Sabbatical

When you go on a sabbatical it is for the purpose of learning something new to include recalling something you had forgotten or to deepen an understanding.  Teachers do this to make themselves better teachers.  Well, drunks go on sabbaticals too.  They stop going to meetings, working the recovery steps and what do they learn on their dry sabbatical?  If they live, they learn that they are real alcoholics for instance.  Life gets that bad on the sabbatical.  Then they come back with a new purpose and enthusiasm they lacked the last time around.  Some people do that with their religion.  They drop out and become “used to be” people.  Life gets bleak with no spiritual replacement and eventually they might come back with a new enthusiasm and focus on working their faith.  

False Gods

 Some people say that they don’t believe in God or don’t believe in false gods.  But if they tend to live in fantasy, then they surely worship a false god.  Fantasy is most often about oneself being omnipotent.  In the fantasy, you can do extraordinary things and are bowed down to by others.  Well if that is not a false god then I don’t know what is.  So if I am walking along and find myself passing the time in fantasy, I remind myself that I can do better during this going from one place to another than wallowing in false god worship.  Worshipping myself makes me a religion of one.  No other members.  

Enough

 Today is my birthday.  I will go to a funeral today for a priest who died last week across the hall from me in our rectory.  He was one month younger than me.  He is gone and I am here.  I have come to realize that life is a gift as I age.  It is a gift not so much for me as it is a gift for others.  I have a chance to be of some service to others, that they might have a better day because I am alive in it. Being also Palm Sunday weekend I will have the Evening service today.  We celebrate someone who is a Gift to many people.  The gift of life is not all about me, but all about all of us caring for one another.  So once again you get a blog to read.  And I get to open some birthday cards.  

One Way

 The problem with addictions is that the love only goes one way.  A drunk loves booze but the drink does not love the drinker.  And so it goes with drugs.  You are addicted to social media, but the media does not have feelings for you.  If it were another person, who did not care about you, then you would most likely give them up, unless of course, you are addicted to the relationship.  One way relationships tend to be addictive.  There is a reason we cannot give them up, and it is most often not about love,  It might be fear of loss.  I try not to pour something into me or pour myself into something if there is no back and forth, no mutuality of the heart.  Booze never cared.  

Plans

 When I get up in the morning and make my plans for the day, they don’t always happen as I planned.  Then I get upset, and consequences follow.  Why have a lousy day simply because I did not get as planned?  After all, it was only my plan and I did not check in with the world to see if we all agreed.  So when I wake up I first ask God what plans God has for me.  Since I am clueless, I ask that I be open.  I may still have plans, but it with an attitude of openness, that is, a willingness to surrender my will and life to God as I have come to know or not know through prayer.  

Domesticate

 I am a Christian who too often wants to domesticate the Gospel I read.  I want it to be comfortable and comforting.  I tend to have short term memory for what bothers me.  I tend to focus belief in that I am converted to believing the correct doctrine and tradition.  My shortcoming at these times is that I ignore the conversion of the heart.  I am shortchanging myself from a conversion of the heart that will more deeply affect my actions and attitudes.  Meditation opens me to listening to a Power, my God, who can ever so gently or more directly, point me in the direction of conversion of heart, such that my actions will not be from ego, fear, self, but from love.  I am a work in progress.  

A Restful Night

 When I wake up from a good night’s sleep, I am rested.  This good feeling can fool me into thinking that I am spiritually fine too, as if sleep healed all my shortcomings or took them away.  Sometimes, when I wake up rested, I think that I have all this energy and want to get on with the “doing” of an active life, saving the world and such.  I will pray “later.”  Then the day goes downhill with my ego in charge and my spiritual life starving and weakened.  So I try to wake up and remind myself that I am a spiritually sick person in need or recovery and that I now have the energy to pray first and then see about saving the world, or at least correcting all the shortcomings of others.  Prayer usually gives me a second opinion about what to do in the world of “action.”