Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, or Part 5 of this series on addiction and Saint Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility. We come to the second to last stage of humility, discretion. According to Saint Benedict, “The eleventh step of humility is that a monk speaks...
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, or Part 4 of this series on addiction and Saint Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility. The fruit of the fear of God, self-denial, obedience, perseverance, and repentance is the gift of serenity, where we truly begin to live in detachment...
Read Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3 of this series on addiction and Saint Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility. Humility, like recovery, begins with a healthy fear of God—the awareness, as Saint Benedict puts it, that we are “always seen by God in heaven” (Rule). There is...
Read Part 1 or Part 2 of this series on addiction and Saint Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility. In recovery, we seek freedom from addiction by following the Twelve Steps. But the true effectiveness of 12-step recovery is found in the fact that, at its heart, it is...
Read Part 1 of this series on addiction and Saint Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility. We turn to what I believe to be the most important and common denominator present at the origin, escalation, and outright enslavement of any addiction, and that which certainly...
“To get completely away from our aversion to the idea of being humble, to gain a vision of humility as the avenue to true freedom of the human spirit, to be willing to work for humility as something to be desired for itself, takes most of us a long, long time” (Twelve...
Rule 1 of St. Ignatius’ “rules of discernment” stands alone in many ways, describing the experience of one who is moving in the wrong direction, away from God, and towards vice and sin. In a modern sense, this first rule also describes those of us who are diving into...
Notice in reading the Gospels that whenever Jesus is facing something difficult, He prays. In one of His most human moments, Jesus struggles in agony in the garden of Gethsemane. Before his arrest, He endures a night of extreme stress that we cannot imagine. He even...
In my own recovery, I have found many helpful tools in St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. I could almost call the Exercises a recovery program for addiction and codependency. Within these exercises, St. Ignatius offers rules for the “discernment of...
In our journey of recovery, Step 1—“We admitted we were powerless over the effects of living with alcoholism and that our lives had become unmanageable”—stands as a beacon of self-awareness and courage for adult children of dysfunctional homes. Drawing wisdom from the...