A Searching and Fearless Moral Inventory

I have read the Alcoholics Anonymous big book, and multiple other books on addiction.  I have read the entire Holy Bible and the Book or Mormon many times.  I have read the Bhagavad Gita, the writings of Confucius, and many books by other religious leaders and deep thinkers.  I have taken classes from a Zen master, spent hours doing Yoga, sat for long periods in contemplation and meditation, fasted for days, and prayed thousands of times. 

There is a unifying theme: Self discovery, meditation, reflection, inner peace, or in other words: an analysis of oneself.

As I study the "12 steps" I find Step 4 to be the most important, the most daunting, and the most meaningful for life in general. 

Step 4 does not say: "List all the bad things you've done."  It asks you to make a "searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself."  Figure out who you are.  What makes you tick? What failures have you had, and what led you there?  What resentments do you still hold?  Why are they still there after all this time?  What are your greatest strengths, your talents, your abilities?  What keeps you from excelling?

Step 4 isn't just about getting over an addiction, or repenting, or fixing past mistakes.  It's about self-discovery.  This is about answering the hardest question we've ever asked ourselves: "Who am I?" 

Writing out this fearless moral inventory will help you discover your true relationship with yourself, with God, and with others. You will find weaknesses. You will find strengths.  You will also find reasons for both.  You will find heartache and joy, but mostly you will find understanding. 

I began working on this four months ago.  I'm still not even close to finishing.

Today's Self-Contemplation: Why do I connect with certain fictional characters?

Why do I connect so well with Jean ValJean from Les Miserables?  Why did I write a 1400 word essay comparing ValJean to Tevye from the Fiddler on the Roof?  Why do connect with Tevye?

When I read the massive book about King Arthur (The Once and Future King) - why didn't I relate to Arthur, or Merlyn, or Pellinore or Galahad, but rather it was Lancelot who struck me to the bone as if our struggles were identical?

I'm beginning to see the themes:

Val Jean: I have done wrong, and cannot escape it. I want to do good, forever, for everyone. Even if I became as wealthy as a King, I honestly don't think I would spend it on myself - I'd use it to help other people. I can forgive myself, and I can forgive others - but I will not excuse myself or resent the law or accusers when I am in the wrong. When I am wrong, I deserve the punishment. Another person should never have to suffer in my place.
ValJean worked his whole life to love other people, to fulfill his promises, his duties. He found in the end that "To love another person is to see the face of God."

Lancelot: I have this strong desire inside me to be the best - at so many things. Not because I want to be better than others, but because I want to reach my potential. I want to be the best doctor. I want to be able to perform miracles - to be so pure that God could work through me.  But like Lancelot - I know I fall short. I don't even know if I want it for the right reasons. Like Lancelot, I repeatedly question my own motives. Do I want to do great deeds for God? for country? for right? or for my own glory? Lancelot's struggle is my own.  The struggle in the mind to be the best, but not compare myself with others. The struggle for perfection, but for the right reasons. The struggle to figure out what really matters in life and who God really wants me to be.

Tevye: The struggling man trying to maintain tradition and his religion while being accepting of others.  He must accept those who change his faith, who leave his faith, and who even go so far as to persecute and mock his faith. He tries to love all and accept all, but then says "how can I turn my back on my faith, my people? If I try and bend that far, I'll break."
Tevye's family and his religion are the most important things in his life, and he cannot live without them. Like him, I struggle to figure out how to be true to myself, my God, my family, yet be open, accepting, loving, and adaptable.

Hopefully this post was helpful to someone in some way.  Hopefully it leads you to a moment of self-reflection, and eventually, to a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself.

Book Review: The Candle in the Wind

Wow - a final book that really wraps it all together and makes it all worth it.  We get to see Arthur's reflections on his entire life.  Why he made the round table, what he hoped to accomplish, what he fought for and why.  We see the destruction of his kingdom.  We see his "sins come home to roost" as he says so many times.

We see that man has good desires, but all men are imperfect.  They often don't live up to their own standard, and they don't know how to deal with that.  Even if they can forgive themselves, they are not forgiven by others.
The book ends geniously.  On Arthur's death bed he calls in a young page and asks him not to fight.  The page must remember what Arthur's dream was, why a round table, why chivalry.  The page must stay alive, and write these things down for future generations. 
The page's name is Thomas Malory (who wrote Le Morte d'Arthur in the 1400's)

The last 10 pages of the book are T.H. White's "morals of the story" described beautifully and poetically.  The book was published in 1958 - and many of the themes relate directly to WWII.
Arthur reflects on the crusades, the quests, and the sins he committed that led to the downfall of his kingdom.

He recognizes that many things he designed to be used for good purposes, have come back to be his ruin.
"He had introduced the idea of total war. In his old age this same total warfare has come home to roost as total hatred." - p. 667

Arthur thinks about man - is he inherently good or evil... or neither?

 "had been taught by Merlin to believe that man was perfectible: that he was on the whole more decent than beastly: that good was worth trying: that there was no such thing as original sin" - p. 666
"His Table, his idea of Chilvalry, his Holy Grial, his devotion to Justice... the whole structure depended on the first premise, that man was decent." - p. 666
"Perhaps man was neither good nor bad, was only a machine in an insensate universe." - p. 667

Arthur asks himself - who failed.  Was it the leaders or the people.   He asks the Chicken and the Egg question:
"Was it the wicked leaders who led innocent populations to slaughter, or was it wicked populations who chose leaders after their own hearts?" - p. 668

"If it was so easy to lead one's country in various directions, as if she was a pig on a string, why had he failed to lead her into chivalry, into justice and into peace?  He had been trying." - p. 668

He then finds one possible source of evil and war - revenge.  The inabilit to ever forgive or forget.
"Man had gone on, through age after age, avenging wrong with wrong, slaughter with slaughter.  Nobody was the better for it, since both sides always suffered." - p. 668
"It was as if everything would lead to sorrow so long as man refused to forget the past." - p. 668

My favorite quote from the whole book comes in this section:
"Man must be ready to say: Yes, since Cain there has been injustice, but we can only set the misery right if we accept a status quo. Lands have been robbed, men slain, nations humiliated. Let us now start fresh without remembrance, rather than live forward and backward at the same time. We cannot build the future by avenging the past. Let us sit down as brothers, and accept the Peace of God.  Unfortunately men did say this, in each succesive war.  They were alwasys saying that the present one was to be the last, and afterwards there was to be a heaven." - p. 669


Arthur then has another thought - maybe the problem is the idea of possession.
"Perhaps wars were fought because people said my kingdom, my wife, my lover, my possessions." - p. 669
 "Perhaps wars only happened between those who had and those who had not." - p. 670
 "Individuals were always crying out 'Mine, mine,' where the church was instructed to say 'ours'." - p. 670

He then realizes the ridiculousness of war - that it is fought over arbitrary and imaginary lines we have drawn:
"The fantastic thing about war is that it was fought about nothing - literally nothing.  Frontiers were imaginary lines.  There was no visible line between Scotland and England although Flodden and Bannockburn had been fought about it.  It was geography which was the cause - political geography.  It was nothing else." - p. 676

The Book was great.  I plan on reading the originally unpublished Book 5 "The Book of Merlyn" next, and then I may read "Le Morte d'Arthur."

Book Review: The Ill Made Knight

WOW!
The Sword in the Stone was fun.
The Witch in the Wood was weird.
The Ill Made Knight was emotionally gut wrenching and penetratingly thought provoking.

The only versions of Lancelot I had ever known were from the musical Camelot, the movie First Knight (with Richard Gere), and Monty Python.

This is not the Lancelot I knew.  This is not the handsome young man who brags about his "humility" and sneaks around with Arthur's wife and destroys the kingdom when they are found out.

First - Lancelot is ugly.  Here are a few descriptions:

"The boy's face was as ugly as a monster's in the King's menagerie.  He looked like an African ape." "The grotesque magnificent shell with a face like Quasimodo's"

Lancelot was hideous.  From the time he was a boy he wanted to be a knight at King Arthur's Round Table.  He wanted to be "the best knight in the world."  He studied and practiced throughout his childhood.  He wanted to have absolute strength, skill, and also purity.  He wanted God to bless him and allow him to perform miracles.

The book is the story of his three loves:
1. Arthur - as the perfect father figure and king.
2. Guenevere - He loved her forever, but love for her interfered with his other two loves.
3. God -  If he wasn't pure before God, nothing else mattered to him.

Lancelot does become "the best knight in the world" and this is where the trouble starts.  Everyone wants to challenge him, to beat him.  All the people want him to be their champion, perform miracles, defeat all evil.  The other Knights of the Round Table need him to save them from time to time, but many of them resent it.
Yes, Lancelot does fall in love with Guenevere - and he does decide to sleep with her, but Arthur knows about it.  He loves them both, and can't punish them.  Arthur keeps them both at court for over 25 years because he loves them both.  Guenevere is his romantic love, Lancelot his fraternal love.  Lance is the "son" he never had, the perfect knight.

Lancelot performs two miracles in his life. After the first, he commits his first moral sin and loses the power to perform miracles.  He is unclean before God, and the gift is lost.
Lance becomes the tragic hero.  The man who wants to be perfect and can never quite reach perfection.  He honestly tries, and the quest for perfection drives him mad.  At one point he is thought to be dead as he spends years in the wilderness living off berries, mostly naked, taunted by children, feared by women, and mocked by men.
When he goes on the quest for the Holy Grail he is permitted by God to see it, but not to enter the room or touch it.  He is very pure, but not pure enough.  It breaks his heart.

The second miracle happens at the very end.  He is asked to heal a wounded knight after all other 149 Knights of the Round Table fail.  He walks down, and takes the knight in his arms.
"Lancelot looked into the East, where he thought God lived, and said something in his mind. It was more or less like this: "I don't want glory, but please can you save our honesty? And if you will heal this knight for the knight's sake, please do."
The knight is healed, the whole kingdom cheers and "in the middle, quite forgotten... this lonely and motionless figure knew a secret which was hidden from the others.  The miracle was that he had been allowed to do a miracle."

You will think I'm silly or having delusions of grandeur - but I think I know how Lancelot felt.
Though our lives are completely different, I felt as I read this book that Lancelot's mental struggles were exactly like my own.
When I was a kid I decided I either wanted to be the President or a Prophet.  (yeah, humble kid I know)
I feel now what Lance felt.  I have this desire inside me to be the best.  I want to be the best at so many things.  Not because I want to be better than others, but because I think I should work that hard.  I want to be the best doctor.  I want to be able to perform miracles.  I mean that.  I want to be so pure that God could work through me.
Like Lancelot - I know I fall short.  I don't even know if I want it for the right reasons.  Lancelot repeatedly questioned his own motives.  Was he doing great deeds for God? for country? for right? or for his own glory?  This book resonated with me like few have because I saw my own struggle.  The struggle in the mind to be the best, but not compare myself with others.  The struggle for perfection, but for the right reasons.  The struggle to figure out what really matters in life and who God really wants me to be.  That was Lancelot's struggle, and that continues to be my own.

I hope my end is better than Lancelot's.

Favorite Quote:
Arthur - "What I meant by civilization when I invented it, was simply that people ought not to take advantage of weakness."  "People ought to be civil.  But it has turned into sportsmanship.  Merlin always said that sportsmanship was the curse of the world and so it is.  My scheme is going wrong."  "They are turning it into a competitive thing."  "Everybody gossips and nags and hints and speculates bout who unseated whom last, and who has rescued the most virgins, and who is the best knight of the Table.  I made it a round table to prevent that very thing, but it has not prevented it."