Maxine

Tallahassee, Florida

Betsie 

Mt Pleasant, SC, USA

Explore the healing power of grace and meditation to break old habits and find spiritual transformation.

English

To find meditation in one’s life is a grace. It’s some- thing unexpected, and finding in an unexpected moment, in an unexpected way, something that changes the world for you.

What do I mean by grace? A special energy of honesty and truth and goodness and healing.

Grace At Work

Hi everyone, I'm Hamish and welcome to another reflection from the WCCM Young Channel. Here we share teachings from John Mayne, Lawrence Freeman, and the rest of the Christian contemplative tradition. Over the next 10 weeks I'm going to read chapters from Grace at Work, The Healing Power of Meditation, a series of talks given by Lawrence Freeman in 2019. The first chapter is called Grace at Work and here Lawrence Freeman talks about the 12-step program for recovering from addiction developed by Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA, back in the 1930s. The 11th step of the 12-step process calls us, through prayer and meditation, to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of his will to us and the power to carry that out. But first, a small quote from the beginning of the series of talks. If anything expresses the nature of God, it is this story of the prodigal son. There is no resentment, no punishment, no condemnation at all, only the joy. If we accept this understanding of God that we see in the story, if this is our image of God, this is how we can be open to God. Meditation is about finding this God within ourselves in an indissoluble union with us because this love of God cannot reject us. Chapter 1. Grace at Work. To find meditation in one's life is a grace. It's something unexpected and finding in an unexpected moment, in an unexpected way, something that changes the world for you. It has been a real grace for me to come into contact with the 12-step program. I think this is the most important spiritual movement of the last century. Through the meditation community that's grown up in my community, through the meditation community that's grown up over the last 30 years, I've come to meet some wonderful recovering alcoholics who have found in meditation a way of putting the 11th step into practice and really understanding what that means. I've always felt that in the right moment in their life, the alcoholic understands the meaning of meditation better than most people. It's a hard one, understanding, to hit bottom maybe more than once to get to that point, but with it comes an insight. It can be a destructive disease, it can be a fatal disease, it can destroy your life, destroy your relationship, but it also has the possibility of leading to a remarkable breakthrough. I suppose what the whole Alcoholics Anonymous or AA movement, the fellowship, is all about is maximizing the potential of this disease, of this addiction, to lead to that enlightenment. There's a potential in it. The program is a remarkable construction that has helped people to use that potentially destructive set of circumstances in their life and potentially destructive disease to lead to a spiritual growth, actually to lead to a deep integration and fullness of life. The times I've been to AA groups, the word I would use is grace, the feeling of grace at work. So what do I mean by grace? A special kind of honesty and truth and goodness and healing. To me it is a kind of Eucharist, it's a kind of communion in that spirit which is uplifting. What I've always found at these meetings is that there's no small talk, there's friendliness and intimacy, honesty, but the normal divisions or barriers or suspicions that we have about each other and the social filters that we communicate through normally are not there. By being there they are admitting and confessing and opening to themselves and to others. The fact that has been no small talk means that people can get down to important issues. People in these groups are telling my story and as they tell my story I think they are sharing a mystery. My story, mystery. There's only one letter between the two and they're telling my story as if they are discovering the mystery and each time they tell it they are adding something to it or they are understanding it more deeply. What is the meaning of my story? What is the mystery of my story? Now that sounds a little egocentric and I think there is quite a lot of egocentricity in the programme. By the very nature of it there has to be, there has to be a concentration on self. I don't think that it is actually egocentricity. I think it is more a transformation of the ego, it's a healing of the ego, but there's a lot of ego there. It's me, isn't it? There is nothing wrong with that provided there is a transformation going on. There's nothing worse than getting stuck in oneself and that of course is exactly what addiction is. Getting stuck, getting into a repetitive cycle and you end up hating yourself. You just hear your own voice and you get stuck in your own patterns of behaviour. So telling my story opens one to a mystery that is mysterious. It's something that I cannot put my finger on. I cannot explain fully, rationally. I can experience it but I can't control it even. What I'd like to do is share with you an understanding of meditation that might just resonate with you. Really the most important way to learn about meditation is to just do it, practice it together. There is a group dynamic to meditation, just as there is in recovery from addiction. The two are very interestingly comparable or complementary, actually I think. In a 12-step program one is unlearning a habit, a deeply ingrained physically and chemically conditioned habit with very complicated and strong psychological and physiological forms and patterns. So one is breaking out of that, breaking a habit. In learning meditation one is learning to put on a good habit. There are difficulties on both sides. There are different kinds of difficulties, giving up drinking or taking up meditation. Both are difficult, both require strength, more strength than we have just in our own ego resources. So we have to open up to a higher power and we have to open to community, we have to open to others. You call it fellowship. In the meditation world I would call it community. Meditation seems to me to be in that sense a grace, something that is a gift, something that is genuinely free. It doesn't cost anything and there is no bargaining about meditation. To find meditation in one's life is a grace, it's something unexpected and finding in an unexpected moment, in an unexpected way, something that might just change the world for you. It changes patterns that we for some reason or another, because of our own mistakes or because of bad luck or a combination of the two, have gotten into. It breaks these patterns. Thank you for listening to the first chapter of Grace at Work, the Healing Power of Meditation by Lawrence Freeman. My name is Hamish and I look forward to seeing you next time on the audio channel. Peace be with you all.