Step 5: A Beautiful Baring

As we enter this Mother’s Day month of May and celebrate the Divine Feminine around and (yes, brothers) within us, I’m mindful of a “chat” in which my wife emphatically advocated for her more “circular” and “cyclical” type of thinking and processing, as contrasted with my more (well, let’s be honest, my completely) linear style. So, just as in our sacred council circles – where we in Illuman endeavor to mirror the more relational, vulnerable and wholistic stance (sustained by our sisters of the species during humanity’s evolutionary “his(hers)tory”) – likewise in Step 5 of recovery from specific addictions to various substances and behaviors (and our general addiction to the delusion of control over reality) do we now sit down – trinitarian-style: us, our Higher Power and a trusted friend – to share fully and frankly “our wrongs.” And to do so in a circular/cyclical, outpouring/inpouring of spiritual mutuality that helps us release the hold these flaws have had on us: “Withholding nothing, we are delighted. We can look the world in the eye. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease. Our fears fall from us.” (AA,  p.75).

As Richard Rohr suggests regarding these fruits borne from the communal process of this step: “the healing was the baring – and the bearing – of the truth publicly” (Breathing Underwater, p.40). But before those “fears fall,” we have to address head-on the most cunning, baffling and powerful of “our wrongs”: that is, our lies. Especially those lies to ourself dressed as denial. As Rami Shapiro puts it, “Step 5 is all about ending the lie. It is a difficult thing to do, not because we don’t know we are lying, but because we don’t know what will happen when we stop lying” (Recovery – The Sacred Art, p.74). 

But held in the circular embrace of this step – just as we sit shoulder-to-shoulder with brothers baring/bearing ourselves in council – we find the courage to stop, stop our lying and denying, by entering the circle of what Richard calls “the economy of grace,” where God loves us “in spite of ourselves in the very places where we cannot or will not or dare not love ourselves … God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change” (BU, p41). And speaking from personal experience, that grace could never be felt by just reading over my Step 4 list (of character defects/wrongs/lifetime-of-lies) alone, by and to myself. It had to be done in the presence of my sponsor, a true anam cara/soul friend, who that day was presencing the loving presence of God’s perennially precious present: Of Grace. To us … Her beloved sons and daughters! This grace, as Gerald May relays, is “an outpouring, a boundless burning offering of God’s self to us, suffering with us, overflowing with tenderness.” (Addiction and Grace, p.118).

Thus, with tender, grace-filled, feminine fortitude, we gather and together walk with, and through, this shared suffering. As Kurtz and Ketcham crystalize: “12 Step groups are founded on a different truth: Human beings connect with each other most healingly, most healthily, not on the basis of common strengths, but in the very reality of their shared weaknesses. Among those who accept their imperfection, there seems to be a special sense of likeness or oneness in their very mutual flawedness.” (The Spirituality of Imperfection, p.198) Next month: Becoming entirely ready to let these “flaws” go!