Daily Reprieve

I kept trying to release her, to diminish her impact on Me.  But I fell for her.  I felt love again, and this caused me to tremble to My very core.  How could I let this happen in this hellish world?  I had been free of this fairytale.  No longer.

I am mortal.  Death is certain, the hereafter is speculation.  But I discovered that My slave had pulled herself up, and the web of the universe honored her as she refused to be called a victim.  She was no one’s victim.  She had been hurt, but so what.

And now it is so clear to me.  Gratitude for what we have is the ultimate FUCK YOU to our mortality.  Choosing to announce the beauty and accomplishments of our lives rather than being weighted down by our slips and flaws was powerful.

I have two of the most beautiful and intelligent children on the face of this planet and we love each other.  FUCK You death.  I have a Father who loves me, loves being around me and all my idiosyncrasies.  FUCK You judgment of Perfection!  I have recovery and blood family who embrace me as their own.  FUCK You self imposed prison of isolation.  I am respected in my uniform and service of this great country and I can still run despite the pain of being over 40.  FUCK you aging bones!  And recovery has given me a Higher Power, a child’s reason to believe in magic once more.  The saving heresies of this program:

– Choosing a God of my understanding.  Thank-you Ebby Thatcher.

– Replacing moralistic sin concept with realistic disease concept, that promotes tolerance and mercy over judgment.  Thank-you Dr. Silkworth.

– The need for a vital spiritual experience, a true goal and empowerment for my life.  Thank-you Dr. Jung and Rolland Hazard.

– The connective empowerment of helping each other. We are all in this boat together. If there is a god, savior, angels, demons, devils…let them duke it out. We have take care of each other.  Thank-you Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob.

The title of chapter four in the Big Book is “We Agnostics.” Those who had come to believe in a power greater than themselves still pronounced themselves agnostic.

Agnostos Theos ~ The Unknown God.

– From Wikpedia, “According to a story told by Diogenes Laërtius, Athens was once in the grips of a plague and desperate to appease the gods with the appropriate sacrifices. Thus Epimenides gathered a flock of sheep to the Areopagus and released them. The sheep roamed about Athens and the surrounding hills. On Epimenides’ suggestion wherever a sheep stopped and lay down a sacrifice was made to the local god of that place. Many of the gardens and buildings of Athens were indeed associated with a specific god or goddess and so the appropriate altar was constructed and the sacrifice was made. However, at least one, if not several sheep lead the Athenians to a location that had no god associated with it. Thus an altar was built there without a god’s name inscribed upon it.”

There is a place in the Christian New Testament where Paul recognized the Unknown God as the true expression of god. In Chapter 17 of the Acts of the Apostles, he pronounces, “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. ²³For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. ²⁴The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. ²⁵And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. ²⁶From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. ²⁷God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ ²⁹“Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill. ³⁰In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. ³¹For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead”

How much of the Hebrew temples and images had been the work of gold and silver and stone? Paul’s people killed in the name of their religion as did Paul himself. Is this the ignorance that is to be overlooked, and ultimately judged?  Since it is answered with resurrection, was the killing condemned?  Paul, a devoted Jew now seeking to generalize the faith among the non-Jewish population?  Paul was a heretic among his own people in order to be true to the Unknown God.

The Gathering of the Unknown God

No More Middle Men!

Ezekiel 34:15- I will feed My sheep and I will cause them to lie down, says the Lord God. I will seek that which was lost and bring back that which has strayed, and I will bandage the hurt and the crippled and will strengthen the weak and the sick, but I will destroy the fat and the strong [who have become hardhearted and perverse]; I will feed them with judgment and punishment. And as for you, O My flock, thus says the Lord God: Behold, I judge between sheep and sheep, between the rams and the great he-goats [the malicious and the tyrants of the pasture]. Is it too little for you that you feed on the best pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? And to have drunk of the waters clarified by subsiding, but you must foul the rest of the water with your feet?

And My flock, must they feed on what your feet have trodden and drink what your feet have fouled? Therefore thus says the Lord God to them: Behold, I, I Myself, will judge between fat sheep and impoverished sheep, or fat goats and lean goats. Because you push with side and with shoulder and thrust with your horns all those that have become weak and diseased, till you have scattered them abroad, therefore will I rescue My flock, and they shall no more be a prey; and I will judge between sheep and sheep. And I will raise up over them one Shepherd and He shall feed them, even My Servant David; He shall feed them and He shall be their Shepherd. And I the Lord will be their God and My Servant David a Prince among them; I the Lord have spoken it. And I will confirm with them a covenant of peace and will cause the evil beasts to cease out of the land, and [My people] shall dwell safely in the wilderness, desert, or pastureland and sleep [confidently] in the woods. And I will make them and the places round about My hill a blessing, and I will cause the showers to come down in their season; there shall be showers of blessing [of good insured by God’s favor]. And the tree of the field shall yield its fruit and the earth shall yield its increase; and [My people] shall be secure in their land, and they shall be confident and know (understand and realize) that I am the Lord, when I have broken the bars of their yoke and have delivered them out of the hand of those who made slaves of them.

I personally have decided that I shall walk this path of Not-Knowing:

1. My knowledge is finite, my resources are finite, and my life span here is limited. I will experience not- knowing, powerlessness, and death while I exist here. And that is alright with me.  I accept life on life’s terms.

2. In order for me to walk freely in any area, I must suspend disbelief to follow that path.

3. The “gods” are jealous of our ability to face mortality, to know that this intense experience is once in a life time. The new testament of the Christians say that their angels long to look into these things.  We are a universal curiosity. In the Rise of the Lycans, Underworld movie, the powerful black human valued being a courageous mortal over being an enslaved beast with eternal life.  It was a mortal who confronted the immortal Victor at the cost of his own life.  Who then expessed the greater power?  As Captain Kirk in Star Trek used to say, the unpredictability of humans is their greatest strength.  We are able to fill in the unknown of the universe with the passion of our limited existance.

4. The very existence of our self-awareness is a testimony to a spiritual instinct. And this powerful instinct is hindered only by self isolating enthronement.

5. Word is perfect expression of our own fulfilled personal mythology.  This is the law written in our hearts.  This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

6. When we are united with this unknown God, it is an extremely romantic, erotic connection; one that all other erotic connections reflect.

7. Religion is pretended knowing.  We have to learn to be alright with not-knowing.  This frees us to live, connect, release.

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This entry was posted on February 7, 2009 at 12:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Addiction, Alcoholism, Journal, Life, Personal, Recovery, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.