Save Yourself

In the Story, “A Christmas Carol,” Jacob Marley tells Ebenezer Scrooge to “save yourself.”  This is a popular notion in our culture.  Take care of number one: you.  Don’t wait around for someone else to do it.  Having “more” is safer than giving away.  Who knows what tomorrow may bring.  The emphasis is on the self, me.  Now Christianity is supposed to be about giving yourself away as with its symbol of the cross.  But now that it is an institution it is less what it says it is.  It is more about preserving the past, holding onto power and control.  But in essence, its founding, it is still about the cross, someone who gave himself away even though he could have avoided it.  That man on the cross was made fun of by the crowd to “save yourself” but he did not.  This is why I like recovery programs such as AA.  A person comes in desperate to save themself.  They want to get something, sobriety, freedom from addiction.  In time they learn that the only way to save themselves is to “give it away,” that is be of service to another struggling addict.  Share the solution of the steps and fellowship.  Listen. Be with. Give up your time and energy and sometimes money for the sake of another suffering person.  Unless you are all in, you will most likely be all out and back into addiction.  And AA is willing to change to meet the modern world and modern drunk while holding onto its core, the 12 steps.  Women, gays, lesbians are most welcome.  AA could teach institutional religion a lot.  But lets give thanks that a lot of AA meetings are taking place in church rooms.  So close to one another and yet so far away.

Materialism

Having stuff, or materialism, is not bad on any spiritual journey.  So don’t beat yourself up about how much stuff you have.  Rather, ask yourself what is your motive for it?  Is it greed? Is your mantra, “More?”  In any spiritual practice we get to reflect here and there on our material stuff, the reputation we are fostering, the manner in which we judge others in wealth.  The solution is not to become mendicants unless you feel called to be a St. Francis of Assisi.  But just not let ourselves lie to ourselves about why we have all our stuff.  Honesty is an essential virtue in any interior growth.  Things are not evil in themselves.  The world is good as Genesis seems to believe.  Just make sure that you do not put a notice on the door of your heart that says, “No admittance for the Spirit, or the Really Real.”

Obstacles

If God is so good then why are there things getting in the way of my being comfortable?  I mean, just when I feel comfortable, something crops up that makes me uncomfortable.  Doesn’t my God, this Power, want me to be comfortable?  Well maybe not.  What if the goal is not so much “constant comfort” as it is “growth.”  Do I grow when I am comfortable?  Generally not.  I kick back and try to float along with little effort.  I slacken off whatever helped me feel comfortable.  I stop growing.  So I have begun to look at things that bother me as possible means to growth.  I go back to my toolbox kit of things and practices that helped me to feel comfortable in the past.  Often, I find that the cause of the discomfort is fixable. It is in me.  Outside issues can be troublesome, no doubt.  How I respond to them is what I call my side of the street.  My God will help me there.  I need fixin’ and I cannot do it alone.  The world may need fixing too, but if I am not in a good space, I will become part of the problem.  Obstacles?  Here I come, and I do not come alone.

The Chiseling Hand

Think of a sculptor who chisels away at a block of stone.  The Artist knows what potential the stone has to become something of beauty and grandeur.  The sculptor knows and the stone does not.  This is  a great metaphor for prayerful meditation.  I am the block of stone who is clueless as to where this meditation is going or to what I will become.  But each day that I meditate, God the sculptor is chiseling away at me, bit by bit, removing whatever gets in the path of me becoming all I am meant to be. I don’t ever have to know where my meditation is going.  I just have to do it each day.  Over time, as the bronze block becomes a work of art, I will become all the inner beauty my Creator made me to be.  I try not to be a blockhead.

Our Problem

I often don’t think that something is a problem until it becomes my problem.  I have been reading about accessibility for people who cannot hear, see or walk unaided, for instance.  I never really think about stairs or narrow doorways or Braille books or sign language when someone is talking.  Such problems for others ought to be my problem too, if I want to be a person of service.  Start with compassion.  Can a deaf person attend one of my talks?  How about stairs and the width of doorways, much less how easy is it to open a door.  Since I am in the church business with its buildings I have begun to consider these things.  Buildings and presentations can become barriers.  But I am also reminded by these same persons that they never let any limitations get in the way of their drinking.  They are good teachers for me.

Feeling Better

One of the results of being on a spiritual path or recovery is that you begin to "feel better."  I don't mean that you always feel good, because that is fantasy land.  What I mean is that you begin to feel your feelings better with the know how of what to do with them.  For instance, you might feel anger, rejection, loneliness, and sadness.  You can identify the feeling, and know how to respond to it.  With anger or rejection you will not necessarily strike back, an eye for an eye, which you have found in past behavior, only made you and matters worse.  You realize that you don't always have the emotional stuff to endure certain responses, so you don't go there.  You let some things simply go.  You learn how to ask the right question of another who might be going through their own stuff at the moment.  You become a better listener.  And you listen better to yourself, your best self.  And you will feel better more often even amid tough times.

Excluded

Did you or do you ever feel excluded?  And especially when you were once seemingly in the center, and then put out to pasture, so to speak, or even felt “dumped.”  Someone who develops a physical limitation, maybe hearing, seeing, or walking, can find that places they went no longer are accessible to them because of their hearing seeing, wheel chair, etc.  But then there are those for whom nothing  physically changed in them, but a new boss came along.  The new boss had different ideas about who would be central and who would be “not so much.”  You ended up the “not so much.”  You felt married to your work or ministry, and someone took it pretty much away.  Well, this is not foreign to me.  Now I could whine, complain, talk behind someone’s back, criticize, but the situation would stay the same, but I would be in a negative mood and emotionally out of balance.  Not good for me.  So what I do is try to think of other people who are feeling or being excluded for whatever reason.  How can I be of some service to make them feel more included and important?  Senior persons would be a place where I could be of service, so this I try to do.  I feel better and find that I have a whole new world of usefulness open up to me.  It is a bit of “do unto others as I would have them do unto me.”  Anyhow, it keeps me out of trouble.