Action

 I hear someone say that they sit in meditation but get no spiritual experience, no sense of change in their life.  Often, such people spend most of the rest of their day in self-absorption, fear, worry, anxiety and judgement.  I have found that a sense of spiritual awakening comes if I include action in service to others. Get out of myself.  I find that being responsive to others in simply human kindness, and attention, much less, cleaning up my messes around them, helps to give me a better sense of peace and contentment in my own skin.  Is that not spiritual experience?  When I am all about me, I fall into isolation, but feel loneliness and alienation from the world around me.  I say, “There is no God, no Power, no Nothing!”  But  if I go back to no meditation and no service to others, then I will experience a killing nothingness.  And that ain’t good!

The Safety Latch

 Sacraments in my church are not supposed to be for feelings of safety, comfort, and warm fuzzy feelings, though they can be that immediately after receiving them, such as Holy Communion.  Many people go back daily to recapture that comfort feeling of Presence.  But Sacraments are meant to unlatch the safety lock as Adrienne von Spier would say.  Sacraments are meant for energy in daily life that can make you a bit of an outlier, an inconvenience to friends and coworkers.  How so?  You are walking along with a companion on the way to an event, a coffee and treat get together, or an event of shopping for some items. You see a beggar on the street. Instead of ignoring that person, or simply dropping money into a hat or guitar case, you stop and say hello, and ask how they are doing.  You might even give your first name and ask theirs.  You treat them in some way that says they matter in a world of shoppers, appointment keepers, workers, to whom they do not matter.  Your companion is inconvenienced and judges you as being silly or wasting their precious time.  Or maybe when you get to your place of eating and drinking, you pause, and say a quiet thank you for what you have, knowing many do not have what you have.  Your pause gives embarrassment to your eating companions.  You are an inconvenience.  Sacraments can do that.  They can become discomforting in the world outside your church building.  

Purpose

 I don’t see my life as a priest, or these blogs, as trying to convince you to believe in Christianity.  Rather I try to give you my experience of a God in my life, how this God has embraced, challenged, loved and forgiven me.  I think that belief is not so much as something put into you as a gift, but rather something that is caught in an encounter with another person who is alive to life.  So many people are full of dogma and ritual, rules, traditions, but nothing seems truly to be alive within them.  I want my life to capture another person’s imagination.  Covid did not diminish my experience of God, the loving embrace.  Closed churches do not diminish love.  They diminish routine.  Church worship did not destroy worship, since I could still walk in nature, God’s cathedral, mask and all.  I am a bad priest since I don’t do catechism teaching.  Often I swim upstream like the salmon to have that encounter with Light and Life, when the going gets tough.  The salmon does not give up.  It goes to spawn new life.  

Problems

 You look at a street drunk and think that he or she has so many problems, while you are so well off.  Stop and think about what that alcoholic might teach you.  They have only one problem as an alcoholic once said.  Where to get their next bottle or drink. They have lost everything, so they don’t have to worry about rent or mortgage, spouse or family issues, a job, or even their health.  All gone.  If they want, there are shelters for them or free food offers.  They have the simple life, the freedom of sleeping here or there.  So what about you?  Do you whine about mortgage or rent?  That means you have a roof over your head.  Do you worry about losing your job?  That means you have one, or are at least employable.  You worry about your kids or grandkids, means you have them to worry about and they still like you.  Our worries are about things we have or are within reasonable reach.  So the drunk on the street reminds me...stop whining.  

Talk Or Walk

 I must admit that there are too many times I talk a good message of wisdom, but do not practice it in my own life that very same day.  I am teaching on zoom and I do sound good, knowledgeable, wise, or at least I think so.  But those very things I talk about, I seem not to be doing.  I allow fear, anxiety and self-pity to sap my energy from living in peace and serenity, much less happiness and joy.  I tend to take situations that require some choice, some solution, and make them into impossible problems.  I fear that I will make a wrong decision, because the right one does not seem clear.  Life overwhelms me, and then I tend to do nothing.  But doing nothing, making no decision, at that very moment of travail, is often the right thing to do.  I pick up some wisdom literature, certainly not one of my blogs on personal ineptitude, read a bit to get a new focus, and then sit quietly and let my heart become still.  Often the Light comes on.  I am the problem and not the solution.  The problem is not “out there” but “in here.”  I stop thinking so much about me and my world, as I imagine it, and just let this Light and me be.  Anxiety and fear seem to slip away.  Sanity rises up!  And I walk the walk.  

Serenity

 I often hear that one should be helpful to others, and this is envisioned as some physical activity, even to the activity of being a good listener.  Well and good, but don’t short change an inner attitude of serenity.  I think that I am of service to those around me, simply by my serenity.  Acting with a simple and quiet acceptance when something does not go as I thought or wanted is being serene.  Or maybe it is my quiet but useful response to a sudden disaster or mishap around the house or workplace.  I don’t always have to be actively doing something to be of service to another.  A person may be in some inner turmoil and being around me might calm them or make them ask whey I seem so quiet and calm and they do not.  Each morning I try to turn my anxieties over to God and then go about my day.  I try no to make too many plans or have too many goals as I only have the same 24 hours as everyone else.  If I try to do too much, I tend to do too little.  

Healing Pain

 Addictive substances or activities only postpone the pain.  Nothing is healed.  Think of exercise or work that is “too much.”  The too much is because you are trying not to face some pain in your life, but the over doing it only postpones that confrontation with inner pain, and causes more pain in the activity you over do.  I think of running.  If I run too much I cause too much pain in my body, and am probably doing all this over exercise to avoid something else.  So I try to run in moderation that has some stress to it, but this stress is a “healing pain.”  Recovery from addiction is a healing pain.  Try doing a step four and five.  It looks like too much, but the relief is wonderfully healing, or so I have been told.