AA MEDALLION AT THREE YEARS" SOBRIETY
NOTE: Here is my blog for Good Friday, so serious, so spiritual,so UNLIKE the real me...while all about in the
blog world tonight is frivolity, and bawdiness:
Click here and see Pammie's latest...oh well, she lives in Texas!
TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE:
GOOD FRIDAY
This Good Friday at 3 PM, I am to play violin solos, sans accompaniment (means no organ, piano, voices, or other instruments). It is for the "Adoration of the Cross" time, which can last anywhere from a half hour to one hour, depending on number of people attending.
So, again, since I thoroughly enjoy playing my violin, the age-old argument rages on in my head. I don't care what anyone says about "How nice, that you play for our meditation, etc., etc." Nor does it phase me that the priests all tell me how much my music adds to the parish community and its services. My Pride (yep, I have that also, plenty!) just does not even "go there".
It is that I feel I should be praying, not doing. When in fact, if I think it through, doing IS praying, especially when in the company of a correct motive.
Isn't this akin to our wonderful AA Program? I cannot simply sit there in AA meetings morning after morning, listening and maybe 'sharing' (still hate that word), maybe sharing what I consider to be some witty tidbit which I heard someone utter many moons ago.
This "three-legged" Program of ours is about Unity (of which most of us know little), Recovery (which we work for the most part, in a private manner, with a sponsor) and SERVICE.
Service. Aha! There it is! That means I'm DOING stuff; cleaning ashtrays, mopping floors, painting the clubhouse rest rooms, setting up, tearing down, chairing meetings, doing actual Twelfth Step work, sponsoring, attending group business meetings, serving as a trusted elected person, and God knows what else!
Service is my guarantee of a better, happier, soberer, more fully lived, recovered (ing, whatever) life. Therein I find that Peace which surpasses all understanding. This is how I stay sober and show others (by example, and by training) how to live it by doing it.
When I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, I thought it was a totally giving organization...giving to me! However, a few years later I found it was ME giving to IT that helped me to grow spiritually, and grow in that social grace, to get along with others.
My life is divided into two parts, before and after AA. Before, my first 40 years I can truly describe as dying embers. Since then, my description of this new life, the second half of my lifetime, can only be looked at as a BURNING FLAME! And that burning flame is LOVE!
In LOVE and service,
Sincerely.
Steve E.
Note: "Burning Flame is Love"--words taken from a Kahlil Gibran poem.
