All shall be well

Gray area drinking

I was a high functioning drinker like Jolene Park, and like her, I didn't have a "rock bottom" per se before I stopped drinking. That said, I'd have to categorize my drinking as really, really, really dark gray.

But her video is a great one, particularly for women who may be using drinking as too much of a crutch. And her NOURISH guidelines to support a more healthy lifestyle are good ones (starts around 6:50):

• Notice nature
• Observe your breath
• Unite with others
• Replenish [helpful neurotransmitters] with food
• Initiate movement [yoga is particularly good]
• Sit in stillness
• Harness your creativity

Connection, trauma, and resilience

I may come back to do more on this, but want to make a note about this very interesting interview by On Being's Krista Tippett of psychiatrist/neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda: How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations.

The topic is epigenetics and how what's happened before we were born can wind up being expressed by our genes later in our own lives. This is the money quote for me (emphasis mine):

What I hear from trauma survivors ... is how upsetting it is when other people don't help, or don't acknowledge, or respond very poorly to needs or distress. ... And I'm very struck by how many Holocaust survivors got through because there was one person that became the focus of their survival, or they were the focus of that person's survival. So how we behave towards one another, individually and in society, I think, can really make a very big difference in, honestly, the effects of environmental events on our molecular biology.

The Knot Prayer

Food and theology

I may have found my calling.

New forms of ministry become possible when eating together is understood as witnessing to the kingdom of God. Jesus was in the food business. Churches should be too.

-- Norman Wirzba, as quoted by Kendall Vanderslice in Farminaries

The Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina has a short course -- A Theology of Food: What We Eat and Why It Matters -- available online. Here's the first video with links to the others.

Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

A sign

Photo by Bruce Hallman/USFWS

I was listening to the Catholic Channel on SiriusXM yesterday, and heard one of the callers share a story about asking for a sign and receiving one. Apparently it stuck with me, as before I fell asleep last night, I asked for my own sign: seeing a cardinal today.

I asked for a cardinal in part because of the lore of cardinals and deceased love ones and in part because I had a longish drive in a rural area for an appointment today. I thought I'd tilt the odds in my favor.

As I drove to the appointment today, I started thinking about how silly I was to be looking for a sign considering that I wasn't in distress ... mostly just impatient to progress in my spiritual growth (next week will be five months since I began my Centering Prayer practice in earnest).

So as I neared town after my appointment, I thought to myself "well, so much for seeing the cardinal today" and not 30 seconds later, a cardinal flew across the road in front of my car. Well then.

Thank you.

Blest Are They

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God

Richard Rohr has been doing the Sermon on the Mount on his daily meditations recently. Today's entry is "blessed are the pure in heart" and he shares Cynthia Bourgeault's description of the connection between the 'heart' and seeing God (emphasis mine):

The heart in the ancient sacred traditions has a very specific and perhaps surprising meaning. It is not the seat of our personal affective life—or even, ultimately, of our personal identity—but an organ for the perception of divine purpose and beauty. It is our antenna, so to speak, given to us to orient us toward the divine radiance and to synchronize our being with its more subtle movements. The heart is not for personal expression but for divine perception. . . .

The ancient Wisdom traditions all saw (I do not mean they theorized; they directly perceived) that the physical world we take for our empirical, time-and-space-bound reality is encompassed in another: a coherent and powerful world of divine purpose always surrounding and interpenetrating it. This other, more subtle world is invisible to the senses, and to the mind it appears to be pure speculation. But if the heart is awake and clear, it can directly receive, radiate, and reflect this unmanifest divine Reality.

-- Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing