that I take at any given moment that does not have a selfish motive behind it.  These actions may also have unselfish motives behind them along with the selfish one.  But the selfish ones can always be identified if I am willing to be honest with myself.  Does being selfish make me a bad person?  I don't believe so.  Does it make me a human being?  Absolutely.   

For example, why do I try to fix other people's problems?  Because I love them and I want them to experience happiness?  Yes. 
 
I used to stop there thinking I was doing a good thing by trying to help others with their problems.  However, by working Step 4 of a 12 Step recovery program I now know that I try to fix other people's problems in an attempt to control them so that not only they feel better but so that I FEEL BETTER, too!  And working the rest of the 12 steps with a sponsor has taught me how I can be happy whether other people are or not.  What a gift! 
 
Why do I try to help other alcoholics?  Because I am called to do so by God and by Step 12 to be of service in the spirit of unconditional love?  Absolutely.  Do I also do it because I know it will greatly increase my chances of staying sober, thereby being able to lead a happy life?  You bet! 
 
For me, the most devastating lies are the ones I tell to myself, including but not limited to:
I'm not an alcoholic.
I can handle this.
I should know better.
I can do anything I put my mind to.
I'm fine.
I know what I am doing.
 
What are some ways in which you are dishonest with yourself or others and what is your solution?

We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.

~Tad Williams

Honesty plants seeds of pain which grow into beautiful blooms.   ~Marie

L. Annual Honesty (Lunaria annua) is a tall (height about 1 m), hairy-stemmed biennial plant native to the Balkans and south west Asia, and naturalized throughout Europe, North America, and parts of Asia. It has large, pointed oval leaves with marked serrations. The common name "Honesty" arose in the 16th century, and it may be due to the translucent seed-pods which are like flattened pea-pods and borne on the plant through winter. In South-East Asia and elsewhere, it is called the Money Plant, because its seed pods have the appearance of silver coins. In the United States it may also be known as "Silver Dollars," also because of the seed pods. In Denmark it is known as Judaspenge and in The Netherlands as Judaspenning (coins of Judas), an allusion to the story of Judas Iscariot and the thirty pieces of silver he was paid.  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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A Week of Virtues - Day 1 - Patience

 

Patience Definition:  The ability to endure delay, trouble, pain or hardship.

Like most good qualities and bad, I have all of them inside of me.  I get to choose which qualities to use.    Before beginning my recovery from alcoholism and depression, I didn't have a choice.  My diseases, which held me captive in self-centeredness, chose for me.  To practice patience over irritation is a choice for me today.  I struggle daily to choose patience.  However, my struggle is significantly decreased when I use the 12 Steps as my guide.  Through these 12 Steps, which I think anyone could apply to their life, I:

• Learned that I am powerless over my diseases (Step 1)
• Came to believe in a power greater than myself who could help me (Step 2)
• Made a decision to turn my choices over to this power (Step 3)
• Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself, which is when I saw the gravity of being irritated and impatient (Step 4)
• Admitted to myself, to God, and to another human being in what ways my impatience caused harm to others, including myself (Step 5)
• Became willing to have God remove my tendency to become irritated with Him, myself, and others (Step 6)
• Humbly asked God to remove this character defect from me (Step 7)
• Made of list of people whom I had harmed because of my impatience and irritation (Step 8)
• Made direct amends to those people except when to do so would injury them or others (Step 9)
• Continue to take personal inventory and when I am irritated or impatient promptly admit it (Step 10)
• Seek through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious contact with God praying for knowledge of his will for me, in this case to practice the virtue of patience, and ask him for the power to carry this out (Step 11)
• Try to carry this message to others and practice the principle of patience in all my affairs (Step 12) 

I may be impatien(t) but I am still beautiful!

"Patience with others is Love, Patience with self is Hope, Patience with God is Faith."  ~ Adel Bestavros

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