I have a confession to make, a paradoxical one: I love and loathe addicts and alcoholics. I am one…in recovery. I love them, us (for there is no ‘us’ in ‘them’ there is only us). I love the ‘Program’ as well. No, I’m not violating the Traditions, just musing on the one-day-one-step-at-a-time journey of daily healing and transformation that occurs for us ragamuffins.
I learn so much…from us. I see me in all of them, even the ones I silently sneer at within my brain. Then I remember I am one with them (so not much room to talk).
Every day I am reminded of God’s goodness and that there is more power in Love & Forgiveness than in hate and judgment.
I am continually reminded in this journey towards God and healing the infinite difference between expectancy and expectation.
Expectancy leads to grace, openness, newness, excitement and opportunity. Expectation leads to resentment, tyranny, close-mindedness, and obligation. Expectancy is dynamic and leads to life. Expectation is static and leads to deadness.
I need recovery, I really do. I need to walk it and work it or I fall from grace and turn from God and burn my worlds to the ground.
But I hunger for more as well.
I hunger for God to rise gently in me with tenderness through the opaque truth of poetry.
I need Beauty…and the soft, rustled breathing of the holy fur ball nestled up under my chin…my Domini Canus, my dog of God who is a god among dogs. I need mountains within eye shot, stable majestic silhouettes reminding me of my speck-of-dustness-but-oh-so-lovedness.
I need kindness towards self and good food…to breathe more, and deeper with slowing motions of intentionality.
I need to remember that God is in the pain, the mundane, the profane and the profound. God is in the other, and in me, in fragility, and falling down, in giggles and graying hairs.
I am learning it is Good to cooperate with Grace and not run from nor deny it. Wrestling with Grace can be likened to ‘aarrrrggghh’ moments of removing sticky duct tape from your fingers as it teases you, playing from finger to finger before finally being wagged off wildly. But Grace comes…and there but for the Grace go I.
One step, two step, three step, four <Breathe!>, step, step, step…12 of them that take a lifetime to trek.
And like rain to dry earth, almost in an instant that took my entire life to happen, I go from parched to overflowing. And breathing becomes more natural, reconnecting me to holy spirit…wholly breath.
And I realize again and again that I need other wounded healers, cracked and lovely, rough and hewn on the edges of life…to bring God into my velveteen heart.
soulpatch.net 