A Good Day

"Today's gonna be a good day." That was the lyric going through my head this morning as I woke up. I'd made my way to the bathroom hoping it was still the middle of the night but when I looked at the alarm clock it was only minutes until my alarm went off. Nevertheless that song lyric popped into my mind as my day started.

And it was.

My coworkers got together and showed their appreciation for all the hard work I've done the past few weeks by gifting me with a certificate to a local Spa. I'm not good at opening cards or gifts in front of others so for a moment I turned my back on all of them while I opened the card. Their kindness really touched me.

It was one of those work days when the work kept piling up and I felt like I wasn't even treading water at points. In the middle of that, in a lull, dearest one called to let me know someone had phoned me at home needing to talk about their problem with alcohol. I was able to slip away in private and return her call. It had to be Divinely led because of how that call went and how my story and hers intersected. You know when things pop out of your mouth and are unplanned and unexpected? The kicker was when she told me she was putting my number away for safekeeping right next to the word hope. Kind of gave me goose bumps, that did. I offered to stay in town and meet her at a meeting. She took me up on it only to call later and cancel. I hope to hear her voice again. I had to remind myself that we carry the message not the person. I so want today to be her bottom.

If you are the praying type please remember dearest one tomorrow in your prayers. He is having surgery tomorrow. He'll be off work quite a while recuperating. While it is not life threatening I think any time one goes under anaesthetic one faces their mortality. I am hoping he is pain free soon. I doubt he knows what that feels like anymore. It's been years.

Tonight we went out for supper to celebrate it being nearly 30 years since we got engaged. I was a teenager back then. I thought I was so grown up. I want to be a ballet dancer when I grow up. I've said that since I was a young girl. My mom used to laugh at me when I told her that. I probably said it the most often when I was in that awkward stage of adolescence when ones limbs are gangly and don't seem to fit the body they're attached to. I said that as often as I told her I wanted a nose job for Christmas or my birthday. I said it for years. Today I never give my nose a thought. It still looks the same as ever but I've changed. Today I take my wish to be a ballet dancer as having its roots in being about the beauty of the movement and about the inherent grace in it as well.

And today I feel beautiful and graceful so maybe my wish came true after all.

Lit For You

These are our prayer candles. If you've ever asked for prayer or if I've prayed for you then there's a good chance one of these has been lit in your name. Sometimes I have one candle just for people who have lost their spouses. I told God not too long ago that I was sick of lighting that candle. Not that I was tired of praying for them but I felt overwhelmed by how many people I knew who were widowed. Sometimes I light one and ask prayers for all the bloggers I "know".

For some people ritual is frowned upon but for me it is comforting. The ritual of lighting these candles can be both comforting and disturbing, depending on the needs of those I pray for. And sometimes there are just no words to pray. Which is in itself a prayer.

Lord have mercy.

As If He Took Dictation

"I'm so glad you told me because I often feel I must be full of shit when I feel prompted to pray something specific and that I'm imagining ever hearing anything from God."

We were having an after the fact conversation about how freaky it had been that her needs in prayer and my prayers for her had jived in a Twilight Zone kind of way.

I rarely pray anything specific for people anymore. I have no idea what is best for them. Well, other than those times when I think I know what's best for the whole darn world and everyone in it. I tend not to talk to God when I'm in that mood because I think I am God in those moments.

Most of the time though, when someone asks me to pray for them, I tell them that all I can pray is that God's will be done in their life. It makes me feel like a lousy prayer warrior, especially when I hear people pray so specifically, like they know God is waiting to hear from them in prayer before He takes action. And then there's the tension between praying the Lord's prayer and those Bible verses that say "ask and it will be given unto you." I used to spend much energy praying with a grocery like list of things that I rattled off to God as if He took dictation.

But this time around some specifics did come to mind and part of my role this past weekend was to pray for this friend in the chapel as she shared her story with the rest of women in another room. So I prayed and began to cry as an image of my friend's deceased husband interceding for her in heaven appeared in my head. I hate when I get blind sided by tears and as hard as I tried to stop them I couldn't. Eventually it dawned on me that maybe the tears had a purpose so I told God that I would cry on my friend's behalf whatever tears my friend needed to cry. I also told God that I thought I was full of shit to think I could hear anything from Him so please forgive my rambling, making no sense to me, prayers that I said between sobs.

Then the power went out in the building. That dried up my tears.

Within the space of a few moments I decided that the power going out could not possibly be God's will and so I prayed against it as if Darkness itself was in charge of the situation. If you only knew how easily I judge people who pray like that. There's a boogeyman behind every tree, don't ya know?

I envisioned my friend and those women in their room with only one small skylight high up in that ceiling. With no additional light there was no way she would be able to see the pages of her talk and all those women would miss out on hearing her story and it all depended on me to pray the exact right thing for the world to right itself. Lord have mercy. Save me from myself. Next I thought that the power must have gone out in that whole side of the city as a very real threat to our little weekend.

In reality I'm pretty sure the kitchen team had overloaded the power supply while they were cooking our supper. One flip of a switch and the power came back on. There was hardly a blip in my friend's delivery of her talk.

So much for hearing God.

I feel ridiculous when I find things out like that. It's why I don't trust what I think I hear in prayer. I feel like I'm picking petals off a flower saying, "Hearing from the Holy Spirit? Imagining Things? Hearing from the Holy Spirit? Imagining Things" until all the petals of the daisy are scattered around my feet. And still I don't know.

It's also why I rarely talk about what I think I hear from God, even if what I hear gets confirmed. Actually that's not true at all. I'm trying to make myself look better than reality. If what I think I hear from God gets confirmed I tend to want to strut around like I am some kind of saint with a direct line to God. Then I have to pray to keep my mouth shut because my ego loves that kind of stuff.

It was a powerful weekend.

Haiti

I found this Haitian blog
through Beth
and have been reading
and praying.

Endless

A new day.
Endless possibilities.
Open.
Honest.
Willing.
The grace needed to be all three
will be given.

Simple, D'oh!

As I laid in bed this morning
praying the 7th step prayer
I also talked to God about other things.
A very simple answer came to me.
Which made me smile
because I had been looking
for a complicated one.

Feeling Support

The energizer bunny was out of sorts all weekend with dearest one gone on a men's retreat. Two nights in a row she sat crying in the bay window looking for him to come home. Yesterday she was in full blown mourning. Poor thing. She understandably nearly turned herself inside out when he came home last night. We let her sleep in our bed. Dearest one told me through bleary eyes this morning that we let her sleep with us for her sake not ours. Amen to that. My God, she has nocturnal ADHD if there is such a thing. She's snoring away as I type.

It was wonderful to have dearest one home again. I love nothing better than to clean, clean, clean when I have the house to myself. I had a pretty good balance between work and play over the weekend. My house hasn't been this clean in a very long time, though. Dearest one looked around and said to me, "Were you bored?"
I even made the bed. Most people probably make the bed every day. I don't. I don't care, either. I can crawl into a bed and if there are covers to cover me all is well. Dearest one, on the other hand, comes to bed, looks at the disarray and says, "this will never do." I then grumble about having to get out of bed so he can straighten all the covers out. It's a near nightly game we play. Last night we didn't have to. Wonders never cease.

I have had a on again, off again relationship with centering prayer for the past year. I start it, I get scared, I run the other way. I start again, I make it through a week or so, I get scared, I run the other way. I did manage it for most of Lent last year and for a few months afterwards. I know of no other discipline that puts me in the here and now so quickly. I ordered a timer CD that starts with gregorian chant and then has the 20 minutes of silence and then gently comes back to gregorian chant to let you know a session is over. I put it into my computer yesterday and thought to myself what a weird place to do centering prayer, sitting in front of my computer. Usually I do it at the tail end of a yoga session. But I started anyway and stuck with it. Before long I noticed I was sitting ramrod straight and decided to ease back into my desk chair. I noticed the chair back wrapping around me as if it was hugging me. As I let the chair embrace me a thought popped into my head "It's okay to feel support." Well. That sentence came out of nowhere and had so many ramifications for me that I cried on and off for the remainder of the 20 minutes. Fr. Thomas Keating says that emotions are energy and what we suppress is stored in our body. Sometimes in centering prayer it surfaces. Tears no longer scare me. They did for much of my life. I'm learning to honour them and let them be. Who knows what those tears were yesterday. I'm okay with that.

Wanting To Mean It

This morning I prayed for someone I have a hugging-close-to-myself resentment towards. I realized that any lingering anger I have towards the perpetrators in my past I was directing like an arrow meant to kill, at this person as if they were the perpetrator. Last week I would have told you I had no lingering anger towards the perpetrators. None. Oh vey.

I prayed according to page 552 of the BB, a section I have high lighted because I (need to) refer to it often.

"If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or the thing you resent, you will be free. If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free. Ask for their health, their prosperity, their happiness, and you will be free. Even when you don'treally want it for them, and your prayer are only words and you don't mean it, go ahead and do it anyway."

I got done praying, felt instantly teary, and then said outloud to God, "I don't know if I mean it. I want to mean it." Then I paused and said more honestly, "I want to want to mean it."
Lord have mercy.

From East To West

It's the middle of the night and insomnia is my companion. Dearest one is having the bed and covers all to himself. I rarely have insomnia anymore and for that I am grateful. With all the hoopla from the furnace being out yesterday, I was late in taking some medication, which usually throws my sleep schedule right out the window. A little blip on the radar screen of life. Every time there's a full or nearly full moon, and the sky is clear, once during night it shines right through the bedroom window onto my face. It feels like being kissed by God.

A few days ago I didn't get outside for my walk until the sun was just about to disappear over the horizon. At one point I thought there was a car coming up behind me. As I turned to see, I realized I had mistaken headlights for the moon breaking through the clouds. It was shining brightly on the road. It felt a little surreal. For on one side of me was the clear, dusky sky and sunset. On the other was a dark sky filled with the moon and a few stars. Between the two were dark, black clouds. I kept stopping and looking from one side to the other, in awe of the view. There are times when Creation evokes a deep gratitude within me. I stood there and whispered 'thank you' over and over again.

Last month, when I found myself in a deep funk, I took stock and asked myself what was I doing when life was at its best. What works? Two things that I had let slide from my daily routine were yoga and a 20 minutes session of meditation. That period of meditation puts me squarely in the present. Being in the present scares me. Whenever I practice this period of meditation for any stretch of time, I eventually end up abandoning it, because it shakes me up at the core. On the flip side there is also a sense that it is working within me at levels my consciousness can't touch. I've heard it referred to as 'Divine Therapy.' Over the past few weeks I have slowly returned to the discipline of meditation.

Yesterday after the 20 minutes were up I felt different. When I stopped to assess the feeling I thought to myself, "oh, I'm in my body." After years of having vacated my body due to childhood sexual abuse, it feels like an incredible gift to trust my body enough to be in it. Anytime I stop living life from the neck up is cause for celebration. I'm trusting that as I continue to heal and grow, inhabiting my body will become the norm.

Yesterday, during my time of meditation, I got this sense that who I am is enough. Right now. This moment. As is. I felt myself open up and receive that who I am is enough as Truth. What other response can one have to that except 'thank you'? It's a little like seeing the sun set on one side of the road and the moon shining brightly on the other. The whole of who I am can be embraced. Thanks be to God.

Sunday Night

It feels like bedtime.
It's 8 pm.
Today I went for a walk.
The first one since last Tuesday.
It was good to have the energy to do that.
Thank you for your prayers.
This radio documentary is kicking my butt.
I need courage and strength.
Or rather I think I do.
I don't know what I need.
I can worry something to death.
Or to life.
Which robs me of
living in this day only.
Today I can handle.
I hope to really know that
one day.
Today.

In Short Supply

Spoonless in Canada.
Prayers appreciated.

Her voice had a catch in it...

This afternoon the batch of fudge just about ready to put in the pan when the phone rang. As I raced to pick it up before the answering machine did, I thought to myself I'll just have to ask the person to wait a few minutes for me to call them back. I picked up the phone to hear her voice catch as she said my name and then there was silence. I asked her what had happened. This good friend, who I may have heard cry once in the last 20+ years, sobbed and sobbed. I have not heard her so broken. Broken in a way that makes a person pound the table and cry in agony. I'm not at liberty to share her name or her source of grief but it's up there just under the death of a child. If you could pray for her I'd appreciate it. There was little I could do on the phone today other than listen. I promised to pray. For those of you so disposed, asking for Mary's intercession on her behalf would be especially appropriate as this friend consecrated herself to Mary on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception earlier this month. When I am burdened with things that break a mother's heart I ask Mary to intercede for me. Whenever I do my prayers get swallowed up in big gulping tears.
Thank you for praying.

Merciful Compassion

This will be my last post before I go for treatment at the local Alcohol and Drug Abuse center August 4th to 24th. This morning I attended my AA home group. I realize many enter rehab without a supportive group of people behind them. I am blessed to have support from several different communities, inlcuding online.
Thank you.

I am also asking prayer for my mom, the alcoholic of my childhood,who is still actively drinking. I had a long chat with her yesterday. It took me most of the conversation to clue in that she'd been drinking. She has congestive heart failure with permanent damage to 50% of her heart. Drinking can hasten her death.
For many years all I had towards her was intense anger. There was a time, right before I sobered up, that I swore if I heard her voice all that would come out of me was a never ending scream. The more I do recovery work, the less anger I have towards her. Facing my own demons and shortcomings has helped me look at her with compassion, knowing she judges herself harshly for making a lifetime of choices that have damaged every relationship she's had. My prayer is that I don't add to her condemnation. There is a part in the Big Book of AA that talks about an alcoholic pointing out every flaw in every situation and person because they want perfection and think everyone else does, too. That sums up part of my mom's story and certainly my own as well.
I also know that there will be a chunk of time devoted to working through my childhood issues concerning my mom while I am in treatment.
Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.

Waiting To Give

This post on resisting sexual temptation is well worth going to read.
Here is an excerpt:

Lord, thank You for the beauty of this person.
Thank You for the gift of my own sexual desires.
Lord, I recognize this twisted, lustful desire in my heart,
and I ask You please Jesus,
by the power of Your death and resurrection,
to untwist in me what sin has twisted,
so that I might come to experience sexual desire
as you created it to be,
as the desire to love in Your image.

This Path

I took those words, "It is not what you are nor what you have been that God sees with his all-merciful eyes, but what you desire to be." with me to Mass this afternoon. I felt a quiet joy within me as I went.

It was one of those Sundays where tears just kept welling up within me. Good tears. The kind of tears, had I been in solitude, would have become a torrent. It's been a long time since I felt so weepy at Mass. Every time I turned around [what, you didn't know we turned around at Mass?! :)] hearing God's word proclaimed reduced me to tears. It's been a long while since I felt pierced by God's word. Or had pictures come into my head in response to prayer.

One picture that came into my mind was that of being carried into rehab in the arms of Christ. And after it came into my head I thought to myself, wait, that doesn't make sense because where is he carrying me? Shouldn't I be getting carried towards him not by him? I mean is he carrying me to the counselors? They aren't going to heal me. Or are they? I had quite the little arguement in my mind about it all. Eventually I let it go and kept with me the picture of being carried by him into rehab.

Then, after receiving the Eucharist I felt like I was being held and rocked within safe arms. I turned, lifted my head and told Jesus, with one finger, you could heal all of me....the physical, the emotional, the addictions. And as soon as I said that I got a picture of myself with bleeding knees and a rocky path ahead of me. And he seemed to say, this is your path. Tonight I trust that this path I'm on is right where I'm supposed to be and that healing will come. It just might not look like what I'm expecting. But I do trust that I'm being carried, being held as I go.

Of Trysts, Traps and Spoons

If I get any more spoonless today I won't be able to walk to the bathroom. Seeing how it's been 17 years since I last changed a diaper, today is not going to be the start of changing my own. Which is a roundabout way of saying it's a couch day today. Gotta save those spoons for the trek to the bathroom. I feel like a limp rag doll.

Yesterday was a full day in town. We ended up skipping our evening plans and coming straight home after buying groceries. I was in bed by 9 pm. I was hoping that sometime during the night the rodent who has taken over my kitchen would make its way into the live catch mouse trap I bought yesterday. With an empty trap this morning, I look at my counters and wonder what the heck could be more enticing than the smell of peanut butter? Ah, yes, the little bugger opted for the bleach scrubbed counter tops instead. Must be on a diet, poor thing. Argh!

I had a check up with the doctor yesterday and was oh, so proud of telling him I'd managed to walk a mile per day for three days in a row this week. Considering that three years ago I could only manage 75 seconds on the treadmill before my heart rate was over the top, walking a mile is a big, big deal. In retrospect maybe trying for a mile three days a week instead of three days in a row might be a better option. Trying to sort out the ebb and flow of my spoonsupply and mulling over whether 3 days in a row followed by a full day in town is worth a spoonless day today is an ongoing battle. Walking a mile does feel like a huge gift.

A very dear friend of mine is in the hospital. She's been there more than not since last Spring. It's been almost three years since she had a double lung transplant. She has been there for me every step of the way as I went from doctor to doctor trying to get answers to my health issues. I found her through the internet even though we lived about 10 miles apart back then. It turned out that she had the same cardiologist as me - the one who told me I was simply hormonal. She had doctors telling her to go home and get a life, insinuating that she was a hypochondriac. That took a toll on her and it's something we understand about one another - how that attitude on the part of doctors can make a person mistrust their instincts ever after. Both of us instinctively knew something wasn't right in our bodies while doctors dismissed us. In the end we both were blessed by the same doctor who listened and made things happen. By that time she was just about ready for the lung transplant. Her name is Karen if you would be so kind as to lift her up in prayer. I'm going to visit her tomorrow. She's so tired of fighting the fight to live. I can hear it in her voice. It scares me because she is such a fighter. She has a giggle that is contagious. And above all else she is full of gratitude for the journey. She knows every day is a gift.

Well, it's almost time for my regular dose of Family Feud. The funniest answer I've heard lately on that show was when asked to name a road sign that described their love life one man answered, slippery when wet. His wife turned brick red.
I'm still chuckling over that one.
Let's hope the mice don't have a tryst of their own before they give in to their cravings and enjoy the peanut butter in the trap.

Brewing In My Soul

42 days ago we were on the cusp of Advent. It was a snowy day here and as I headed out the door to attend an Advent retreat, I faced icy roads and a long drive ahead of me in the dark. It was to be my first taste of Advent since my reception into the church and of experiencing for myself what it means to wait for the Light to pierce the darkness. During that retreat I wrote this prayer. Turning my chair towards a wall of windows while watching giant flakes of snow fall I shut out my inner censor and spilled my guts to God in that prayer. Afterwards I sat in the room of women and wondered what they would think had they known that renting a porn flick for my solitary enjoyment the previous night was what prompted that prayer. That I knew with the viewing of that film I was spiralling downwards fast while seesawing between both the shame and the thrill of it. It was the culmination of a lifetime of sexual compulsion/addiction within me manifesting itself outwardly in a way I could no longer hide from even myself. My written prayer scared the shit out of me. I don't know what felt worse. What happened when I let my guard down and rented that movie or what happened when I let my guard down and wrote that prayer.

When I had been doing a step 4 and sharing it with Father Charlie in a Step 5, my sexual issues weighed heavymost on my mind. There was some relief in alluding to them, even speaking clearly about some of them. While inching closer to the Light however, I skirted around rigorous honesty. I was playing at seeing how close I could come to the truth without actually facing it. Compulsions I could admit to, but the label of having a sexual addiction perhaps belonged to the perpetrators in my past, it didn't belong to me. It wasn't too far of a cry from standing up at my first AA meeting nearly 18 years ago, and admitting that I was an alcoholic. In that moment I felt I had become my mother(the real alcoholic), something I said would never happen.

I brought a copy of my Advent prayer to Father Charlie the next time we met for counseling. It took a while before I could say that my prayer was connected to my struggles and that it had a name. Sexual addiction. I understood that some people could engage in some of the behaviours I struggled with and it wasn't compulsive or an addiction for them. The same way some people can have a drink and it doesn't become a problem. But for me this was a complusion spiralling out of control.

I reached out for help from someone I knew who had been on the path I was staring at. Her counsel, encouragement and prayers gave me strength to climb out of the pit of denial and stand on solid ground. Pope John Paul II said once that we should not fear "the truth about ourselves." Not exactly what goes through my mind when I think of Jesus saying, "Be not afraid."

I have thought often of writing about my struggle here but if other things I've shared with you have felt like an unveiling of my soul this surley tops them all. I kept open to sharing and then a few things happened to prompt me to go ahead and write this post.

One was that Moneybags wrote about people requesting a patron saint for the year. Well, actually it was about a patron saint picking you for the year. I am still new in my Catholic faith and thought, "what the hell - having a saint intercede for me couldn't hurt anything." And at first when I found out St. Augustine of Hippo picked me I had him mixed up in my head with St. Francis of Assisi. When the fog cleared I remembered that the last time the cat had made it into the house I yelled that if that cat was on the counter licking the butter again I was going to kill it and I knew I didn't have all that in common with old St. Frank, although it wouldn't hurt to have him intercede for the cat. After that my eyes grew larger with the realization that all I could remember about St. Augustine was his reputation for being sexually out of control. "Ohhhh," I thought. How appropriate. I was sure he was winking at me from heaven and saying, "Gotcha."

This morning I found this snippet about St. Augustine:
He is a prophet for today, trumpeting the need to scrap escapisms and stand face-to-face with personal responsibility and dignity."

and this one:

St. Augustine of Hippo is the patron of brewers because of his conversion from a former life of loose living, which included parties, entertainment, and worldly ambitions. His complete turnaround and conversion has been an inspiration to many who struggle with a particular vice or habit they long to break."

Oh ye good St. Augustine - you understand exactly what's been brewing in my soul.


The other factor in writing this came about from reading Ronald Rolheiser's book Against an Infinite Horizon. I read this account and it puts into words my own experience of these last 42 days of abstaining:

"You are as sick as your sickest secret. That's a phrase AA groups use to challenge people to understand what, at its roots, sobriety really is. Drunkenness, of all kinds, has much more to do with lying than it has to do with alcohol, drugs, or anything else. We are sober, truly sober, when we stop lying."

He goes on to talk about a film called Sex, Lies, and Videotape in which he says "a man who has every kind of dysfunction, including sexual neuroses in his background, makes a vow to never again tell a lie. He sets up a video camera and invites people to , with as much honesty as possible, tell the story of their sexual lives. The ones who come and speak honestly, regardless of whatever weaknesses or perversions they have get better, grow gentler and eventually get healthy while the people who lie and do not face their truth slide ever deeper into hardness, rationalization and self deception."

The Truth shall set you free is a theme that has woven itself through many of my posts. After I dared to say the phrase "sexual addiction" outloud to Father Charlie I felt my body actually relax. There is truly something freeing about admitting to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.(step 5) I no longer struggle on my own strength. God knows. God's there.

Well, we both know God has been there all along. But once, many years ago I felt Jesus standing beside my bed and saying, "You know what? That (behaviour)will never be life giving. You are trying to find life where there is none. Only I can fill that gap." There was no judgement, no weariness in his tone. Just a full knowing that I was seeking life where there was none to be had. And he was going to be patient for however long it took for me to surrender to that truth.

What else can I say? I look back at the process of restlessness with where my sexual issues were going and how that prompted me to do a step 4. I see how the grace imparted in doing that step showed me some truth which helped me on my journey. But it didn't stop there. It didn't halt the process of self denial in this area because I hadn't disclosed fully to myself just what I was messing with. Seeing the process of opening the door a crack to let a little light in lead to the door being blown off my self deception.

And this is not the end of the story. In giving up a source of comfort, a way of soothing my emotions and keeping real intimacy at bay I am left with a gaping hole of sorts. I find myself more emotional, more agitated. I see these things about myself with as little self judgement as possible. I pray more. I feel some embarrassment that it's taken this many years of sobriety to come to a fuller understanding of sobriety in other areas. There is also a deeper sense that the journey is a journey, a process. I haven't arrived. I never will. But there is a freedom, a relief in not lying to myself anymore. A gentleness with myself that leaves room for the process to continue. God's patience with me is life long. His love never fails. I shudder to think of trying to conquer this addiction once and for all but for this moment I can abstain.

It's taken me several hours of writing to get this post to the point where I can hit the publish post button. I started writing when it was still dark out. It is appropriate in more ways than one that the light is now breaking through the darkness outside as I sign off for today.