Physically, Emotionally, and Spiritually

"Where am I physically, emotionally, and spiritually?"

God, I missed some times with you this week. I know I let the busyness of my days keep me from talking with you. I know you are patient with me, far more than I ever am with myself. I just want to say that noticing my disconnect, and the extra struggle that abring me, was important for me. I'm so used to doing it alone...this life thing...and meeting with you daily is new to me. I know how important it is to my ongoing recovery and overall well being. I find myself much more irritable and discontent when I'm not spending time with you, listening to your guidance and resting in your peace. I love the mental image of resting my head on your shoulder and just relaxing into you. When I do that, I breathe deeper and just let go of everything weighing on me. I know this is the one place I can truly just be me, and I need that daily. I am making a commitment to you and to myself to show up and meet with you daily. I know you're able to make space for me in my days. Help me to be mindful of my time and energy, pacing myself, and turning to you throughout the day for guidance and rest. Left to my own devices, I will burn out and create chaos in my life, resulting in messes to clean up. I know you'd much rather have me live in a way that brings your ways of peace and love to others and to myself. I am grateful for your patience and grace. I know when I get right spiritually, the physical and emotional get right automatically. Thank you, God, for this reminder today.

If Only

How has my life been filled with "if only's?"

I chuckled a bit about the lengthy list of "if only's" in the reading (Step One -- The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous), as I recognize myself in them. I often thought, if only people in my life would love me how I wanted to be loved, I would be able to love myself. If only others would act this way or that, I wouldn't be so angry all the time. If only food didn't make me fat, I could eat whatever I wanted and be happy. If God were sharing about me, I know He would say, 'the selfishness is strong in this one.' And that would be the God's honest truth. I wanted the world--everyone and everything in it --to be the way I wanted it so that I could live without all the drama I created for myself. Everything was always about  me. Truthfully, I still manage to find ways that I'm trying to control things around me, and thankfully I have some God-led awareness and people in my life that gently and compassionately remind me that I'm not in control, and I gratefully have a program that teaches me to prayerfully seek God's help in removing my shortcomings--which includes wanting to control and run my life on self-will instead of God's will. Old addictive ways creep up in a myriad of ways as I do the daily work in this program of recovery, and I find the struggle to lead to blessings and joy as I lean into my developing relationship with God. I am a grateful compulsive overeater, as this disease has opened up my world in ways I never expected and never thought possible.

Growing Spiritually

"I cannot grow spiritually by myself. A seed had to be planted in my heart, and for that seed to grow, it had to be nourished daily with prayer, devotion, and meditation. If I feed myself every day, I will grow spiritually just like the flower. In time, I will blossom into a beautiful, soft, colorful person." - Seeking the Spiritual Path

It took me time to realize this point...that in order for me to continue to grow in the program of recovery, I had to grow spiritually, and I couldn't do this by myself. I needed God's help. I was afraid of trusting God to help me. I wanted to do it on my own, at least then, if I failed it would be on me, and I could only be angry at myself. I tried every which way grow spiritually without God. I thought I could think myself into spiritual growth...that maybe the more I knew about myself, the more growth I would attain. I spent a full two years in this program trying to do spiritual growth my way. A few months ago, I stopped running from God and finally gave in and leaned into this work with God. God has been chasing me down for years, and I've been running away...and, when I think about it, this is what I've always wanted...to know and believe that I'm worth the chase. I was just so angry about everything, I wasn't yet ready to give up that anger and give up wanting everyone, including myself, to suffer for not being able to fill up that deep dark pit inside me. I knew what I wanted, I just had a misguided understanding of where to find the thing that would fill me up. So, I tried to fill it with food. Now, I understand what I was looking for was in building a relationship with God. I'm finally learning that I can trust God, and I'm excited to experience what God has for me--what growth I can experience next through each struggle and the joy I can find in this connection with God, which includes what He brings to me through my fellows. Thank you, God, for never giving up on me.

What is Meditation?

Excerpt from Spiritual Direction and Meditation by Thomas Merton, transcribed here for posterity and usefulness.

To meditate is to exercise the mind in serious reflection. This is the broadest possible sense of the word "meditation." The term in this sense is not confined to religious reflections, but it implies serious mental activity and a certain absorption or concentration which does not permit our faculties to wander off at random or to remain slack and undirected.

From the very start it must be made clear, however, that reflection here does not refer to a purely intellectual activity, and still less does it refer to mere reasoning. Reflection involves not only the mind but also the heart, and indeed our whole being. One who really meditates does not merely think, he also loves, and by his love--or at least by his sympathetic intuition into the reality upon which he reflects--he enters into that reality and knows it so to speak from within, but a kind of identification.

St. Thomas and St. Bernard of Clairvaux describe meditation as "the quest for truth." Nevertheless their "meditation" is something quite distinct from study, which is also a "quest for truth." Meditation and study can, of course, be closely related. In fact, study is not spiritually fruitful unless it leads to some kind of meditation. By study we seek the truth in books or in some other source outside our own minds. In meditation we strive to absorb what we have already taken in. We consider the principles we have learned and we apply them to our own lives. Instead of simply storing up facts and ideas in our memory, we strive to do some original thinking of our own.

In study we can be content with an idea or a concept that is true. We can be content to know about truth. Meditation is for those who are not satisfied with a merely objective and conceptual knowledge about life, about God--about ultimate realities. They want to enter into an intimate contact with truth itself, with God. They want to experience the deepest realities of life by living them. Meditation is the means to that end.

And so, although the definition of meditation as a quest for truth brings out the fact that meditation is above all a function of the intelligence, nevertheless it implies something more. St. Thomas and St. Bernard were speaking of a kind of meditation which is fundamentally religious, or at least philosophical, and which aims at bringing our whole being into communication with an ultimate reality beyond and above ourselves. This unitive and loving knowledge begins in meditation but it reaches its full development only in contemplative prayer.

This idea is very important. Strictly speaking, even religious meditation is primarily a matter of thought. But it does not end in thought. Meditative thought is simply the beginning of a process which leads to interior prayer and is normally supposed to culminate in contemplation and in affective communion with God. We can call this whole process (in which meditation leads to contemplation) by the name mental prayer. In actual practice, the word "meditation" is quite often used as if it meant exactly the same thing as "mental prayer." But if we look at the precise meaning of the word, we find that meditation is only a small part of the whole complex of interior activities which go to make up mental prayer. Meditation is the name given to the earlier part of the process, the part in which our heart and mind exercise themselves in a series of interior activities which prepare us for union with God.

When thought is without affective intention, when it begins and ends in the intelligence, it does not lead to prayer, to love or to communion. Therefore it does not fall into the proper pattern of mental prayer. Such thought is not really meditation. It is outside the sphere of religion and of prayer. It is therefore excluded from our consideration here. It has nothing to do with our subject. We need only remark that a person would be wasting his time if he thought reasoning alone could satisfy the need of his soul for spiritual meditation. Meditation is not merely a matter of "thinking things out," even if that leads to a good ethical resolution. Meditation is more than mere practical thinking.

The distinctive characteristic of religious meditation is that it is a search for truth which springs from love and which seeks to possess the truth not only by knowledge but also by love. It is, therefore, an intellectual activity which is inseparable from an intense consecration of spirit and application of the will. The presence of love in our meditation intensifies and clarifies our thought by giving it a deeply affective quality. Our meditation becomes charged with a loving appreciation of the value hidden in the supreme truth which the intelligence is seeking. This affective drive of the will, seeking the truth as the soul's highest good, raises the soul above the level of speculation and makes our quest for truth a prayer full of reverential love and adoration striving to pierce the dark cloud which stands between us and the throne of God. We beat against this cloud with supplication, we lament our poverty, our helplessness, we adore the mercy of God and His supreme perfections, we dedicate ourselves entirely to His worship.

Mental prayer is therefore something like a skyrocket. Kindled by a spark of divine love, the soul streaks heavenward in an act of intelligence as clear and direct as the rocket's trail of fire. Grace has released all the deepest energies of our spirit and assists us to climb to new and unsuspected heights. Nevertheless, our own faculties soon reach their limit. The intelligence can climb no higher into the sky. There is a point where the mind bows down its fiery trajectory as if to acknowledge its limitations and proclaim the infinite supremacy of the unattainable God.

But it is here that our "meditation" reaches its climax. Love again takes the initiative and the rocket "explodes" in a burst of sacrificial praise. Thus love flings out a hundred burning stars, acts of all kinds, expressing everything that is best in man's spirit, and the soul spends itself in drifting fires that glorify the Name of God while they fall earthward and die away in the night wind!

That is why St. Albert the Great, the master who gave St. Thomas Aquinas his theological formation at Paris and Cologne, contrasts the contemplation of the philosopher and the contemplation of the saints: 

The contemplation of philosophers seeks nothing but the perfection of the one contemplating and it goes no further than the intellect. But the contemplation of the saints is fired by the love of the one contemplated: that is, God. Therefore it does not terminate in an act of the intelligence but passes over into the will by love.

St. Thomas Aquinas, his disciple, remarks tersely that for this very reason the contemplative's knowledge of God is arrived at, on this earth, by the light of burning love:

The contemplation of "philosophers," which is merely intellectual speculation on the divine nature as it is reflected in creatures, would be therefore like a skyrocket that soared into the sky but never went off. The beauty of the rocket is in its "death," and the beauty of mental prayer and of mystical contemplation is in the soul's abandonment and total surrender of itself in an outburst of praise in which it spends itself entirely to bear witness to the transcendent goodness of the infinite God. The rest is silence.

Let us never forget that the fruitful silence in which words lose their power and concepts escape our grasp is perhaps the perfection of meditation. We need not fear and become restless when we are no longer able to "make acts." Rather we should rejoice and rest in the luminous darkness of faith. This "resting" is a higher way of prayer.

Pray About It

"God was not there to prevent me from feeling pain but to help me face it..." - Seeking the Spiritual Path

God, I haven't felt welcome there. I've been coming for more than six weeks now, and some still don't even know my name, many haven't reached out to me. Is this really where I'm supposed to be? Is this my home group?

Dear Child, Yes. This this where you're supposed to be. Don't run away. Lean in. I hear that small one inside saying, "it's not fair; they should want me," and I'm asking you to take some steps out in faith and reach out to others in your group. Many are struggling right now. I'd like you to be of service. Freely give what you've been given freely. Share my love and acceptance to others in your group. They need you as much as you need them. I will give you the strength and the words to know what to say. I'm here with you. You are not alone. Your loving Father, God.

My Step-Three Prayer Today

"I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understand God."

My God, help me to release the frustration I feel when someone talks over me, as you know how triggered I get about that due to my past. Through you, I know that my voice matters. I am letting myself feel the frustration, acknowledging its presence and the pain that comes with it, telling myself the truth--this person did not mean to do this or hurt me through their actions--and I'm giving this over to you. My Higher Self is patient, kind, and full of grace, and I will lean into that now as I let this go and go on with my day happy, joyous, and free. "Hello, little one, I feel you down there in my belly, crying that your voice wasn't heard. I hear you. I acknowledge you. You matter. You are not alone. Let's accept God's peace and love in this instance, and go play, okay." I give this to you, God, and accept the comfort and care that doing so gives me.