DID YOU KNOW?
by an anonymous South Bend Professor
Instead of scolding his wife for spending too much money, both of them had to take the time to sit down, prayerfully seek God’s guidance, and then, with both of them agreeing, “work out the budget by which God wanted them to expend His funds.” He himself had to quit hanging around with his old drinking companions, and both he and his wife needed to stop evaluating people on the basis of how much money they made, or what they thought they could get out of these people if they pretended to be nice to them. They found themselves beginning “to move in circles where God has use for us, rather than with the people we think we can use.”
Surrender our lives and wills to the care of God was a series of concrete actions which we performed, in which we sought guidance from God, attempted to act in all things as we believed God wanted us to, and called on God’s power to enable us to act in this new way whenever our old character defects started pulling us back into our old behavior patterns. God would give this enormous power to us, this real power over ourselves and our own thoughts and actions, but only if we were willing to use it for worthy purposes. The worthier our purpose, the greater the power God would grant us.
Behavior based on divine guidance instead of legalism should determine what we do in each new situation encountered in our daily lives. It is important to note that the Oxford Group laid out no complicated set of mechanical moral rules to follow. Legalistic religions which create long lists of rules—highly detailed codes of behavior which say that this sort of thing is always evil and ought never be done, while that sort of thing is always good and should always be done—do not in fact help us in the long run in leading a truly good life. They load down our souls with a long and poisonous list of absolute do’s and don’ts which produce a vast array of serious psychological problems including depression as well as a variety of shame and guilt–based disorders. In addition, trying to do things that way, by following a rulebook in rigid mechanical fashion, fails to do justice to the nuances of the actual situation in which we find ourselves when we make the difficult decisions.
People who belong to legalistic religion systems also quickly discover that there are all sorts of ways to be unbelievably mean and cruel to other people while still following the official rule book. This of course totally defeats the purpose of a true spiritual life. The way to actually live our lives smoothly and well, the Oxford Group taught, was to quit being legalistic, and learn to ask God for guidance whenever we had to make a decision on what to do next: what to spend my time working on this afternoon, how to respond to a child who was behaving in a totally obnoxious fashion, what to say to a spouse or a co-worker who was angrily criticizing me, whether I should spend money on something I wanted or be responsible and pay bills with it and the host of other countless decisions that make up our daily lives. The spirit of God was the spirit of love, tolerance, compassion, and kindness—not a spirit of mean-hearted intolerance which sought only to criticize, condemn and diminish other people. The spirit of God would have us treat each man and woman as a unique individual, not as someone whose intrinsic personhood had to be crushed and annihilated. To be continued…
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