A Daily Reprieve

 "We especially ask for freedom from self-will, and are careful to make no request for ourselves only.  We may ask for ourselves, however, if others will be helped.  We are careful never to pray for our own selfish ends."

" 'Thy will (not mine) be done.'  We can exercise our willpower along this line all we wish.  It is the proper use of the willpower."

This idea of my will versus the will of my higher power and the proper use of willpower is rife in the A.A. literature.  I confuse what I want a lot with what's good for me or right in the present circumstances.

"Here we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision.  We relax and take it easy.  We don't struggle.  We are often surprised how the right answers come after we have tried this for a while."

"It is easy to let up on the spiritual program and rest on our laurels.  We are headed for trouble if we do, for alcohol is a subtle foe.  We are not cured of alcoholism.  What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition."

"In meditation we ask God what we should do about each specific matter.  The right answer will come, if we want it."

One enduring legend in human history is of the Fountain of Youth.  There are mentions of this implausible place in literature dating to the time before Christ.  People actually went out and looked for it, led by the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon, who was actually chartered to find the fountain, believed to be on a place called Bimini.  None of his writings ever mentioned it so we can surmise he was too smart to waste a lot of time trying to find such a ridiculous place.

Another one is alchemy - turning a base metal into gold.  This was widely investigated in the scientific community for hundreds of years and the results of the research carefully guarded.  Think of it - if you could turn lead into gold then right quickly you'd have boatloads of gold so it would lose it's value immediately.  It would become worthless.  Still, each society thought if only they could find the answer they'd be able to mine gold and thumb their noses at everyone else.  They would become unimaginably rich.  Only them.

I also am intrigued by how the eventual, inevitable downfall of many powerful societies has come about because they overextended their reach.  You'd think that once you controlled half the world - like Spain once did and the Romans and the mighty English - that you'd be satisfied.  If Germany had left Russia alone in WWII then they might still be in control of all of Western Europe.  But no . . . always reaching for more, more, more.  It reminds me of a billionaire bitching about taxes.  It's clearly not about the money - it's about the status.  Clearly no one can spend five billion dollars.  They want to get to ten billion because there's some billionaire in Texas who has seven.  I think most of us believe that once we had an unimaginably large fortune that we'd just start giving it away.  I bet most of us wouldn't.  I bet I wouldn't be satisfied with one Ferrari - I'd want a whole garage full of Ferraris.  I'd build a dedicated structure to house all of my Ferraris.  My desire to help the less fortunate would go right out the window.

These thoughts came up after I wrote down the italicized quotes from The Big Book and the 12&12 - passages I used when I led a meeting a few days ago.  It makes me ponder how much of my motivation is to get what I want and avoid what is painful.  I think that's very human but not very spiritual.

" . . . a daily reprieve based on the maintenance of our spiritual condition . . . "

Boy, it doesn't get any clearer than that.