Eyes

 I can no more see God than I can see my eyes.  Yes, with a mirror, I can see my eyes.  But otherwise no.  The one thing the eye cannot do is see itself seeing.  And so it is with my God who is as much a part of me as are my eyes and in the same way.  I cannot see God because God is not an object out there.  Nor can I see God inside me with my imagination or mental pictures.  All I would get is distortions probably manufactured by my ego’s need for some security and assurance.  I can experience God just as I can experience seeing.  To see is a verb, not a thing or object.  I experience my eyes seeing.  My eyes are not things that I look at.  So too, I can experience God, as Love, but not as some object that loves.  My best seeing of the Love, is when I close my eyes and let go of focus on images.  The Light in the Darkness.  And the light overcomes the darkness.  

Capacity

 We have a natural capacity for listening to “silence,” just as we have a natural capacity for breathing.  One does not have to learn to breathe in normal healthy life.  So why do so many people say they cannot stand silence?  I suspect that they don’t practice it and so become spiritually unhealthy.  Listening to the silence is the breathing part of the spiritual journey.  At some point, usually when very young, people learn to fill up their lives with sounds of noise.  It is TV, cell phone, computer, ear buds, and so forth.  It is not that these are all bad in themselves, but rather that they become “too much” and the silence becomes no more.  I try to practice being in silence when there is silence all around me, such as early in the morning, or when no one is around.  This helps me to recover an inner silence when I am in the daily life of noise, and sounds that are simply a part of the day, as in work, travel, and such.  You tap a new-born on the butt and it makes noise.  It is practicing breathing.  But then notice that the baby spends most of its time in silence, only making noise when it wants something essential, such as food or clean diaper.  It does not like noise.  

IS

 Most believers I meet use their imaginations to keep in touch with their God.  The imagination is like starter wheels on a bicycle.  It is good for beginners.  Why for beginners?  Because the imagination works with objects. It imagines things.  God, or my God, is not a thing, not an object that my imagination can wrap around itself.  My God simply IS.  So I use my imagination to say that God “is not!”  Am I an atheist?  I hope not.  But if I imagine God as not anything, then I am on the track to a relationship with an energy, power, the real, who IS Love.  God is a verb that cannot be imagined or thought, but can be loved in intimacy.  God as the great Void eliminates images.  All this takes time in a prayer of letting go.  Of what?  Your images.  

Detachment

 It is easier for me to become detached from outside things than from inside things.  I can give up a food, or give up TV, but it is much harder to give up ego and self-will.  I pat myself on the back for giving something up but find that I still have the same negative, judgmental, irritable response to things that happen in my daily life.  My ego does not want to give up its reign.  My ego does not care a fin for whatever outside thing I give up, as long as the ego is allowed to enjoy a certain sense of power, security and esteem.  Are these bad things?  The ego can never get enough of this stuff.  It’s mantra is “more.”  My power can give up meat.  But a Greater Power is needed for me to detach from all this ego control.  Thus I practice a prayer of letting go and letting my God.  Letting my God do what?  Deal with my fragile ego.  

Thoughts

 Some people say that when they try to meditate and not focus on their thoughts, they keep having thoughts nag at them.  Well, the mind keeps working, and feeds on thoughts.  The question is, “Are you attached to the thoughts?”  When my thoughts sort of fade into the background using whatever method I use, then I am aware but not attached to those thoughts.  They lose power to direct my emotional life for instance.  I may be aware of a fantasy in my mind but I don’t pursue it.  At times I am unaware of any particular thoughts, which is a deeper prayer, but the important thing is to meditate in a way that thoughts don’t control you.  Example: I get a thought that the weather is bad, the roads are a mess, and I will be killed or badly maimed if I visit my friend.  I cut short my prayer, call my friend and say I won’t be coming for our reunion.  The thought controlled me so I was filled with fear.  In fact, all I needed to do was check the web site for road conditions and find out that the roads are perfectly fine and well maintained.  Thought are just thoughts.  You are the one who gives them power over you.  

The Teacher

Besides today being my sister Elizabeth's birthday, as she enjoys her new Florida Apartment, she was a school teacher.  It is said that a good teacher is one who when they finish teaching the course, the students should no longer need the teacher.  Be that as it may, I hope that I am a good teacher of the spiritual path regardless of one's circumstances.  If the saying about a good teacher is correct, more and more people will no longer need me if I am a good teacher.  Which means that eventually I can stop blogging and will just be teaching myself.  It does seem that I always have need of me and the ones who teach me, because I never seem to get it completely right.  I am a forgetter and life-long slow learner of spirituality.  My blog readers are way smarter with better memories than mine.  Practice, practice.  Oh, and Happy Birthday, Bebs! 

Foreign Language

 When I was in Mexico, I often felt so alone, with people all around me speaking a language I had not yet learned.  But was I so really alone?  There is always the language of Silence.  It is the language of the Divine, the Mystical, The Soul, and it waits to speak to me from within or from some event or sign around me.  I but need to learn to listen.  Even in the midst of people speaking in ways I do not understand, I am connected with this Silence, if I but open the ears of my heart.  I try to keep this in mind when I am surrounded by people I do not know, especially in travel or churches.  I am never alone though I can feel alone.  The Silence can change the feeling.  Solitude does not meaning being just with myself.  That would be disaster as I tend to dip toward insanity.  I am always with the One, who is in me and through me and around me.  

Leaving Early

 People leave church and meetings early.  “I got my grace and have other things to do and places to go, “ so says the early leaver.  “I have enough sobriety and gotta go,! Says another.  And so we live diminished lives, but don’t know they are diminished since we have not yet experienced “fullness.”  Think of your lover who suddenly gets up and says, “I gotta go. Got stuff to do.”  But you have more love to give!  Do they not want all of you?  I guess not.  Think about that the next time you leave early.  Both you and your Divine Love, Power, suffer loss.  We are greatly loved, but keep searching for it in all our busy schedules, and lists of things we think we “gotta do.”  

The Train

 I think of God waiting and hoping for me to come to the Station of the Presence, like I used to look down the tracks in the direction of where the train is supposed to come.  Why is the train not here?  Why is it late?  It promised in the printed schedule to be here now and there is only empty tracks running alongside the platform.  I get upset.  My schedule is not being met.  Well, I am often like the late train or the train that never arrives, in this case at prayer and God is waiting patiently.  Like a train stuff happens.  The unexpected arises.  Or I am simply tardy or uncaring about God’s waiting.  But unlike me who gets miffed and impatient, God just continues to wait, with Love and Hope.  I have a Waiting God, full of Power, but forcing nothing on me.  There are days when I never arrive at the rendezvous.  Often I arrive later than I said I would.  Yes, stuff happens, but most of the time, when tardiness rules, I lack the intensity to keep a scheduled spiritual practice.  God still waits.  

The Tree

 California is entering into summer now and people are getting wary of forest fires.  Forest fires are terrible right?  Well you might ask the eucalyptus tree about that, if it could talk.  I love the smell of the eucalyptus.  These trees are found in clumps of places that once had forest fires.  What? Yes, for a eucalyptus tree to crack open its tough pods to germinate, it needs a forest fire.  Mother Nature helped out those trees to spread new eucalyptus life long before someone decided to buy land, cultivate it and build a home or a town.  My point is that when I think something is terrible, it is from my own narrow and self-interested point of view.  I once lost a job, and thought it was terrible.  But in fact it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.  Disaster is at times but a singular view.  So be careful when you buy land or build near a eucalyptus tree.  Buyer beware?  

Barriers

 Who was there for the Big Bang and The Resurrection? My belief is that the same One was at each.  I think they both happened from the energy of Love.  The Big Bang said that there would be no barriers to creation.  Expansion continues with new life.  Love does not seem to be bound by barriers.  When Jesus rose from the dead, no wall or door stood in his way to prevent entry into a room.  Love seems to triumph over barriers.  The Big Bang and the Resurrection were new creations.  Can I awake each morning and say this is a new day, a chance for me to participate in new creation?  Can I love through any would be barriers?  Usually, I am the barrier, so I work on myself first.  “Bondage to self, here I come and you won’t stop me.”  A little outside Power helps.  

Full Life

 Some Christians think that “Resurrection” is something that happens after you die.  I beg to differ.  I think resurrection means living a full life or life to the full beginning here and now.  But to do that one must be willing to bear their own cross whatever that might be.  Now think of walking a child to their first day of class, the First Grade, in the Catholic School and saying, “Now Mary, I am putting you into this school so that you can learn to carry your cross, not always get your way, suffer rejection, betrayal, and still love those around you even if they are not very nice to you.”  Well, if Mary is not wanting to turn around at that moment, when she walks into the classroom or the church and sees someone bleeding and miserable on a cross, she surely will want out.  The Full Life?  I am still a work in progress.  

The Next Thing

 Jesus of Nazareth knew that he was going to die very soon.  He did not run away and hide or ask God to fix it, though Jesus was not real keen on a crucifixion.  But the night before he died, he broke bread with his followers.  The sharing of food gave him courage to go on the the next thing, be it difficult and scary.  This is why Christians have something called “The Mass,” in which they recall what Jesus did at his last supper. Then they share the food.  This is so that they too can have the courage to go on to the next difficult and sometimes scary thing.  It is why the communion bread of mass is given to the dying.  Some Christians go to the mass and eat the bread, asking their God to fix things so that they and people they love don’t suffer.  Christianity is often not meant to be that comfortable.  

Friend

 A friend is someone I can be with, and be happy though nothing much seems to be happening at times.  There is silence, but when the friend is not there, nothing else seems to take the friends place.  Couples often call their partner, spouse, their “best friend.”  In the silence together something might break through that is part of their bond.  I find prayer to be like this for me.  God is my friend.  Often nothing seems to be happening in prayer, though I am aware that I am at prayer, in silence, and not alone.  I sit in silence with my friend, God.  Sometimes something breaks through, an enlightening moment.  Like any deep friendship, nothing can fulfill their absence.  

Klara And The Sun

 Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is a wonderful novel about love.  And only 301 pages.  It is a story of an AF, artificial friend, named Klara.  Through observing the world around her from her store window, she realizes the power of the Sun.  She gets her very energy from the sunlight, and sees what it can do for others.  She is made to seek the sunlight.  This is reinforced by how others respond to the sunlight.  She develops a connection with a “real” person, Josie and wants the best for Josie.  Klara is even willing to give up something precious in herself for the sake of Josie.  Klara tries to destroy pollution because it interferes with sunlight, but fails.   Klara is powerless except she has faith in the sun.  I have been given a love for God and nothing else can replace that love, though I have tried.  I am “programmed” for God Light. This is my faith. The days that I do not connect to that light in meditation is a day when I am not at my best, not myself.  I have to give up something of myself, my “precious” time, to bask in this Love.  I am irreplaceable in God’s Love.  No AI can replace me.  A wonderful book!  

Choices

 I am a celibate priest. I made a choice.  I have never known the love of two people who decide to get married.  Nor have I suffered the divorce of two married people.  But then again they have not known my celibate experience of love.  Living means we make choices.  If we have a chance for a vacation and  two choices, we make one and leave the other.  We want to pontoon down the Danube and we want to backpack into the high Rocky Mountains.  It does little good to be way up the mountain and well into your backpacking trip to be sitting in your tent while the wind howls and the rain falls, wishing you were on the  Danube.  I ask myself here at the monastery, a choice I have made, what can I see and experience that makes today all worth the choice.  On a rainy/snowy and cold windy day, I don’t wish I were in a fine San Francisco restaurant eating a good fish.  Choice always means we don’t get something, but then we do get something from the choice.  The gift in choice is sometimes hidden, while the wishful is simply fantasy fueled by myopic self-pity.  I have found it so.  

Homo Sapiens

We are called “homo sapiens.” This means “wise humans.”  To become wise, one must study, and be open to new experiences that can widen our cultural horizons as given to us in our otherwise closed world.  In the movie/play, West Side Story, there are two gangs, the Jets and the Sharks.  The Jets are white and the Sharks are Puerto Rican.  The neighborhood used to be all Jet and then the immigrant Sharks showed up.  Each group had notions about the other based upon rather narrow experiences, or just fear of being rejected by their group.  Neither group had much education. Love was the only thing that could cross the divide and the crossing led to death.  Love educates.  It makes us grow toward the sapiens we are capable of.  Study means we challenge, explore, question and then open to new experience about what we are told. A good teacher is one who does this.  Now for the quiz.  Who played Maria in the play and who played her in the movie.  Hint: they are not the same person.  

Faith

 I hear people say they once believed in God,  What happened?  Bad things happened as they defined events.  Someone too young died in some horrible way, or just never had a chance at life, such as a baby.  Their faith was dumped because God did not come through for them.  The God they believed in was something like the “President of the World” who had control over everything and would not let bad things happen in the person’s world.  Then bad things happened, so God as world controller did not exist or did but was not worth any faith.  Faith for me is that God is Love, but love does not fix everything according to my sense of what should be.  If loving someone meant that they would fix everything for you or the world, you would love no one.  For me faith makes sense because Love makes sense.  A perfect world does not make sense.  A better world makes sense if I am loving a little bit like God, who is unconditional love.    

Attitude

 Do you ever pray “with attitude,” as they say.  That is, you really are skeptical of this God belief stuff, but you pray anyway since you are desperate for some change.  My suggestion is that in these cases you continue to pray with your attitude.  And while you do it ask yourself if things are getting worse in your life?  Now if you prayed for someone to be healed and they died, you may very well be ready to dump the God stuff.  In this case, I have found that the “St. Francis Prayer” is a great help.  Why?  It takes all the focus off of me.  I stop asking that my life be miraculously made the way I want it to be.  Instead, I ask that I become an instrument to make the lives of other people and situations better.  I think this “attitude” might diminish a bit.  Attitude is no help in consoling those others who are bereaved at a loss.  You are not the sole sufferer in this world.  

The Ten Percent

 I say to myself, “I am bored!”  This might be because I am flipping through the channels of my life, or what I call living at the 10% level.  But there is another 90% to which I do not pay attention. The result is that I am bored, or maybe distracted.  Self-pity walks into my life when I live only the 10%.  So what to do?  I try to pay attention.  Simone Weil thought that paying attention was like prayer and I agree.  Paying attention is not so much about talking to God, but about NOT talking to myself.  Take a moment to see what arises.  Look around, not quickly, like the scrolling through email or facebook.  I have this precious short time of life.  Boredom is simply a flag to tell me I am missing out, or ignoring my 90%.  I hope my blogs are part of the 90% for you.  They often are for me.  

The Search

 To know that there is search is to be on to something, so said Walker Percy who wrote the novel, The Moviegoer.  I try to keep myself open to this search and not get caught up in becoming fully immersed in the routines of everyday.  What is the search about?  For me, it is about there being something deeper, something of great meaning within the routines and/or beneath them.  So I try for some quiet introspection early each morning.  Meditation yes, but also just sitting with a cup of coffee and see what might arise as I put aside my daily bucket list or today’s bucket list of tasks.  It is the letting go of the routine, the habit of getting on with the next thing, that opens me to something.  This something is the hidden, as if meaning was shy but hopeful of my attention.  The important thing is first to know there is something within worth searching for.  

Attraction

 I have found convert work based upon catechisms, rituals and rules to be somewhat ineffective, at least in the long haul.  What I have found works better is the good example of another person who walks the walk of whatever they believe. In my spiritual path that would be Jesus.  Now someone like Gandhi was taken by the example of Jesus but not by the example of people who called themselves believers.  That would be the British colonizers, for instance.  In recovery programs, addicts come in desperate for help and this energy might get them started on what is called “working the steps.”  They see recovery in a book, rituals and rules/suggestions.  But what makes for a deeper sobriety, one that sticks, is the example of another recovering addict.  The newcomer wants what the sober person has, which is exhibited in action, attitude and life-style.  The best guides/sponsors are ones who walk the walk and do not just talk the talk.  

Yourself

 I am not in a monastery to become a monk and drop my old identity.  Rather I am here to be me, to be or become who God made me to be.  In the world out there I might be who you want me to be, or who I am expected to be by someone I see as authority or power in my life.  Or I try to be a fantasy me based upon some public or entertainment person.  Usually, that would be hair style, clothes, manner and things I buy. In the monastery I am free to find the me whoGod made me to be.  And what might that be?  Well, it is a Christian monastery, so I am meant be be Christ, but not a holy card Christ, or kitch image of pious Christianity.  I am meant to be Christ as me.  I don’t try to be like someone, but rather to be like me and if I can do that Christ will be revealed.  It is a lot of letting go around here and that can be tough, but then such is becoming oneself.  As Dan Berrigan said, “If you are going to be a Christian you had better be good on wood.”

Action

 I hear someone say that they sit in meditation but get no spiritual experience, no sense of change in their life.  Often, such people spend most of the rest of their day in self-absorption, fear, worry, anxiety and judgement.  I have found that a sense of spiritual awakening comes if I include action in service to others. Get out of myself.  I find that being responsive to others in simply human kindness, and attention, much less, cleaning up my messes around them, helps to give me a better sense of peace and contentment in my own skin.  Is that not spiritual experience?  When I am all about me, I fall into isolation, but feel loneliness and alienation from the world around me.  I say, “There is no God, no Power, no Nothing!”  But  if I go back to no meditation and no service to others, then I will experience a killing nothingness.  And that ain’t good!

The Safety Latch

 Sacraments in my church are not supposed to be for feelings of safety, comfort, and warm fuzzy feelings, though they can be that immediately after receiving them, such as Holy Communion.  Many people go back daily to recapture that comfort feeling of Presence.  But Sacraments are meant to unlatch the safety lock as Adrienne von Spier would say.  Sacraments are meant for energy in daily life that can make you a bit of an outlier, an inconvenience to friends and coworkers.  How so?  You are walking along with a companion on the way to an event, a coffee and treat get together, or an event of shopping for some items. You see a beggar on the street. Instead of ignoring that person, or simply dropping money into a hat or guitar case, you stop and say hello, and ask how they are doing.  You might even give your first name and ask theirs.  You treat them in some way that says they matter in a world of shoppers, appointment keepers, workers, to whom they do not matter.  Your companion is inconvenienced and judges you as being silly or wasting their precious time.  Or maybe when you get to your place of eating and drinking, you pause, and say a quiet thank you for what you have, knowing many do not have what you have.  Your pause gives embarrassment to your eating companions.  You are an inconvenience.  Sacraments can do that.  They can become discomforting in the world outside your church building.  

Purpose

 I don’t see my life as a priest, or these blogs, as trying to convince you to believe in Christianity.  Rather I try to give you my experience of a God in my life, how this God has embraced, challenged, loved and forgiven me.  I think that belief is not so much as something put into you as a gift, but rather something that is caught in an encounter with another person who is alive to life.  So many people are full of dogma and ritual, rules, traditions, but nothing seems truly to be alive within them.  I want my life to capture another person’s imagination.  Covid did not diminish my experience of God, the loving embrace.  Closed churches do not diminish love.  They diminish routine.  Church worship did not destroy worship, since I could still walk in nature, God’s cathedral, mask and all.  I am a bad priest since I don’t do catechism teaching.  Often I swim upstream like the salmon to have that encounter with Light and Life, when the going gets tough.  The salmon does not give up.  It goes to spawn new life.  

Problems

 You look at a street drunk and think that he or she has so many problems, while you are so well off.  Stop and think about what that alcoholic might teach you.  They have only one problem as an alcoholic once said.  Where to get their next bottle or drink. They have lost everything, so they don’t have to worry about rent or mortgage, spouse or family issues, a job, or even their health.  All gone.  If they want, there are shelters for them or free food offers.  They have the simple life, the freedom of sleeping here or there.  So what about you?  Do you whine about mortgage or rent?  That means you have a roof over your head.  Do you worry about losing your job?  That means you have one, or are at least employable.  You worry about your kids or grandkids, means you have them to worry about and they still like you.  Our worries are about things we have or are within reasonable reach.  So the drunk on the street reminds me...stop whining.  

Talk Or Walk

 I must admit that there are too many times I talk a good message of wisdom, but do not practice it in my own life that very same day.  I am teaching on zoom and I do sound good, knowledgeable, wise, or at least I think so.  But those very things I talk about, I seem not to be doing.  I allow fear, anxiety and self-pity to sap my energy from living in peace and serenity, much less happiness and joy.  I tend to take situations that require some choice, some solution, and make them into impossible problems.  I fear that I will make a wrong decision, because the right one does not seem clear.  Life overwhelms me, and then I tend to do nothing.  But doing nothing, making no decision, at that very moment of travail, is often the right thing to do.  I pick up some wisdom literature, certainly not one of my blogs on personal ineptitude, read a bit to get a new focus, and then sit quietly and let my heart become still.  Often the Light comes on.  I am the problem and not the solution.  The problem is not “out there” but “in here.”  I stop thinking so much about me and my world, as I imagine it, and just let this Light and me be.  Anxiety and fear seem to slip away.  Sanity rises up!  And I walk the walk.  

Serenity

 I often hear that one should be helpful to others, and this is envisioned as some physical activity, even to the activity of being a good listener.  Well and good, but don’t short change an inner attitude of serenity.  I think that I am of service to those around me, simply by my serenity.  Acting with a simple and quiet acceptance when something does not go as I thought or wanted is being serene.  Or maybe it is my quiet but useful response to a sudden disaster or mishap around the house or workplace.  I don’t always have to be actively doing something to be of service to another.  A person may be in some inner turmoil and being around me might calm them or make them ask whey I seem so quiet and calm and they do not.  Each morning I try to turn my anxieties over to God and then go about my day.  I try no to make too many plans or have too many goals as I only have the same 24 hours as everyone else.  If I try to do too much, I tend to do too little.  

Healing Pain

 Addictive substances or activities only postpone the pain.  Nothing is healed.  Think of exercise or work that is “too much.”  The too much is because you are trying not to face some pain in your life, but the over doing it only postpones that confrontation with inner pain, and causes more pain in the activity you over do.  I think of running.  If I run too much I cause too much pain in my body, and am probably doing all this over exercise to avoid something else.  So I try to run in moderation that has some stress to it, but this stress is a “healing pain.”  Recovery from addiction is a healing pain.  Try doing a step four and five.  It looks like too much, but the relief is wonderfully healing, or so I have been told.