The Promise of Spiritual Awakening
We are promised a spiritual awakening.
This week, I will dwell on that two-word promise.
We can discern what awakening means by considering what it is not. When I am awakened, I don’t discover something new. An awakening is the stirring of something within me which is dormant.
When I awaken in the morning, I awaken my consciousness, which was dormant while sleeping. When we practice the Steps of AA, we awaken a dormant aspect of ourselves, a spiritual aspect.
Whether consciousness in the morning or spirit with the Steps, that which is awakened is already within us. It is not something new.
And wakefulness is not on or off; it is graduated. In the morning, I progress from barely awake to partially awake, then almost awake, and fully awake. And a spiritual awakening is similar.
But what is the spiritual that is awakened?
As with awakening, we can begin to see what spiritual is by considering what it is not. Spiritual is not physical, emotional, or mental; spiritual is that part of the human psyche left over after these three. It is a fourth element of human character.
But the meaning of spiritual is more than a list of things it is not. Let me share my experience of spirituality, the remainder left over after physical, emotional and mental.
At this point in my journey, spiritual is a sense of the divine. And this sense has changed in my sober journey. God, as I have understood Him, is different today than before. God has not changed, but my understooding of Him has changed. And the changes continue today.
There was a time when I thought of God as the white-haired man dwelling in a cloud in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. But increasingly, I feel my spiritual awakening as awareness of a flow in the universe, unfolding to some good end.
We are promised a spiritual awakening, and we can see that awakening is graduated from barely awake to fully awake; and spiritual, as we have understood it, changes as we progress and live. Nothing is permanent about this promise of spiritual awakening; both parts of the two-word promise of spiritual awakening change and morph over time.
As I listen to fellows in the AA rooms who have trouble with the idea or mention of God or spiritual awakenings, I think, “Stick around; what we are talking about is within you, and trust me, things will change. Boy howdy, they did for me. And they can for you.
“Please stick around and watch the changes happen.”
