Taken from this great speech given by AA legend Sandy Beach is how the prayer of St Francis opens up an idea about the power of spirituality:
“Looking back, I would say that the prayer of St Francis in in the 12 and 12 under the 11th step was just an eye-opener when my sponsor explained it to me.
So, if you’re new, I’m just going to focus on the first line in that prayer and see if your evaluation of it was the same as mine was when I first heard it.
The prayer starts with just,
“Lord, make me a channel of thy peace”.
So, what do you picture when you hear that? And I’ll tell you what I pictured: here I am, just a wreck. Full of anxiety, all these things and here’s this vision that I have. “Make me a channel of thy peace” – so this channel opens up from somewhere up there and all this peace flows in to me and I feel wonderful.
And my sponsor says, “Well that’s close, but you have it exactly backwards”.
“You have it exactly backwards. That’s not what happens at all. You see, you are living in the self-centred, intellectual perspective and that’s exactly how it looks but nothing in the spiritual world conforms to the intellectual world and that’s not how it is at all.
And I’m saying, “Oh my god, this is getting complicated. I just don’t understand this. All we’re talking about is a little channel and now he’s got me off into advanced something-or-other”. And he says, “Well, look at the rest of the prayer. It says ‘I want to be a channel of thy peace, so that I can go out and bring understanding and bring love and bring comfort and bring peace. So that I can go out and take care of all other people that I may run in to’.” And he said that the channel comes from inside of you, out. “You had the energy completely reversed, you thought that you needed something. You don’t need anything at all. You already have it all inside and it’s been locked in there through your character defects. It’s been blocked and that’s why we have these steps to open that channel so that all of this can come out and you can allow this infinite supply of peace and love that’s already inside of you to get out and you’re going to find that the greatest joy in the world of just spreading this.”
And I remember saying, “well it doesn’t feel like that, it feels like there’s nothing inside of me. It feels like I’m empty and if I ever open up and let whatever little is in there out…” I had the picture that I was like a balloon that was just going to deflate when the air was let out. And just be flat.
Shrd 