Improving conscious contact with God…and yourself
Step 11: We 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.
Last week we talked about the importance of viewing recovery as a process without end. We commit to a process that we never stop committing to. It’s an ongoing refining process. Step 11 hints at something similar: we try to inch closer and closer to contact with our higher power (God of our understanding, what have you). Specifically we’re told that improving conscious contact is the product of prayer and meditation. This is undoubtedly true. I’m also nearly certain it’s an incomplete list…if we’re talking about how one gets closer to God.
I mean…I suppose I should try to make a list…I’m going to withhold a few things though because I will be coming back to this topic next week. But…wonder and awe are things that come to mind. Stereotypically we think of getting in touch with wonder and awe through nature. I’m sure there are other ways. Human relationships are themselves another way to engage and deepen our relationship with God (I’ll say more on this next week). Time for reflection, time for solitude and silence. Time with scripture or other spiritual writing. These kinds of spiritual disciplines surely make a contribution.
Are there other things? Sure, of course. Make your own list! Improving conscious contact with God can be a highly personal process, if you want it to be. If you’re formally working the steps with a sponsor you may hear something different but, for our purposes, we can be flexible and expand some definitions.
Step 11 then tells us exactly what to pray for: knowledge of God’s will and the power to carry it out. I can’t imagine that it’s important that we limit ourselves to this kind of prayer, but it’s an important type of prayer. And it gets pretty close to these verses in Proverbs.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart;
don’t rely on your own intelligence.
Know him in all your paths,
and he will keep your ways straight.
~ Proverbs 3:5-6, CEB
We’ve got this idea here about trusting in God’s wisdom and trying to follow the path he lays out before you. Same kind of idea to praying for knowledge of his will and the power to carry it out.
Now-let me throw a wrench in the works- I personally think it’s important to learn to trust your own wisdom and your own gut and I believe God can work through these impulses that we have. It seems as if these verses encourage us to be skeptical of ourselves, but I don’t think that’s exactly what they’re suggesting. I believe we can find a way to look at this passage that teaches us both to place our trust in the Lord while simultaneously learning to trust ourselves: and that is through using our spiritual disciplines to make sure that we’re formed.
When I say formed, I mean grounding ourselves in God’s wisdom such that it becomes intuitive, becomes integral to who we are. Using spiritual disciplines to ground ourselves in the wisdom of God increases our ability to trust ourselves and our instincts as God begins to give us more and more godly wisdom of our own.
Conscious contact creates a kind of unity between God’s way of seeing and our way of seeing. Our “old” way quiets down as the “new” way ramps up.
For my part, I don’t care what you do so long as you find a practice that feels sustaining and life-giving (and not like torture). Something you can do habitually over time and continue to trust the process as it slowly unfolds.
So, I’ll close with a question…what spiritual disciplines have you practiced that you find life-giving and sustaining?
