"Unless I am at peace with the child of God I am, I cannot love and help my neighbor." (One Day At A Time In Al-Anon, January 5)
If one is in internal conflict, one’s ability to love and help others will be impaired a little, and repairing this impairment will improve the easy and quality of the love and help.
However, I do not think it is the case that one cannot love
and help others if one is not at peace with ‘the child of God’ one is.
To be human is to have such internal conflict, to be at war
with one’s divine nature.
Yet anyone can make someone else a cup of tea, adopt a benevolent
attitude towards another, or act in their favour.
If one could neither love nor help another until one is at
peace with oneself, no benevolent thought and no benevolent act would ever have
been possible in the history of mankind.
The attempt to resolve all of one’s internal conflicts and
become one with that ‘child of God’ before one lifts a finger for others not
only postpones life until some vanishingly distant fairyland but is doomed to
failure.
It is precisely the trial by fire of developing love for
others through resolute mental and practical effort that one starts to see the
divinity in all people.
To discard the entirety of humanity to work on one’s
relationship with oneself would be precisely to deny in the entirety of
humanity (which is fairly extensive) the thing one is looking for in oneself.
If others contain the divine spark, that urgently commands
my love and help, right here and now.
While I am getting on with applying the programme to learn
to be rightly loving towards and helpful of others, I can certainly, as a side
track, do the internal work of the Steps (inventory, confession, forgiveness,
surrender, amends) to bring about internal harmony.
There is no need to choose between the two and put off one
to concentrate on the other.
One can do two things on the same day, and one can do two
things today.