Once you have tasted God, worldly solutions will not satisfy as they once seemed to do.  There develops a dissatisfaction with those things of the world that filled you up before the taste of God.  Call God whatever you will, or no name.  Your soul has fed on the inexplicable and this nourishment will go deep.  Life becomes more profound, rather than a series of things accomplished or encountered.  But some of those same encounters are not meaningless.  They take on a new meaning.  This is what makes life more profound.  The same activities, events ..read more

 Once you have had an in-depth experience of God, Higher Power, the One, you are never really the same.  You no longer can forget.  A person who finds a higher power in a recovery program and stops their addictive behavior, will never forget that Spiritual Encounter even if they leave the recovery program.  The soul, the interior life has been awakened and does not go back to sleep even if the mind does.  An in depth spiritual encounter with the Divine seems to fill an inner hole or space.  It is profound as it is fulfilling.  But God will dig another hole in ..read more

 If you don't enlarge your spiritual life, then you are in danger of failure in the rest of your life.  Many of us got into the spiritual path because we did not care for the path or lack of path we were on.  But if the spiritual path is not enlarged, then we most likely will return to whatever path or addiction we were on.  Or life becomes aimless, and aimless can be covered over with destructive behaviors.  To enlarge the spiritual path, we must first stay on it in a daily practice of reading and meditation.  Then we might expand to a group, or church on a ..read more

One of the things that I realize in a deep encounter with the Divine, The One, Ultimate Reality, is that I find I need less of other things.  Nothing can replace the encounter.  So what happens? I now have an energy to declutter my life of stuff.  Much of my stuff, my purchases, my accumulations, had to do with filling something within me.  I did not see it at that time of the purchase or the holding on, but with the deeper  prayer life, I see it now.  I can now begin to unload stuff, give it away, throw it out, whatever.  The spiritual life becomes ..read more

 If you belong to some group, church, association, one of the best ways that you can be of service is to invite a newcomer to come back.  First of all, it requires you to notice and engage the newcomer.  You initiate the action.  So this takes you out of self-absorption.  Second, don't assume anything that was said or the content of the gathered group got through to the newcomer.  They may be simply wrestling with the unfamiliar surroundings.  Third, the newcomer can replace the person who has been coming for years but is now moving, changing careers, or time ..read more

 Why do we say that stillness in the deepest part of ourself will give us peace.  Because we can be like the ocean.  Life has its hurricanes.  On the surface area and a bit below the surface, there is lots of turmoil and chaos.  But the deep part of the ocean remains calm.  The hurricane chaos cannot reach that depth.  If a species gets nothing but bad from the ocean turmoil, then the species develops so that it can go deeper.  Some fish are smarter than humans with all our brains.  When the fish senses the ocean surface if growing into a hurri ..read more

 Impulsive, self-activated activity is incompatible with surrender.  Self-will can be the signal that we are moving away from any surrender.  If your life was or is a mess at the moment, full of chaos, you might ask if surrender to a will or program, or activity other than your self-will might be the answer.  Or the beginning of an answer that will be positive.  Surrender might begin by letting go of your tight grip on whatever is part of your unhappiness.  We just stop doing whatever is stressing our life.  People stop ingesting their addiction, stop focusin ..read more

 This is Mary’s month, as we say in my religious tradition.  So if your name is Mary, this is your month.  Now she is the Mother of Jesus.  At the Annunciation, an angel appears to her.  She did not freak out, but was rather troubled by what the angel said, “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.”  She has no husband yet, plus women don’t name the male child in her religion.  My point is that she is brought up with a religion of certainty about things.  She has the adolescent faith of certainty that many of us recall ..read more

 When grieving a loss, we sometimes might chastise ourselves for feeling so stupid or forgetful about things.  Don’t.  It is all part of grief.  When Mary Magdalene came to the empty tomb, she weeped so hard, filled with a sense of loss, that she did no even recognize she was talking with angels, or the voice and presence of Jesus, himself.  But once called by her first name, a moment of intimacy, a connecting moment, she recognizes Jesus.  When a newcomer enters a recovery meeting for addicts, they are often so filled with grief at losses in their life, that they ..read more

 We tend at times to set the bar too low in our expectations of doing good.  Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and found it empty.  All she wanted was to find the body of Jesus and give him a decent burial.  She never expected that he would be alive, raised from the dead.  Jesus had much more in mind for her…to become the herald of Good News.  It is the same with an addicted person coming into their first few Recovery meetings.  Their hopes, expectations, are that they can find a way to stop the addiction, and stay stopped.  That they would have a whole ne ..read more