Anonymous

 Anonymous means helping others and not worrying about getting praise or being known for my good deeds.  God, my Higher Power knows and that is good enough for me.  My imagination and fantasy is anything but anonymous.  But they are delusions.  Reality is that I am important but not publicly known for it.  I am important enough to take care of myself in all areas, physical, mental and spiritual.  Then I might be able assist someone else who needs help that I could give.  Being anonymous is not the same as feeling like you are nobody.  I prefer anonymous.  Never go wrong with humility.  So I try to be helpful, be of service.  

Giving Joy

 So someone says to me, "I get nothing out of my prayers.  Bored. No joy."  Oh.  Well maybe prayer is not all about you getting something.  I get bored sometimes and don't get what I want sometimes.  So what. Isn't prayer between me and someone not me, like God, Higher Power, The One?  Instead of focusing on what I am getting, I try to remember that God might be getting joy out of my praying.  Life is not all about me.  I probably would do a lot less helping of others if "my joy" was the focus.  Prayer is relationship.  What I feel is not all there is to it.  

Being Like

 To relate well and even to love someone, their must be some likeness, some compatibility.  Opposites may attract, but to grow together you take on something of the other person.  So it is with prayer and the God, the Power, the One to whom I relate.  We start out as opposites, unlikeness.  God is unknown, no thing, unseen.  I come to the relationship exhausted from trying to be known, seen, become something, ego driven to be recognized with accomplishments.  I bring my thoughts, delusions, wants, ego focus.  God is not going to change.  I must change.  In the silence and solitude I begin to forget about my preoccupations to be special and unique and important.  I gradually become no one, being nowhere, going nowhere in the mediation.  I forget the old separate self.  I become for a moment,  One with and not two separate.  Intimacy.  I then bring this to my everyday encounters with others and other situations.  

Basics

 Do you ever find yourself saying that you are going to get back to something that you used to do, but then ceased doing for no particular reason?  No one or event forced you to stop?  I don’t want to be in that situation anymore.  I don’t want to say, “I am going to get back to meditation. Spiritual reading.  Contact with friends.  Exercise. Balanced eating.”  No one stopped me.  I just stopped.  Complacent? Bored? Too busy with something less important than whatever good habit I dropped?  I hear people in Recovery programs say, “I am going to get back to basics.”  Why did you stop in the first place.  I don’t have to go back to basics if I never leave them in the first place.  Painfully, what drives me back to a good habit is a life gone unmanageable.  

The Heart

 When you look across a room and see someone who attracts you, or hear their voice, and words, and are drawn to be with them, you are seeing with the eyes of your heart and the ears of your heart.  You are falling in love.  To see only with the eyes in your head or hear only with the ears on either side of your head will not make this sudden and seemingly deep connection.  You will see and hear “another” but not “the other.”  Another, that person will not be part of you, in any deep, unitive fashion, to make you a better self.  “The Other” will.  I cannot read or meditate on spiritual books, pictures, images, architecture, unless I can be inside me, with the eyes and ears of the heart.  You can talk about a Power greater than yourself, but unless it is heard by another as a language within their heart, they won’t be much moved.  

The World

 What does it mean to “leave the world?”  One hears this in monasteries for instance.  Are monks running away from life, real world problems?  No.  “Place” does not avoid life or problems.  To leave the world does not mean getting away from the everyday, but from a life that is exclusively for yourself.  Then what?  Begin to live for others, be of service, especially service that does not look for rewards or good feeling, but rather serves for the sake of the other.  It is to become more selfless and less selfish.  You can begin this kind of life focus without going anywhere geographically.  It is an interior job of the spiritual path.  

Grow

 We have flowers growing in their pots in our monastery cloisters, halls.  The plants make no sounds.  They grow in silence.  Over the course of a week they get a little attention, but are mostly left to be themselves.  They flower beautifully in their time.  They get some sun through the window, some water, and a bit of pruning.  I can learn from the flowers.  I need silence to grow, and some attention, but mostly solitude, like the plants.  When I talk a lot, make a lot of commotion so I won' be ignored, I don't really grow much.  If I walk into a room and no one pays any attention to me, I can be like the plants, and grow in the silence and solitude.  I can look watch and see in the room.   Maybe the plants are watching me.  Maybe they grow best when we are kindred spirits as I walk by in the cloister, silent and in solitude.  

Priority

 When you are making plans for the day I think it is important to have a priority list.  What is the most important thing to do today?  Your other plans might get messed up by situations beyond your control.  Stuff happens.  But you don't want to be the reason your day turned out to be a mess, disaster, chaotic.  For someone in recovery, sobriety is the first thing on your list.  Everything else and everybody else has a better chance of working out if you are sober.  And then what if there arises and emergency, not planned?  You cannot manage such things if you are not sober and sane.  Left to your own devices, well lets not go there!

Injured Thinking

 I have injured thinking.  It came from some bad practices over time.  My injured thinking shows up in resentments, judgments, not getting my way or my plans done, fear, self and more self, isolation as punishment of others for their bad behavior, and general whining about the state of the world.  Injured thinking keeps me in bondage.  What to do?  Well, I decided to find like-thinking injured people, and see if they had any solution.  Surprisingly, damaged as they were, they welcomed me and gave me some things to do as suggestions for a solution to my injured thinking.  They did not promise that my injured thinking would go away, like surgery that removes bad stuff.  They did say it would no longer run my daily life if I practiced their suggestions on a daily basis.  So I joined the "Injured Thinking Club."  Injured thinking is pretty cunning and sneaky.  So I practice what the club taught me on a daily basis.  It seems to be working.  Today.  

Live Or Lose

 Faith must be lived or you lose it.  It is not just a series of doctrines in your head.  The same with sobriety.  You might memorize the twelve steps but if you don't practice and share it, you won't stay sober.  Lots of people drop out of religion after a schooling in "learning" things, because they don't practice it.  Maybe they don't see anyone else around who they admire for their faith life.  I grew up a believer in Jesus, the doctrinal Jesus.  I went to church.  Then I moved on from church.  And my faith faded.  I also became quite selfish, self-centered, fearful, and drunk too many times.  Fox hole prayers maybe.  Then I began to say, "This is not working."  So I began to read the literature.  The New Testament of the Bible is the Christianity Big Book.  Oh, Jesus said, "Follow me."  Doctrine? Not so much there.  But action, being of loving service, letting go of my self-will run riot.  Faith came back, the one that works for me.  And I read another Big Book recommended by people of action who I admired for their tireless effort to help others.  They said, "Follow us."  Now I live in a monastery and don't drink.  And my life is no longer all about me.  

Missionaries

 Christianity thinks of itself as "missionary."  It brings Jesus to those living in darkness.  But what it brings is European culture and economic thinking wrapped in religion.  Europeans think of property as a commodity to be bought and sold.  Our constitution has right to own property written into it.  But the Natives of what we call North America, Indians, believed that we are part of the earth and it is part of us.  Very non-dualistic.  In our modern Western World, many people on a spiritual path are hungry for non-duality, Oneness, equality.  Yes, the tribes and peoples fought sometimes with one another.  We are not perfect.  But when they sold us land, such as Manhattan Island to the Dutch, it was not for gain of things, trinkets, but for the sake of peace. So if you are meditating in an attempt to find some inner unity and oneness with the world about you, ask yourself how much time and energy you put into having, and owning stuff.  Sometimes less is more.  

Salt

Salt is supposed to flavor food.  Enhance the taste.  I use a little in my bread baking.  If there is no salt in the dough, you will notice this in the finished product.  It lacks "something."  Now what if you walked into a meeting or gathering of people, all of whom had a self-evaluation that they are losers.  You might say, "Who wants to hang around with a bunch of losers!"  I have heard people say that.  They leave and never come back.  But what if you decided to "salt" the meeting with a flavoring of acceptance, loving-kindness, encouragement, hope?  Serve as a positive flavoring of the meeting.  It is a way of being of service and getting out of yourself.  The results?  Not your job.  Don't worry about results.  I try to do the action and then I am always flavored for the better, and that is a good thing.  More kindness and less judgment always improves me.   

Heart

 Purity of heart can be thought of as an acceptance of ourselves as we discover who we really are and not who we “want” to be.  We may want to be like someone, but we will never be other than who we are. This means that we come to an acceptance of our limitations.  Fantasy has deluded images of ourselves and are all-powerful wannabe.  We come to discover that we suffer from exaggerations about ourself.  So the spiritual formation process is that first we come to see the mess, but with an acceptance of how we have been.  Then we can work on the real rather than the delusional.  Beneath this false self is a really good person, but one that has limits and can be fallible.  These are not bad things.  These are human things.  

Who I Am

 I discover who I am by gradually discovering who I am not.  Meditation may help here.  I get insights about past choices that are still part of my life.  For instance, did I choose a career, a way of life, a relationship because it felt safe? Gave me a sense of power and control? Made me feel acceptable in choosing this rather than that as my work?  Or was it all about self-promotion?  In meditation I might get an inspiration now and again, or maybe during the day, or when I go to bed at night, that what I chose or am doing is not really me.  Why this insight?  Because I come to realize my motives, my fears, selfishness, self-promotion, sense of deep unhappiness with my solutions to life.  This can happen in recovery programs where it is said, “What needs to change is everything.”  

Be You and Not Someone Else

 There is a the Bible story of two sisters, Martha and Mary.  Jesus and his male companions come to visit.  Mary sits at Jesus feet and listens. That is who Mary is.  She sits and listens.  She is not a person who is well organized and able to cook a meal for a bunch of guys.  Martha has this talent.  But she is not happy about it.  She complains that Mary does not help.  Martha is not interested in people being who they are.  Martha wants more people to be like Martha.  Try becoming who God made you to be, to discover and live out your life and gifts, and you will be criticized by those around you.  Martha may also be unhappy because no one is paying any attention to her.  She is unnoticed in the kitchen.  If you try being you or being of service to others to be noticed, recognized, praised, you will be in for many a disappointment.   For Martha, the task at hand may indeed be difficult.  When this happens to me I need to find gratitude or else I will live in resentment which is not a good place to dwell.  

Faith

All alcoholics have faith.  They believe in alcohol.  When things don't go their way, they drink rather than pray.  Why?  Alcohol is quicker and more certain in the results.  Prayer, you have to rely on someone else and give up your own will in the process.  In the spiritual stuff things don't always turn out the way you want.  With alcohol you have more control over the results.  Things always turn out the same.  And by then you don't care anyway.  I am living an alcohol-free life today.  I have faith in some spiritual help.  Left to my own devices, well, let me not go there anymore.   Guaranteed disaster.  

Expectations

 Reality happens and often we don't have any control over it.  But we do have control over our expectations.  You are waiting for a subway to come.  Your expectation is that it will arrive in a few minutes.  The reality is that the subway broke down and is clogging up the tunnel.  You go into a fit.  You are unpleasant to another person who had nothing to do with the breakdown.  You leave the station, go to a bar and get drunk as your answer to the broken subway.  Maybe you call home and yell at whoever answers the phone.  Someone besides you must suffer this subway breakdown.  Now you are having a breakdown.  All because you could not let go of your expectation.  Expectations get in the way of happiness and sanity.  

Cleaning Up

 I know people who clean their house before the cleaning people come.   They don't want the cleaning people to know how messy they are.  Someone said that God is like "the cleaning lady."  She expects a mess.  You don't have to hide the mess.  Think of God as your higher power who comes to do a really good job of finding all the dark and hidden corners where the really bad mess is.  We are all meant to be sparkling clean but life happens, mess happens and then we need help.  God, Power, Love comes to clean up.  So you need not try and hide your mess from God, the cleaning person.  That is why the 12 steps has step 4 and 5, and why Catholics have confession, and Jews Yam Kippur.  

Love

 I tend to believe that we become our truest and best self when we love.  I become who I really am made to be when I love.  Domination and manipulation diminishes us when we practice it.  Selfishness won't do either.  This is why people who are trying to recover from a life lived badly are often asked to practice service for the sake of others.  It's not yet love, but it gets us out of ourselves when we try to be helpful for the sake of others.  When I am feeling kind of crabby and out of sorts, it helps me to get out of myself if I try to be of service to others.  Baking, cooking is one way that I do this.  Those I feed don't deserve my kitchen artistry.  Oops!  Attitude adjustment time.

A Call Within

Mother Teresa of Calcutta helps me to understand myself in this monastery and maybe will help you in your transformations and recoveries.  She had a vocation within a vocation or a cal within a call.  She was a religious sister teaching in a girl's school.  Then she felt called or moved or inspired to minister to the poorest of the poor.  She stayed sister in religious life but changed her occupation.  So if you find yourself inspired or Power-filled to enter a new way of living, you might not have to change everything.  You could be a drunk lawyer and decide to become a sober lawyer.  I am still a Paulist, but I live a more monastic life in this monastery.  I have a vocation within a vocation.  Lately, I am finding that he founder of the Paulist Fathers, Isaac Hecker, was a lot like me.  So I think I making some sense of myself.  Your original vocation may not be a mistake, but rather a step  on a life-long journey.  

Resurrection

 Resurrection from the dead is about revealing your truer self.  When Jesus rose from the dead he revealed that he was a lot more than a fellow from Nazareth, a teacher and healer.  Recovery is about resurrection.  You were dead to your true self and living a life that was fake, for whatever reason.  It became intolerable so you ingested a lot of stuff.  You almost die physically, but then you get into recovery and die to that old way, the wrong way of false self.  What lives? You discover, step by step, a you that is a miracle, but always there within.  You are being raised to new life. This is a never ending process of deeper discovery of self, gifts and talents, and lots of change.  Recovery never ends.  It is a verb of action.  

Paradise

 Paradise was all bout being our true self.  It was where you were free to be who you were created to be.  There was no pressure for Adam and Eve to be otherwise, no shame about being oneself.  Thus the comfort with no clothes.  Then we succumb to the temptation to be someone else.  Being ourselves is not enough.  We want more, power, control, esteem.  Thus we reach out for the apple that is not necessary for our happiness.  We become ashamed of ourselves and thus the fig leaf covering.  The morning after a drunk is the fig leaf time.   “More” is a big problem for addicts.  Many of us, avoiding our true self search, are uncomfortable and the solution is usually “more” of something that is of little or no use to happiness.  I am enough, if I can discover this I. 

Masks

 When a person drinks too much they are probably putting on a mask over a mask.  Drunk, they are double masked.  The first mask is the one they wear all the time, trying to show themselves as someone they are not.  They have yet to find their truer self.  This is an uncomfortable way of living, trying to be, act like someone you are not.  So they drink.  Then the second mask goes on over the first.  Now they begin to feel more comfortable, for a few drinks.  They feel like they fit in with the scene.  They ‘Act” differently.  Maybe everyone in the room or space is acting too with drink as the energy.  Is not such behavior a self-punishment?  And if so, for what?  Maybe for not ever becoming our true self, one that has no need to escape into drink.  

Higher Education

 The first purpose of higher education is to discover yourself, who you uniquely are.  If you choose to be a lawyer, doctor, or theatre performer before you know who you are, then you will not be your best self in your “job.”  This process is somewhat monastic.  You need to be able to spend time with yourself and get to like the real you behind your imperfections.  If you don’t like you, then why should anyone pay a lot of money to spend an evening engaging you acting on a stage.  If you don’t like being with you, then why should anyone else?  Meditation is the ultimate being with oneself without the control of fear, anxiety or the escape of fantasy.  

Theatre School

Joan of Arc Theatre School would be an apt name for a school.  Why?  Because Joan of Arc did her thing.  She paid the price, as she was burned at the stake age 19.  She refused to let adults, in her case, men of power, dictate her life to her.  A lot of girls get involved in singing, acting, dancing schools up through high school.  But then the powers that be want such girls, now young ladies of 17-18, to get practical.  Beyond high school you are just living your fantasy, is what adults might say.  They want the girl to go to college and get a degree in something practical, that is, in which they can support themselves.  The funnel gets pretty narrow for anyone to make a living on stage.  So those young ladies who stick to their hearts’ desire have Joan of Arc as a model.  Be yourself.  Otherwise your whole life will be an act.  

Separate

 If I am in a place among people, and find myself judging, assessing, finding fault with those around me, it is because I am alienated from myself.  If I stop looking out and look within, how I am feeling for instance, I may find an inner discomfort, a sense that while I am in this space, this room, train, event, my insides, my truer self is really elsewhere.  So when I feel separate from others, I stop examining them, and rest in myself asking the question, “And why are you here, Terry, doing what you are doing or going where you are going?”  Maybe I am embarrassed by the answer, but then I feel a connection with others in the room.  The kinship of shared inner disconnect is somehow comforting.  And maybe someone is looking at me in judgment.  But on a New York City subway everyone is looking at their cell phone.  

Change

I remember some many years ago when I did not have a job nor a girlfriend.  I felt so alone, and so joyless.  The outside world had to change or else I was in for an unhappy, unfulfilled, anxious existence.   Well, today the outside world has not changed much in my personal and professional life.  But I no longer feel alone or anxious or joyless.  What happened?  It seems that the insides have changed.  Whatever fears and worries I might now have about outside things, cannot absorb my time, my emotional life.  I work on the insides now as my focus.  Then I can respond to the world from a place of sanity and fullness.  The Power is within.   

Busy Mind

A busy mind is not all bad, unless it is ignoring the present and focusing on the past and the future.  Only the present exists.  If I am not into the present, as in mindfulness, then the future will always be future.  Anxiety is often due to the inability to be in the now, the present moment.  The now has only so much going on, so the mind will not be busy in the now.  I think that is what mindfulness is about.  I can only do one thing now.  If I am doing one thing but anxious about something next or beating myself up about something past, I will be in a bad space.  I fool myself to think that "later" I will relax.  When later comes, if I am not mindfully present, I continue with anxiety about past and future.  This is insanity and self-centered fear.  It certainly is not recovery.   

Let Go

 Happy 4th of July!  Or maybe today is not showing up happy.  Lots of places no longer allow fireworks due to drought conditions.  In looking back over the last couple of coronavirus years, I see myself on the precipice of wishing things had been different.  Forgiveness too is about wanting the past to be different, to be better.  Someone said you won't forgive until you let go of the hope that the past will be better.  A lot of present anguish, resentment, and fear is tied up in part with wanting a better past.  The past, in concrete, can teach me lessons I can usefully apply to the present for myself and in service to others.  If today is not happy because I am stuck on wanting a better past, then I am in an impossible situation.  I don't want that.  I will work on the present.  Power exists in the present moment, not the future or the past.  

Forgettable

 Would you like a perfectly forgettable day?  You might say no, but then again, a perfectly forgettable day is one with no trouble, mishaps, messiness.  Such days are easily forgotten.  In your daily life, if all your plans go well, it may end up being a perfect day, and forgettable.  To be greedy, you might want things to go your way, plus something memorable.  I tend to think that I too often settle for a perfectly forgettable day.  I can tend toward narrowness.  My routines lean toward the edge of narrowness, if I am honest.  But if I reach beyond the routine, the certain, the known, it might get bumpy.  The invitation to a spiritual path of life is so that we will have the power to reach for the unforgettable.  It is a risk.  But I don’t want my obituary to read, “He lived a series of forgettable days that became a forgettable life.”  Anonymous yes, but forgettable not so sure.  

Inclusive

 I am not here in this monastery to shut out the world, to escape the world, but rather to be at war with my untamed false self.  This self operates as separate, over and against, fearful, hoarding, judgmental, and divided against people and things around me.  I want to become ‘un-walled” as someone said.  A meditative life with more silence and solitude tends to recognize fretful thoughts as they arise and let them go, or ignore them at the very least.  The meditation itself has an energy to accomplish this.  I do not do it on my own will-power.  In essence, I am not in control.  Some other power, deeply imbedded within me, will do the heavy lifting when I stop trying to run the show according to my own ego-driven false self.  Little by little I will more connect with the world as One with me, rather than as the enemy to be avoided.  

Good News

 The place to go on Sunday mornings in New York City is not to a worship service in a church.  It is the Farmers’ Market.  The street is full of families, singles, couples, elderly, all shopping for the fresh produce.  They come because they know what they will get and it is always top quality.  They will be well fed by what they buy.  They can also get a treat a lot better tasting than the donuts after mass.  At church you are never sure if you will be fed by the sermon.