Text: Psalm 1
For the past eleven weeks we have been learning from Alcoholics Anonymous and the Twelve Steps to recovery. The founders of AA, known among alcoholics as Bill W. and Dr. Bob, used many teachings from the Oxford Group, a conservative Christian movement founded in Oxford, England, that emphasized moral and social renewal through personal surrender to Christ. Of all the teachings of the Oxford Group, the most important was the saving power of prayer.
Today we deal with Step Eleven which talks about the power of prayer and meditation to transform our lives. Bill W. often said that neglecting Step Eleven was the greatest mistake an alcoholic could make. He went on to say:
"The other Steps can keep most of us sober and somehow functioning. But Step Eleven can keep us growing, if we try hard enough and work at it continually… If (someone) persists (with step Eleven), he will almost surely find more serenity, more tolerance, less fear, and less anger. He will acquire a quiet courage, the kind that doesn't strain him. He can look at so-called failure and success for what they really are. Problems and calamity will begin to mean instruction, instead of destruction. He will feel freer and saner… His sense of purpose and of direction will increase. His tensions and anxieties will commence to fade. His physical health is likely to improve. Wonderful and unaccountable things will start to happen."
Doesn't that make us want to have the benefits of Step Eleven in our lives as well? But before we get to Step Eleven, let me review the steps we have covered so far.
1) We admitted we were powerless over the effects of our separation from God and that our lives had become unmanageable.
2) We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3) We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.
4) We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5) We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6) We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7) We humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
8) We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9) We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10) We continued to take personal inventory and, when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
And now I turn to Step Eleven which says, "Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out."
I have been astounded every week at the depth that I have found in each of the Twelve Steps. Once again, I am amazed at this simple statement of the importance of prayer and meditation to recovery.
Every week I have tried to find connections in Scripture, and today I have chosen this passage from Psalm 1, primarily because of its emphasis on prayer and meditation. Verse 2 says, "but their delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law they meditate day and night."
This psalm is an introduction to all one hundred and fifty of the psalms. It begins by telling us something about the secret of life. "Happy are they…" begins this psalm.
This word "happy" calls to mind the Beatitudes from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Remember how it says, "Blessed" are the merciful, the meek and those who mourn. Jesus used the word "blessed" which is the same word that is used in Hebrew to begin Psalm 1. The word Jesus used also means "happy," and many modern translations use that word in the Beatitudes. Other meanings are "fortunate, "rich," or "prosperous."
Don't we all want this secret to a happy, meaningful, fulfilling life? The psalmist gives us that secret as does Jesus. In Psalm 1, he presents several paths of life, "Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers…" Happy are those who do not take the wrong path, but do take the right path. The path that we take determines how our life turns out.
The right path is described in verse 2, "Happy are those… (whose) delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law they meditate day and night." The verb which is translated here “meditate” literally means “to mumble,” such as one might do were one quietly reading the Scripture over and over to oneself aloud.
I like the imagery from Psalm 1 about the characteristics of the genuinely happy person. Verse 3 says "They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper."
When I let my mind picture a tree, I always see an open field with a spreading oak tree in the middle of it. What feelings come to mind with such a mental image? A tree speaks of stability, serenity, and strength. I think of those roots that grow deep and make the tree strong against the storms of life. I think of the dazzling blooming trees of our mountains in spring. Trees yield their fruit. It brings strength, serenity and calmness. That's what this step brings to us. Happy is the person who has prayer and meditation at the center of their lives.
I have been surprised when I discovered the prayers that are most common in Alcoholics Anonymous. I never would have expected that these addicted friends would center on the three best prayers ever written. A.A. is most associated with three prayers - the Lord's Prayer, the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi, and the Serenity Prayer. All of these are wonderful prayers that will sustain our spiritual lives.
When I recalled that the Twelve Steps emphasize "God as we understand him," I was surprised that most Alcoholics Anonymous meetings end with the Lord's Prayer. But then I noticed that the Lord's Prayer never mentions Christ. It does not end, "in Jesus name." In fact, it is a prayer that probably anyone of any religion would be completely comfortable praying. I had never thought of it as an ecumenical prayer, but it clearly is.
At the General Assembly in Kansas City in 2001, the Arkansas Regional Minister Barb Jones shared a devotion in which she talked about a time in seminary when things were going really badly for her family. She went to the dean, who happened to be an Episcopalian, shared her story and asked him to pray for her. He said, "Sure. Let's say the Lord's Prayer." And the two of them bowed their heads and recited the familiar prayer. After the Amen, Barb looked at the dean with a puzzled look as if to say, "Is that it?" She had expected him to pray specifically about the concerns she had just shared with him.
Then the dean said, "You don't get it, do you?" And Barb admitted that she didn't. The dean then explained his belief about the power of that particular prayer. He said, "In saying the Lord's Prayer we are saying the most powerful prayer known to humankind. That prayer has been prayed continuously since the days of the early church. People all around our world have prayed that same prayer day and night for two thousand years. When we pray it, we connect ourselves to all believers everywhere and in all time. We pull together the collective power of all those prayers." Barb said she left feeling that she had really been prayed for.
The second prayer is the prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi, that odd character devoted to poverty. He had been a rich young man, but gave it all up to follow Christ. He once stripped all his clothes off in the center square and said, "If these clothes were given to me by my father, I disown them all in order to follow only Jesus Christ." He became a radical mystic of the Catholic faith. He is the one who gave us this wonderful prayer.
I have mentioned before my recovering friend who sat down with me for several hours and talked about his experience of going through each of the Twelve Steps. When we got to Step Eleven, he said, "I have decided to use the prayer of St. Francis. All through the day, I repeat that prayer over to myself several times."
Listen again to this beautiful prayer:
"Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy. O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life."
My friend repeats this prayer over and over, and he says, "When I meditate on it, my life slows down." And once again he said to me, "This too is nothing to do with drinking. It's about living life, about being comfortable in my own skin."
Then he told me about a man named Jerry in his A.A. group who specializes in classes for beginners. Jerry is a house painter and not an educated man or wealthy. But he has an incredible sense of presence about him. The beginning students are glued to this incredible man.
Jerry tells about first meeting with his sponsor. The sponsor asked him, "What do you want?" Jerry answered something offhand, but the sponsor said, "No, what do you really want?" And Jerry replied, "I want my brain to stop!" His mind often raced in addictive thoughts which almost drove him crazy, and quite often drove him to drink. He wanted his mind to stop.
Jerry is now a man whose mind has stopped because of many hours spent in prayer and meditation. Somewhere I read about aspiring to have a "mind like water." When we have a mind like calm water on a lake, then we can deal with the difficulties of life. When our mind is like water, then we can deal with the stresses that come our way.
How do we get this mind that slows down, a mind like water? Step Eleven tells us it is through prayer and meditation.
The prayer most associated with the recovery movement is the Serenity Prayer. The thing that astounds me the most about this prayer is that it was not written by some recovering alcoholic somewhere. This is a prayer written by one of the most renown scholars of theology of the last century. It was written by Reinhold Niebuhr, a pastor and later professor of theology at Union Theological Seminary. But even he admitted that the ideas at the heart of the prayer had been floating around for a long, long time.
The story is told that he stopped at a café on his way to preach at church. And he wrote out his morning prayer on the back of a napkin. After he said the prayer in church, someone came forward and told him how much they liked his prayer. Reinhold Niebuhr gave that person the napkin on which he had written the prayer.
When Bill W. and the early founders of A.A. first read the prayer, he said, "Never had we seen so much A.A. in so few words." And with amazing speed, the Serenity Prayer became a vital part of the alcoholic's prayer life. It could well be true that none of us would have ever heard this prayer had it not been for our recovering friends.
Once again, I find that the recovery movement has pointed me to great wisdom. In fact, the Serenity Prayer is a wonderful treasure. It contains not only "so much A.A.," but so much wisdom for all of our lives. What a great gift to all of us!
The long version of the Serenity Prayer says:
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that you will make all things right if I surrender to your will; so that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with you forever in the next. Amen."
Maya Angelou has a chapter in her recent book on the subject of "complaining." Angelou says that when "whiners" would come into her grandmother's store in Arkansas, she would go through a routine that would begin by quietly beckoning Maya to come closer. Then she would bait the "whiner" customer with "How are you doing today, Brother Thomas?" As the complaining gushed forth she would nod or make eye contact with her granddaughter to make sure Maya heard what was being said.
As soon as the "whiner" left, her grandmother would ask her to stand in front of her.
"And then she would say the same thing she had said at least a thousand times, it seemed to me. 'Sister, did you hear what Brother So-and-So or Sister-Much-to-Do complained about? You heard that!' And I would nod. Mamma would continue, 'Sister, there are people who went to sleep all over the world last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake up again. Sister, those who expected to rise did not .... And those dead folks would give anything, anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of that plowing that person was grumbling about. So you watch yourself about complaining, Sister. What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.'" (Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now (NewYork: Random House, 1993), 85-87.)
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."