This is http://www.essayz.com/a8907261.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %GOD STEPS TOWARD HONESTY AND INTEGRITY FOR ADDICTS 890726 In our society, where so many of us are victims of and participants in addictive and codependent behaviors, it is difficult to believe that God's steps towards honesty and integrity will be good for us. There are too many things about which we have not been honest with ourselves, or with each other. There are too many aspects of our daily lives in which dishonesty has played an essential role in coping successfully. It is not easy to give up those ways of coping successfully, for we fear that giving them up will lead to profound failures which we cannot cope with honestly. In our society, to cope successfully with the many forms of addictive and codependent behavior, we have too often learned to successfully engage in increasingly serious forms of dishonest behavior; even in the face of increasingly serious failures. Each step towards thoroughly dishonest behavior has been a small step. Our problem is that not often enough have our steps towards dishonest living been compensated for by steps towards honest living in balanced personal and communal integrity. As we have learned to repress successfully our many forms of daily dishonesty, it has become more difficult to cope successfully with the reality of our many forms of dishonesty. Each form of dishonesty breeds additional forms of dishonesty, and so more difficulties in dealing effectively with our present forms of dishonesty. When any form of dishonesty is associated with a socially approved form of success, it is difficult to give up the form of dishonesty; especially if we view it as being an essential tool in achieving socially approved forms of success. To give up such a successful form of dishonestly appears to mean giving up success. Each day in which we do not give up our progressively more serious forms of dishonesty (because we see them as essential to our progressively more successful accomplishments), we are taking a step on the road to personal and communal disintegration. Honesty is essential to both personal and communal integrity. When we cannot be honest with ourselves, we cannot be whole. When we are not whole, we are not healthy, and we cannot cope successfully in any meaningful way. When we cannot be honest with ourselves, we cannot make wise decisions which are informed by a true appraisal of the facts of our situation. When we cannot be honest with ourselves about the experiences of our daily lives, we cannot be honest with each other about the experiences of our daily lives; and vice versa. To be honest with ourselves we must be secure enough to be honest with each other. Security is the freedom to be honest with each other and ourselves. It is a gift we can give each other, if we take God's steps towards honesty, to compensate for our too frequent steps towards dishonesty. Even so, in our society, where so many of us are victims of and participants in addictive and codependent behaviors, it is difficult to believe that God's steps towards honesty and integrity will be good for us. We are trapped in our collusive games of mutual self deception as both victims of, and participants, in our progressive forms of apparently successful dishonesty. It is hard to see it clearly up close and personal in our own lives, even when we do see it dramatized by extreme forms of dishonesty on the part of powerful people who have become corrupted by the great power that they have succeeded in achieving through their use of progressively more serious forms of dishonesty. We dishonestly assume that we are somehow different and better than they are, and continue to use dishonesty as a tool to achieve our various meaningless forms of success. We are not honest with ourselves or each other about the ways in which dishonesty renders success meaningless. We are less concerned with human meaning, than with our successes. We are less concerned with authentic human relationships, than with relating successfully. We render our successes meaningless when we give up honest human relationships to achieve our meaningless successes. We lead meaningless lives of successful human manipulation through misleading behaviors. Not all forms of dishonesty involve lying. Many forms of dishonesty involve only misleading behaviors by which we get others to make assumptions which are not true, and neglect to help them see that their assumptions are not valid assumptions. Some forms of dishonesty involve only not telling the truth when it should be told. We can make honesty look bad by telling the truth when it should not be told. Truth can be used in cruel and manipulative ways; and to make honesty look like a bad policy. Truth without love is alienative; especially when it is used in manipulative ways by powerful people who have no decent sense of justice. We are rarely honest about the abuse of truth in our daily lives, except when doing so makes good a excuse for our dishonesty. Dishonesty may involve no more than neglecting to discuss matters which concern us greatly; because we do not want to be embarrassed. We are dishonest when we pretend that such matters do not concern us, and neglect to discuss them. As patterns of neglect set in, we become progressively less and less concerned about many matters which should concern us; for they relate in essential ways to our neglected personal and communal integrity. If we have not been given the security needed to discuss them without embarrassment, we fail through our neglect; and we cannot deal honestly with the roots of our failure. Our steps towards dishonesty are often small and subtle, well hidden from our daily consciousness; unless we are regularly taking God's steps towards honesty and integrity to compensate for our subtle small steps towards dishonesty. True prayer is taking God's steps towards honesty and integrity. In true prayer we seek to find the way back to honesty, wholeness, health, integrity; back to the Garden where we did not know how to engage in all our subtle forms of dishonesty. Now we think we know how to tell the difference between the good people and the evil people by measuring and comparing in some way their various forms of success; but that too is part of our collusive game of mutual self deception. How can we hope to tell the difference between the good people and the evil people when most of us are highly skilled in subtle forms of misleading behavior, and when few of us really want to be embarrassed by the truth about ourselves. We avoid real prayer because it would be too embarrassing. God has given us the gift of security through which we can be honest with God; but only if we are willing to stop pretending that we have earned God's gift of security and so have a right to it. We cannot be secure with God's gift of security unless we are willing to accept it as a free unearned gift, rather than as something we have a right to through some form of merit, or some present or future payment. When we reject God's gift of security we blaspheme the Holy Spirit and cannot enjoy the forgiveness which we reject in rejecting God's security. We want security on our terms, not on God's terms. We want to achieve security through defensive measures by which we will have control of our own security. We want to be in control. We do not want God to be supreme. We want to be like God in what we imagine to be God's power and control, not in Her true Spirit of Love. We daily try to achieve the security which we have rejected. In our efforts to achieve what cannot be achieved because of its nature, we engage in dishonest behavior because there is dishonesty in the presumption that we can achieve security through our own efforts. We deny that security is a gift to be received, rather than a condition to be achieved. When we deny that truth in rejecting God's gift, we set the stage for our tragic pilgrim's slippage towards increasingly serious forms of deadly dishonesty. We continue on the slide towards more serious forms of dishonesty because we cannot believe that it is possible to escape from the prison of our web of successful and respected dishonest behaviors. The good news is that such an escape is possible. The good news is not some new technique, ritual, procedure or doctrine through which to achieve success. The good news is that we can accept God's acceptance of us without first achieving success; provided we are willing to accept God's gift of security on God's terms. The good news is that we do not have to pay for the security either before or after accepting it. If we try to pay for God's security after having presumably accepted it, we will find that we did not accept it on God's terms; and we will find we do not have the security we pretended to have accepted. The bad news is that it is difficult to accept the good news. To accept the good news means accepting God's gift of security on God's terms; and taking God's steps towards honesty and integrity. It means giving up one by one all the subtle forms of dishonesty by which we are accustomed to appear to achieve success. That is a terrifying thought! It disturbs us. We try to forget it. The bad news makes us forget the good news, unless we make a habit of prayer understood as regularly taking God's small steps towards honesty and integrity. Communal prayer is the encouragement of private prayer. Private prayer is encouraged by communal expressions of honest appraisals of the kinds of steps we have been taking. Private honesty is encouraged by communal honesty. Private honesty is discouraged by communal rejection of people who are open and honest about themselves and their experiences. God's steps towards honesty and integrity have to do with both private and communal behavior. One set of steps can not easily be taken without the other set of steps being taken. God's steps towards honesty are not a purely private matter, nor are they purely a communal matter. There cannot be real honesty and integrity unless both private and communal prayer support each other. To be in God's service as a servant is to be taking God's steps towards personal and communal integrity. It is absurd to believe that subtle forms of dishonesty can form a regular pattern in the service of God. It is NOT always an expression of Love to tell the truth. It is NOT an expression of Love to weave a web of dishonesty which will imprison us with the felt need for progressively more and more deadly forms of dishonesty. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================