This is part of an ongoing series about the 12 Steps as applied to ideological attachment and political polarization. I reference this book by Rabbi Rami Shapiro.
Step 10: We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
Step 11: Through prayer and meditation we sought to improve our conscious contact with God.
At some point, I started combining steps in these posts because I was feeling so resistant to writing them. There is a certain dry, plodding quality to the 12 steps that I have always struggled with. It’s necessary— a path for those of us whose addiction to sunshine and rainbows and high-flying sensation leads us into delusion— but like anything , you get tired of it.
Today, however, I’m really struck by this particular step combo, because I think that maybe they should have been reversed. The first, step 10, Rami Shapiro calls “attending to the moment.” It’s paying attention to your actions and attitudes, noticing when you’re getting off course and rectifying that as soon as possible. The language of the step suggests frequent pausing and stopping to review in a very analytical way, and that isn’t a wrong way to approach this step.
But, as Shapiro suggests, it is possible to pay attention in the midst of things, not merely after the fact, and in so doing to adjust our behavior immediately, before we go completely off the rails. I know I’ve told this story before, but a moment I had in a coffee shop illustrates this. In 2017, shortly after Donald Trump had been inaugurated, I was planning to attend one of the many rallies and protests that were springing up. When the barista asked what my plans for the day were, I told him I was attending an anti-deportation protest. His whole demeanor shifted in an instant, from open and curious to hesitant and suspicious. I felt myself immediately tense up, preparing for battle as a million defiant responses raced through my mind.
As I opened my mouth, I heard a gentle voice urging me. Wait. Take a deep breath. Relax your shoulders and open your heart.
Instead of a rant against the evils of Trump or the Republicans, I told him about the people in my neighborhood, and that attending the protest was a way to show that I cared about them. As I shared this, calmly and happily, the barista’s face it up and his body relaxed. “Oh,” he said, “Carry on.”
If I’m really honest with myself now, I think I cared more about being seen as a kind person and identifying with the right kind of politics than I did about genuinely supporting the immigrants in my neighborhood. Attending a protest is easy. Actually getting to know people and participating in their lives is another thing entirely, and is done most authentically not out of some political or moral motivation that makes one feel virtuous, but out of a genuine desire for friendship and conviviality. Nevertheless, I was able to see what I needed to see in that coffee-shop moment, and a potential confrontation became a moment of mutual appreciation and connection.
That is what I think step 10 is ultimately about. Performing a daily review or periodic “moral inventory” can be useful. But it’s being able to see our thoughts and attitudes slide down a path that leads to the addictive or dysfunctional behavior and nip it in the bud, right then and there, that truly allows us to be free. And it’s step 11 that helps us get there.
There’s this meme I sometimes see floating around Facebook, usually shared by disaffected former Christians, that says something like “If I prayed for help in my darkest moment and I didn’t receive it, does that mean I’m doing prayer wrong?” The goal being to show that God obviously doesn’t exist, because he doesn’t answer prayers, and that religious people who insist he does are gaslighting everyone else.
But the truth is that yes, I think a lot of people— particularly those shaped by rigidly dogmatic notions of God or loosey-goosey moralistic therapeutic deism, which is generally what the formerly religious reach for as a pit stop on their way to atheism— are actually doing prayer wrong. The first group cultivates spiritual practice as a way of aligning themselves to a particular kind of groupthink, and the second generally eschews spiritual practices like prayer unless in extremis.
God is not bound by the axioms and paradigms humans create to manage our fear and anxiety, and neither is he a vending machine where you pop a prayer in and get a candy bar in return. He is the larger consciousness in which all others, humans and animals and spirits together, live and move and have our being. Answers to prayer so often come in the form of a small, subtle nudging that urges you to stop and open your senses to a different way of acting or perceiving. Subtle not because God doesn’t know how to communicate, but because we don’t know how to listen.
I love step 11 because it clearly illuminates exactly what prayer and meditation are about— improving our conscious daily contact with God. When we set aside regular time, not just to speak to God, but to quiet our minds and let go of all the noise— social media chatter, sensational news stories, office drama, and all the rest that regularly clouds our ability to hear the voice of God— we build a channel of two way communication that becomes stronger and clearer with regular practice. And it’s this that allows us to attend to the moment and interrupt our craziness before it causes problems.
There are a number of strategies that help us do this. Some form of meditation that quiets the mind, whether silent, like Vipassana or Centering Prayer, or rhythmically repetitive, like a mantra or hesychast practice, is invaluable. Even 5 minutes a day is better than nothing. And, although perhaps less necessary, I find familiarizing yourself with an oracular system that uses symbols to be profoundly useful. I use the Tarot, but Shapiro suggests the I Ching. If you become entirely dependent on any one system for hearing the voice of God, it can become a slide into another form of superstition or dogma. But as one of many tools in your toolkit, divinatory arts are supremely useful.
Yesterday, I was using the Tarot to ask the question, “What is blocking me from achieving [this thing I want]?” And the answer I got was that I needed to surrender, and when I asked what I needed to surrender to, the card I drew was the Ace of Cups. A free-flowing fountain of love.
I was incredibly annoyed. What is this dumb hippy bullshit?! I thundered (inwardly) in response. I want practical help, not some mystical blah blah blah about divine love! I was doing this via phone app while soaking in the bathtub and decided that maybe the environment was preventing me from hearing correctly. I resolved to do a proper Tarot session with real cards. I like to open these sessions by lighting a blue taper candle that sits in a brass candlestick, the old-fashioned kind for carrying at night, with a wide saucer to catch the dripping wax and and a ring to slip your finger through. The problem was I had just burnt my last candle down.
I headed to a store that I thought might have the kind of candles I was looking for, but they didn’t. I was getting agitated, because I really wanted to figure this question out and I couldn’t believe that the store only had tapers in white and green.
I headed to the big-box store across the street, and as I wandered the aisles, I thought about when I was young, how supermarkets always had tapers in a dozen different colors because people used them for dinner parties, just as my mother did, set out on a white table cloth with bone china. And the problem was, as I surveyed all the horrible, sloppy people around me in their weekend sweats, was that nobody valued beauty or formality any more, and they never threw proper dinner parties and that was why I couldn’t find my damn candles!
That was the moment that God slapped me upside the head. I realized what an absolute idiot and hypocrite I was, judging random people as somehow less than me. Particularly as I do not even own a white tablecloth or fine china and if I throw a dinner party, the plates and cups are often as not mismatched and some people might have to eat sitting on the floor.
The next thing that happened was that I felt an immediate opening of pure love and appreciation for all the people around me, for showing me the way home by just being themselves. That love colored everything around me, making even that utilitarian, aesthetically unappealing superstore with its harsh fluorescent lighting appear lit with a soft, sparkling glow. I felt as if I was made new, and that a whole new realm of possibilities had opened up before me.
It occurred to me that I was experiencing that fountain of love I had seen in the Ace of Cups. I remembered how much more easily my life flows and decisions become when I’m able to relax and open and trust that love to carry me through, and realized that I had come to this place not because I needed a blue candle, but because I need to be shocked into seeing.
We will fall asleep and forget what God looks and sounds like time and time again. It’s building that conscious contact that allows us to remember. I’m not saying that these moments of metanoia can’t happen without making it a regular habit, but in my experience, it makes them a whole lot easier.