Barely Living

We can live without living.  It is often our way to avoid pain.  To avoid the pain of poverty one had known when younger, they might work so hard as to lose a love that was once theirs.  Work draws all the attention.  Life goes too fast for love.  It is love that will slow you down.  An alcoholic is alive, but not really living.  They drink to avoid pain and they lose what love they had.  Love slows us down.  If you practice the spiritual life it must be for love and not to avoid pain.  The spiritual life will be for love if there is a growing relationship.  You know it is growing because you become less about yourself and more about others.  Foxhole prayers are just another way to avoid pain.  They are not relationship with a Power that is Love.   

The Garden

 Love is a garden, I was told.  We have to keep working at it.  When I see a beautiful garden like our San Francisco Arboretum, I am well aware of how much work it takes to make it what it is.  A beautiful love takes work.  Even messy love takes work to deal with the mess.  Someone told me that they love AA.  It is a Recovery Program for Alcoholics.  They love it because they work at it.  If I say I love the spiritual life, it is because I work at it.  There are times when it seems so much work, bother, time-consuming, and it is those times that I must especially pay attention.  Absence of feeling does not mean absence of love.  It means get out of myself.  Gardeners are not selfish people.  

In Between

Where is God?  Well, one place I have found God in action is that space between outside stimulus and  response.  Stuff happens.  People say and act as they do.  That is outside stimulus.  How do I react? Anger, resentment, revenge, whining, self-pity, are all responses in which there is no space for God.  The stimulus and my reaction are bing-bing.  But when I pause, that is God at work.  I may feel a response for a moment.  Feelings happen.  But action need not follow if God gets some space.  This is why I need a spiritual practice in the morning, early.  

The Script

 Why do I get angry, resentful or upset at what someone says or does?  I have come to realize that on some days and occasions, I have gotten up and written a script for how the day should go.  People have their lines to speak and their actions to perform according to the script.  Unfortunately, they don’t read the script.  They say and do things free of my program for my happiness.  So, I am really the director of a fantasy play.  I am the only one in it.  Even God has opted out.  

Trees

 There is a non-profit in San Francisco, “Friends of the urban Forest.”  They plant trees in neighborhoods in tandem with City and neighborhood approval.  One objection to having a tree planted in front of one’s home or business is that they will never live to see the tree grow to full bloom.   But that is not the point.  We don’t plant slow growing trees for ourselves alone.  We plant them for those who will follow us.  Recovery people and people in religious building refurbishing and expansion don’t so much think everything they do is for the present.  Recovery meetings are kept going, functioning, not just for the present membership but for those who have not yet entered the door.  The same with places of worship, and monuments.  

The Whisper

 Grace, that spiritual Power, energy, gift to the heart, does not shout out for our attention.  Grace respects our will to accept or reject.  So grace comes as a whisper.  This is why we need to have meditation in our life.  It is a prayer of quiet, so that we can be open to that whisper who will energize us in a direction for our good and those around us.  Grace gets us out of ourself by getting into ourself first.  

Urgent

 We can get so busy that sometimes important things don’t get done.  The important things too often get buried in the “urgent.”  Ego, fear based life, the self-important focus make some things urgent, that in fact are just getting in the way of the important.  Important things don’t always appeal to our self-interest, or quiet our fears.  People in recovery skip meetings because of a sense of urgency.  Then they drink and so it goes.  People skip worship services, prayer, spiritual practices because they don’t seem to wear the “important” label.  They become optional, or “later,” which rarely comes.  Doesn’t God know how busy I am?