There is a Sunday Morning meeting of the fellowship, reasonably early at 9-00am. This is a good time for a weekend meeting, to go and feel connected to like minded fellow persons who are in the fellowship of choice.

We get to choose what we talk about, people volunteer topics and we then have a discussion. Whoever makes the topic discussion, gets to choose who else will volunteer there opinion by raised hand picking. We all vote and can speak. We can listen if want just to listen, and we can talk if we wave our hand enough to share our views.

Quite a good turnout for the time of day. We generally turn up rain or shine. And today we choose the subject of our Spiritual development as we live our days out from here on in, a day at a time. In our fellowship, which is about recovery, we guess its difficult to pitch much planning beyond a day at a time, because beyond a day in our personal plans, well that is really quite often a stretch too far. And quite right for we can be better occupied dealing with the present. All the good books in the world suggest we are best looking at the here and now, its what we are experiencing. Too much in the past and we are daydreaming and too much thinking about the future and we are missing this day, today.

So here we are, and the topic is our spiritual development, and our spiritual nature. This might be a good news topic or a bad news topic. Depends on a few things for us. Some people we are pretty convinced are into faith and believe in God. Some people think and feel there is no God, and some people are so bloody clueless they don’t want to talk about this, its to much and all they want to do is not think about a drink. And some people don’t care, and sigh and some people want to get stuck in have a good munch on their spiritual core.

Me, I have some views and feel it better to listen, I am still pretty new around and my views are very straight and can be subversive or of no consequence depending on your point of view. I will share my view as we go along here.

First let me say every single fellow is entitled to their view. Our traditions say anyone from anywhere can join our fellowship and deserves to be included providing they have a desire to lead a sober life. So we don’t exclude anybody, unless they are violent and even then we don’t really like to because staying they may calm down long enough to hear something to keep them off the bottle. We are like that, we believe we are all equal, and its this thing which can spark off all sorts in our fellows as we start spiritual discussions.

As we get underway, its pretty obvious we don’t really understand what spiritual is, because its not easy to define. And when we are all from different backgrounds and teachings we don’t see eye to eye on anything remotely religious, except some think there is a God, some don’t think there is a God and some don’t think. So we are pretty well fucked for a consensus. Which is good because we generally believe we won’t get one. This is where one of our traditions helps greatly, we let anyone in, and they can believe in whatever keeps them sober! A great lesson because we don’t have to make them or ourselves do anything but sit and listen and join in if they want.

Now we start to hear the problems of being spiritual, it is easy to forget to be spiritual, as the days are long and there are things to do. And we all have to get on with life so our spiritual path can be a bloody nuisance. Family, boyfriends and girlfriends and kids and grannies and uncles, well there are so many dents to being spiritual. And then there is work, work is not so spiritual, especially careers and employing people and being employed by good ordinary folk or even dickheads who wind us up. This all gets in the way of Spiritual. But we don’t really know what it is yet, except daily life really screws up being Spiritual. Fuck me, we can miss the point sometimes.

And of course we all agree we do often miss the point, which is why we gather to talk about it so expertly. And we meet often because we are prone to get bogged down and get very thirsty!

And we laugh some more. And in this meeting is one of our fellows who is really working hard to keep their stuff together. Dishevelled and looks as unsavoury to some as a tramp in their living room, I can see the spiritual hackles rising or was that their intolerant hackles. Those who have forgotten their own fucking mess do tend to have little compassion for the sorely afflicted who are ill. And I can see the look of distaste and I am so glad our fellow traveller who is sick with something, speaks, speaks so clearly about spiritual matters, I hear him clearly and I hear his sound advice. And still I see the nervous twitch of the so called spiritual elitists collars, who are just able to tolerate this fellows share. Cunts! A word that comes easy to my mind. They, the so called spiritual who are working so hard at it, they who offer their own views on their spiritual journey, some of them are so full of prejudice and so full of judgment, they are as spiritual as shit. And they don’t see their folly.

But most of us are there and we feel for the fellow with all too obvious difficulty, and we hear him clear as a bell. He may look like shit and be finding every moment of living a personal nightmare, but inside he beats with heart and simple outlook. He suggests, make the best of the day, make our relations good with all people. Be careful with ourselves and others. Keep our lives simple and stay sober. That in essence offers us the best choices to be the best we can. And when we are our best, we are able to get from life what we need, and not obsess on things to fix us or unnecessary wants.

Now how hard is spiritual? Not that fucking hard is it?

As to my views, well I am a spiritual person because I was pre programmed like every other human to be so. We are all given the same similar capacities to be spiritual. We have similar genetic make up and the differences are not enough to exclude anyone from being spiritual.

Like our computers we can buy these days, we are preloaded and programmed to be anything we are learning. We all have pretty much the same memory to use and the same experiences to live. We all eat, shit and think. We all feel if we are allowed. So our spiritual capacities are pretty much the same from person to person.

Like anything in life, if we do something long enough we get a habit and most likely good at it, as Aristotle observed when he described excellence as simply good habit. And in our fellowship we know all too well where a bad habit will take us.

So we have a limit as people, to how much we can be spiritual. Actually we can be no more or less spiritual than anyone else. However we can be more practised in our spirituality. Which really is how we live our lives. So being spiritual really is about how we live today, one day at a time.

We will never have more spirituality than anyone else, or better spirit or be a better person in our pious observance of rules we might invent for ourselves and our spiritual outlook. We can be sanctimonious in our spiritual development, in which case we have lost the plot. And we can be judging of others who are still finding their way, and again that requires piety and not spiritual awareness. Parsimony can afflict the spiritual seeker as they fumble in their quest for more spirit than they can get. Wankers aren’t they?

So we have wankers too in our fellowship, I have been one many a time. But hey that’s life!

And in amongst all this angst, we are all learning the simple life. A day at a time.

In essence then spiritual matters are of conduct and our human values. Spiritual is something to do with good conscience and our approach to living our lives daily. We can have a really good day, where spiritual imbues us and we are gifted with peace. And we can have crap days where peace is certainly hard to find if we move away from our way living and behaving. So simply the debate left some with hope and with calm, others with whatever their recipe for sobriety requires, and some of us bemused as we realised our utter powerlessness over others and their outlook.

So much ground covered. And the simplest solution. Stay sober a day at a time and all these debates and challenges and feelings can be handled and resolved as we go. No right no wrong, some wacky and mad, some sane and calm. All in an hour and food for our spirit.

My view is simple, we have principles so simple called steps to living. We have ways to keep ourselves safe from self harm. We got here somehow and stayed sober today, and go to bed with more open a mind to making it, life, work a day at a time. We find love of ourselves and fellows and all human beings and surely acceptance is key, of reality of course. One day is all we have, over and over to share experience strength and hope, to make good where we can and restore ourselves daily to sanity…

Now that feels spiritual to me.