Be a warrior in recovery

Just heard Darrin Donnelly on the radio talking about his book, Think Like a Warrior. It's written as an inspirational fable, and in it, the main character, Chris, is visited by five of history's greatest coaches: John Wooden, Buck O’Neil, Herb Brooks, Paul "Bear" Bryant, and Vince Lombardi, who help Chris figure out how to overcome obstacles and achieve his dreams. Their lessons:

• Focus on the things you have total control over – primarily, your effort and your attitude in the present moment. 
• Love what you do and attack each day with joy and enthusiasm. Find your purpose and live the life YOU were born to live. Don’t be afraid to dream big. 
• Follow the dreams in your heart and ignore the naysayers and cynics. Keep reminding yourself of all the reasons your dreams CAN come true. 
• Be relentless and never, EVER give up on your dreams. Expect problems, but know that you have what it takes to overcome each and every one of them. 
• Choose faith over fear. Most failures are a result of fear and worry. Be fearless and know that you have everything you need to become the person you were born to be. 

It's interesting how applicable these are to recovery. See more with Donnelly here.

In the ocean

drift by demandaj

"You may feel that you have a long way to go before realizing the degree of habitual meditative awareness of oneness with God exemplified by the great mystics. But the intention of your heart ... bears witness that a transformative journey, not of your own making, is already under way. Imagine that you go to the ocean, take off your shoes and socks, and wade in ankle-deep. It’s true that you are in only ankle-deep, but it’s also true that you are in the ocean."

-- James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Rohr on trust

Some thoughts from Richard Rohr. First, on fear, grace, and trust:

Ask yourself regularly, “What am I afraid of? Does it matter? Will it matter at the end or in the great scheme of things? Is it worth holding on to?” Grace will lead you into such fears and emptiness, and grace alone can fill them up, if we are willing to stay in the void. ... To stay in God’s hands, to trust, means that we usually have to let go of our attachments to feelings—which are going to pass away anyway (which is the irony of it all). 

On trust and surrender (emphasis mine):

Surrender, yielding, trusting, and giving are never going to appeal to the ego. We have to be taught this deeper wisdom soon or civilization will continue its rapid downward spiral. The key, of course, is to Whom we are surrendering: a Trinitarian God. The life of faith is learning how to rest in an Ultimate Love and how to draw upon an Infinite Source. On a very practical level, you will then be able to trust that you are being held and guided. In fact, you can trust after a while that almost everything is a kind of guidance. ... [What] I am saying that what first comes to your heart and soul must be a yes instead of a no, trust instead of resistance.

Finally, a homily: Trust is a Rock You Can Build Upon (start ~7:30).

It's not about you

It's a paradox, but the challenge with spiritual searching is to ensure it's not an ego-trip. Fr Laurence Freeman writes:

The great pitfall of ‘finding oneself’ is the pitfall of narcissism and self-centredness – the danger of seeing it all revolving around yourself and for yourself.

Lots more in his e-book Finding Oneself. 

If the church were Christian

Quaker pastor Philip Gulley suggests ten standards for rediscovering the values of Jesus. He writes that, if the church were Christian:

• Jesus would be a model for living, not an object of worship
• affirming our potential would be more important than condemning our brokenness
• reconciliation would be valued over judgment
• gracious behavior would be more important than right belief
• inviting questions would be more important than supplying answers
• encouraging personal exploration would be more important than communal uniformity
• meeting needs would be more important than maintaining institutions
• peace would be more important than power
• it would care more about love and less about sex
• this life would be more important than the afterlife

Gulley's book looks like a must-read to me. HT to Richard Rohr.

Abandonment prayer

I like this prayer from Father Dolindo Ruotolo, who wrote as if Jesus were speaking (emphasis mine):

Shut your eyes and say with all your soul: Jesus, You take over. Don’t be afraid, I indeed will take care of you, and you shall bless My Name, in humility. A thousand prayers do not equal only one act of abandonment; don’t ever forget it. There is no better novena than this: Oh Jesus I abandon myself to You, Jesus, You take over.

There's also a novena version.

To Will One Thing

A prayer from Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing by Søren Kierkegaard.

Father in Heaven, what are we without you?
What is all that we know, vast accumulation though it be,
But a chipped fragment if we do not know you?
What is all our striving?
Could it ever encompass a world,
But a half-finished work
If we do not know you?
You, the One who is one thing and who is all. 

So may you give
To the intellect, wisdom to comprehend that one thing
To the heart, sincerity to receive this and this only
To the will, purity that wills only one thing
In prosperity, may you grant perseverance to will one thing
Amid distraction, collectedness to will one thing
In suffering, patience to will one thing. 

You that gives both the beginning and the completion
May you early, at the dawn of the day,
Give to the young the resolution to will one thing
As the day wanes, may you give to the old
A renewed remembrance of that first resolution
That the first may be like the last
And the last like the first
In possession of a life that has willed only one thing,
To know God.

Matthew Kelly's spiritual habits

From Resisting Happiness:

• Believe: Have faith that holiness is possible, and everything you do every day leads you closer to or further from the-very-best-version-of-yourself and the holy life God wants for you.
• Ten minutes a day: Create a daily habit of prayer.
• Hour by hour: Offer every hour of your life to God as prayer, especially your work.
• Free your mind: Spend time reading the Bible and other spiritual books.
• Serve powerfully: Get outside yourself by finding ways to make a difference in the lives of others.
• Mass: Attend daily Mass once or twice during the week to develop a deeper love for the faith.
• Fasting: Deny yourself in small ways many times a day so that God can fill you with spiritual strength.
• Reconciliation: Confess your sins regularly and open yourself up to spiritual coaching.

We're reading this book at my church for book club. Chapter 26 (on delaying gratification) has my name written ALL over it.

Thomas Merton prayer

Thomas Merton's prayer from Thoughts in Solitude:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Now is the hour

The prologue of the Rule of St Benedict contains this:

Now, therefore, let us finally arise. Scripture stirs us up saying, “Now is the hour to rise from sleep.”

It's explained by Michael Casey: (emphasis mine)

No call is resisted and resented so fully as the call to wake up. So we need not be surprised if we do not want to be stirred into action, especially when we do not know exactly what will be involved. ... 

By creating a miasma of sensory fireworks we effectively block out anything beyond what is sensate: any spiritual perceptiveness, any attention to interiority. ... 

The result is that we are so awake on one level that there is no room for a more interior awakening. ... 

To be awake and alert spiritually we have to limit the amount of attention we give to other areas. And, according to St. Benedict, we have to make a start right away. “Now is the hour to rise from sleep.”

Cardinal Tobin on faith

This:

We’re encouraged to compartmentalize faith. Faith is seen as equivalent to worship and thereby reduced to an hour on Sunday morning, if that. It really impoverishes the notion of faith, of which the biblical image is a type of vision, a different way of looking at things. 

Faith is not an opiate or belief in the pie in the sky and the great by‑and‑by. It’s about the great drama of human existence and seeing something differently. I think that part of ministry and the life of the church is to help people make that connection, to see something differently. 

Faith tells me that my life with God is not simply about me and Jesus, because if it’s just me and Jesus, then it’s mainly about me. Faith impels me to have the vision to see other people not as objects or people who will do things that will meet my needs but as fellow daughters and sons of God, as brothers and sisters, as fellow pilgrims.

No such thing

"No such thing" is the title of Mirabai Starr's cover article in the Summer 2017 issue of The Mendicant, the newsletter of Richard Rohr's Center for Action and Contemplation which looks at Christian mystic Julian of Norwich's take on sin.

Julian description of her experience of the Divine:

I did not see any sin. I believe that sin has no substance, not a particle of being, and cannot be detected at all except by the pain it causes. It is only the pain that has substance, for a while, and it serves to purify us, and make us know ourselves and ask for mercy.

Starr adds (emphasis mine):

Julian informs us that the suffering we cause ourselves through our acts of greed and unconsciousness is the only punishment we endure. God, who is All-Love, is “incapable of wrath,” and so it is a complete waste of time, Julian realized, to wallow in guilt. The truly humble thing to do when we have stumbled is to hoist ourselves to our feet as swiftly as we can and rush into the arms of God, where we will remember who we really are. ... 

Sin is nothing but separation from our Divine Source, and separation from the Holy One is nothing but illusion. We are always and forever connected in love with our Beloved. Therefore sin is not real; only love is real.

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.”

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.

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."

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.