Public Prayer

 Why do some people appear pious on the outside but seem rather self-indulgent.  It may be because they pray publicly but not privately in silence and stillness.  If we are always talking in prayer then we don’t spend any time listening.  If you meditate, sit still, in silence, you just might get a Power within you to reveal a shortcoming to work on.  You might realize that you are self-indulgent.  Priests are told over and over that they have to do “mental” prayer as it is sometimes called, so that they work on the insides and not just the outsides.  Recovery people have to do more than look sober.  

Meaning

It seems that for many of us, the question that precedes any conversion to a more spiritual way of life is, “What is the meaning of life?”  I remember asking myself that during my first two years at my first post MBA career employment.  I asked others if they were fulfilled in their work and they all seemed to say yes.  It was not a yes for me.  Something about meaning kept coming into my mind.  There was some other or deeper meaning.  Eventually, through GRACE I began to discover or recover a meaning deep enough for me.  I am sure that many of my coworkers enjoyed long and fulfilled careers at that corporation and jobs they did there.  I simply had to find where my peg fit.  

Why Me?

 When something happens to me, such as accident, illness, a change in living situation, and I complain, “why Me!?  It is a bit egocentric, as if I am so special that nothing untoward should ever happen to me.  Why am I so special and someone else who has a bad turn is just, well, ordinary?  Or it was their own fault, whatever happened.  Why not me?  I am part of the human herd that can stumble, fall, break some part of my body, be wounded, get sick and have surgery.  Self-pity, whining, complaining and resentment seem to follow the sense of my specialness.  Things do fall apart if for no other reason than we are aging.  I try to be grateful that I have today.  

First Cup

My first cup of coffee in the morning, after I make my bed, is the best cup of the day.  In part it is because I am filling my spiritual cup of reading, and meditating, while I slowly sip my first cup of coffee.  Eventually, I have a second cup, but that is with breakfast while I read the news.  I am not filling my spiritual cup with the news or cereal.  So I often don’t even finish the second cup.  I always know if I am being spiritually filled, if I am enjoying my coffee.  I wonder if there will be coffee in heaven?  

My Youngest Day

 As Anthony Hopkins said in his well expressed autobiography, “Today is the youngest day of your life.”  When you feel morbid about aging, replace it with something uplifting.  Today you are the youngest you will ever be from now on.  So make the best of the day, which can begin with some gratitude.  Even if you are hungover, or recent surgery, you woke up.  You have this day.  Make it a day of wisdom that can come with age.  One piece of wisdom: it is harder to fool yourself anymore.  Another hangover?  Been there before.  Yes, and you know what to do, before you don’t wake up to another morning.  Surgery?  An infection?  Cold?  By now you know how to heal.  And being your youngest day, there are still things, places, events, people that you have not experienced.  Be like a child.  Someone said that was a good piece of wisdom.  “ Unless you become like a child…”

A New Normal

My Mon passed away this date 23 years ago.  We were close.  Along with my Dad, we did things together, shared events, in specific places, or just a pace of life together whenever I visited which was often.  They were a meeting place for my siblings and me.  The mourning was not just for the absence of my Mom in my life, but the sudden absence of things and events and a way of being, all of which was well time spent together.  One should not try and replace one life too quickly with another as if to avoid the emptiness.  Mourning is for just that, the emptiness.  It takes energy.  Mourning loss, the sadness, the tears are all part of the space needed to let go of something gone, and be with it.  In time, healing time, I would later come to a sense of who I am, Mom-Less, and begin to build something of true self into those spaces.  The missing never stops as my friend Marcia once told me, so wisely.  But one does live on with memories that are not meant to fill the space, but simply to be part of one’s knitted life.   

Fitting In

 If you are trying to find yourself in your own world, it does not help if you focus all your attention on fitting into someone else’s world.  If someone tries to fit into the world of the rich in order to get something from them, that person will lose themself because they are not fitting into their own world.  A healthy group, be it church, recovery, club, is such because it is helping you to find yourself in your world.  Drunks in recovery come from all different worlds of experience and income.  They have a singleness of purpose which is to know the truth of themself and help others to do so to in recovery from their alcoholic behavior.  They are different but bound together by a common purpose.  

Negative Presence

 When we pray but feel bored or empty, it is called “Negative Presence.”  God, Higher Power is present but we don’t feel anything that we would call a presence.  Feelings don’t go deep enough to experience the depth of Real Presence.  I try not to go into meditation with any expectations.  I trust that God is at work whether I feel anything I would call God or not.  Boredom comes and goes, but God is always present.  So come and stay still.  Your Higher Power is at work.  

Equal

 There is the boss and there is the employee.  There is the rich and the so-called middle class.  There are language differences, skin color differences, and ethnic differences.  Lots of differences.  But love is a great equalizer.  Love does not focus on any difference, but rather on what is connective.  In San Francisco there are lots of “mixed” couples.  Such a couple sees the ‘blend.”  Sobriety is a great equalizer.  Alcohol does not care about differences.  It destroys equally.  In a meeting all blend together with a common purpose.  To stay sober just for today is a common purpose.  

Doing Nothing

 For those who keep score on all their daily accomplishments the idea of prayer does not factor in.  Prayer becomes “doing nothing” or scoring no points on the board of things done.  You don’t see results with prayer.  You sit and meditate, looking into the darkness of your inner self, and say, “nothing is going on.”  The something of meditation is often experienced as nothing since it cannot be quantified or apparent.  But wisdom says that one who is rich in works and poor in prayer is ignoring the interior while attending to the exterior.  Such is spiritual poverty.  

The Cross

 When a couple gets married in my church they never go to the cross or crucifix in the front of the church.  They are not asking their God for the self-emptying that will be required to live a life-long marriage, the sacrifice required to make the marriage work.  When I was ordained a priest I don’t recall going to the cross either.  I was too full of myself from the ceremony and congratulations.  I learned the hard slow way.  But I am still here almost 50 years later.  Grace is everywhere.  

Forgiveness

 We cannot buy forgiveness.  And no one can pay us to receive forgiveness from us.  We might be able to buy mercy, but never forgiveness.  If I am going to forgive someone it must come from my heart.  It must replace resentment and revenge.  Forgiveness is very valuable.  If someone chooses not to forgive me, that is not my concern.  I cannot earn it.  But I can live the better life than the one that got me in all this mess in the first place.  That I can do as it is my side of the street to clean up. 

Othering

 Children seem to accept others in all their differences.  But then comes indoctrination, culture in which they live.  Differences are taught such that people become “others.”  Others are not one of us, due to culture, color, income, class and so on.  I have to check on myself each day and see if I am othering people.  If I see the beggar on the street and say, “There but for the grace of God,” then I am not othering.  This does not always happen though.  “Thank God, I am not one of those people,” is sometimes the first thought or feeling.  We all have gifts, sometimes hidden, often different, but more visible to the humble onlooker.  

Recovery

Recovery from addiction requires certain rules, and rules limit one’s freedom.  If you want to go from Boulder, Colorado to Aspen you cannot get there by going East.  It is a simple rule of geography.  A goal limits one.  If you were leaving Boulder and did not care where you went, then you could go in any direction.  You have to have a desire to go to Aspen in order to follow the rule.  You seem to have to have desperation to follow the rule for recovery.  Abstinence is too much unless you are desperate.  We love our freedom.  But at the cost of one’s life?  The rules, steps that limit us now can open us to a whole new world.  I like such rules.   

Seek and Find

 I find that solitude is very helpful for me each day.  I need time in solitude which is not the same as being alone.  Solitude has more of a spiritual connect.  To what?  To a Power that helps me find or reconnect with my lost sense of self.  It got lost in the hullabaloo of daily life.  The hullabaloo is where I end up doing someone else’s will to please them or fulfill a false sense of who I am.  A false me cannot find God’s will, which is for the authentic me.  In solitude, prayer deepens me to reconnect.  Then I can be open to the Divine Power and what I can authentically be today.  

Charity

 Charity, as in love, does not go looking for evil.  Living with others who are not like me reveals how much love I have.  If I think they are evil because they are different from me, then I lock charity.  I am looking for differences and see them as negative, rather than as a way to expand my horizons, get different opinions.  And then finally, acceptance of our differences.  Who knows how they see my manner?  To think I am the good norm, is simply my opinion.  And to ignore them is to learn nothing.  

Community

 What is the point of living in community?  One good reason is that community allows those with whom we live to become our teachers.  See yourself as a learner amongst those with whom you associate or with whom you live.  Learn what?  How to escape self-complacency.  You read in a paper or on line about the sufferings of someone(s) in some other place or country.  You sort of dismiss it or pass over this story moving on to something “more interesting.”  Why?  Because their suffering differs from your own.  Their home got flooded out, but you are suffering from a toothache.  You would stop at a story that was about the latest dentistry and tooth decay solutions.  It is harder to escape those with whom we live in community.  Which is why they can upset us all the more than a story in the news.  

Do Over

 Why do people drink too much alcohol?  They want a do over of reality.  They want a reshoot of the scene in which they find themself.  An example: they walk into a room full of people at a social occasion.  They feel lonely, not part of any group.  They lack sober social skills to fit in.  But when they start drinking the scene changes for them.  They feel able to speak and interact and feel part of the whole social scene.  Until the social scene does not feel part of them.  Too much scene changing alcohol.  So if you feel disconnected at a social event, realize it is only your opinion.  The reality may be you are more connected than you think.  Sober.  

Feelings

Feelings are optional.  We cannot control them.  But we need not wait for them in order to make a decision.  For instance, we can say we are sorry for something without waiting to feel sorry.  You can make an act of the will not to do whatever you are not yet sorry for.  You need not feel sorry.  Pray and decide to change.  People go to recovery meetings without feeling a desire to go.  People go to church, synagogue, ashram, temple, without feeling a desire to go.  Feelings are always optional.  I have met many a person who did not feel like going to recovery meetings anymore.  Then they drank and only bad things happened.  If I waited until I felt like writing a blog there would be many a blank day.  Or jogging for that matter.   

Any Length

 There is a story in the Gospel in which a woman goes to any length to help her daughter whom she love dearly.  Love goes to any length is the point.  She is a foreigner to Jesus.  She is not a Jew.  So it is a bit outside her purview to ask him for anything since he is a foreigner to her.  They have a whole history and culture of staying separate.  But the woman loves her daughter and Jesus is the answer to healing her daughter.  The woman is insulted by Jesus when she asks for help.  So twice she has to eat her pride, her sense of self.  But she does follow her tenacity which inspires her wisdom. “Even the dogs eat the scraps from the master’s table,” she says, when Jesus refers to her as a dog.  She gets what she wants.  Love conquers regardless of the price.  

First Things First

 There is a lot to be learned from reading wisdom stories.  Read the Gospels.  Jesus walks on water.  What to be learned from that?  Well, before he walked on water he went up to the mountain by himself for the night.  Up to that point he had been first a carpenter, then a healer and then a teacher.  Others had been healers and teachers.  But no one walked on water.  Jesus first did deep meditation, a night full, in silence and solitude.  He got in touch with his God, Father, Power.  He realized his deepest and truest self.  Then he walked on water.  We all can be so much more than we think we are, or are told we are, if we have a deeper prayer life.  

Enough

 There is a famous bible story in all four gospels in which Jesus feeds thousands of people with just a little food.  Well, actually he does not do it, or does not do it alone.  His disciples actually do the distribution of the food, and Jesus looks to heaven before he gives them the food.  The disciples say they cannot feed all these people.  True, but God Power can help them do more than they thought.  They are concerned for the hunger of the people, but feel powerless to do anything about it.  Left to our own devices, yes.  But with a bit of power greater than oneself, lots can be done.  I try not to let concern for the suffering of others be the termination of my assistance.  

Idols

 People who downgrade religious worship say that Sunday is idol worship.  They scoff at the God believers.  But those same people have their own idols.  Activity is their idol.  For some it is work, seven days, all day, each week.  For some it is packing in endless activities on Sunday.  One event after another or more than one event at a time.  Kids are brought into this mayhem going from one thing to another lest they become “idol” or bored.  Silence, stillness, meditation, reading outside of homework are nowhere to be found.  Doing nothing much is not equal to laziness.  It may well open the gift of time to renew or discover are true self.  

Noah

 “I cannot do anything.  I am only one person.”  This is what we tend to say that allows us to remain ineffective if not indifferent.  But consider Noah in the bible story of the flood.  Ecological disaster is about to happen due to a flood.  Global warming to the max. You say it is a story?  Well, story or not, it has a point.  One person can do a lot.  He builds a boat and brings on all the animals and plants and a few people.  He nurtures them all for 40 days.  No dinosaurs though.  They got wiped out in an earlier disaster when there were no humans to help.  One human being can make a difference.  So for me, when I see a mess, I respond as best I can and pray for that power greater than me to lead me.  

Never Again

 Never Again can be a tough thing to do.  It is full of pride, the ego at work.  “I can do this.”  You think your will-power can change some lifelong tendency or action forever simply by saying so.  But this usually leads to failure on the “never again” scale.  I love bread.  Doc says drop the bread.  Ugg.  Impossible.  But maybe I can just not eat bread today with my breakfast.  Just for today.  This is more doable.  And it would help to get a power greater than my weak will-power involved.  “God help me, just for today.”  Now off to breakfast!

Leaven

 A little can go a long way.  So become like leaven.  Don’t worry that you did not do enough.  Do something small rather than nothing.  Flour and water are just that, flour and water.  It won’t become bread until you add just a little bit of yeast.  Then the whole batch will rise and you can bake it.  A little yeast goes a long way.  So today I will try and do the little things that make my home a better place to live.  Reset the dishes in the dishwasher.  I live with savages.  Ok.  I will write about judgment tomorrow.  

Speak Up

 There are times when speaking up is important.  When I see something that is wrong as in someone being wronged, silence would make me a spectator.  Speaking up makes me a witness.  And using my video on my cell phone camera can be a way to speak up as a witness to something that you believe is a wrong done to someone else.  

Silence

 Silence is not really the opposite of speaking out loud.  Sometimes we talk too much without thinking and what comes out is banal at best.  Silence is what gives speech some content worth saying and listening to.  I can sit and listen to people talking and feel no need to “interrupt” for the sake of participating.  My silence is a participation.  And sometimes people need a listening ear and not a talking tongue.  

Retirement

 Retirement is not simply about existing with no purpose.  It is a season of our life.  Seasons have reasons and peculiar activities.  You are entering a new season and it is the time to discover what its purpose is for you.  It is not just about moving to change the outsides such as from cold winters to warmer winters.  Change the insides as well.  It is about a change in patterns of life, ways of doing things, and new things to do as well as old things that have been put aside.  And always a time to avoid isolation.  The “routine” can easily slip into that.  

Cleaver

 I need to be careful that my sermons are not cleaver, but rather profound.  I can come up with cleaver quite easily, but profound takes more time.  It takes prayer to allow the sermons to develop.  Cleaver ideas come more quickly but this is because they are not deep.  Often I am quiet in a room of talkers because I have nothing much to say.  It takes me time.  I prefer to be helpful rather than noticed.