Someone in a meeting recently said:

I must remember that God created us as people who can hurt.

That is a very profound statement indeed, and one which most of us will never really have thought of. We are indeed capable of hurt -- of inflicting hurt, and feeling hurt. The famous story on acceptance in the AA Big Book tells us what the reason for that is -- that we are dissatisfied with some aspect of God's world, and that when we try to change it, or when it changes without our consent, we hurt. We refuse to accept that everything in God's world is just the way it's supposed to be. We think that the problems we see around us are a function of the inadequacy of that world, rather than of some expectation within ourselves.

This thinking lies at the heart of Buddhism, and indeed AA is about as close as Western spiritual experience has got to Buddhism, as Bill W. remarks in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age. The Buddhists believe that the hurting comes from wanting, not from getting or not getting whatever it is that we want. Program talks about this a little differently: it sees the attempt to place our will before God's will as the source of the problem. But in fact there's little to choose between the two ways of expressing this same truth. Fortunately, in both cases it's easy for us to tell when we've made the mistake of placing our wills or wants first. We hurt -- it's the primary symptom, and the pain guides us once again to examine the question of our will versus the will of God as we understand God.