The Older Brother

Now in that same bible story from yesterday, the Prodigal Son has an older brother.  He is very loyal.  He does not run away, but stays with his father and works the business, faithfully.  But that is not his loyalty.  He is loyal to his resentments.  His younger brother is back home safe and sound, though yet to grow up.   The family is having a party.  The big brother won't go in.  He rejects the whole idea of celebrating this younger brother's return.  He want him to be rejected and punished because he is not "loyal" and "selfless" like the older brother sees  himself.  There are church-going people who want to worship, celebrate, but only with people they judge to be just like them.  They are loyal to their judgments of who is the "outsider."  I don't want to be like either brother.  I prefer to grow into being the father.  Unconditional love.  

Prodigal Son

There is a rather well-known story in the New Testament Gospel about a "Prodigal Son, " who is addicted to self-centeredness.  He takes his inheritance from his father who is still alive, and goes off to spend it all on personal pleasure.  Spends it all, including his nice clothes, and ends up slopping pigs, starving and now desperate.  A little self-pity too.  He goes back to his father who welcomes him with open arms.  End of story? No.  Beginning of recovery.  The Son hit bottom.  He is still self-centered.  His belly may get full, but his heart is still in need of much healing or rebuilding, or maybe even building for the first time.  This is AA.  It welcomes anyone who says they are done with their addiction.  Not drinking is no sobriety.  It only gives you enough clear-headedness to pick up the tools offered by the process of recovery and start to use them.   A spiritual practice starts with not wanting what you have, or your "old life."  You want a new life of meditation and becoming a better person, you have to work on it daily.  Maybe this blog helps a little.  

Fantasy Explusion

 In trying to meditate, how do you banish fantasies that crop up in your imagination?  Waylessness.  Don’t try to get rid of the distraction, or try to get somewhere.  The mystic way is ‘no way.”  Fantasies, and all things that distract us from peace, are always going somewhere in the imagination.  Fantasies, though unreal, always have some purpose.  They are trying to take us to some place of fulfillment or disaster.  All unreal in this moment of meditation.  So when I sit, I try not to have some purpose or goal.  Ultimate Reality does the heavy lifting.  I am on the way to no place, that is really some place when I arrive.  

Growing Up

 What does “growing up” mean?  Well, look back on your childhood.  Who was that person you needed who came through for you when you were little?  Maybe no one, or someone.  A good definition of growing up is to become the person you always needed as a child.  As my best self I will never dismiss a child because I am too busy, or they are not proper in some way of my narrow judgement.  Too often what we want is for children to behave according to our narrow culture.  In fact what many children need, so early in life, is to heal.  Then their best self will begin to live, and someday they may want to grow up to be like you.  

Disconnected!

 I am down mountain in Boulder, Colorado at the moment.  I came to teach, plus a few other things for a couple of days.  I have to adjust and let go of some things, such as monastery routines.  At the monastery we can get on the internet, though we have no cell phone service.  Here at the Boulder rectory we have no internet.  We do have it at the office.  So when I awake early to pray I cannot send out my blog to FB page, unless I go out into the cold and dark to the office.  Monsters are everywhere in the dark, and maybe I am a bit lazy.  So for a few days you will not find my blog on FB for that day until a few tardy hours later.  I am impressed with how many people came up to me in Boulder and said they read my blog.  So I will keep it going.  It is comforting to know people love me and miss me here.  It encourages me to love myself.  This is what good community can do for one.  

Baby Baptism

 I was baptized on this date in 1943.  I think my Mom stayed home to prepare the dinner, as was the Catholic custom of baby baptisms back then.  Since I was born on March 28, I was a pagan for less than a month.  The prevailing idea among Catholics back then was that pagans had no chance for heaven and Protestants had a lot rougher go at it than us Catholics.  We had death-bed confession, and last rites, even if we had been bad in life.  Fortunately  a lot has changed in thinking and this is all to the good.  But I am grateful that my parents decided to share their faith with me and that Mom made a good dinner for everyone, except me of course.  So who can remember their baptism date anymore?  

Escape

 Some people get into meditation, not so much to enter into a deeper reality of oneness and unity beyond knowing, but for the purpose of abstraction.  They want to eliminate unpleasant realities in their life, their surroundings.  They don’t want to face up to the task in front of them for practical living.  What unpleasant reality?  It would be unpleasant to face the reality that you are in fact disconnected with the people around you.  They are accomplishing the necessary tasks of making a day more manageable, such as cleaning up around them, and you don’t want to be bothered.  You like being taken care of, rather than pitching in.  To face that in yourself, would be unpleasant.  Abstraction erases this unpleasantness from your emotional viewing screen.  Though those around you know that you have opted out, you remain oblivious.  One must walk unity, not talk it.  

Own Time

One's own time is outside of routine.  It is not a blank that must be filled in with some violation of freedom to be.  Just be.  The ego will try to take over with its demands.  The system will want some production, and will whisper, "Don't waste time."  If you can learn to resist all this and just be OPEN, then you are in your own time.  Once you get over any guilt, discovery awaits you.  Discover what?  Yourself, rather than the self someone else wants you to be for their benefit.    

Wisdom

 True knowledge is the realization that we are One, Unity, with the world around us.  This does not come from outside ourself, but from some deep rest within ourself.  This deep rest is self-less love, a knowledge that is in emptiness and unknowing.  You know by unknowing what your conscious mind and culture, tribe, life history has taught you.  It is the deep contemplative place of non-activity.  It will lead to a new, energized, true-self activity in the world that is always connecting with others and not competing, judging, or separating out.  You stop striving in order to strive in a whole new fashion.  

Meaning

 When we cannot find meaning within ourself, then we begin to find meaning outside of ourself.  We look to exercise, science, news, the digital world, activity, work, shopping.  We might have some attraction for quiet but our restlessness will not allow it.  The outer world calls for involvement. The inner world calls for detachment.  Before you can surrender to detachment, you must surrender this restlessness to do, accomplish, gain, and the whole world of “More.”  

High Price

Being right, keeping others in the wrong, holding onto grudges, can pay a high price in your own emotional stability or lack thereof.  If you become angry in your being right, or fill up with resentment, revenge, fear, you are torturing yourself on the insides.  Moreover, it does not seem to change anything outside of yourself.  What if you were to forgive, accept, or even love?  You might be much less tortured inside your own emotional sphere.  You might set yourself free to use your energy in more useful places.  All that previous negativity did little for outside change.  Forgiveness can do a lot for inside change.  Why try to fix others while breaking down yourself? 

Pass It On

 I often read some quote or come across some image that helps frame something for me.  Images and phrases can catch our imagination or thoughts.  Mental pictures are ways to focus some idea.  When I come across such quote or image, I often use it to explain something in a blog.  I often say, "Have you ever heard?" or "Someone said," or "I have heard it said," so that I don't make it sound like I thought it up.  If you want to be of service to others then read and listen.  When you hear or read something that catches you and makes you think, pass it on to someone else.  Wisdom is not meant to be buried but to be shared.  

Awakening

People sometimes think of "spiritual awakenings" as something to make them feel good.  If it is all about you, it is hardly an awakening.  Spiritual awakenings are for making connections with others and the natural world in ways that are helpful to the other.  It is a way of being of service, of being the solution to pain, stress, darkness, and it comes from your heart.  And then you will feel good in the effort.  The results of course are not up to you.  Even God is not responsible for the results.  I say God loves everybody and creation, but look what a mess is turning up!  But God keeps loving, and from time to time someone awakens and becomes a part of the solution.  Today, let it be you and me.  

Sacraments

My church has seven sacraments.  Other churches have a different number or none.  Sacraments use things, material things, to express God at work.  It is the visible to express the invisible.  Sacraments can be called, "inventions of love."  Someone or someones, made them up to express an intimacy with God in the action of the sacrament and our participation.  Kisses are inventions of love too.  Homo Sapiens or our ancestors before us, made up kisses to express love.  Smiles can do this too.  It is not that we never smiled.  We just invented a new meaning for it.  It is all sacramental, things/actions to express Love whom I call God in action.  

Wayless

 Grace has a waylessness about it.  It is pure gift.  You don't know where it comes from, but you do know it is unearned.  Rather than try to figure it out, maybe see how you can make use of it to become yourself which means you will be more connected with people and environment than when before the gift happened in your life.  Grace can wear a myriad of guises.  It may come as Love or Compassion, or Forgiveness, or Patience.  "Why am I suddenly acting this way?" you ask yourself.  "Where did this come from?"  It came from the ultimate giver of all good gifts,  which means it did not come from your imperfect self.  Go with it.  Though Grace is Wayless, it will lead you on the way to being your best self.  Then you will become a grace for others.  

Wilderness

 Prayer is like a wilderness.  Deep prayer is never the same place as before.  You may be in the same place, your favorite prayer space, but that is just your body which grows comfortable in its familiar setting.  The prayer of silence and stillness is not so much to comfort as to surprise, with its sudden arrival, or more so, your arrival in this new wilderness, never before experienced.  Oh, you think it is the same as some previous experience but it is not.  You are never the same and God does move about giving you new angles of the Divine.  If you fear the wilderness because it gives you no security and control, then fear will have to be dropped in your "letting go" practice.  Fear isolates.  The wilderness surprises with new and heretofore hidden treasures, buried deep within the soil of your soul.  

Poetry

 The poet, Jessica Powers, speaks of the spiritual life as "trackless solitude."  We cannot track the path of solitude.  Yes, we can have our methods, but when solitude does come, it seems to simply show up from we know not where.  Such interior work is mystery about which we have little or no control.  Solitude is more than being by yourself.  One does not so much need to be by themselves, as to come upon their true selves, in which they feel a still comfort.  Effort is only required when you want to be someone else, someone you are not.  Solitude can be sudden, but usually takes a bit of patience and desire for peace.  In that peace is the hidden desire of us all, to be one, unity with the all-ness of creation. 

Enough

 Greed and jealousy/envy, are about “not enough.”  I would tend to be jealous of someone getting special attention, as I saw it, because I feel deep down that I am not enough.  I am comparing, contrasting, and speculating about that person, rather than being happy for them in the attention they are getting.  When I feel that I am not enough, it is hard to celebrate another person’s life and success.  Greed is when I don’t feel that I have enough.  I want what they have.  Jealousy too can come in here.  The way I get out of this dilemma of not enough is to get another opinion.  The spiritual path is in part getting the God opinion.  God’s view is that I am enough.  Greed and jealousy drop away as I embrace the God view, and I am better able to relate and celebrate those around me.  

The Best Me

God is.  Energy. Power. Love.  Unifying.  When I am the best me, then God is, and I reveal this by my way of life.  God is in the world through me.  This is transformation.  When I am acting out my faults either in noticeable action or attitude, thought, negativity, God is, but hidden within me.  Meditation connects me to this God, this positive energy, Love.  Meditation gets me out of my own way, puts my Self with all its fears, worries, envies, and such, to one side.  Then God is, becomes apparent in me.  Apparent to others, even when not apparent to me.  The God within becomes the walking around, loving presence using my hands, voice, feet and heart to touch others.  

The Audience

Religions and Recovery have at least one thing in common.  In the same room or worship space, there are persons who are the audience and there are persons who are the practitioners.  They all showed up.  But some are going to engage or participate such that when they leave the gathering they practice what their group is supposed to be about.  Practitioners are looking for something in the gathering to help them to be better persons according to the beliefs, steps, process of the gathering.  The better I participate, even if in active listening, the better practitioner I will be outside in the world.  Is that not what these gatherings are all about?  Getting rid of Self? 

Connection

 Some people work on personal perfection, but fail to work on connection.  Such people pretty much stay to themselves in trying for "improvement" such as a spiritual path.  They may be with others or live with others, but are really living more or less alone under the same roof.  Some monks can tend toward that.  It is somewhat hermit-like, though you are not living alone.  I think that personal perfection requires, for me anyway, a connection with others that touches the heart.  Connection challenges me to be forgiving, compassionate, non-judgmental, and a listener.  I could not become whole, alone.  

No One Looking

 Someone gave me the "shopping cart measure."  If you want to measure how well you are doing in service work, ask yourself if you put the shopping cart back into its parking lot rack, or better, back into the store?  Do you do the right thing when no one is looking?  Food chains are having trouble finding workers.  One place they lack personnel is in the business of retrieving shopping carts.  The carts can sit all over the parking lot for quite some time, which also means less shopping carts in the store for customers to use.  I admit that I reluctantly, with little joy in my heart, take the cart back to the store.  OK, if I have a really bad, that is, far away from entrance parking space, I will put the cart into the parking lot rack.  But at least I do it, and it helps old people.  I am old too, and appreciate a cart at the entrance to the store when I arrive to shop.  How about you?

The Doing

As someone said, "I am what I do, not what I say."  How true.  People, well, some people, tell me that I am a good preacher.  That makes me and my ego feel good.  But preaching is talking.  I must keep a vigil about my "doing action."  I have met people who are in ruts or maybe routines.  But when they hear a new idea, they chime enthusiastically for that idea.  But then they do not embrace it in their actions.  The routines or ruts win out.  If I think something is a good idea, but I know in my heart I am not going to do it, for any number of reasons, I try to make sure that I say that.  And if I am being rigorously honest, say why I am not going to do this good thing.  Keep my talking and doing linked.   

Conversion

 What causes someone to convert from one way of life to another?  Witness.  You can talk enthusiastically about a way of life, a spiritual path, or you can incorporate this way into beautiful buildings, paintings, sayings, steps, but none of them make for someone to change.  I can go into a beautiful Mosque, but that does not make me want to consider becoming a Muslim.  I can walk into a Recovery meeting, but that would not make me want to give up my addiction if I had one.  Witness is what attracts me.  Walk the walk.  We got plenty of builders, talkers, promoters, but I prefer someone who actually lives the life they profess.  

A Bad Day

Someone said to me one day, "I am having a bad day.  My job, my partner, my home, does not make me happy.  I am done with this recovery business and spiritual path stuff.  I am going back to a drink."  I looked at the person and asked, "Is this day worse than the day you began recovery and stopped drinking?"  I could see the person pondering this question.  So I added, "When you began recovery, you had no job, no relationship, and no home.  Maybe you are suffering from unmet expectations?"  So if you are trying to be on some spiritual path, some prayer/meditation practice, and you are having a bad day, ask yourself if maybe you might be suffering from unmet expectations.  In which case, oblivion is not the solution.   

My Side

 I like the visual idea of "keeping my side clean."  It reminds me to clean up any traps that might snare me in my judgments, obsessive thoughts and resentments, all anger-building stuff.  When I try to clean up someone else's side, I end up blaming and complaining.  I have tools to work on me,  bad habits that work on fixing others.  

Anonymous Power

 I think that coincidences coming together is really God power acting anonymously.  I had this happen recently.  A friend of mine was passing through Boulder and asked if I would like him to pick up my mail and bring it to the monastery.  Since nothing had been forwarded to me from the Church office there, I assumed there would not be much.  Wrong.  He brought up a bunch of Christmas cards and a packet that had a Cigna Prescription card that goes with my Medicare insurance. It had been in my Boulder mail box since last November.  At the same time, my dermatologist ordered a prescription for me and  I chose to pick it up at a small pharmacy that I had not yet used.  I had yet to get any discounts, as I thought, at the bigger pharmacy.  Anyhow, I went to pick up my prescription and they had my address and phone number already on file from the doctor's office.  I gave them my insurance cards, and they checked them out.  I got a big tube of skin lotion for $5.96.  Anonymous Power had my back.  

Two Sides To One Coin

 Sometimes I over-react to a slight misstep by someone else.  What they did was minor.  My response was major.  I might not say anything, but walk away and get an inner rage about what they did to me.  One the one hand I am resentful, but the other side of the coin is that I am feeling sorry for myself.  Self-pity reigns.  "How could they do this to me?" and so on.  One time after some event brought on my resentment and self-pity, I went for a run, muttering to myself and planning my response to the "offending" person.  The incident ruled my life until I jumped into the shower, still muttering.  Suddenly, the hot water turned cold.  The emotional binge of the earlier event evaporated.  It was no one's fault that the shower turned cold.  It happens.  I waited for the water to turn hot again and finished my shower.  The earlier incident and my emotional binge were gone.  I guess it was not all that important, unless you are crazy.  Maybe cold showers are an answer?  I try not to make more of something than it really is.  Except when I am the center of the universe.  

A Good Quitter

 What is addiction anyway?  Well, one aspect of it is that you might be a good quitter of some addictive activity.  You have quit lots of times, so you think you are not addictive.  But then ask yourself if you are a better starter than quitter?  I have quit lots of things but then found that I always started up one more time than I quit.  As a quitter I was not very open-minded.  But as a starter, one more time than I quit, I became very open-minded.  And that has made a big difference.  

All

 If your life is not going well, and you want to change you, rather than someone or something else, you might have to be all in.  I have met people who want to drop a bad habit that seems to control their whole life.  Their solution, which I have found to be fruitless, is to drop the addiction, give up the addiction, or problematic part of their life as they see it, but then try to control all other aspects of their life.  They try to stay manager of some parts of their life.  It does not work for me.  I cannot say that I will now live at the monastery as the only change in my life.  Not much will happen with this partial letting go of address and a bit of life style.  I have to be willing to let go of lots more self-management.  It is called surrender.  It is much easier to change address, as if that were the total solution.  Any addictive situation affects All of yourself.