May 24

INTEGRITY MONTH: DAY 24: “Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.” ― André Gide

Faithfulness is a great concept; one I did not know how to perform well for a lot of my life. To be faithful to anything means to not talk disparagingly about it, to not interfere in its greatest good, to not walk away when things are tough or frightening, and to remain steadfast in all times to that ideal, person, job or concept.

To remain faithful to what lives inside of me was not possible for a long time here. I could not comfortably own so much of myself, my attitudes, my behavior, my past and the shame I felt about all of it.
I had to begin, in the 12 steps, to walk away from clinging to those things. I had held on so tightly to that description of myself and my life. The story was deeply imbedded in my psyche, and it felt like it had to be surgically removed for me to move forward without the stories.

Under all of that lived a vibrant, happy, free spirited woman I have allowed myself to become. I am not ashamed of who and what I am any longer. This has been a long climb, with many slides back down into old ideas.

My focus has been, since day #1, on the recovery that I longed for and dreamt of. We all have these ideas in our hearts; but have no idea how to implement them. The sadness and longing we feel is not for relationship with someone else, it is for relationship with that part of us that personifies and resonates with Spirit.

We can call that God, or Allah, or Fred; it does not matter. Spirit, Higher Power, or Universal Power are the same thing. It all resides within US and we are longing for it from the moment we leave it, I believe. We seek that within us which is Wisdom, Love, Truth, Light, all of these things.

To be true to that is not culturally supported. Our culture speaks, instead, of money, property and prestige. It teaches us that something out HERE, in the material world, is what we need to be satisfied and to still that longing.

So, we gravitate to food, sex, money, work, drugs, technology, busy-ness, whatever it is that feeds that longing for even a minute.

This is why our social environment is so terribly broken. We are satisfied with what I once read: “a plastic Jesus on our dashboard.” We settle for cheeseburgers when our heart is screaming for giving and receiving real love from US!

We use drugs and alcohol so we can forget the longing for a minute. Then it comes back, and the knowledge that we settled, yet again, is killing us!

The 12 steps give us the ability to learn how to stop the insanity of “filling the gaping hole in our hearts” with what it truly needs…spiritual sustenance.

We must learn to be faithful to that space of longing. To feed it what really works, love and spiritual sustenance. There is no settling. We all know it to be true. We just whistle and buy a new car, a cheeseburger, smoke a joint…it does not matter how we feed it junk food. What matters is that we learn to be faithful, to US. It is the only kind that matters. Walk in love today my friends…Peace.