Grounding Christianity in love

From today's Daily Meditation from Richard Rohr (emphasis his):

Franciscans never believed that “blood atonement” was required for God to love us. We believed that Christ was Plan A from the very beginning (Colossians 1:15-20, Ephesians 1:3-14, John 1:1-18). ... The Franciscan view grounds Christianity in love and freedom from the very beginning. It creates a coherent and positive spirituality, which draws us toward lives of inner depth, prayer, reconciliation, healing, and universal at-one-ment, instead of any notion of sacrifice, which implies God needs to be bought off. Nothing changed on Calvary, but everything was revealed as God’s suffering love—so that we could change!

And in a very complementary way, here is today's reflection from Craig Bullock (emphasis mine):

Many years ago, I went to my spiritual director complaining that I was praying to God for guidance, but God was not responding. He answered, “You know, God is very busy. He has many responsibilities.” I asked him if that meant that God was too busy to answer my prayers. He said, “No, but God is not going to waste time speaking to you if you are not going to listen to what He has to say.” Simply put, God’s miraculous love can only break into our lives to the degree that we are open to it, without conditions or qualifications. In other words, the willingness to obey God’s guidance is the necessary precondition for receiving guidance. We are hesitant to be open and obedient because we fear what God might do. We believe that God wants to limit our happiness, when, in actuality, God’s will is the only source of true happiness. Yogananda tells us that, “God is love; His plan for creation is rooted only in love.” And he also says, “There is no other way to find God’s love than to surrender to Him.”

Hummingbirds vs jackhammers

Sorry to only be seeing this now (it's from 2015), but this is a great talk by Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert on hummingbirds vs jackhammers ... aka people motivated more by curiosity vs passion.

Watch the whole thing over on Oprah.

It's a mystery

A fave line from Shakespeare in Love. I'm posting it now as I will likely refer to this again and again.

ADDICT

Celebrate Recovery is big on acrostics, like this one for RECOVERY:

 I got to thinking about the word ADDICT.

A
Deeply
Distressed
Individual
Comforting
Themself

This is more acronym than acrostic, but I like it. I may tweak over time.

Thoreau: The cost of a thing

I'll take that

I'm seeing my therapist later today after a two-week, 4th of July break. At our last meeting, she had been astonished that I had completely stopped binge eating after June 15th (when I stopped drinking).

She and I have been doing lots of work related to attachment/development trauma and she's a big fan of the internal family systems model (read: lots of inner children), so she and I both know that this is not some miracle cure ... but that at least for now, the binge eater has gone MIA. Or perhaps, as in her metaphor, the others have "locked her up."

It may be a little of both. The "dutiful daughter" (I can be great at compliance when externally motivated) has shown up as a result of perceived "threat" (said therapist was frustrated at my "extreme codependence" in avoiding rehab to be caretaker for an invalid pet).

Anyways, on the plus side, since DD has shown up, I'm now down 12 pounds. Since I've got a crapload more than that to go, I'll take it!

How did I do it? Following the guidelines of the Nutrition GPA app. Eat lots of veggies and fish, avocado, and legumes at least once a day. Avoid refined flour, fried foods, processed meat, excess sugar, and alcohol. Oh, and ice cream for dessert in the evening (that's for the kids 👧).

I used to be a weight loss blogger formerly. All of the years that I spent agonizing and arguing about carbs, fat, gluten, fasting, vegan, paleo, ad nauseum ... when it looks like this moderate approach (at least for me) might be a winner. We'll see!

Revolutionary Contemplation

Thanks to a Richard Rohr pointer, this post's title and morning's reading is from Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams's address to the Synod of Bishops in Rome from 2012; this is the first address by an Archbishop to that community (see video below).

Like Fr Rohr, I find some interesting passages in the address that really apply to my current journey, such as (emphasis mine):

To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter. [8]

Thomas Merton describes [a time when he] had contracted flu, and was confined to the infirmary [and] felt a ‘secret joy’ at the opportunity this gave him for prayer – and ‘to do everything that I want to do, without having to run all over the place answering bells.’ He is forced to recognise that this attitude reveals that ‘All my bad habits…had sneaked into the monastery with me and had received the religious vesture along with me: spiritual gluttony, spiritual sensuality, spiritual pride.’ In other words, he is trying to live the Christian life with the emotional equipment of someone still deeply wedded to the search for individual satisfaction. It is a powerful warning: we have to be every careful in our evangelisation not simply to persuade people to apply to God and the life of the spirit all the longings for drama, excitement and self-congratulation that we so often indulge in our daily lives. [9]

Invoking the Holy Spirit is a matter of asking the third person of the Trinity to enter my spirit and bring the clarity I need to see where I am in slavery to cravings and fantasies and to give me patience and stillness as God’s light and love penetrate my inner life. Only as this begins to happen will I be delivered from treating the gifts of God as yet another set of things I may acquire to make me happy, or to dominate other people. [10]

I will leave the "works vs faith" undertone/commentary for a later date, though I tend to agree very much with this:

It should not need saying that this is not at all to argue that ‘internal’ transformation is more important than action for justice; rather, it is to insist that the clarity and energy we need for doing justice requires us to make space for the truth, for God’s reality to come through. Otherwise our search for justice or for peace becomes another exercise of human will, undermined by human self-deception. ... True prayer purifies the motive, true justice is the necessary work of sharing and liberating in others the humanity we have discovered in our contemplative encounter. [11]

It's really quite easy to let this be all about my ego! I don't know that doing action (works) and contemplation (faith) together is a panacea about that ... very likely not. But as Fr Rohr writes, action and contemplation "must be brought together or neither one would make sense."

A new name for codependency

Somewhere in my travels I came across Ross Rosenberg. He has coined a couple of terms related to codependency. The first is "Self-Love Deficit Disorder." In an article summarizing SLDD and how he treats it, Rosenberg writes:

"Codependency" is an outdated term that connotes weakness and emotional fragility, both of which are far from the truth. The replacement term, “Self-Love Deficit Disorder” or SLDD takes the stigma and misunderstanding out of codependency and places the focus on the core shame that perpetuates it.

The codependency arises when people:

repeatedly are attracted to or find them self intractably in a relationship with a narcissist despite the lessons they keep willing themselves to learn ... [and they] feel trapped in their relationships because they confuse sacrifice and selfless caring with commitment, loyalty and love.

Rosenberg also has coined the term "codependency anorexia," which happens:

when [codependents] hit bottom and can no longer bear the pain and the harm meted out to them from their malevolent pathological narcissists. ... In an effort to protect themselves ... they flip their vulnerability switch to "off," which results in a complete shutdown of their emotional, relational, and sexual machinery.

Stuff to ponder.

Community and addiction

In a post on trauma and addiction, Stanton Peele includes a couple of interesting (IMO) points. First Peele notes:

Community is the fundamental factor in human survival and satisfaction. In fact, [Sebastian] Junger finds, it is the community to which people return that determines PTSD outcomes, and not the events that trigger it.

And he quotes anthropologist Gary Barker on a similar point:

Our whole approach to mental health has been hijacked by pharmaceutical logic. PTSD is a crisis of connection and disruption, not an illness that you carry within you.

The leader at last night's CR meeting made a similar point on the importance of community in CR. I think that's one of the things that is great about their format. Everyone starts together, and you're in a room with folks with all sorts of different "hurts, habits, and hangups."

And depending on the meeting, you may hear people refer to the group as a "forever family." Kinda nice!

Thoughts for today

Two complementary comments from two of my regular reads. First, from Richard Rohr:

Contemplative prayer is like striking a tuning fork. All you can really do in the spiritual life is resonate to the true pitch, to receive the always-present message.  ... Prayer is connecting with God/Ultimate Reality. It is not an attempt to change God’s mind about us or about events. Such arrogance is what unbelievers make fun of—and often rightly so. Prayer is primarily about changing our own mind so that things like infinity, mystery, and forgiveness can resound within us.

Then from Craig Bullock of the Assisi Institute:

To be born a human is a great gift because we have been fashioned in God's very own image. What does this mean? We are meant to hear the highest harmonies, to behold the most luminous lights, to taste the sweetest of delights, to inhale heaven's most intoxicating fragrances, and to touch the Divine in all persons. What then has gone wrong? Our soul's senses are enslaved by lesser gods, dulled by the dross of ignorance, and governed by the whims of desire. Restoration to our original innocence, to our full potential in God, cannot occur without our own effort – and the effort required is of the will and the heart. We must choose to make an interior journey, to pull ourselves into our own center.

Wholeness

Why this? Why now?

I wanted to make a note for now about why this, why now? I wasn't blogging when I first came across an "a ha" moment for me (so no link), but basically it was something along the lines of "you do not earn grace, nor do can you achieve it through works ... you can only remove the obstacles to it."

For me, those obstacles certainly include the "hurts, habits, and hang-ups" of codependency (or as Ross Rosenberg calls it, "self-love deficit disorder"), food, alcohol, and screens (TV, social media).

More on the obstacles later, but as far as why this, why now, I want to leave this from Fr Richard Rohr on being open to grace:

Contrary to the grace versus “works righteousness” split that became popular after the Reformation, it is a lot of work and practice to remain fully open to undeserved and unmerited grace (Philippians 2:12-13).

There's lots to say and I will at some point, but I'll just start with noting that at this late stage of my life, it's clear that not only does this "work and practice" involve stopping with the numbing out all the time, but to "search wholeheartedly" for God (Jeremiah 29:13).

I'll be honest, my snooty, judgmental, intellectual (left) brain is not so sure about all of this, so I'm just setting that aside and letting my heart seek for now.

Psalm 51:10

My prayer for healing the hardness of my heart (in fact, I wear it near my heart).

Mother Teresa on judgement

I'm doing Fr Michael Gaitley's Consoling the Heart of Jesus retreat, and have just completed the first part of obstacle 5, where he talks about softening the heart by overcoming the sins that harden it. One of these sins is judgement (or a judgmental attitude).

Bingo.

I'd actually marked down judgement in obstacle 2 under the section of attachments (the things that we think would cause us distress to give up).

Fr Michael mentioned this great Mother Teresa quote in today's lesson. Marking it here for inspiration!

St. Thérèse of Lisieux on love