This is not the old story of the Buddhist vacuum cleaner which comes with no attachments ....

An impoverished vacuum cleaner salesman in pre-Castro Havana is recruited against his will by British Intelligence to create a spy-ring. Aware that there is not only no one willing to spy but nothing for them to spy on anyway, Wormald creates a mythical ring of spies, all of who require to be paid, of course; the money goes to fill the wants of Wormald's insufferable teenage daughter. Prompted by the eager master who recruited him to provide some real evidence of covert activity, a desperate Wormald transcribes repair diagrams of the vacuum cleaners he sells; and these are received at the highest levels of the British Government as concrete proof that some foreign power is constructing in the Cuban hills gigantic vacuum cleaners to suck aircraft out of the sky ....

This Graham Greene story may remind us eerily of certain recent happenings in the modern world of international espionage. And the same lesson can be drawn in both cases. We have a propensity to see what we want to see, and conversely not to see what we don't want to see.

If our Step 11 meditation is merely a means of understanding more deeply a faith which we already have, that will probably get us somewhere -- further than Wormald's drawings got British Intelligence, at any rate. But an approach to meditation which is "open-ended" offers the possibility of discovering things about ourselves and about our God which we don't already know; and that has the capacity to change our lives ....