I'm finally accepting it....

I live in Texas. I live in this house and work at this place and there is no escape. I've always escaped or somehow been moved on. So much so that I didn't realize how I was taking Texas as a temporary thing.

But yesterday, I bought a bookshelf for my upstairs bedroom and moved books from boxes onto the shelves. Somehow, this lent an air of permanence to my residence. People who move might leave the stuff in the boxes. People planning on staying some place will unpack and settle in.

The new bookcase tells me what I have decided.

This weekend was almost my first private multi-day since foot surgery. I jog/ walked for 5 hours and 20.5 miles on Friday. I cross trained for 2h47min on Saturday. Today, Sunday, I did another 3.5 hours and 15.35 miles of jog/ walk. I don't really plan all this. When I go out for a long run, I just go until I run out of time or it starts to hurt real bad. So yes I am training for a marathon. But no, I am not following a training plan. I just go out and if all is well, I keep going.

I don't know why I like to do miles. If I lived in the mountains, it might not seem so strange to spend a day hiking. But, it is very boring where I live. The deep reason for why I do this have not been discerned. But dreaming of endurance has been in my brain since a very young age. But like silence, my brain does not speak of why this must be so.

I have to quit asking questions of silence. I should quit expecting it to make me wise. Silence just is and must be enjoyed without demands.

To be in the world but not of it: At the practical level, it means not participating. Like not eating the food of the masses, or watching their TV, or doing a family, or ... get the point? But one level down it means thinking different. This is possible if you train your synapses to respond differently. Another level down it means a focus in another direction. This means that life and all of its purposes and awarenesses and desires are in a direction not of this world. This is possible but not easy since distractions come along continuously.

They built monasteries to help this process. Men went to the desert to help this process. Had I stayed in the monastery, I'd have to be "of this world." A small enclosed world different from society; but a world none the less. I'd have to conform to them and their religion. The knowledge that makes this world an illusion would not have been obtained. The deeper thinking is possible for one allowed intellectual and spiritual freedom; but not one confined in a religious prison.

I live as a solitary. I study spiritual material. I don't eat the meat or watch the TV. I don't have any ear worms except those from the 60s and 70s which are triggered frequently but not that often.

Jesus in not Lord. Christ just is.

The Idea of the Monastery.....

....versus the monastery itself.

I want to know God. There was beautiful promises made about how the monastery was the place to carry out that quest. I've been out of the monastery and carrying on that quest for 10 years, using many spiritual opportunities. These opportunities are not Catholic so might not have been available to me had I stayed at the monastery. My body mind and spirit are free to accept all opportunities offered me by Spirit since I am not locked in a box.

What follows is a distinctly negative view of what I saw during my recent visit to the monastery where I was in formation: death and ghosts of people. Yes there are positives to convent life, but that is not my current focus. And my comments are somewhat framed by the final profession of one of the sisters which occurred this weekend.

I am on the last day of a 6 day vacation. I slept late, dreading facing the Texas heat. As usual, my mind had wandered into my monastic problem. That is, all the various questions regarding why I went there and why I didn't stay and the God quest now. I got up and went to turn off the fan by my bed. It suddenly struck me. I wanted the idea of the monastery, but I see now, not the monastery itself.

The idea of the monastery was "a school for the Lord's service;" a place away from the world where undistracted prayer could be carried out. For me, it was a place to practice contemplation with people who I thought were as intensely interested in God consciousness as myself. Perhaps they all go to the monastery with that quest. Formation, the process of training nuns, is exactly that: formation. Formation is a process of changing people from who they are to what the other nuns think is acceptable.

I say now that the monastery cripples people. What I saw was people crippled by their life in a insulated box. Obesity in a world where there really isn't that much food. White skin which never sees the sun. A sister with a bony disfigured upper body, yet she is my age. Dull colors and decorations from the last century. The most color was from a small pile of M&Ms a sister sitting at the reception desk had obtained from the stock kept for guests. Oh my God, how terrible that half a days work for two young sisters was to sit at a reception desk where hardly anyone ever comes! A sister telling me about her programming of automated machines, not even guessing the sophistication of the machines used in my chemical plant. In the monastery, few have to worry about the day to day survival issues of obtaining food, going to work, dealing with money, maintaining a house or car, health care, making life decisions.

While I was doing my spiritual study, the thought struck me that the monastery was a practice similar to Chinese foot binding of women long ago. That is, the monastery is a binding of religion and place which causes people to grow in strange unnatural ways.

Then I flashed on the picture of Abbot Gregory putting the nun's wedding ring (to Jesus) on the finger of the newly professed nun. I thought with horror how that is so symbolic of male power in the Church. I couldn't stand it.

So, my quest for God consciousness goes in in the world. My learning result from my visit is that I cherish the idea of the monastery, but continue to thank God that I didn't make a profession. Yes, my ego will still worry over the experience of being asked to leave and the dogma that vowed religious are somehow special to Jesus. These are synapses which will always be in my brain; but my mind knows more. Everyone is either equal before God, or our God is a terribly cruel God.

I am reading a scholarly tome about the Q source of the gospels. It will show a quit different picture of Jesus. I have the ability to carry out monastic practices: silence, solitude, prayer, simplicity, poverty (meaning poor-in-society not poor financially), chastity, Lent, spiritual reading, vows of obedience, stability and conversatio made to God.

And I am about to go outside and enjoy an hour or so of walking in the Texas heat. Tomorrow it is back to work.