"If you are willing to bear serenely the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be ...(for Jesus) a pleasant place of shelter".
- Collected letters of St Therese of Lisieux, translated by F. J. Sheed.
The trial of being displeasing to ourselves - this is the pain we all feel when we see ourselves and our fallen state. It's integral to the Twelve Steps and to the Work. It is a real pain, and it bites like no other. James Joyce's phrase - "agenbite of inwit" - is an accurate description of how we feel when our conscience, which literally means "seeing all together", shows us how we are. It bites us again and again until we accept our pettinesses, our weaknesses, our inconsistencies and much, much more; and we must suffer the sight of all this without running away from it, without trying to justify ourselves, and without judging and condemning ourselves, either.
St Therese offered everything to God, including her own "littleness". Here is the origin of the name given to her spiritual path, "The Way of Spiritual Childhood". By this she did not mean being naive or childish. She was talking of the way children with loving parents will run to them and confide their faults, and how, strengthened by our faith, we as adults can also confess our faults and accept our own "littleness". The saint was increasingly aware, as she matured in her convent community, of her own weaknesses; "her sinfulness, her tendencies to be self-righteous and judgmental, and to show a lack of full charity to her sisters" (Walking the Little Way of Therese of Lisieux, by Joseph F. Schmidt).
In working the Steps, we first catch a glimpse of our littleness when we admit in Step One that our lives have truly become unmanageable. We give up our previous ideas, that we are perfectly all right, that we are doing well in every respect, that each alcoholic binge is just an unfortunate and rare mishap, and admit that we've lost the plot. Our drinking has taken control of us, rather than the other way round, and every part of our life is a mess. We must see this, really see it and accept the truth of it.
Wisely, the Steps immediately go on to encourage the alcoholic to have faith in a Higher Power, a "God of their understanding," and then to willingly submit to the loving guidance of that God. By the time Step Four is reached, and the alcoholic is asked to make a fearless and searching moral inventory of his life, he has at least begun to trust that he is not alone in his distress, that he has the love of his God and the fellowship of an understanding AA group to turn to when he needs them.
But the inventory itself must be written and confessed, eventually to God and to one other person, usually a sponsor from the AA program, who's been there and done it all and who will completely understand the alcoholic's situation. As a Catholic, I chose to make my own Step Five (the "confessional") to a Jesuit priest, who was also a member of the program. His wisdom, honesty and compassion helped me through this difficult task, and I'm forever grateful to him for that.
However understanding our sponsor or chosen confessor may be, however, we have to bear the pain of looking unflinchingly at ourselves, and this can never be easy. AA members continue with this practice throughout their lives; it is vitally important for their sobriety. A daily inventory is made, either with "spot checks" on their spiritual state throughout the day, or, if they prefer, a final, more thorough spiritual check at the end of the day. Alcoholics are advised to continually check themselves for feelings of fear, worry or anger, so that such dangerous states are not allowed to fester.
In the Work, we are told from the very beginning of the need to observe ourselves. Not only do we look at our actions, we also become of our thoughts and feelings, our physical state, and our posture as we take "snapshots" of ourselves during the day. All centres must be observed so that we get a complete picture of how we are, because unless we are thorough and honest with ourselves we will never make any spiritual progress at all but will keep repeating the same mistakes over and over.
At the same time, the Work and Twelve Step programmes both insist that our observations must not be allowed to drift into what AA calls "morbid reflection", and what the Work points out as a negative emotion: the constant return to a state of remorse, without any attempt to change. If an alcoholic does this, she may be in danger of becoming seriously depressed, and this in turn could lead to a relapse. It is to be prevented at all costs, and a wise sponsor will be able to spot whether this is happening and if necessary draw the sponsee's attention to it.
In the Work, we don't dwell on our negativity. We don't identify with it: it is no more the "real" us than are any of our negative emotions. We see it, let go of it and make a fresh start at once.
As we go deeper and deeper into the Work, we discover that we are not at all the people we once thought we were. Our once-buried conscience gradually begins to speak to us without words, bringing its light to situations and inner states we had never suspected were present. Thus, we may see that we are not at all the kind, gentle, courteous driver we had believed - we may not have shouted at anyone, true, but what about the quiet fuming and sighing when we are caught in a traffic jam? Or our angry thoughts when the way is blocked by a really stupid person? What's wrong with them - don't they know who we are? And so on. We may find our attention drawn to these thoughts by changes in our physical state, such as increased heartbeat and muscular tension; or perhaps we are suddenly aware of feeling uneasy. When this happens, we can see ourselves, and disidentify.
Throughout our lives, we have all been prevented from seeing the full reality of our being by something which Gurdjieff called "buffers", and which Charles Tart, the psychotherapist and writer on the Work, calls "defence mechanisms". Other therapists refer to them as reaction formations, or blocking mechanisms. Whatever their name, we all have them. They stop us from seeing our multiple inner contradictions, and that's necessary for our survival, because if we saw ourselves all at once, in all our contradictory, inconsistent states, we would go mad.
Their removal is therefore very gradual and happens at a time when we are prepared to suffer the pain of seeing ourselves. As St Paul writes in II Corinthians, "For godly sorrow worketh repentance unto salvation, a repentance which bringeth no regret: but the sorrow of the world worketh death. For behold, this self-same thing, that ye were made sorry after a godly sort, what earnest care it wrought in you, yea, what clearing of yourselves .." (verses 8-11).
This "clearing of ourselves" is exactly what we need, in the Work. It is a form of self-remembering. It brings us close to Real I. St Paul is pointing out that when we suffer because we have behaved mechanically, this can lead to repentance, a word which literally means "thinking again". In the Work we are encouraged to repent, not in the sense of wringing our hands and bewailing our sins, but meaning that we look afresh at what we are like so that we may become more conscious as a result.
In previous posts I wrote about mechanical suffering, which we must sacrifice to make progress in the Work, and the sort of suffering which is brought about by events in the world, over which we are powerless and which we must simply accept. But this third type of suffering, that of seeing ourselves as we truly are, painful as it is, can bring us real insight and new understanding.
Of course, we must make these observations every day, but if we persevere we will find that the light works very gently and very compassionately, pointing things out that we need to see, but never condemning, never judging, never criticizing. If any of those judgmental "I's" creep into our observations, we detach from them immediately and let them go. We take the feeling of "I" out of them. Such "I's" will put a stop to any sort of understanding if we let them, and that is why Jesus tells us not to judge, because if we do, we ourselves will be judged, and there will then be no escape from our suffering.
In the Acts of John, one of the gnostic gospels, Jesus tells his disciples, "If thou hadst known how to suffer, thou wouldest have been able not to suffer. Learn thou to suffer, and thou shalt be able not to suffer".
And much of the Work is about learning how to suffer, so that we may be able not to suffer, as Jesus says.
Each day is a new start in our spiritual journey. It is a fresh opportunity for insight and growth.
I'll end with an insight from Dr. Nicoll, who says, in Volume Five of his Psychological Commentaries, that in the Work, "state is place". In other words, when we are in a particular psychological state, we are in a definite place in ourselves. Different places in the brain are concerned with different thoughts, activities and emotions. Our state at any moment is due to the place we are in.
He goes on to say, "There are many dangerous places in the psychological city of yourself. It is necessary to study them by prolonged Self-Observation, and try to become increasingly conscious of the roads that lead to them, and why you go down them. This is intelligent observation."
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