🙏🙏🙏

Oh, my. Even there.  In  the ER monday where my wife’s treatment kept getting interrupted with trauma calls

with my friend Gary who has brain vascular is.

with Richard who wants to gst drink as soon as he is out of prison.

Where I FIRST encountered Christ was when I was in early recovery fro alcoholism,  30 years ago.  The words “let’s go pray” came o to my mind.  The idea they prayer was something we do together, me and Him.

last time was yesterday when I was despairing of events in lotics and the world.  During the night I centered using the name

of Jesus as a sacred word in Rhythm with my breath.  I the morning as I was standing by  the toaster in the kitchen something seemed to say to me “trust. Eternity.”  Not heard. Sort of felt

My friends are praying for Mary, as I am too.  Also Jason and Diane.

please pray for Oriol, a friend’s son, gravely ill in the UK.

I’m reacting  to the Wendell Berry passage:

To reach out to someone despite his grandiosity and meanness, despite his having wiped out a woodland

Yes – the man is broken and at  bottom, clinging to the illusion that it’s ok when he knows it’s not.

I could reach out knowing that he could do no harm.  No more woodlands to bulldoze.

But there are those also with grandiosity and meanness who are not broken.   Who have many woodlands to devour.

When I could go alone into the forest and surrender to the forest.  Can’t do that anymore but I can do CP

when I could go to to the Carmelite chapel near me and be alone – but not alone.  Can’t do thst anymore; bishop closed the convent.  But I can do Cp.

Where ego drove me to retreats and onto baroque seeming chapels, I was really looking for the excitement that came my conversion

I keep trying  to get it back

when I first saw a NH mountain i. had to get off up there.   But when I got to the summit, my legs were shot, and I had to worry about getting down

1.  I went down a rabbit hole listening  to bono and pulled up a bio on google.  Used to be pop stars were older than me (Elvis, John Lennon) or at least the same age (McCartney).   Ok, he’s just a little older than my son and has glaucoma and tinnitus.

2.  I rented a locker in 2019 and filled it with excess books, maybe 200’or so.  I finally paid  a guy to empty it.  He kept some.   Now I’ve bought even more books.  The place is a mess, books everywhere. Clothes I  don’t wear anymore

3.  Surrender is not a new concept.  I’ve been inAA for 30 years.  When I was young and only 55 or 60 it was easy.  I could gst in the river and swim upstream and then let the current carry me back. Literally.  I’m sure I still can do thst, but june would have a fit.

Now, nearing the end of life, it’s crunch time.   Hmmm, maybe I can hang on 10 more years?  Yeah but can june, who’s already 87?  My friend Dick at 88?

she is frightened so we don’t talk about this.

and most people here are well past all this, I’m sore.

in a way i didn’t  before, I’m finding myself resistant to readings here, anything by Keating.  Part of it comes from my household where my partner does not seem to want any of this.

for several years I was an active Benedictine oblate.  Now I can’t imagine wanting to go in the monastery

 

Of course I’m caged.  Can’t go on retreats anymore, can’t do solo retreats where it’s me and God.   I need to stay close to home Cause my best friend has balance issues and falls.

There’s a high cabin on a mountain near here run by Appalachian mountain club.  I used to fantasize about booking it so I could hike up there and be alone. But that’s out of the question.

But some of that desire to get out there and get lots of spiritual consolation is spiritual gluttony.  I don’t get a lot of thst spiritual consolation doing my Cp here in the house.      So caged in a way, but then maybe not.  Of course self examination is necessary to look out for self pity and the bondage of self.

 

Let me add about fear.  June’s fear runs our life.  I find joy be going to our comdo outdoor pool alone and swimming laps while I lookup at the sky.

Last I went, june was in tears when I came back. “You’re the only family I have” she said.  Every one in her own  family is dead. And we ar somewhat alienated – at least geographically, more likely emotionally – from our  kids, who are scattered all over North America.

So I can’t get a swim without an argument or anxiety

Susan’s post takes me back to a dream I had a few nights ago.   It only last about 15 seconds.  But I – we? June and me? Identities flux in my dreams – we were a bunch of people who were at peace.  It was safe.  Peace.  Sort of happy like a Buddha’s little smile.

I tried the fear exercise but to do it I had to invoke fear, by imagining the future.  In other words, not staying  in the moment.

Adeline,it would be wonderful to have that ritual at the conclusion of a 5th step!

After a retreat I sat by a river and remembered the  Anima Cristi which I had just learned:”water from the side of Christ. Wash me.”   And I looked at the river.  And I thought if the way the earth’s water circulates through the world. ( The planet doesn’t get “new” water, the same water circulates) And how the water the lady at the well drank, the water Jesus and everyone drank, even the water that passed through his body,  I had probably drunk, even swam in, right there in that very river.

I couldn’t agree with Kathleen more.  It’s one of the liveliest stories in any of the canonic Gospels  The woman is marginalized (as Susan says) and maybe even an outcast among other women – certainly she would be an outcast among all in Jerusalem, where she would more likely be stoned to death.

She’s interesting because she is familiar with scripture.  She knows about the Messiah!  Maybe she’s even literate?  She also is fearless, talking alone to a strange man she’s never met before.  I’d like for John to tell us more about her, but it’s enough, I guess.

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