If you want peace, seek justice, says the slogan. Perhaps it's true in a political environment. But for recovering addicts, the idea of justice can be dangerous. Sometimes it's lethal. More than one sufferer has returned to his addiction because he "unjustly" lost his wife or child, for example.

Many of us are familiar with another saying in Program: If life were fair, I'd be dead. It's a pithy little quote and there's no doubt that it's true -- in a fair world, our addiction would probably have killed us many times over. But the longer we remain in recovery, the less we tend to remember these words. Instead, fortified by the ongoing improvement in our physical, mental, emotional, and financial condition, we can often seek to re-enter the world we lost when we were still practicing our addiction, and as we do so we can be drawn to espouse a variety of causes that involve the seeking of justice -- particularly, of course, when we are looking for justice for ourselves. We dispute the ticket we got for going through that red light, even though we know we've done it a few times before and been lucky enough not to get caught. We protest our "excessive" property taxes by casting around for other people in similar properties to ours who pay less than we do. We've been restored -- so we think -- to a world where we can afford once again to seek fairness and equity.

One of the hardest lessons we learn from an energetic working of the last three Steps is that justice -- particularly for ourselves -- is really none of our business. Our practice of Steps 10, 11 and 12 is not for the purposes of getting something, of obtaining a reward that's commensurate with our efforts. In a very profound sense, our working of these Steps is pointless. We simply do not have sufficient understanding of ourselves, of our universe, and of God as we understand God to know why Steps 10, 11 and 12 seem to help us to find peace. For peace is the very thing that those Steps do bring -- and if people like us can experience peace, then truly there is no justice.