Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I have been thinking of my early recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous. I found my spirituality through AA, a higher power, God. I truly came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. I have been having a resurfacing of doubt partly because my Buddhist rock has been shaken by the strong yearning to know God. The other part is that of my sensitivity to others suffering and doubt which makes me feel hopeless, which make me want to fix them and when I have shared in deep personal ways makes me think that the only way to connect with someone is through sexual intimacy. Desperation, turns to despair, which turns to hopelessness, which is now turning to sexual desire. Another level of escape. I am seeing too though how this is just another play of the ego. The urgency to fix the feelings. Finding the way, the answers. Always searching. Anyway, I remembered in meditation this prayer which I carried with me for a long time when I was introduced to it by Father Tom Weston at a LGBT AA Retreat in Los Gatos. It is called the Prayer of Trust and was written by a Jesuit priest to a young student:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God

We are, quite naturally, impatient in everything

to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something new;

and yet it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through

some stages of instability -----

and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.

Your ideas mature gradually ----

let them grow, let them shape themselves,

without undue haste.

Don't try to force them on,

as though acting on your own,

you will make your own tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit

gradually forming within you will be.

Give him the benefit of believing

that his hand is leading you,

and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself

in suspense and incomplete.

~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Isn't that just wonderful! Trust in the anxiety of feeling in suspense and incomplete. Trust in groundlessness.