A single bird chirped hello outside of my room in the Old Friary. It was in February 1999 the last time I stayed in that part of this wonderful Graymoor Christian Unity Center. And the only reason I stayed in the Old Friary then, where the single rooms are a bit pricier than the doubles in the main retreat center, was because a buddy from Philadelphia made the reservations. Seems it was an Anthony de Mello retreat and a few of my Philadelphia friends, like me, are big fans.(That was the last time they had a de Mello retreat too – seems Mother Church grew to find his spirituality a bit too Eastern or dicey. His contention that our final barrier to God can be our concept of God is a bit much for an institution highly invested on our buying their concept of God.)
And as fate would have it, that weekend down the other end of the Old Friary, a group of Carmelite nuns were staying as their convent up in Beacon New York was being renovated. So because I did not obey the ‘don’t talk to the sisters’ suggestion, and asked for some prayers and I later got their address, for ten years now I’ve been graced with their prayers as I send them a few dollars and little stories and other things I’ve written. One year I even made it to their home for an October 1 celebration of the feast of the famous Carmelite, St Theresa of the Little Flower. Two days from now as it turns out.
There is more. Then I was only about six months removed from my latest relapse into my addiction to crack cocaine. Also then I was 16+ years in a job in a hospital finance office and I was summarily disappointed with my career choice. Writing was my dream and people repeatedly suggested to me to write and do my job, but for some reason I just could not do that. I could put together poems and little stories, but I just could not get started on this book I dreamed about writing. Somehow I knew that job had to go. The sense that pushing paper was not God’s will for me was with me at all times….and of course the fact that I’d really turned my life around but simply could not stop the pattern of relapse I’d struggled through for the preceding 4+ years was another part of my angst. And as fate would further have it, totally at random I picked a spiritual reading for a Lecto Devinia exercise that was very appropriate. Two years later I quit the job…a la the birds in the air and lilies in the field, I had enough faith that the Father would take care of me, one of his most prized possessions. When I boarded the plane to my father’s family’s homeland of Ireland, off to the first book and the rest of my life, I was six months removed from the latest, and God willing, the last relapse. It’s now nine+ years since I took that final fall.
The book was called You CAN Go Home Again and though it was anything but a big seller, it was my way of going Home to the loving protection of my Creator. Seems he maybe required that kind of faith to keep me clean.
So now it is fall 2009. The no work and then part time work honeymoon lasted until about four years ago. I now work in the drug/alcohol field and with its lack of monetary reward and dysfunction and paper work galore, it can be immensely frustrating. But at least I am helping some people. And I do have to pay the bills. My latest project involves taking the 12 steps to the non-addicted world. The book I wrote 12 Steps to Change Your World is my 6th but only the 2nd I’m getting published. It is a lot shorter and more accessible than the other. It was edited by a real editor and is far tighter and more focused. Still I got a rejection letter from the first traditional publisher I sent it to. That news and the difficulty I’ve had in getting a church or prayer group to try working the steps, has me quite frustrated. It is difficult to de-condition people that the steps are only for the addicted.
Alas the graces of places like Graymoor keep me plugging forward. As they buzzed through portions of the retreat, they gave no direction or reading concerning the Lecto Divinia that was on the schedule. I’d thought the ‘ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you’ would have been a good one for me. These instructions seem to be about working harder at the task at hand but for a lot of my life, instead of knocking when the asking and seeking went unanswered, I’ve crawled back under the covers…as I did this very morning after the retreat.
Funny the way it works out sometimes. The crawl back under the covers and failure again to do the quiet time and guidance piece I stress so in the step class, gave way to a far from blessed day for me. But I schlepped up to my weekly rosary group and then over to the local adoration chapel to do the closing portion of the Chinese meditation I do called Qigong. (I’d done the opening-imagining steps while saying the rosary). And the meditation seemed as flat and empty as had the rosary, but somehow the memory of the ‘at random’ Bible selection I chose for my own Lecto Divinia came back to me. I’d opened to Chronicles (I think) and to one of the happiest moments in the Old Testament when David is handing over the reigns to his son Solomon and giving him instructions on how to build the Temple. My dad was as good and upright a man as I have ever known, but he too suffered from the pangs of regret and procrastination. My whole Graymoor connection is about him. In 1940 he landed there in sort of pilgrimage to find himself. The first of 16 straight years I went there was my first sober anniversary in 1993. But as I sat in the chapel, I realized his grace and his blood are probably the most significant sources of my ability to go forward and to repel his regrets as I do so. For sure we are all connected but is any connection as strong and lasting and influential as that of a father and a son? His Alzheimer’s and my cold, empty, alcoholic mindset precluded any instructions to be handed down to me towards the end of his mortal days. But in the realm of God and grace and heaven and Eternity, the floodgates of love and progress are never closed.
And so for the briefest of moments, the final tearful smote of this year’s Graymoor trek came over me. The beatific period on the end of a sentence peppered with so many splices of ecstatic connectedness…including all the wonderful new friends I had made. The ground I walk on that hallowed mountain walks with me as long as I believe it. I guess putting the one foot in front the other this rather blah day, and locking myself to this machine until this story was finished, netted a heart that had been indeed been knocked open.
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