Saint Paul’s insight about knowledge is critical to understanding why our lives become unmanageable when we rely on our power or “knowledge” (Step 1). The true knowledge that leads to love and freedom from addictions, compulsions, and unhealthy attachments can only be acquired as a gift from God. As the Baltimore Catechism reveals, this type of knowledge is “a gift of the Holy Ghost which enables us to see God reflected in all creatures and to praise Him in them, but yet to see the nothingness of creatures in themselves so that we will desire God alone.” In other words, this gift helps us to embrace God as our supreme good and everything else as secondary. It is when we invert this ordering and place things or people above God that our lives become unmanageable.

A proper understanding of God’s love, as outlined in today’s Gospel reading, assists us in acquiring the grace to practice 12-step principles daily (Step 12). In our day and age, the meaning of love has been distorted. It is precisely agape or sacrificial love that the Lord invites us to have for all, including our enemies. Agape is the very nature of God Himself and, like the Holy Spirit’s gift of knowledge, it is a gift given to us as we grow in our identities as His sons and daughters in recovery. When we surrender to Him and ask for these gifts, He bestows them on us with generosity, allowing us to indeed love God and others, including our enemies, which without grace is impossible.

As we heal and recover, obstacles to God’s grace previously blocked by addictions, compulsions, and unhealthy attachments are lifted. Steps 1 and 12 become bookends to our perpetual growth in holiness and a new way of living as His children. By living this way through our recovery and the sacraments, we both receive and enjoy God’s gifts of knowledge and love, becoming “reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever in the next.”

Reflection Questions 

• How does the Holy Spirit’s gift of knowledge differ from the merely human kind of knowledge? What difference does it make in your working of the Steps?
• How did you understand love when you were struggling with your addiction, compulsion, or unhealthy attachment? How has recovery altered your understanding of what true love means?

Daily Mass Readings

First Reading: 1 Corinthians 8:1B-7, 11-13
Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 139:1B-3, 13-14AB, 23-24
Gospel: Luke 6:27-38

Reflection by Talitha R.