Breathing Under Water : Spirituality and the Twelve Steps

Again and again, you must choose to fall into a love that is greater with both friends and children. It is all training for the falling into The Love that is the Greatest. All loves are a school of love, and their own kind of vital spiritual experience—until a lasting Relationship with the Real finally takes over.

Alcoholism is deeply frustrated desire,

addiction emerges out of a lack of inner experience of intimacy with oneself, with God, with life, and with the moment.

If God is somehow in the suffering, participating as a suffering object too, in full solidarity with the world that He or She created, then I can make some possible and initial sense of God and this creation.

Suffering people can love and trust a suffering God, Only a suffering God can “save” suffering people, Those who have passed across this chasm can and will save one another.

Addiction is a spiritual disease, a disease of the soul, an illness resulting from longing, frustrated desire, and deep dissatisfaction—which is ironically the necessary beginning of any spiritual path.

We were made to breathe the Air that always surrounds us, feeds us, and fills us. Some call it God.

James always insists on orthopraxy instead of mere verbal orthodoxy: “To listen to the word and not obey it is like looking at your own features in a mirror, and then, after a quick look, going off and immediately forgetting what you look like” (1:23–24). For James, to “actively put it into practice is to be happy in all that one does” (1:25), and,

God’s much better role—which is to help you know what you really desire (Luke 11:13; Matthew 7:11).