LINKING CHARISM AND RECOVERY
We are living in an age of convergence. Many fields of human experience are coalescing, networking, supporting each other. In many instances, psychology is encouraging spirituality and spirituality is supporting the movements toward holistic health. While visiting the glorious redwood forest in California a few years ago, I asked the guide what accounted for the stability of those 200 foot giants. The former biology teacher in me expected him to reply that their roots went very, very deep. To my amazement his reply was “They lock roots with each other; they hold each other up.”
In the following article I will share how I find the writings of Fr. Jean Pierre Medaille, S.J., the founder of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, link with and support the steps of recovery of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Sixty six years ago, since entering this community, I have become more knowledgeable about the writings of this horse riding, country Jesuit missionary of southern France, who lived in the mid 17th century. Thirty years ago, in beginning to work my own 12-step program, I became familiar with the recovery program formulated by Bill W. and Dr. Bob, co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. The parallels to Medaille’s thought are striking but not surprising, since the philosophers have told us through the ages that the truth is the truth by whomsoever it is presented.
Medaille’s writings must be read in their context and with a consideration of his entire charism. If phrases are separated from the whole, Medaille could be misunderstood to be an extreme ascetic, depending on his own strength, determination and will power, but read as a whole he is seen clearly as a mystic, one who depends entirely on “…God as we understand Him.”1 – a primary principle of A.A.
STEP ONE: Admitting powerlessness over the addiction is the first step in recovery, without which there are no other steps or on-going recovery. Without both the realization and the feeling of powerlessness, one stands fighting the unconquerable waves that will drown the recovering person. Medaille challenges his readers to that emptying of the false self2 which had created the unmanageability of my life, well masked ad full of insecurity, was fertile field for the disease of alcoholism. Using and abusing alcohol and prescription drugs had brought on depression, insomnia, difficulty in being emotionally honest and a deeply nagging, shadow-like question, “What is God’s name is wrong with me?” “Something’s out of sync.” To all appearances I was functioning well both in community and ministry, but as Tom Brady says in WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? There was a “hole inside and the wind was howlin’ through.”3
STEP TWO: “came to believe…” has been a tee shirt phrase on the New Jersey boardwalk since the 1980’s. The second step, “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity” reminds me of Medaille’s advice to “listen to (God) attentively … attributing to Him, as is indeed just, the honor resulting from the success of your good actions.”4 Repeatedly at 12-step meetings I hear truck drivers and housewives, teen-agers and bankers relate how only by the spiritual strength of the Program are they able to come to a daily reprieve from their particular addiction. Recovering persons do not take personal credit for their growth; they have painfully experienced their own inability to cope with the disease of addiction and have come to the absolute conviction that it is only by a Power greater than themselves that they have stopped and been helped to “stay stopped”. One evening an old-timer spoke wisely when he said, “The only thing I really need to know about God is that I’m not Him.”
STEP THREE: When the first members of A.A. were sifting through their experience and that of others in order to formulate these 12 steps, they knew that recovery was a matter of a hard decision to put the cork in the bottle and go to meetings. That decision, made only by God’s strength, is very much like what Medaille wrote: “…the total self-abandonment into the hands of Providence with a dependence that is absolute.”5 For both the French Jesuit who began a religious community without the permission of his superiors6 and the stock broker from New York City, dependence on a higher power had to be total and touch every aspect of their lives.
STEP FOUR: “Know thyself” has always been a requirement for human development, but the 12-step program calls for making a moral inventory that leaves nothing unnoted. Addiction of any kind expresses a “self-will run riot”7 which Medaille also knew of when he emphasized “However pure your intentions ad your views seem, convince yourself that, in some recess of these intentions, you are still seeking self.”8 This may seem like a negative attitude toward the beauty of human nature, but this is only at first glance. In the fuller context of Medaille’s writings we realize that he was saying, as was Bill W. that there is a need to be aware of how egocentric, grandiose and self-centered we can be if we lose perspective. Sometimes we do well to jump up on a desk and look around at life from a different angle as Robin Williams taught his students to do in DEAD POET’S SOCIETY. Any addiction prompts us to demand what we want when we want it and love is the energy that allows us to do this less frequently. Medaille speaks of “love (being the influence that empties us) of every kind of vanity, cowardice, needlessness, sensuality (and) earthly attachment.”9 We need to look at life from this unselfish love-perspective.
STEP FIVE: Taking this step is an occasion a deep release from the burdens of the past, but it is also a humbling experience in that we share the inventory from our fourth step with another human being. Fears must be “given away” – talked about, explored and some action taken against them. So too, Medaille must have realized this when he recommended in Maxim 76 “…reveal, should an opportunity offer, what allows you to be less esteemed, but do this with discretion.”10 Taking the fifth step gives me the impetus to link with another in a way that brings about “the beginning of true kinship with man and God.”11 Acknowledging my character defects to one who receives them reverently gives me a feeling of “Whew! People can take me just as I am. I don’t have to be perfect in order to be loved.” Medaille advised:
“associate yourself with one of your sisters, in order
to have a little discussion on virtue in which you will
give an account of yourself in the following points:
whether you have corrected a certain fault to some extent,
whether you have practiced a particular virtue, what
consolations God has given you recounting them with
great simplicity and humility.”12
STEP SIX AND SEVEN: When the recovering person becomes “entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character”13 and has “humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings”14 they are at a point of great grace.
That complete reliance on a Higher Power resonates with the Jesuit recommendation that we should “base the whole strength and hope of success in whatever you plan, upon a complete mistrust of self that you ought to join to a perfect confidence in God alone.”15 The 12-step recovery program suggests that wear indeed trying to grow in God’s image and likeness when we are willing to work against and hopefully to be relieved of our character defects and willing to become who we are actually called to be.
STEP EIGHT AND NINE: Step eight suggests that we have “made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.”16 While step nine advises “make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”17 Medaille, in his writing, does not mention making amends as these steps of the Program advise. Perhaps, this is because restitution was often practiced as an ordinary element in a sacramental confession in Medaille’s time. However, when Medaille, in Maxim 6, picks up on Paul’s “Put aside your old self”18, he is underlining the reason for the eighth and ninth steps, mainly that we will be able to walk the road of recovery with a clean slate, able to look everyone in the eye. “Thus you can be grace, draw many people who will profit by your example and conversation.”19 Recovering persons who have taken the eighth and ninth steps do very often draw others to their own recovery by an ability to be emotionally honest and accepting of their responsibility for their actions and attitudes of their past.
A.A. is a program of attraction rather than promotion.20 The preamble challenges: “If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it – then you are ready to take certain steps.”21 Medaille’s way to saying the same thing is found in Maxim 13 “accept without hesitation the loss of all good and the suffering of all evil, rather than the failure, however slight, to fulfill the holy will of God.”22 I recall at a meeting years ago hearing a 16 year-old girl who had been in the program two years. As she told her story, I thought “Even though I’m 40 years older than that kid, I want what she has.” The thought resonated in my heart and I experienced what Medaille knew – that grace draws others.
STEP TEN: This is one of the maintenance steps by which spiritual health is sustained and bolstered: “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”23 This step invites the recovering person to remain cognizant of what is happening in both their head and their heart, to take “a continuous look at our assets and liabilities”24 because “a great many of us have never really acquired the habit of accurate self appraisal.”25 Medaille advised his followers to make a morning and evening examen of conscience. He suggests beginning with gratitude for our gifts and graces, asking for light to know yourself and then looking over the day to see where we went wrong.26 Spiritual writers over the centuries have agreed with Socrates who wrote that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
STEP ELEVEN: The early members of A.A. fully realized that the Program is a spiritual one. Sobriety is dependent upon spiritual health andso active members of the 12-step program are encouraged to seek “through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”27 Medaille’s challenge to do the same is frequent – to so put aside self-will that one “will no longer be able to choose deliberately anything except that God’s will be completely and perfectly accomplished in you, by you, and among all others.”28 He writes further, “apply yourself seriously and totally to perform with perfection the present will of God.”29 Heavy language? Negative overtones? Smacking of Jansenism?
Not when connected with other heart songs of this mystic, “as far as possible”30, “with great gentleness and courage”31 and “as best I can”32. Every recovering person, whether the addiction is work, food, gambling, alcohol or medication, slowly realizes that the Higher Power wants one to be well and free, one day at a time. Medaille’s words “Seek in everything God’s contentment and not anything else”33 are encouraging as the recovering person connects her health with her relationship with God. I heard a recovering priest say one day that he never prays for anything other than what the eleventh step suggests. Medaille was suggesting the same thing when he wrote in the 1650’s “be always ready to obey peacefully, indifferent to all that is not against God’s will … finding always your complete contentment solely in fulfilling God’s will.”34 Medaille further encourages a level of self-acceptance that recovery demands. He advised, “be undisturbed that others have more intelligence and ability than you, more grace and even more virtue when God has so willed it, finding your contentment only in the accomplishment of His contentment.”35
STEP TWELVE: The last of the steps “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs”36 means that if I want to keep the gift, I have to give it away. I have to help others deal with their addiction. Here again, Medaille’s works are a promise for setting aside the old false self “thus you can by grace draw many people who will profit by your example and conversation.”37 Many new members of the 12-step groups are so elated by their new-found life that they zealously want to shout it from the housetops and sometimes must be helped to find a middle road for doing this. Zeal is a distinctive mark of the Sister of Saint Joseph according to Medaille, as he puts before her as a model “the most zealous” and challenges her to “embrace in desire the salvation and perfection of the whole world”, but with characteristic moderation he continues, “In a spirit replete with a true humility and generous courage.”38 What a powerful combination – humility and courage – as one sets out on a twelfth step call to carry “experience, strength and hope”39 to another!
The more I ponder these two rich sources of spirit-food, the writings of Father Jean-Pierre Medaille and the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, the more I sense the harmony within myself that trying to grow in my recovery is linked with growth in my community charism. I suspect these connections can be found in the writings of founders and foundresses of other religious communities. Aren’t we fortunate to live in this age of convergence when we can live the example of these glorious redwoods?
Sr. Francis Anne Gilchrist, CSJ
PRINCIPLE SOURCES
A.A. ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS WORLD SERVICES, Inc.
Third Edition 1976
12/12 TWELVE STEPS AND TWELVE TRADITIONS, ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS WORLD
SERVICES, INC. 1952
M.L.I. MAXIMS OF THE LITTLE INSTITUTE, Jean-Pierre Medaille, S.J. VillaMariaCollege, Erie,
Pa.
M.P. MAXIMS OF PERFECTION, Jean-Pierre Medaille, S.J. McCarthy Printing Corp., Erie, Pa.
1979
FOOTNOTES
1. A. A. p59
2. M.L.I. #3 p8
3. V.C.R. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? Tom Brady
4. M.L.I. #15 p12
5. M.L.I. #100 p32
6. Medaille apparently neglected to seek the expected approval of his Jesuit
Superior since in a letter from Pere Caraffa, the General Superior in 1647,
we read “Regarding the pious group of women that you tell me you have
assembled, I can only answer that you ought not to have begun such a
project without the approval of your provincial …” JEAN PIERRE
MEDAILLE’S LITTLE DESIGN, Sister Donna Singles, and S.S.J.
Privately Published.
7. A.A. p62
8. M.L.I. #83 p26
9. M.L.I. #92 p29
10. M.L.I. #76 p25
11. 12/12 p57
12. LITTLE DESIGN p86
13. A.A. p59
14. A.A. p59
15. M.P. #4 p4
16. A.A. p59
PRINCIPAL SOURCES
A.A. 1 ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS WORLD SERVICES, Inc. Third Edition 1976
12/12 TWELVE STEPS AND TWELVE TRADITIONS, ALCOHOLICS
ANONYMOUS WORLD SERVICES, Inc. 1952
M.L.I. MAXIMS OF THE LITTLE INSTITUTE, Jean-Pierre Medaille,
S.J.VillaMariaCollege, Erie, Pa.
M.P. MAXIMS OF PERFECTION, Jean-Pierre Medaille, S.J.
McCarty Printing Corp., Erie, Pa. 1979
AA 2
FOOTNOTES
1. A.A. 1 p59—(A.A. 2 p71)
2. M.L.I. #3 p 8
3. V.C.R. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM Tom Brady
4. M.L.I. #15 p12
5. M.L.I. #100 p32
6. Medaille apparently neglected to seek the expected approval of his Jesuit
superior since in a letter from Pere Caraffa, the General Superior in 1647, we
read “Regarding the pious group of women that you tell me you have assembled,
I can only answer that you ought not to have begun such a project without the
approval of your provincial. . . “JEAN PEIRRE MEDAILLE’S LITTLE DESIGN,
Sister Donna Singles, S.S.J. Privately published p63
7. A.A. p 62 –A.A. 2 p. 74
8. M.L.I. #83 p 26
9. M.L.I. #92 p 29
10. M.L.I. #76 p 25
11. 12/12 p 57
12. LITTLE DESIGN P 86
13. A.A. p 59 – A.A. 2 p 71
14. A.A. p 59—A.A. 2 p 71
15. M.P. #4 p 4
16. A.A. p 59—A.A. 2 p 71
17. A.A. p 59 – A.A. 2 p 71
18. Eph. 4: 22- 24
19. M.L.T. #6 p 9
20. 12/12 p 181
21. A.A. p 58—A.A. 2 p 71
22. M.L.I. #13 p 11
23. A.A. p 59 – A.A. 2 p 71
24. 12/12 p 88
25. 12/12 p 89
26. Primitive Constitution Chap. 5. St. Didier mms Published privately
27. A.A. p 59 – A.A. 2 p 71
28. M.L.I. #18 p 13
29. M.L.I. #20 p 13
30. M.P. Part I p 11
31. M.P. Part I p 10
32. M.P. Part II p 2
33. M.L.I. # 26 p 15
34. M.L.I. # 72 p 24
35. M.L.I. # 79 p 25
36. A. A. p 60 – A.A. 2 p 72
37. M.L.I. # 6 p 9
38. M.L.I. # 7 p 9-10
39. A.A. GRAPEVINE Preamble International Journal of Alcoholics Anonymous