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!