Hope

 Hope is not evidence-based.  Faith is.  You believe because of what you have heard and seen.  You might say you have never seen God but believe.  This belief is based on what you have heard and seen in others, such as parents, friends, rituals, preachers, readings.  You pick up on their experience.  In Recovery programs you have faith because of what you have seen in others.  Could this be for me too?  Could I get sober like these people?  You have no evidence that you can get sober because you have never been sober, only dry.  This is where hope comes in.  Hope is what keeps us all going forward.  I keep hoping I will be a good priest.  I have seen it in other priests and hope that if I do what they do, I have a chance.  

Mausoleum

The Mausoleum life is one that looks pretty good on the outside but is all about death and dying on the inside.  Young people especially know this if they have addiction issues.  They can still look good on the outside, but inside they are spiritually and physically dying.  They are not yet into recovery that heals the insides.  As a priest, I have my clerical clothes that I wear on the outside and can look pretty good when I need to look and sound good.  But if I do not have a spiritual practice for the insides, then I am dying, or living the :mausoleum life.   

Recycling

 I am more peaceful and therefore pray better when recycling does not make me crazy.  We have the three barrel system here in San Francisco.  Each barrel has pictures on it of the various things that go in that barrel.  Some of those picture images look the same on different barrels.  Often I am holding something in my hand that does not seem to fit any picture.  Makes me crazy.  But AI, a bot, will help my meditation.  How?  It will take away the crazy in me.  In time, when I am about to put something into one of the barrels, the AI will gently speak up and say, “No.”  Then it will tell me which color barrel will take my item to discard.  San Francisco says it is coming.  A bot helps me meditate.  The future!  

A System

Values need a system to enact them on a regular basis.  The system is some organization, coordination and so on so that the values can be lived out on a daily basis.  Sobriety is a value for an addict.  But just wanting sobriety or trying it in some haphazard way will not keep the value active.  Recovery programs are the system of meetings, steps, communal bonding that allow the value of sobriety to be lived out on a daily basis.  The monastic life is a system to allow the value of deep prayer to be lived out.  Both these examples are self supporting.  If you want someone else not in your system to keep it going, you are in a precarious situation.   

Who Am I?

Who am I if I am not working?  We are so driven to self-identity by the work we do for pay, inside or outside the home.  Even if we work at a job for pay from home it is still work that identifies us.  Many people think they are a “nobody,” or a “less than” if they do not have a paying job.  Stay at home Mom is seen a lot differently from a stay at home worker for pay.  This view says you are not productive as your full self until you get paid.  Raising a family from home is not seen as a career.  A stay at home Dad who is not getting paid would be under the same stigma.  No one pays me to stay at home, but that does not make me second rate or “unproductive.”  Besides, we in this category do not really stay at home.  But it is our base, our gathering of self place.  

The Afterwards

 Living in a City as a boy, I walked to church on a Sunday morning or any morning when I was serving mass as an altar boy.  Two precious things came after mass on Sunday.  The walk home went past family run food shops.  We picked up the newspaper, breakfast rolls, other baked goods, meats and deli stuff.  All was fresh that morning.  And there was no rushing to other organized activities.  No sport activities or organized games on Sunday.  I think it helped to set me up for meditation, for the slower life that meditation requires of us.  There were no coffee and donuts after church.  You simply hung around a bit because there was no real rush to go to the next thing.  And you did not need to go to the bathroom because you had nothing to eat before mass, no coffee or sugar stuff.  In San Francisco where I help out in neighborhoods, saying masses, some of this can still be done.  In the suburbs it is a different world.  

The Knitter

 Knitting takes separate threads, separate colors at times, separate widths, and knits them into one.  Though the threads are knit together, the colors or size remain the same.  In the spiritual life, we can be different shapes, sizes, colors, and still come together as one.  Meditation is like the knitting.  It begins to see unity where before there was only differences.  In prayer I can become one with myself in all my differences.  And then begin to become one with others.  Spiritual Knitting!