Moments of Clarity 5-24-10

Deep Gap, North Carolina

It is ever more challenging to be quiet and hear the Still Small Voice that imparts life-sustaining wisdom. When I made my first retreat journey here to the end of the road in the Appalachian Mountains, there was a true sense of isolation. It was perhaps much easier to turn off life’s white noise and listen. Cell phone service was not available. Making phone calls required going to the retreat house and using a dial-around calling card on an old black rotary phone. It never did connect for me. TV was a fickle proposition with an old satellite disk that never worked during my first month up here. An old computer in back of the main retreat house sometimes allowed access to the nascent Internet through a very slow dial-up modem, one often not working.

For certain, one did not roam around in the forest at night with I-pods, laptops, smart phones, and 12.2 mega-pixel digital cameras with 8 GB memory cards. My first time here I did not clip onto ambient Wi-Fi signals in the woods and download real-time video streaming from the other side of the world. I wrote down scattered thoughts in a homemade paper journal. It certainly would not have happened a decade ago that my brother would suddenly show up in the dark lichen-covered forest in a real time chat box illuminated by a plasma screen; a communication function I did not even know existed in my computer. I still have no idea how it was last night that this box suddenly showed up and I was able to sit in the dark and have dialog with my brother three time zones away. I believe we were both stunned by the experience.

In this high-tech age with our silicon cyber-toys we are able to stay more connected than we might like. Cell phone coverage includes the hermitage I am staying and plenty of struggling people have called, trapped in real time problems, wanting real-time answers or at least willing ears. Seventy five daily e-mails still remind me at least the scam artists of the world still want my money, if not my erudite spiritual wisdom. Some notes actually require real-time response from me, matters such as airline reservations and confirmation of speaking engagements. These silicon gadgets have allowed me to maintain some fragile illusion of self-importance.

Despite the age we live in, perhaps because of it, the need for solitude is ever greater. Perhaps it really does not add to the veracity of my retreat experience to clip onto Wi-Fi at sunset and find out my investments have headed south once again, at a swift gallop. Fast paced lives, filled with chaos, spill over into our own serenity, and so often, we find at least one of our own oars out of the water. It is in stillness we have a chance of seeing clearly, perhaps getting our oars back in the water.

When first wading into recovery, I heard it said that we must be very selfish about our recovery. I now know this means, in part, setting up firm boundaries and not allowing the chaos of others to wash willy-nilly over the sand on our own beach. We certainly can be of no use to others or to ourselves if we have allowed our own foundations to be eroded.

James G Lawson wrote a classic book back in 1911 called Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians. In this reprinted text, he describes the life changing experiences, epiphanies, renewals, transformations, moments of clarity, if you will, that came to many individuals with household names. To a person, alone in their pain, they sought the only One Who could show them the way clear of their soul pain, to a larger place of wholeness and serenity. To a person, that One proved faithful, and every one of them entered into fulfilling, meaningful, sometimes very difficult, lives of service to others and the One Who liberated them from their dark night of the soul.

Lawson’s biographies immediately reminded me of the collected stories found in the textbook of Alcoholics anonymous, affectionately known in recovery as the Big Book. Four hundred pages are given to stories of lives transformed when individuals came to a moment of pain-induced clarity and allowed One to burst through force fields of denial and self-delusion and bring healing through self-honesty and admission of one’s inability to even sit still and listen – a moment of clarity.

Christopher Kennedy Lawford has recently assembled another four dozen stories into an anthology called Moments of Clarity. As with the stories in the Big Book, individuals described their own waterloos of hitting pain-induced bottoms. At those teachable moments, clarity flooded into shattered lives, illuminating them with hope and possibility. All attest to life-long missions of bringing experience, strength, and hope to those who have yet to find clarity and new life for themselves.

Lawson’s life accounts spanning many centuries, those of early AA in the 1930s, and Lawford’s stories of the 21st century all share the same truth. It really is darkest just before dawn. An encounter with the One Who can make all things new often begins with a clarifying moment birthed in our deepest pain.

The wisdom of the twelve steps guides us to seek by prayer and meditation a greater consciousness of God as we understand Him. As we move towards greater consciousness of God, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn’t. What was our choice to be? This choice, rightly made, is one that has transformed millions of lives. Has it transformed yours? Have you had your moment of clarity?

For a little while longer the light is among you. Walk while you have the light, that darkness may not overtake you; he who walks in the darkness does not know where he goes. While you have the light, believe in the light, in order that you may becomes sons of light.