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Although not a member, I spent nearly five decades attempting to follow the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous® after learning about its offered path. Following the Twelve Steps provided me with precisely the kind of life support I needed. However, doing so required that I face a rather insurmountable obstacle. The Twelve Step process required me to seek conscious contact with God as I understood Him. Try as I might, such a spiritual connection never emerged during my first fifteen years working the Program. Regardless of the route taken to secure a higher power, not once did God reveal Him/Herself to me.
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The great philosopher, Dante Alighieri, opened his epic poem Inferno with a line that would eventually haunt me: “In the middle of the journey of life, I found myself in a dark wood... for the straightforward path had been lost.”That description held a powerful resonance as I approached the age of fifty, thanks to having become adrift in a similar wilderness. Spiritual light of any kind remained not only illusive but out of my reach.
Lesson 1
As the Series Preview mentioned, the spiritual formula I attempted to harness in early adulthood was theAlcoholics Anonymous®Twelve Step approach: I must seek conscious contact with a higher power wherever I might find Him/Her. Over and over, I trieddialing God’s number but all I would hear in response was the phone’s perpetual ring. Never did I experience the presenceof another voicenor was there any sign of an incoming call.
Lesson 2
Necessity is the mother of invention. That formula aptly describes how my search for Grace began. By the time I turned fifty, I had perfected the artform of faceplants. My journey to that point had been a series of avoidable accidents. Rather than staying in the center of life’s road, I ran my personal vehicle into one ditch after another.Many of those wrecks were barely survivable.
Lesson 3
Back in the early 2000’s, I hadn’t contributed much to my writer’s basket of spiritual insights. Nevertheless, even then I felt an increasingly powerful compulsion to understand and articulate what my redefined spiritual identity might look like. I needed a baseline, a set of parameters to follow in my search for Grace. As usual, I found my answers through banging away on my laptop.
Lesson 4
A few years ago, my friend John, referred to in the Series Preview, provided me with an update to his autobiographical notes, a volume two of sorts. It included many valuable insights he gained during his years as an educational filmmaker. I was especially delighted to read about his experiences writing and directing nine episodes for an acclaimed PBS series titled, The Examined Life. The production’s goal was to explore the nature and evolution of human philosophy. The series included an impressive roster of contemporary philosophers who sat down with John for extended interviews.
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