Beautiful

Photo by Michael T. Ruhl via Washington Post

Careful cooking is love

St Benedict: On food and drink

From the Rule of Benedict, three chapters on food and drink:

• Chapter 39: On the Measure of Food 
• Chapter 40: On the Measure of Drink 
• Chapter 41: At What Hours the Meals Should Be Taken

See also commentary (Lawrence: 39, 40, 41), St Ignatius: Rules with Regard to Eating, Christian Fasting: A Theological Approach, and food in early monastic rules.

Fruits of prayer

Today's late-day Centering Prayer session was filled with lots of thoughts (as usual), but many/most of them could be categorized as thinking about either 1) what I could eat for dinner after prayer or 2) why my "progress" in CP was so slight and whether I was doing it wrong somehow.

But the founders of CP note that it's about intent -- "to simply be in the presence of God and engulfed in that divine sense, whether felt or unfelt." Thus "if you don’t do it correctly, it doesn’t matter" ... the "principal method of Centering Prayer really is to sit down."

So there I was, with about five minutes left and I was very aware of an internal craving/itch to eat to soothe. And I'm not exactly sure what I did (or what was done to me), but in those last few minutes I had a very clear awareness of that itch being replaced by a sense of peace.

That's a first ... in nearly 60 years.

Coincidentally or not, it has been six months (today) since I attended the CP workshop I took to begin my practice in earnest.

St Ignatius: Rules with Regard to Eating

From the third week of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, his Rules with Regard to Eating. See also commentary (Simmonds, Shano), St Benedict: On food and drink, Christian Fasting: A Theological Approach, and food in early monastic rules.

Psoas, stress, and fear

If true, this could be a big factor in the growing level of anxiety I've experienced after I moved to a full-time teleworking position that, along with a fall or two, definitely contributed to my experiencing some mobility issues:

The muscle that is most central to our fight/flight response is the psoas. When we don’t respond, these stress hormones go unspent and become stored in the body. This can bring many health problems including insomnia, lowered immune system, anxiety, eating disorders, depression, and living in a constant state of fear or alert.

Because the psoas is so intimately involved in such basic physical and emotional reactions, a chronically tightened psoas continually signals your body that you’re in danger, eventually exhausting the adrenal glands and depleting the immune system. – Liz Koch, Author of The Psoas Book

Thanks to this, I'm off in search of some physical therapy to address an issue with one of the hip flexors that has been problematic for me.

Reality of God

From Unbelievable by John Shelby Spong (emphasis mine):

If God is the Source of Life, then the only way I can appropriately worship God is by living fully. In the process of embracing the fullness of life, I bear witness to the reality of the God who is the Source of Life. ... 

If God is the Source of Love, then the only way I can worship God is by loving “wastefully,” a phrase that I like. By “wasteful” love I mean the kind of love that never stops to calculate whether the object of its love is worthy to be its recipient. It is love that never stops to calculate deserving. It is love that loves not because love has been earned. It is in the act of loving “wastefully” that I believe I make God visible. ... 

If God is the Ground of Being, then the only way I can worship God is by having the courage to be all that I can be; and the more deeply I can be all that I can be, the more I can and do make God visible. ... 

So the reality of God to me is discovered in the experience which compels me to “live fully, to love wastefully and to have the courage to be all that I can be.”