Cracked vessels, you and I

 When I was a young child, my parents poured endless love into me.  I soaked it up and asked for more and more.  I was an empty vessel asking to be filled. As I grew older, slights from circumstances in my life caused cracks, so that love poured into me would run out.  I looked for love anywhere I could find it, and could never get enough because all that was poured into me, more or less, ran right out. Personally, I looked for approval from my peers.  I had a particular affinity for finding people who would constantly build me up.  This is not a bad thing in itself.  But I began rejecting positive praise - writing it off.  This progressed in my life and I came to a point in my late teens and twenties when I would actually counter positive affirmation with negative thoughts about myself.

     This progressed. It wasn't until I found myself heavily addicted to nicotine by the time I was 40 that I began looking for a way out.  I found relief in the 12 steps.  I found what my issues were - what made me tick.  I realized that I had this propensity to counter the positive with the negative. I realized I was a cracked vessel, not holding the love that had been poured into me by my family, my friends, and my wife (especially). I found though, in the wisdom of the 12 steps that I could be repaired like a Japanese pot.  The Japanese often took cracked vessels - pots, cups, bowls and "glued" them back together with purified gold.  This left a beautiful, but flawed vessel, that was able to beautifully serve its purpose.  It was not what it was originally.  But to a collector, it was far more desirable.  It did its job with its flaws showing.  It was much more valuable because of its flaws.

     I think we are all slowly becoming one of those Japanese vessels. I think everybody has some I believe this purpose is to be filled up with love overflowing so that we turn and fill others with it as well. Step 4 in the 12 steps is to take a "searching and fearless moral inventory."  The sponsee looks at all the circumstances and people in his life and asks how they may have unhealthy flaws in himself and how these flaws cause him to react to events and people in his life.  He identifies patterns of behavior and finds underlying issues that cause him to act in the ways that he does.  I think everyone could find value in the wisdom of the 12 steps.
addictions to a small extent, and some peoples' progress to catastrophic levels. Addictions are just things that we rely on instead of an honest trust that God will fulfill our needs. These addictions and personal tragedies and slights we receive as we go about life, create cracks in us.  And I believe that we no longer can fill our purpose:

     It is through the slow growth of this process that you identify your core issues.  You do this with a sponsor and in the light of a loving community. Then you turn these things over to God, with your sponsor.  You "humbly ask the God of your understanding to remove all these defects of character."  It is an exercise in fierce honesty.  It can hurt.  But then I found something.  That God talked back.  Through my friends and my counselor and circumstance, he said to me, "I hear you."  And he began the long process of removing these things from me.  I am not sober yet - I am still smoking... some people do this step and immediately stop.  Other people find that they have to go through this process for a long time - maybe years.  But I can see God removing these things from me.  Patching my leaks with pure gold. In Christianity there is this belief of the Refiner's fire.  It burns and purifies you slowly as you grow closer to your creator, becoming someone that brings a little bit of heaven to earth, here, now.  Someone who is aware of others and loves them, though they may hate you.

     My wife can see my new veins of gold, patching my broken pieces together.  And, just as importantly, I have begun to be able to see them.  I am beginning to love myself - scarred and cracked, but lovingly repaired by my creator.  A vessel worth far more to my creator and to the people in my direct contact because of its lovingly repaired cracks.

     If you are interested in the wisdom of the 12 steps, but don't have an active addiction that you can identify, there is a program called "Celebrate Recovery" that is the 12 steps for people with no identifiable addictions.  But I believe, we all have something, something that we worship instead of our creator.  Something we rely on for our security instead of simple trust in God.  There is hope for this in the 12 steps.  I believe everyone who opens themselves up to the process of repair, by the 12 steps or by another means, becomes one of these beautifully repaired broken vessels, with gold in the cracks.