WATCHING THE PLASTIC FLOWERS GROW

Everyone has a center to their life. In fact, I have changed centers frequently, depending on the stage of life I am encountering. My work stage, for example, has worked near the top of my list. I have to eat, so I earn money to pay the bills. It was interesting to me to discover how I just fell off the side of a cliff when I retired. I had a purpose, and the next minute, what would I do with my life? At 65, I was older than most retirees, but the paradigm switch was traumatic.

Everyone must have a purpose for living, even after retirement. If you are military and put in thirty years, your whole life is turned upside down when you get out. There is no longer a mission you must fulfill. Now, you are left alone to fill the hole left by your sudden interruption in a way of life. With what will you fill it? Make or spend money? Reading? A hobby or craft? Playing chess? Going to church? Watching television? Drinking yourself into oblivion? Taking medications to bring you up or down? Chasing women or allowing men to catch you? Sitting in your rocker on the front porch of life and watching the plastic flowers grow?

You know you are in trouble when your plastic flowers start to bloom. Each of us must wake up to the fact that work or former patterns of relationships no longer provide meaning and that self-cleansing on the inside is needed to sit up and begin to live again. If retirement is death, do you want to remain dead or continue living whatever time is left with integrity and meaning?

This blog is not about hypothetical formulae to put into your life that will save you from the martyrdom of ordinary living (boredom). I am not you; you are not me; God is not us; and we, most certainly, not God. Leaving aside the possible problems you might have with God, I share the only thing I know, that of my background and how my search for purpose and fulfillment as a human being is in the process of becoming something more than who I am now.

THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT ME (In no order of importance.)

MY FAILURES WERE MOST IMPORTANT IN MAKING ME WHO I AM NOW. Don’t interpret this incorrectly, but my life has been a total failure at the very roots of my being, despite all my successes. I don’t think I am a bad person, but I have met many people throughout my life and failed miserably at treating them with the respect they deserved. I was a jerk. The more and more I look back on those scenarios or encounters with people, in particular, I could have done so much better and done so much more to have helped me be more present to their needs and not my prideful self-aggrandizement. Getting older (and believe me, I am old at 82.8), I now am not the same person I was at an early age. I began to discover my former self in 2013 when I joined a group of Lay Cistercians (www.trappist.net) and learned to shut my mouth and listen to that faint whisper in me from the Holy Spirit. Gradually, I grew perceptibly more to being like Christ (loving others) and less like me (the jerk). I grew to the point that I could see that my former life was not garbage as much as straw rather than the hay I thought it was.

In my new life with the Christ Principle as the center of my life, I attempt to make atonement for my sins (failures) to those I have wronged, slighted, ignored, discounted, or hurt. I go to these situations in my past and ask forgiveness of these people, telling them that I am a sinner and asking them for mercy. This is my atonement for my sins and what I think Purgatory must be like; a place of second chances to look back on your life (What else is your framework of reality after you die?) and make all things new with the help of Christ.

Whatever successes I have had, and I am blessed, have been because I have tried to abandon the treasures of this world (money, fame, fortune, gratuitous sex, power) for those God thinks are important (loving others as Christ loved me). I am a work in progress with Jesus the Magister Noster as my tutor. I have purposefully placed myself in the care of the Holy Spirit (Baptism) so that I can sustain myself on the journey with the bread of heaven (Eucharist) and fix any diseases of the spirit (Penance and Reconciliation) that make me ill.

St. Benedict, in Chapter 4 of the Rule, states: https://christdesert.org/rule-of-st-benedict/chapter-4-the-tools-for-good-works/

“41 Place your hope in God alone.
42 If you notice something good in yourself, give credit to God, not to yourself,
43 but be certain that the evil you commit is always yours and yours to acknowledge.

44 Live in fear of judgment day
45 and have a great horror of hell.”

I AM THE ABSOLUTE WORST PERSON I KNOW AND AM A FAILURE AT ALL I ATTEMPTED IN MY LIFETIME.

Lest you think I am a Sado-Masochist who flagellates myself daily over the insensitivities of everyone I have ever met, let me assure you that I indeed am that person, but, thanks be to the Holy Spirit, I have activated a long-held but dormant belief that I am also a citizen of the kingdom of heaven and an adopted son (daughter) of the Father. Lest I become too obtuse, I have always been what I considered religious, but only with the awakening of the dormant Holy Spirit when I was accepted as a novice by the Abbot of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit (Trappist) did I awaken much like Snow White did. As the years went by, from 2015 onward, I noticed a strange phenomenon happening to my awareness. I began to see myself in terms of my new contemplative principles, which led me to the all-encompassing Christ Principle, from which all reality pours and flows pure knowledge, pure love, and pure service. Lectio Divina, with its deceptively simple prayer leading to contemplatio (contemplation), has been the door into which I have opened the lock of my past life, good as it might seem to those on the outside looking in, to find that simple upper room in my self where I alone can go. I lock it every time I go there and just wait. At first, what was the temptation to flee this place because there was nothing to do (martyrdom of the Ordinary), with humility and obedience of my will to the reality of God, became my salvation because I slowed down my life, exhibited profound focus with the ever presence of the Holy Spirit, and now can’t wait to go to that special place where I am overshadowed by:

• serenity
• simplicity
• solitude
• silence
• stability
• steadfastness
• Scripture
• security
• and thus, salvation.

Like the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, when I realize that I must put them into my life and then just wait (sometimes for years), there is a movement from my formation as a Lay Cistercian to my reformation. I must break those bad habits of my citizenship of the earth (Seven Deadly Sins) and die to them by making a conscious and sincere choice and then put the Gifts of the Holy Spirit where there was once just sin and imperfection.

I NOW REVEL IN THE PENITENTIAL PART OF ME RATHER THAN WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED IN LIFE.

The unintended consequence of Original Sin is that all humans must learn to be not only human, which is the condition into which they are born, but also spiritual, the condition for which each person must choose (Baptism) to move to that next level of intelligent design, the spiritual universe where Jesus is Lord. To do that, I must die to myself, not just one time, but every day, seeking to meet Christ in whatever comes my way. The power to do this does not come from me (citizen of the World) but from my presence to be in the way of the pure energy of the Holy Spirit. I assimilate that energy as I can absorb it (Faith) and make it part of THE WAY (Belief). Being a penitential person is a reminder that, like St. Benedict points out in his Rule, Chapter 7, I must always realize who I am and remember that God is God and not a whim I can manipulate at will because he made statements in Scripture. The Lay Cistercian Way is one of the cross, not the morbid facilitation with how Christ died, but the cross as the alter upon which the Lamb of God atones each nanosecond for the choice of humans (Adam and Eve being types of representing all humans), giving glory to the Father for our adoption and allowing us to tag along at the feet of the Master and get a peek at what St. Paul calls the third heaven.

As I contemplate this, which I was unable or unwilling to do even ten years ago, I do so against the Christ Principle, as stated in Philippians 2:5-12. It is only after a profound focus on what many consider “nothingness” that I have moved imperceptibly toward an awareness of my life as “something.” The sign of contradiction on my forehead becomes ever clearer to me. I don’t have to “do” anything when sitting next to Christ on the couch of my upper room. Energy flows from that which is greater (divinity) to that which is lesser (my humanity). I absorb only as much as I am capable (capacitas dei) through the penitential disciple of prayer (not just one prayer), but the immersion in the Way, the Truth, and so, the Life. The purpose of all life is to love God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength and your neighbor as yourself. (Deuteronomy 6:5 and Matthew 22:36) It is only with the power of the Holy Spirit that I may advance towards fulfilling what it means to be human as my nature intended.
The product that comes from this overshadowing is a sense of humility that God would even think me worthy enough to enter my temple and reside in the Arc of my Covenant, that I must make myself worthy of that presence by doing all in my power to atone for my sins in reparation for being such a total prideful and duplicitous person to all I have ever met and asking their pardon, forgiveness for my insensitivities, and ask them to pray for my conversion (conversatio morae). This is not a one-time petition but part of my Lay Cistercian Way that I have forged with great difficulty and anguish. At the same time, there is great joy and serenity that I have been selected to be an adopted son of the Father and heir to the kingdom of heaven. None of this is due to me or all the prayers I have ever offered to the Father, thanking him for this underserved gift. The Way of Christ, the Cistercian Way, the Lay Cistercian Way is a penitential walk while I live to follow those footsteps and trace the route Christ took in his Way. My discovery of the unimaginable knowledge, love, and service I receive as I make the way to the cross is impossible for me to describe using human concepts. I now know what Mrs. Murphy, the avatar of the late Father Aidan Kavanaugh, O.S.B. meant when he taught us in 1963 that this humble person, sitting in the back bench of Church, eyes lowered and just being in the presence of the Real Presence, knew more than all the learned theologians and scholars combined. She sat on the back bench with no conditions, just being there and thinking, I love you. This is penance to which I aspire (not there yet).

HEAVEN AND HELL ARE NOW

More and more, I am convinced that we make our heaven (good works) and hell (bad works that do not cause us to mature into what our nature intended). The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, although somewhat ambiguous because there is no such tree in the physical universe, is nevertheless at the core of conversio morae (daily conversion from my false self to my true self). Who determines what is good for us is one of the three questions humans must discover. The other two are “What does it mean to be human?” and “What is the meaning of authentic love?”

If I make my heaven later on, I want to bring with me those things that make my humanity capable of knowing, loving, and serving on earth what I want my heaven to be later on. I am human, and it is my frame of reference. People sitting around in sheets like zombies is not my idea of heaven. Hell becomes not a place of torment but the anguish of knowing that you could have had it all but made the wrong choice…forever. God does not punish us; we punish ourselves for those choices which are not authentic. Here we go again with good and evil. I believe we have been seduced by a false narrative about hell and therefore, heaven.

WAITING FOR GODOT

The famous play about two fellows waiting for someone named Gadot, who, by the way, never shows up, is an example for me of the importance of focusing on the waiting and not on the outcome.

My prayer life is one of waiting, longing, or anticipating Christ next to me on the couch in that upper room of my heart (Matthew 6:5).

Meditation is using thoughts and words, and sounds to think about something. Contemplation is taking those thoughts without using words, thoughts, gimmicks, or books. It is the heart waiting next to the heart of Christ. At first, I thought something had to happen, but then, as I listened to the heartbeat of Christ, my energies focused on waiting without words.

I am too busy to retire. I will save that for after I die. Now THAT’S retirement.

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