I am an AA kid.

I was dragged to meetings multiple times a week before I could do more than gurgle.  Many of the meetings were held at the church we went to, and both times we would pray with the words of The Lord’s Prayer, so I thought we were simply going to church 5 times a week.

So when I was struck with homesickness in my freshman year of university, I tracked down a local AA meeting instead of going ‘home’.

It’s been 8 years since I have been to an AA meeting, and I don’t remember the 12 Steps like I used to.  Where once I had them memorized, now I can only recall Step 4 and Step 13.

What’s that, you say?  There is no Step 13?  Ah, but there is.  Step 13 is the hidden step, the AA equivalent of ‘lather, rinse, and repeat’.

But Step 4 is the step that I have never forgotten.

#4  Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

No surprise, then, that this step is the one which has resonated so deeply.  For no change, no personal growth, no expansion of the soul can take place until you truly step into the place of deep knowing.

Nothing can happen until your life is illuminated by truth and you shed the darkness of denial.

Part of a searching and fearless inventory is to open ourselves to the wonder and beauty that is our soul, our life, our being.  Yesterday I was presented with an opportunity to do just that when Vanessaleigh wrote about how I encompass Ubuntu, the I am that you are of living.

It is part of a series in which she has written of just how someone embodies Ubuntu, the deep love for others as ourselves.

It is not easy to unconditionally open to this acceptance.  Our first instinct is to retreat, to qualify and explain ourselves.  But opening to this ‘deep beauty’ is just as important to our searching and fearless moral inventory as accepting our failures of spirit.

Then I received an email on forgiveness.

Most of you know that my struggle with forgiveness had centered on my father.  I’d use a technique to ‘forgive’ him, but then later be consumed by my anger and fear and hate all over again.  It wasn’t until this April, when I learned to let go of ‘me’, that I realized I no longer held any anger toward him.

And so I breathed a sigh of relief.  It was the emotional equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest.  Yay me.

And then I received an email on forgiveness.

And realized, again, that I was not finished on the topic of forgiveness.  Sure, I no longer held any anger for my father, but did I love him?  Could I love him more than as just another human on this planet?

Could I love him more directly, more openly, more fully than I have?

This answer, uncomfortably, is ‘yes’.

The past does not exist, nor does the future; only this present moment.  I cannot not exist in a place of total love if I am living fully in the present.

What would being fully in the present feel like?  A place of total love?  A place of fearlessness?  A place of centeredness?  All these things.  What would that mean for relationships if we only took each moment as it came?  If the past ceased to exist?

What would that mean for world politics if we only took each moment as it came?  If we stopped nursing the collective wounds of a decade past?

And this email pushed me yet even further.  Uncomfortably further.  I knew it spoke Truth because I resisted what it had to say.

“What I will say to you – respectfully, tenderly, cautiously, with fingers and legs crossed – is that the most important repentance in your life is not your father’s, but yours.”

My first response was “Is he on crack? I didn’t do anything wrong!  What on earth would I have to ask forgiveness for?!  For what would I repent?”

And then I remembered a conversation I had on Sunday about how the only AA step I remembered was Step 4.  What, I wondered, did the rest say?

#5  Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

#8  Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

#9  Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Numbers 5, 8, and 9 are the steps directly relating to forgiveness.  Not of another, however, but of forgiveness for ourselves.

And the truth is clear; I have wronged others.  Sometimes unthinkingly, but always in fear or anger.  And, even clearer, is that the people I have wronged were most often the people I loved the most.  My brother, my husband, my Rowan.

And I’ve apologized to others, but have I ever asked for forgiveness? Not once.

And I wonder why I ever thought they were the same thing.

I fully believe that you should give as you wish to receive.  If you want love, give love.  If you want peace, practice peace.  If you want patience, be patient.  The law, it seems, is immutable.  If you wish to be forgiven, then forgive.  If you wish to forgive, then ask to be forgiven.

Then lather, rinse, and repeat.