Daily Reflections
September 20

H.P. AS GUIDE

See to it that your relationship with Him is right, and great events will come to pass for you and countless others. This is the Great Fact for us.
-ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 164

Having a right relationship with God seemed to be an impossible order. My chaotic past had left me filled with guilt and remorse and I wondered how this “God business” could work. A.A. told me that I must turn my will and my life life over to the care of God, as I understand Him. With nowhere else to turn, I went down on my knees and cried, “God, I can’t do this. Please help me!” It was when I admitted my powerlessness that a glimmer of light began to touch my soul, and then a willingness emerged to let God control my life. With Him as my guide, great events began to happen, and I found the beginning of sobriety.

Twenty-Four Hours A Day
September 20

A.A. Thought For The Day

Step Four is, “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Step Five is, ” Admitted to God to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” Step Six is, “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.” Step Seven is, “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.” Step Ten is, “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.” In taking a personal inventory, we have to be absolutely honest with ourselves and with other people. Have I taken an honest inventory of myself?

Meditation For The Day

God is good. You can often tell whether or not a thing is of God. If it is of God, it must be good. Honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love are all good, unselfish helpfulness is good, and these things all lead to the abundant life. Leave in God’s hands the present and the future, knowing only that He is good. The hand that veils the future is the hand of God. He can bring order out of chaos, good out of evil, and peace out of turmoil. We can believe that everything really good comes from God and that He shares His goodness with us.

Prayer For The Day

I pray that I may reach out for the good. I pray that I may try to choose the best in life.

Walk In Dry Places
September 20

All we need to know.
Maintaining

Seen from today’s perspective, the early AA members had rather narrow attitudes toward the study of alcoholism. They became restless and fidgety if member started discussing psychological aspects of the problem or gave other indications that they were trying to learn more about the disease.

While we don’t need to hold such narrow attitudes today, we should at least concede that we don’t need complex information to stay sober. All we have to know is that we have a very compulsive problem that can be arrested by eliminating the first drink.

Even today, nobody fully knows why the first drink is so deadly for people like us. Our experience and the experience of others tells us that it is. That knowledge alone can be an important building block in finding and maintaining sobriety.

While being open-minded to new information, I’ll remember today that a fairly simple idea…. that I’m an alcoholic and can’t live with alcohol…. Is the main thing I need to know.

Most people’s confusion comes in the area of their desires, not their needs. Giving can be one of the greatest ways to receiving. If you want more love, give love. If you want more joy, be joyful. Look for the good in all things and situations, and you may be surprised at what you see.

–John Roger

All we need to do is allow more joy and love into our experience. We need to really choose it, to allow ourselves to feel it, paying attention, choosing to be alive and to be kind; allowing ourselves to feel and to be nurtured by the natural order of the Spirit of God. When we choose and allow it, the dramas fall away and dissolve.
–Patricia Sun

Father Leo’s Daily Meditation
September 20

SHARING

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
– Henry David Thoreau

I thought that I was the only one who felt like I did. Nobody could possibly understand. I was different from everybody and needed to keep my life — my true life — a secret. I was living a life of quiet desperation! Then I went to a meeting for recovering alcoholics and heard somebody share my pain, my loneliness, my confusion, my addiction — my life.

I was lonely because I kept myself separate from people. I saw them as being different from myself, and so I remained the lonely and isolated victim. Strange how similar we are when we begin to share. When we get beneath culture, class and creed, we discover sensitive human beings trying to make sense of their lives. We need each other.

May I risk rejection in my spiritual need to share and be known.

Elder’s Meditation of the Day
September 20

“You will only get back what you give out.”
–Joe Coyhis, STOCKBRIDGE-MUNSEE

The Great Spirit created a system of balance and justice.

This law says, if you treat others with respect, you will be treated with respect. If you gossip about no one, no one will gossip about you. If you are fair in all of your dealings, you can expect the same. If you share with others, others, will share with you. If you judge others, others will judge you.

You will always get back what you give out. The original teaching talks about being a giving person. A giving person will constantly be on the receiving end.

My Creator, help me to be a giving person today.

Touchstones Meditations For Men
September 20

Sexuality expresses God’s intention that people find authentic humanness not in isolation but in relationship.
—James B. Nelson

We men have regarded our sex lives and our spiritual lives as two different worlds. This attitude has caused many crises – anger and frustration with our partners, power struggles, accusations and hurt feelings, shame and guilt about our own behavior.

We can join our spirituality with our sexual selves by taking responsibility for being sexual. Being responsible means we take the risk of being vulnerable, of giving and receiving affection and sexual expression in our relationships. We cannot expect satisfaction of our desires simply because we feel them. In sexuality, as in all parts of our lives, our Higher Power is our guide. We can also say no to sexual expression if we wish.

God guide my sexual awareness today. Open me to experience sexuality as a creative gift for relationships.

Daily TAO
September 20

COUNTERPOINT

It is blazing hot today.
Valley heat is drawn to meet the coast.
The cool days of autumn dance with false summer.
White within black, black within white.

Autumn was coming on, and yet today there is a sudden shift. It is hotter than summer. Even in the midst of a cooling trend there is its opposite.

In the minds of those who follow Tao, duality in life is not clearly demarcated. There is a fuzziness at the line. Day does not have a sharp border with night. So it is with the alternations of the seasons. It is not a simple, smooth continuum from summer into autumn. There is complexity and counterpoint.

If nature is full of subtlety and even false appearances, how wise must we be in order to follow life’s rhythms unerringly?

Daily Zen
September 20

Those who are following the Way should behave like a piece of timber which is drifting along a stream. If the log is neither held by the banks, nor seized by people, nor obstructed by gods, nor kept in the whirlpool, nor itself goes to decay, I assure you that this log will finally reach the ocean. If monks walking on the Way are neither tempted by the passions, nor led astray by some evil influences, but steadily pursue their course for Nirvana, I assure you that these monks will finally attain enlightenment.

– Sutra of Forty Two Chapters