Answering the Call

Maybe there are as many definitions of spiritual awakening as there are people who have had them. But certainly each genuine one has something in common with all others. And these things which they have in common are not too hard to understand. When a man or woman has a spiritual awakening he has now become able to do, fell. And believe that which he could not do before on his unaided strength and resources alone. He has been granted a gift which amounts to a new state of consciousness and being…

TWELVE STEPS

AND

TWELVE TRADITIONS:

STEP TWELVE

(pp. 106-107)

*****

My bedroom was a room in the basement in my school years. I can recall… going back… Mom would call from the top of the stairs in the morning to wake me. I heard her call… I heard her well enough. I'd answer, "I'm up!" and roll back over to go back to sleep. If she heard no stirring after a few minutes, she would call again. I tried answering again, "I'm up, Mom!" She was persistent, however, and would finally holler, "Get up! I want to hear your feet on the steps in two minutes or I'm coming down!"

            It was only then that I jumped out of bed, fireman style, headed upstairs, showered and finally sat down to breakfast before putting on my coat and going out the door to school. The ascension up the stairs… the cleaning up from a long slumber… this was my awakening after, what seemed to be at the time, an annoying series of wake-up calls.

            This has been my experience with a spiritual awakening. It is a three stage affair: the call… the awakenings… the pestering calls… the arrests… the failed career… the ruined marriage… the self imposed isolation… despair… the jails and then awake and out of bed…. after so many calls and promises, I finally stayed awake. Once I rose to take the steps upward to the place of renewal, where I cleaned up and sat down to breakfast, I had only begun the second stage: the third stage was where I put on my coat, kissed my mom on the cheek, and headed out the door into the world.

            This is only the beginning.

---

geo 4,835