A Personal Ghetto

Dave Brisbin 9.22.24 If the first three Steps of AA are a serial surrender of the illusion that we can manage our lives isolated from the greater power of community and God, then Steps 4-7 are a serial healing of the damage those illusions have done. Just as surrender is too big to happen in one step, so is our emotional and psychological healing. Stages. Cycles. When the 4th Step speaks of making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, we think of lists of defects and shortcomings. A moral inventory is much more than a list. Defects and shortcomings are surface symptoms that expose deep, unconscious fears. Until we face those fears, the source of our dysfunction, we blame everyone and everything outside ourselves for our pain. We live as unconscious victims of circumstance…under the myth that circumstance determines well-being. The circumstances of Polish Jews in 1940 were horrific. After the German invasion that started WWII, they were concentrated and walled off in a tiny section of Warsaw—the ghetto. Over 460,000 Jews, 30% of the population, were crammed into 2.4% of the city’s space. Rationed under 200 calories a day, compared to over 2,600 for Germans, disease and starvation were rampant. Under such circumstances, these people should have been destroyed. Instead they built an underground society of hospitals, soup kitchens, orphanages, schools, libraries, workshops synagogues, recreation centers, a symphony orchestra. A smuggling ring of children aged 4-8 crawled through openings in the walls to bring food and other necessities from gentile sympathizers. Their writings reflect the need to find themselves by finding God in every detail of life. They kept their humanity, sanity, and faith by staying in contact with life, with God and God’s creation beyond the ghetto walls, beyond circumstance…aware that their thoughts and emotions, however intense, were not the whole of themselves, that they had a choice. This is Step 4 lived out, not listed out. Becoming aware of the whole of ourselves, the unresolved fears that if not fearlessly faced, will keep us in our own personal ghetto whatever our circumstances.