A Drop

 Today, I hope to be a drop of love.  Some people are parched, and a drop is more than nothing for them, even if they do not notice.  I won’t worry about the results of my drop. I won’t wallow in, “I should do more.”  My drop may be what I can do, and it is better than a bucket of self-interest, self-pity, or bondage to self.  I recall a fellow nailed to a cross, lingering near death, not being able to do much of anything.  Then he poured out a drop of love.  He said, “Forgive them.  They know not what they do.”  And those to whom he spoke it did not hear him.  The results seemed nil.  He died.  But those words are remembered still today by many people.  That drop of love is a consolation for many.  So be a drop of love.  Don’t worry about results.  You never know.  Don’t call it “too little.”  You might be surprised.  The fellow who died on the cross.  They say he rose from the dead.  Everyone around you is bearing some cross.  Be a drop.  You never know.  

Alone

 Do you sometimes feel alone with another person?  Don’t always be blaming yourself or thinking you are not enough.  A lot of aloneness with others in a conversation, or on cyberspace, is because your point of view does not interest them.  You feel at these moments like you are alone, but with others.  I have had that happen to me.  I say something and someone responds by changing the subject.  There is no response or follow up to what I just said.  I accept that what I have to say does not always interest others.  You might say my blogs are worthless and you turn me off, or out.  OK.  But if I think I am in some way insufficient for the world, I will not blog again.  And as you can read, day by day, I  go on and on.  Believe in yourself.  Anyone reading this?

Anxiety

 Notice the days when you are full of energy and have that positive feeling, a connective feeling.  Why?  Sufficient sleep?  Correct diet?  Good exercise? Perhaps.  But take a look at your “anxiety-quotient.”  You don’t feel anxious on these energy days.  You might feel a challenge, but not an anxiety.  Anxiety is tiresome as someone said.  If you are on the starting line of a race, or about to perform, or take on a project, you see it is a challenge, but you are not full of anxiety that you are not enough or you cannot do it.  Anxiety saps energy, recovery and peace.  Why meditate?  Maybe you will lower you anxiety level.  By doing less in that meditation time, you will reap a better day’s harvest.  

A Hand Of Water

 You have today.  Tomorrow, today will be gone, like water cupped into your hand, running through, not to be recovered.  Today, you can get some things accomplished, but not everything, just like drinking water from a cupped hand.  You don’t get all of it.  It is the nature of water in a cupped hand.  It is reality.  Fantasy says I can do all I want or “must” do.  In fact, I am a mere human, fallible, limited.  Fantasy dies in our limits.  A spiritual connection today helps me to limit my “more” in which I thought I could do more and more.  Or I think I can be all things to all the wants of everyone around me.  Then I cannot wait for the burden of today to end.  Today started out as a gift.  Then it became a burden of stuff.  What happened?  I thought I could drink all of the water cupped into my hand.  I thought I could satisfy all the greedy wants of others, and myself.  

The Burden

 As the poet says, “not-enoughness ” is a burden.  On such days, or moments, I feel so unfinished, so much not done, the unbecoming me. Or I feel that I do not get enough love, acceptance, recognition.  At such moments as this, I am living on the surface of myself.  Meditation, some way to connect to my deeper self is where I drink from the well, the waters that refresh me.  There, in that well, rest the truth that I am enough and can drink of the energy to reach out to another, or do some task that I have put off, or simply enjoy being with me as good company, being by myself rather than being alone.  You are enough.  You have the gift of today.  You can “be” for yourself and maybe for others who feel burdened by not being enough.  

The Bother

 Today, will I bother to love?  Somedays loving seems like a bother.  Apathy is guiding me.  Any gathering, be it recovery, worship service, family, I am like a crab.  I enter the gathering and scuttle like a crab to find a place where space rather than people are around me.  Then I sink down into my shell.  I am backing into survival, or trying to get an isolated spiritual fix, or just doing my duty, showing up.  But at least I am there.  Maybe grace will be at work and some energy will bring me to lift my head out of my shell, and then bother myself to love, to connect with another person.  I will begin to think less about me and more about another person.  I am not the only one struggling today.  On days when it is a bother to love, I am part of a vast audience, each of whom is struggling too.  So, I bother.  And grace abounds a bit more in the encounter, the effort of trying.  

Their Best

 If I say that I love someone, do I love them to become their fullest self, even if that disagrees with my practical plans or future for them?  Say a person aspires at a certain age to want to become a musical stage actor.  You say you love this person, but think it impractical to seek such a career.  In your wisdom, you think so few people make it in show business, plus your plan for this person you love is that they grow up to have a secure job, home, family.  Are you loving this person to become their best self, even if it disagrees with your plans for them?  When Jesus invited disciples, he did not try to make them become anything.  He simply said, follow me and love one another.  They each had to figure it out through trial and error, to eventually become their best selves.  To me, Jesus’ plan is that we love one another by becoming our best selves.  If I try to be someone else rather than me, I will have little energy left to love anyone.  I might not even love myself.  

Second Opinion

 Disaster!  I was making my first "from scratch" cream sauce for a pasta.  The pasta was cooked just right.  The cream sauce recipe came out just right.  To die for.  I lifted up the pan filled with the cooked pasta swimming in the cream sauce and laid the pan on the edge of the sink, while I held it.  As the monks walked in for their lunch, the pan tipped over and everything fell on the floor.  I shouted,"Oh no!"  Thank God I did not shout worse, this being a monastery.  No lunch for the monks, except for a salad and the fresh baked pumpernickel bread still warm from the oven.  The solution?  I have to kill myself.  My life is in ruins.  I messed up badly.  And I was angry that the monks would not get to taste this sauce I made.  One of the monks, particularly starving looked at the dinner on the kitchen floor and said, "Oh we can eat that."  But saner heads prevailed.  Then as I was wet mopping the entire kitchen floor including the greasy spots from the splattered dinner, one of the monks walked in and said to me, "Detach."  A second opinion to killing myself.  It seemed the wiser course.  This is why I like recovery program processes.  People get a second opinion to their insanity.  Has anyone got disaster cooking stories out there?  I don't want to feel alone.  

Being Someone Else

 Did you ever want to be “like someone else” in choosing or envying a behavior, a way of life, a career?  I did.  I wanted to pry this other person open to find the happiness in them that I did not have.  I assumed they were happy.  Happiness was a commodity out there in the world and they had it.  I did not.  Eventually, I found out that I was not made to be anyone else but my true self.  Happiness was within me, but only if I could discover my unique and best self, each day.  It is a daily rediscovery, because it is so easy to get off my path and onto someone else’s.  Beware of practicing being happy on the outside.  That drink you did not need?  That is happiness practice on the outsides.  I don’t want my day to be a daily acting school, playing the part of someone else I might admire or fantasize as happy.  Morning meditation, midday interior check ups, help me to enjoy being me.  

Like Yourself

 Do you like yourself?  A good question to ask each day, because it can effect and affect how we go about our day.  What if I am grumpy or nasty around people, impatient, intolerant, unaccepting of life on life’s terms?  Or what if I just don’t want to be with anyone.  Avoidance!  It is easy for me to be alone in a monastery, so I have to check my motives for doing so.  I could hide behind “I need my space,” or “I am here for quiet contemplation.”  Maybe yes, but if the energy behind anything is “I don’t like myself” then I need to do some spiritual maintenance.  Morning mediation, is my check on “liking me.”  If I don’t like me, then woe is the world around me that day.  Isolation is not “being alone” time.  Criticism, judgment and resentment follow.  If you are having a lousy day, check up on this question: Do you like yourself?

The Choice

 When a young person chooses a major, or special study, or trade, often the motivating reason, underlying their choice, is the energy that they can change the world.  This is their uplifting, energizing purpose.  I had this in mind when I decided to be a priest.  Without such a purpose, I don’t think I would have or could have gotten through difficult times.  Too often we lose this purpose, become jaded, “practical” or cynical.  Then life becomes survival, one darn thing after another, and then you die.  When I wake up in the morning I ask myself this question.  Am I going to change the world today?  No way, unless I begin with me.  The world will be a better place, whether in monastery or Manhattan, if I work on me first.  Maybe today I work on cynicism.  Or fear.  Or gratitude.  Or liking myself.  And maybe in the middle of the day I just need a nap.  Do you first.  Then good stuff will happen.  

Terry’s Day Off

 A true day off for me is to wake up after a good sleep but not have to get up.  No alarm.  No pressing agenda.  Nothing better,  Nothing more rare in my monastery life.  A day off is not about waking to pressing agendas, yours or others for you, that are outside your normal routines or normal job.  Those might be good days, precious days, but not “days off.”  I think many of us need such a day in our life here and there.  I do.  Does the monastery allow for it?  Uh, let’s not go there.  If I have to burn for a day off here and there, so be it.  Genesis says God took off the 7th day.  Once a week.  I am not that greedy for a day off.  But that nothing better feeling than a day off is precious.  Take the day off.  Blame me.  

Arm’s Length

 If I walk into my room and have a disquieting feeling, I call it, “Being at Arm’s Length.”  Someone told me that.  Maybe the room itself is problematic, such as when it is dirty, too disarrayed for even me.  Well, then I can clean up and “arm’s length” might go away.  Maybe I see something plainly, as I enter the room, something I have been avoiding doing, a reminder pile that only gets taller, with dust.  Or maybe it is simply me.  My monastery cell is what I have.  I cannot simply move to another cell or room.  Unless something is obvious when I walk in, I try to sit quietly in the disquiet, seeing what “arm’s length” might want to teach me.  A sense of belonging may then to overcome the arm’s length feelings.  My thoughts may have to settle down from where I have just been and where I have been doing something else.  My room can be a window to my soul.  Quiet, stillness, can clear the window.  See.

Rain

I have lived so long in the Western side of the Rockies, that I have forgotten how wonderful, and mesmerizing is a gentle New York rainy day.  Growing up in New York, rainy days were boring.  No fun.  Could not go to the beach.  Outdoor sports were discomforting and messy.  I prayed for sunshine to cooperate with my plans.  Now I pray for rain out West.  In White Plains, NY recently, we had that gentle but continuing rain.  I welcomed it, the smells and sounds of it.  So when something seems boring to you and useless, upsetting your plans, judge not.  What does not cooperate with your plans, your world at the moment, might be a blessing for someone else.  Except black ice.  But even that is part of the result of snow or rain.  Right Knoxville, TN?

8th Grade Graduation

In my memorabilia I discovered a memory book of pictures and quotes from fellow 8th graders in my book.  I also discovered that I had written in my vital statistics.  I had a 28 inch waist.  What happened!  On another page I saw listed the three things I wanted to be when I grew up.  The first choice was “PRIEST.”  What!  I don’t remember writing that when I was 14.  I have at times thought that God took me on only because I was not much good or successful at anything else.  but now I realize that it was my destiny.  I am what I am suppose to be.  God has been after me for a long time.  But maybe all my drifting here and there, my life-time friends, different road experiences, were all part of a blessing to make me a better priest.  So don’t beat yourself up about “wasting time,” because it might have been all those experiences that gave you the depth to do more fully, your destiny.   

Stepinac

 I was with old friends for a gathering in the town of our high school, Stepinac.  We were given a tour of the school, 61 years after we last were inside the building.  Lots of changes and modernization for sure. And a lot more expensive.  We were shown, among other things, the refurbished chapel.  It struck me that I spent so little time inside the chapel in my four years in school.  It was most often empty so it would have been a good place to sit quietly and meditate in high school.  It is what I love to do now, but as a teenager, I did not know this about myself.  In some ways, I was too young, too immature for much of what high school offered me.  I participated yes, and my year books shows all of that listed.  I learned a lot but never learned much about myself.  Education was participation and learning stuff, information, but not much about the mystery of me.  I did not know there was a mystery.  I am trying to focus now more on learning about the mystery of me.  I requires a lot of unlearning, of letting go of stuff that has hidden me from myself.  

The Toddler

It is difficult to explain the language of silence to someone who is unfamiliar with it.  Here I will call this language, “God Talk.”  Think of a mother and her infant.  The mother and child spend lots of time together.  They pour themselves into one another.  The child makes a sound that you cannot understand.  But the mother knows what the child is saying in the language of infant-speak.  The rest of us only see exteriors, not interiors.  So it is with the language of silence in prayer.  One must pour themselves into it with some kind of affection-connection, or it will stay just exterior silence, the absence of sound, with no connection to intimacy.  If a mother wants to be open to the infant-speak, then the mother will not walk around with ear buds, tuning the infant out.  

The Disguise

 All of us have needs and wants.  I try to keep them separate.  If I let go of focus on me, in meditation, I seem to be able to keep them separate.  If I ignore my interior “need” for silence and stillness, then my wants tend to bleed into disguised needs.  Disguised wants can chew up my day, my life, my peace.  And they never satisfy, because wants, disguised or otherwise, never answer the heart-need that I think we all have.  I may need to eat or bathe, or put gas in the car, or charge the battery of car, phone, but I don’t need to do a lot of social media, or fantasize about a different life.  At the end of the day I ask myself, “Did this or that satisfy?”  Or is the hunger within still unattended.  

A Focus

 The energy behind fear, in part, is a focus on what I lack or where I feel pain.  I fear a loss or a lack of something.  I feel pain, physical or emotional.  This may all be true on any one day, but if I focus on loss or pain then I will live in fear.  Not good for me.  So when I wake up and at some points in the day, I try to remind myself, call to attention, what is positive in my life.  The phrase, “counting my blessings” comes to mind.  My attitude, my emotional energy can ruin my day, and the day of others around me.  Oblivion is a solution to fear, but it is short term and can even be terminal.  It will result in more pain and loss.  So I work on the prayer of counting my blessings.  You who read my blog are a blessing for me today.  

A Life

 People tell me that they do not like Christianity because of all the doctrine and rules.  I think my Catholicism is first of all a life, a way of life.  I call it the “Mystical Life.”  What?  Yes, it means Non-duality, ultimate Oneness.  Do I experience this every day? No, but I have my moments.  I think the way to experience and live this Oneness with all around me, is through meditation.  Meditation comes before catechism.  Unfortunately, my religion tends to teach catechism first and never really gets around to meditation.  The idea of “All things in Christ,” makes no sense, or only a catechism answer sense, unless one has a spiritual life rooted in meditation.  The experience begins within one’s depth, with the process of death to self-focus, and then it begins to be lived in fits and starts in everyday life.  Holy Communion was supposed to help, but got then prelates and clerics got all caught up in who is in and who is out.  Not the road to non-duality.  

The Storm

 There is a story in the Bible about Jesus sleeping in the back of a boat while a violent storm is upsetting his disciples, who are wide awake in the boat, upset that Jesus does not wake up and rescue them from their dilemma.  Isn’t he supposed to be God?   Many so called believers meditate to feel the calming presence of their Power, Deity. When they feel all stormy inside, mind, feelings upsetting their tranquility, they wonder where is this God?  Does their god not care about them?  Well, maybe God is right there within them, sleeping.  Maybe God so enjoys being within us that God can sleep in peace.  Storms don’t bother God.  They bother us.  Some people give up on their god because their meditation does not bring them peace.  If they think they can control their meditation, then they don’t need a god.  They are their own god.  Some days meditations are stormy.  But spiritual weather changes too.  Whining never makes the rain go away.  

Baking Adjustments

 I just finished baking and eating a loaf of bread.  Instead of baking in the monastery oven, I was baking in a convection oven, that was true to its temperature setting, and at sea level.  So I adjusted and tried something new.  I had fresh rosemary and basil growing in the backyard of the home where I was baking.  I had a bigger Dutch oven than at the monastery.  So, I added the herbs after the bread rose twice, quite quickly.  Then I baked for a shorter period of time than in the mountains.  All worked out magnificently.  If you are placed in different circumstances, you adjust for baking, so why not adjust for people.  Not everyone is the same, so why would I act the same toward everyone.  I may be the same person, as I am the same baker, but the person in front of me is not the same as everyone else around me.  I just saw the movie,”CODA.”  Oscar winner.  A must.  

My World

 I just saw the movie, “Belfast,” Oscar nominated.  A very good movie, but I could not understand the dialogue without subtitles.  The dialogue was too  thickly accented for me, but not for them.  But the adults knew if they moved to London, no one would understand them.  Theirs was a small world, but made unsafe by political, cultural violence.  A little boy, Buddy, in his even smaller world, knew his community of friends and family.  In an unsafe big world of Belfast, he felt safe in his neighborhood because he knew everyone in his little world.  I try to be aware of the person in front of me.  They may not share my world, nor care.  But if I say I care, then I need to be open.  Otherwise, we are more likely to talk over or around one another, but not to one another.  There will be talkers, but no listeners.  

Fireworks

 Last month, I went to a baseball game.  After the game, there were fireworks.  I enjoyed the fireworks.  We don’t have fireworks in the monastery county because of fear of forest fires.  The fireworks are a good memory still.  I had not seen fireworks in several years.  We clapped, ooh and aah for them.  But they did not change my life.  A good memory can be just that.  It need not change you.  So many people seek new, different experiences, hoping for some change.  If no change, the experience goes from “good” to “not much,” or “not worth it.”  I simply accept a good experience as just that, and part of my memory bag.  The monastery on the other hand is “a life.”  Fireworks are not a life.  Drinking, drugs, sex, food is an experience, but not a life.  The monastery is slowing changing my life, and often is unspectacular, unlike fireworks.  I try not to get trapped in the spectacular.  I have power to seek the spectacular but not the power to change my life.  For that, I need spiritual help.  

The Swimming Pool

 Recently, I had access to a swimming pool.  At first, I was going to pass it up because I don’t do swimming pools in my monastery life.  Then I thought, “Why not try it?”  The water was not cold, nor the pool crowded.  No lane sharing.  I swam some laps and felt ok.  No soreness.  I wore goggles so my eyes were protected.  Then I began to run in deep water, with my feet not touching the bottom of the pool.  I had a weight-bearing device for that.  It all felt good.  When I got out, I was not sore in joint or muscle.  Usually, after running on the soft ground of the monastery, I am a bit sore.  After the pool, no need to stretch.  The next day, I was still feeling good.  Sometimes, I just have to get out of my routines and try something different or new.  Now, I need to find a monastery with a pool!  With a deep end.  Dream on.  But still, good to try something new that is safe.  Routines can become ruts.  

Making Sense

 I bought a new iPhone, an SE.  I was told the learning curve from my old iPhone 6 would be easy.  I went to a class for beginners.  It was the right class for me.  Being a dummy I needed a patient teacher who could connect his/her wisdom with some empathy for my being clueless.  The class trainer was a good teacher for me.  He found a way to move me from where I was, lost, to a bit of wisdom that was useful to me to me.  So if you are trying to teach someone something, to pass on some wisdom, I believe you must first connect to their clueless or shut-down space.  The great math teachers know how to connect with someone who says, “I am no good at math.”  The same with someone who says, “I cannot stop drinking.”  If you cannot get into their powerless world, then you probably cannot teach them much.  Besides entering into my clueless world, the second thing the iPhone teacher did was teach me things I found useful that I did not even know about. Just because you think something is useful does not mean the student agrees.  Be in their world before you try to bring them into yours.  

The Unseen Cable

 A lot of the power to run our modern world comes from unseen cables buried underground.  You see the results, but the source is hidden.  A great metaphor for Spiritual Power.  The God of my understanding is at work, but often hidden, obscure, except that good stuff happens that I do see.  So why do I pursue doing good stuff so that I am noticed?  What if I am not noticed?  Then I am doing good and getting upset.  Well, that will make for a lousy day.  Or life.  I have found that being in a fit spiritual condition each day goes along with no worry about being noticed, but still trying to be of service to others.  Even my meditations go unnoticed as I do them in the privacy of my room.  But my spiritual Source does notice, and keeps me on the path of sanity.  

A Path

 I sometimes say the popular phrase, “I cannot see the forest from the trees!”  So I am on no path, just lost.  Rather than ask why I am lost, I have found, duh, that I am usually alone in this situation.  The solution was to ask for help, to companion with another person who cared about me finding my way.  Left to my own devices, I stay lost, or just trundle along trying to get my own self-will accomplished.  I am wandering in frustration and maybe a bit of fear.  I am lost!  Another person, companion, might give me an opinion, a suggestion, even show me a path I did not see with my unaided self.  So when lost, I get help.  The Power that has my best interest often shows up in another person who is not so lost as I am at the moment.  Get help!

More Time

 We say "I want more time."  That is, we don't want to die just yet.  For what do we want more time?  Think about how much time you spend looking at TV or your smart phone.  Each day!  To what extent are they distractions? And distractions from what?  For instance, it might be to ward off loneliness, or a sense of unimportance in your world.  I have found those feelings in my life, but looking at a screen does not bring happiness.  Only diversion.  What someone suggested is that we need a pair of spiritual walking shoes to get onto a path of fulfillment.  Spiritually, I try to walk out or away from focus on self, centered on self.  When I meditate, read some spiritual literature, I am avoiding this self-implosion, and spiritually walking toward making the world a better place after my meditation, and sometimes even in my meditation.  Occasionally, the remote will inform me constructively.  But most of the time it deforms me.  

The Fear Solution

 There is a bible story in which the guys who were supposed to be followers of Jesus got into a boat without him, to go across a big lake.  They get a few miles out and big winds come up, waves wash over the sides of the boat, and they are rowing like crazy, full of fear.  Jesus comes along walking on water and the guys freak out.  Jesus says, “Don’t be afraid. It is I.”  They want to pull him into the boat to get rid of their fear of drowning. Jesus never gets into the boat.  Suddenly, they come to shore.  The point?  Fear may get you to your destination, but it won’t bring about intimacy.  When prayer is a trying to grab onto God or your Power to get something, you may get it.  But only trust and surrender will bring intimacy, a sense of union and Love.  I can spend most of my spiritual life trying to get somewhere, and then wonder why I am still lonely.  Surrender for me would be like walking on water.  I need help for that.