Pleasurable Results

 Meditation is a bit tricky for an alcoholic.  Why?  Well, alcoholics seek pleasure.  “More” is the operative goal.  So they begin to meditate in the hope of feeling good.  Feeling good, and then feeling better, the true goal of an alcoholic.  But meditation is not a solitary activity.  God or Higher Power is at work, revealing more than the alcoholic might care to know at that moment.  As with all meditation, sometimes the activity and seeming results of time spent, are blah, not much, full of distractions.  This is to break us out of our egocentric desire to feel better in whatever we do.  But maybe the point of meditation is to know God’s will, not ours, and the power to carry it out.  If you are less selfish, more giving without any need for results to make you feel better, then the meditation is working.  So I have found out.  

St. Frances of Rome

 I went to school in the Bronx, to St. Frances of Rome on East 236th Street off White Plains Road.  The Woodlawn section of the Bronx.  The “nuns” as we called them had a deep influence on my life.  Some were scary, ok.  But most were not.  What struck me was that they had given up so much for love of God.  They wore those nun clothes in hot weather.  They got no real salary.  They were patient with us brats.  They showed care for us.  They did not seek the things of the world, power, esteem, wealth, much less marriage.  Their God made a big difference in their life.  I have come to realize that any true spiritual growth moves in that direction.  Being lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, is life at a minimal level.  I can easily sink to it.  If you say you have a religion or recovery from addiction, then ask yourself, “Am I lukewarm today?”  Those women religious are history today, but their example can still be lived out in this world.  And it could be you!

Missionary Aspects

Any conversion experience, be it from addiction or religion, has a missionary aspect about it.  We want to tell someone else about the change in our life.  I have found this “telling” this promotion aspect a bit of a problem.  Talk is cheap as someone said.  Action is more a convincer.  I want to see the change in a person’s life, not hear about their new beliefs.  In recovery it is called progress rather than promotion.  Don’t be telling people you are sober.  Show them a change in your life from selfishness, fear, mistreatment, anger,  and whatever other bad habits and emotions ruled you.  Show people love and concern for them by your actions.  Sobriety does not last simply on good feelings.  The pink cloud passes.  The character defects don’t.  In religion,  people can become so righteous.  They tell others what is the right belief, the correct religion, for which you will burn if you do not conform to their right way.  Guilt will not hold anyone for long.  Be a good missionary. Change your life.  Others will notice.  They are watching.   

The Call

 What does a Higher Power, the Divine, the One, God, want from us?  To call us out of ourself.  Get us away from our focus on success, wealth, and power.  If the focus is out of balance, all about me, and ways to allay my fears, then I am not much use for service to others.  Service takes time and energy away from success, esteem, power.  Service is no longer all about me.  Fear is what stands between service and self-focus.  Coming out of college with a huge debt, coming out of a nasty divorce, loss of job from downsizing, weather-related disasters, can raise up lots of fear.  At such a point it does not occur to us that being of service to others can allay this fear.  I simply don’t have time to be paralyzed by this fear, because I am doing something for someone else.  In trying to heal another, I am healing myself, no matter the effect I might have on the other person(s). 

Good Shepherd

 What does a good shepherd do?  For one thing, the shepherd moves the sheep from a field that is all eaten up, to anther field that is fertile and grown for eating.  True spiritual guides do this with anyone they try to help or sponsor.  The spiritual path is one of growth and change.  you don’t stay in the same place forever.  What you do and how you believe on a spiritual path ought to change over time.  If you are in a religion, you don’t do the same things as an adult that you did as a child.  Child prayers are often about getting this and that.  The child feels it lives in a world controlled by others.  But if one is going to have an adult faith, the person moves into less talking to their God and more listening to God in meditation.  For Catholics, you become what you eat.  An adult faith is one where you become the good shepherd for others.  You move from a focus on getting to one of giving.  You take up your own cross of service instead of asking the crucified one to take your cross away from you.  It is the same in recovery programs.  The newcomer is yet a child in recovery.  They are on the receiving end.  Meetings are where they find good shepherd sponsors who once were newcomers themselves.  In a word grow up!  

In Plain Sight

 God’s love is always available even if we don’t ’ believe or want it.  A person who has a conversion experience comes to know this.  The great “AHA!”  God’s love is bottomless, but we miss it when we are obsessing over what we don’t have, what we think we need, or want.  Since such people are already hitting themself over the head, God need not bother doing it with love.  In my religious tradition, Catholic, God is in plain sight but hidden in a little, thin, white wafer.  Why so small and so unassuming, fragile?  Well, ask God.  It is not important to me that people notice my loving actions or simply my love for them.  It is important that I love them.  Do my side of the street of love.  My spiritual path is that my love will deepen, not that I will get a lot of recognition.  I am a work in progress.  

False Pride

 Pride in myself can be very good, but not if it makes me feel superior to someone else.  If that is the case, then I am full of judgment, criticism, and separation from the “other.”  Thus I close the door on God, my spiritual power.  My God lives in all creation in order to show us connection, not separation.  Nature, the earth, is not other than but rather part of me.  I can have pride in my work, in a good effort, and it is graced if I feel connection with others, rathe than “better than.”  People in recovery programs and healthy worship groups in religion, all feel connected to one another.  This is how a community builds: one stranger, on newcomer welcomed at a time.  

Identify

 A book can only do you a lot of good and even be enjoyed if you can identify with it.  We know this when we read a novel.  I am not much for sci-fi books but love historical fiction.  I identify with the story, the persons in it.  The Bible did not much much sense to me in any important way until I could identify with the people God was trying to help in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.  I did not really begin to read it in any depth until my later 20s.  I saw myself in the lost sheep, the prodigal son and so on.  When younger, I thought I was Jesus!   People get into recovery from addiction when they can see themselves in the Big Book or whatever the literature that is trying to help them.  I read Buddhist Sutras, not so much to understand Buddhism, as to understand me in the Sutra.  

Too Much

 Don’t try so hard to make someone feel less guilty, less ashamed, less conflicted about themselves.  You do them a disservice.  True conversion, change of life, comes with the interior struggle or else there will be no real reversal of life badly lived.  I remember when I was in a really bad way.  I called Mommy back home on the other side of the country and said I wanted to come home.  Her response?  “NO.”  It was in the long term the best thing she could have done for me.  An interior struggle, one I would have liked to avoid, got me going on a path, a long path, but a path to a reversal of my life.  Mercy is only gobbled up when we can gaze upon our own inner poverty, our emptiness.  The healing must be deeper than mere whitewashing our shame and guilt.  That can be done with a few drinks.

Powerless Love

 God’s love, the Divine, Higher Power, is powerless.  Such love does not force us or act tough.  God loves humbly even with all that Power.  God does not force us, but rather shows us a way.  God respects our free will.  God is humble in this way.  Would that religions would be so humble instead of demanding, “do this or else.”  Recovery programs are about suggestions.  The person in need will only respond when they realize that their will power is broken, like a lot of the rest their self.  They want to want but need help.  That is why recovery programs have guides, persons who walk the recovery path giving suggestions.  God is behind all this.  A person will come to believe in some kind of God when they begin to see the miracle happening in their ability to say no to the addictive behavior and live a life of love toward others.  You can only love another person powerlessly, humbly.  You cannot force them to respond with love.  You cannot manipulate them.  Knocking yourself out in action or expending money will not make someone love you.  Love with humility rather than be pathetic.  

Brand New What?

 I have heard people say that they are going to change their life and “get a brand new start.”  Oh?  What they most often mean is that they are going to redo the past in a whole new way.  But I don’t know that this is a good goal.  The past is past and all messed up due to bad behavior of one sort or another.  People in Recovery programs, for instance, know that you don’t so much make a brand new start to change the past, but rather make a “brand new end.”  In bad and addictive behaviors, before they got help of whatever sort, the end was pretty predictable.  In addiction you either get locked up or covered up.  I like to work on myself in view of the end of my life.  I cannot change memories, nor change inappropriate past situations.  A wrecked car is a wrecked car.  I cannot make it new again.  As I age, I am sure some health issues will crop up from unhealthy habits of my past.  But do the best with what I have rather than go into whining about what I had lost.  I still have my God and some friends.  They must have bad memories.  But I will take any miracles I can get.  I am working each day on the new end.  I am grateful that I have this chance at sanity.  

Authenticity

 The prayer of meditation is meant to change us.  It is meant to reveal ourself to ourself.  It takes courage to meditate.  Without words or thoughts to focus on, without images to look at, we are vulnerable to God revealing our mediocrity to ourself.  I think piety is something else.  Novenas, prayers with lots of words and images, are often about worship and if we are honest, about getting whatever we worship to give us our agenda.  We don’t see ourself changing, but about others, boss, spouse, child, changing.  We want the Divine to get onto our agenda.  Prayers of petition need meditation to balance us.  Sometimes, what we want, is not what God wants or what we need.  Work out yourself.  This may be where the problem is rooted.  

Statio

 In the monastic life there is something called “Statio.”  It is referrred to as a sacred stop.  The monks line up two by two and stand still for a few minutes, before processing into the chapel for choir.  It is meant to slow us down, to put a stop between one task and another.  It is a good idea for all of us I think to do Statio here and there each day.  Put down cell phone and other internet devices, do no work, accomplish no task for maybe three minutes.  Just stop and be.  Does it drive you crazy?  Then what it is doing is revealing the craziness of your life that is buried beneath your pace of one thing after the other.  Would that teachers would do it in schools, so that students are taught the value of Statio, being simply with oneself.  

Seduction of pride

 When one has seemingly overcome their debilitating addiction, their seduction to pride can take over and they begin to believe that they are better than other people around them. This is how pride seduces us.  We think we have become a superior creature.  What is needed here is humility.  We must remember that without the spiritual power, God, Higher Power, we are nothing without this Power, this Spirit of strength.  I see this in some people who “get” religion.  They are on the correct way, and of course, anyone not on this same way is lost.  We actually advance quite slowly in grace, recovery, the spiritual life.  This is why I like a path of suggestion.  It seems to imply ongoing growth dependent on God.  Daily meditation keeps us on the path of humility and dependence on God.  

Acceptance

 Trust the path that opens before me.  God is at work but in God’s time.    Acceptance will come when we are ready.  It cannot be forced.  It will germinate in darkness.  The purpose of our prayer is to work on the trust that God is work in our silence, stillness and seeming inaction.  In time we overcome our fears that something is being lost.  Nothing is being lost in God’s time, only our time and our need for control.  Things are not lost, just found in other ways.  I keep this in mind when I think of moving, a change of my situation and even my aging.  I do what I can do today, that is meditate and the next right thing.  Be useful to others and be kind to myself.  Light comes after the darkness.  

Recovery

 Recovery is like having the stone removed from covering or crushing your heart.  The stone is one of fear, selfishness, ego-centricity, resentment, and the desire for "more" no matter what.  When the stone is removed, you are raised up to a new life.  You are spirit-filled.  Sounds rather Christian does it not?  Addiction is what crucifies you.  Some days you think in self-pity that you belong there on your cross and other days you wish, for the moment, to get off, but your weak resolution is not enough.  A recovery program can take you off the cross, but only a higher power can remove the stone that covers your heart.  Simply being off your cross, not drinking/drugging today for instance, does not remove the stone.  Only a spiritual way will do it.  A recovery program gives you twelve steps.  So what will it be today?  Cross or Resurrection?  

Living In The Solution

A babbling mind lives in the problem.  A listening mind lives in the solution.  A mind that prays with thoughts full of why my world, or the world, is a mess and why does God not fix it as I see fit, is a babbling mind.  I am living in the problem.  So I try to let go of the above agenda, and just let myself begin to listen in the stillness and the silence.  Now I am open to the solution.  If I am in this world to play the role that God assigns me, then I must be living in the solution.  So I must listen.  Be humble.  Wait.  Be patient.  My higher power is the solution for people who want to live in the problem.  Silence, solitude, stillness are the three "S" things I try for in my meditation.  This is more a letting go than a grabbing on.   My God's will is the solution.  

47 Years

 Today, I am ordained a Paulist priest for 47 years.  Miracle!  When I left San Francisco in 1972 to join the Paulists religious order on the East Coast, several of my friends said that I would be back in a few weeks or at best a few months.  I was seen as a bad fit for this change.  I liked girls and I liked to party.  And I was selfish and self-centered.  I was also afraid, but did not know it at that transitional time in my life.  In summary, I had very little to offer God or the Catholic Church or the  Paulists,  but here I am 47 years later.  Though my faults and shortcomings opened the door to many mistakes and dissipation, I miraculously helped a lot of people.  Often, when I thought I was being helpful, I was actually being selfish.  Yet many times I was being helpful, unbeknownst to me.  I would show up, and God would do what God does with me.  So if you think yourself a mess, don't give up.  God, as I come to realize, is one of miracles.  Sober living.  

Becoming

 It is not what I do so much as what I become in what I do that is important.  You might be of service to another, try to do a good deed, but the results are not what you expected or wanted.  Yet it is not so much the "good" deed or action that counts, but rather what did you become because of the action.  Resentful at the results is not worth the action.  Acceptance of the results would be what makes you the better person for doing the action in the first place.  We are not in charge of results anyway.  We are not gods.  We don't control other people, places and situations in spite of what the ego wants or thinks.  Become humble.  I pray, not to enjoy a good buzz, but to become a better person by my daily efforts.  What is better?  Well, more loving while others around me are not so loving, would be a betterment of myself.  

Prayerfulness

There is prayer and there is prayerfulness.  They are not the same.  Prayer is something slotted into my day.  I sit and meditate for a specific time.  I read a spiritual book for a specific time.  I talk to God about this and that for a bit here and there.  But then the slot time is over and I get on with my life, not much thinking about God.  Prayerfulness is something that I cannot force to happen, but it comes with a practice of meditation, over a period of time.  I keep in touch with God through everything in my life that day.  This is prayerfulness.  Keep practicing prayer and in time the grace of prayerfulness will gradually develop.  You may have slotted activities, but you will no longer have a slotted God.   

Self-Talk

 It is a grace, a spiritual help, that when I am in "self-talk" I suddenly awaken to the question, "With whom am I talking?"  Sometimes it is a dead person.  I am giving them dialogue, my self-talk script, and I am answering them or noticing feelings when they speak my script.  Whatever the relationship was when we were in real-time existence, or before they died, it is the same in self-talk.  In my script they don't change.  Nor do I.  Just keep reliving the same old stuff.  Once I admit this in self reflection, then God can get involved and bring me to the real present moment and my feelings about the past being relived in the present.  Sometimes, self-talk is a fantasy about a different life in the past, the near or far past.  The real past is not enough for me, so I have to recreate something more interesting and more successful for my ego, damaged ego, that is.  Meditation keeps me in the real, and the present time.  

Running The Show

 One way to avoid a spiritual path or any inclusion of a God in your life, is to have the attitude that whatever you do, you will "run the show" yourself.  If you have any character defects, and we all have some bad habits or attitudes, then those defects will become the guiding energy.  Selfish?  Selfish people run the show selfishly but they generally do not think they are being selfish.  They just avoid any second opinions.  No listening ear.  Running the show yourself eventually leads to misery for you and others.  Loneliness is sure to enter the picture too.  I try to remind myself to be open to second opinions, especially God's opinion, which I will only hear in a prayer of silence and uncluttered mind.  Meditation helps lots here.  

Emotional Conversions

Conversions that are full of emotions, will not last.  It is like a pink cloud experience.  A person in this stage thinks they will never go back to old ways.  But emotions won't carry us very far.   Such a person must carry on a day to day sober experience of a spiritual practice with all of its steps.  Prayer reading, becoming less selfish in service to others will keep one on the path.  At such times, this might seem like trudging, because there is no spiritual high.  Think of your daily practice as a way of being grateful.  For what?  For the conversion that saved you for today.  

The Taste

 Once you have tasted God, worldly solutions will not satisfy as they once seemed to do.  There develops a dissatisfaction with those things of the world that filled you up before the taste of God.  Call God whatever you will, or no name.  Your soul has fed on the inexplicable and this nourishment will go deep.  Life becomes more profound, rather than a series of things accomplished or encountered.  But some of those same encounters are not meaningless.  They take on a new meaning.  This is what makes life more profound.  The same activities, events, daily actions, will take on a deeper and even more symbolic meaning.  So keep meditating.  It is not all darkness.    

The Empty Space

 Once you have had an in-depth experience of God, Higher Power, the One, you are never really the same.  You no longer can forget.  A person who finds a higher power in a recovery program and stops their addictive behavior, will never forget that Spiritual Encounter even if they leave the recovery program.  The soul, the interior life has been awakened and does not go back to sleep even if the mind does.  An in depth spiritual encounter with the Divine seems to fill an inner hole or space.  It is profound as it is fulfilling.  But God will dig another hole in the heart, so that we cannot forget our need, our desire, our longing, no matter how far we may drift from the first encounter.  Even if you walk out the door on God, God does not stay on the other side.  God goes where you go.  The holy haunting!

The Growing In

 If you don't enlarge your spiritual life, then you are in danger of failure in the rest of your life.  Many of us got into the spiritual path because we did not care for the path or lack of path we were on.  But if the spiritual path is not enlarged, then we most likely will return to whatever path or addiction we were on.  Or life becomes aimless, and aimless can be covered over with destructive behaviors.  To enlarge the spiritual path, we must first stay on it in a daily practice of reading and meditation.  Then we might expand to a group, or church on a spiritual path.  Then we expand to becoming of service so that we counter self-absorption that can happen in meditation.  Even a senior, somewhat homebound can pick up the phone and call someone to ask how they are doing.  Or send a text.  Getting out of self leads to all kinds of adventures.  You are not in charge.  

Declutter

One of the things that I realize in a deep encounter with the Divine, The One, Ultimate Reality, is that I find I need less of other things.  Nothing can replace the encounter.  So what happens? I now have an energy to declutter my life of stuff.  Much of my stuff, my purchases, my accumulations, had to do with filling something within me.  I did not see it at that time of the purchase or the holding on, but with the deeper  prayer life, I see it now.  I can now begin to unload stuff, give it away, throw it out, whatever.  The spiritual life becomes a decluttered life.  I have books, athletic gear, two and three of things, when one or a replacement is enough.  My life can no longer be filled with stuff.  Meditation might clean out your garage and allow you to put your car or cars there.   

Come Back

 If you belong to some group, church, association, one of the best ways that you can be of service is to invite a newcomer to come back.  First of all, it requires you to notice and engage the newcomer.  You initiate the action.  So this takes you out of self-absorption.  Second, don't assume anything that was said or the content of the gathered group got through to the newcomer.  They may be simply wrestling with the unfamiliar surroundings.  Third, the newcomer can replace the person who has been coming for years but is now moving, changing careers, or time schedules or aging.  Without newcomers, you will eventually have no group.  And that teenager, the adolescent, don't assume that they will come back to your church because they are with their parents.  They need to be recognized by other members.  Get out of yourself and your comfort zone.  

Ocean Depths

 Why do we say that stillness in the deepest part of ourself will give us peace.  Because we can be like the ocean.  Life has its hurricanes.  On the surface area and a bit below the surface, there is lots of turmoil and chaos.  But the deep part of the ocean remains calm.  The hurricane chaos cannot reach that depth.  If a species gets nothing but bad from the ocean turmoil, then the species develops so that it can go deeper.  Some fish are smarter than humans with all our brains.  When the fish senses the ocean surface if growing into a hurricane, the fish goes deeper.  What does a human do?  Stays to watch the hurricane.  Meditation is to take us to our deep places while the storm of life beats around the surface.  

Opposites

 Impulsive, self-activated activity is incompatible with surrender.  Self-will can be the signal that we are moving away from any surrender.  If your life was or is a mess at the moment, full of chaos, you might ask if surrender to a will or program, or activity other than your self-will might be the answer.  Or the beginning of an answer that will be positive.  Surrender might begin by letting go of your tight grip on whatever is part of your unhappiness.  We just stop doing whatever is stressing our life.  People stop ingesting their addiction, stop focusing on a problem that at the moment is not solvable by oneself alone.  You stop.  A spiritual path is meant to help you to stay stopped.  Bad stuff happens if we keep doing bad stuff.  And good stuff happens when we discover what is the good action, and do it.  

Mary’s Monrh

 This is Mary’s month, as we say in my religious tradition.  So if your name is Mary, this is your month.  Now she is the Mother of Jesus.  At the Annunciation, an angel appears to her.  She did not freak out, but was rather troubled by what the angel said, “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.”  She has no husband yet, plus women don’t name the male child in her religion.  My point is that she is brought up with a religion of certainty about things.  She has the adolescent faith of certainty that many of us recall.  But now she will be led from certainty into pondering, bewilderment, questioning, and even some doubt about the sanity of her adult son.  She will wrestle with her faith.  Most of us, when we had those feelings, we just gave it up.  Doubt meant you lost your faith.  When we lose the certainty of youth, many of us just walk away into unbelief or agnosticism.  But all Mary’s feelings are “progress” in faith.  Faith has to move from certainty if we are going to grow up into an adult believer.  Mary has consented to evolve when she says, “Do it to me according to your word.”  Happy May Day!