Fasting

Today, I am fasting.   Why, you ask?  It is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement on which it is traditional for observant Jews to fast all day.  Am I a Jew, observant or otherwise?  No, I consider myself spiritual but not religious but Judaism is as close as I’ve come to a religious landing place since I left my childhood religion at 18.  That is a result of raising my children Jewish, taking several classes on Judaism and attending services for about 20 years.  During those years we belonged to Temple Beth Sholom in Santa Ana and I became fond of the notion of a Day of Atonement during which you took stock of the previous year, atoned for you mistakes and started anew.  The Yom Kippur liturgy leads us through an inventory of the year, along with an ample helping pf praising God, thanking God and asking God for forgiveness.  My wife and I no longer belong to a temple or attend service, but for years we’ve gone to a park on Yom Kippur with prayer books in hand and read the liturgy aloud.   And fasted.

The Top of the List

If you ever find yourself working the 12 Steps, you will eventually be making a list of persons you have harmed in order to begin to become willing to make amends to them all.  If you are anything like I am, you’ll find the list making easy and the notion of becoming willing a bit abstract.  You’ll end up with a long list of people that you’ll review with a friend or sponsor and likely discover that you never actually harmed some of the people on your list, so you get to cross them off.  Whew.  But there will still be plenty left … some, you could make amends to tomorrow … some, perhaps never.  If you have a good friend or sponsor, he’ll tell  you, Put yourself at The Top of the List.   You’ll say, Oh, sure, maybe even writing your name on the page, but you’ll go back to worrying about those other people on your list.

Living Amends

Twenty years ago, my friend Ron and I were technical directors for the development and upgrade of a dipping sonar program. A dipping sonar is essentially a very large microphone that is lowered into the water from a helicopter in order to find submarines. The Navy was seeking a new processor board (computer) for the system. Our company had developed such a board which made winning the job seemed almost certain, so Ron and I were assigned to lead the proposal effort. In a big company, it takes several hundred thousand dollars to crank up the proposal writing process, so deciding to bid on a job isn’t taken lightly. We put together what we believed was an excellent proposal and optimistically sent it off. Two months later, we received a letter informing us not only that we hadn’t won, we were technically non-compliant.   Ron and I had both missed a single requirement in the