Steps 4-11: Cleaning house

Let's review: Only the brokenness of my psyche separates God and my Self.  The Solution to egotism isn’t spiritualized egotism.  Nor is a god of my own making a higher power.  In early 12-stepping, I was unwittingly making those two mistakes.  When recovery established itself as part of my spiritual journey, I hadn’t seen my mistakes, and I didn’t realize the extent to which I already had what I needed.

In recovery, we talk about problems, and we make bold to claim they have a solution.  The symptoms of OCD, of which I was becoming increasingly conscious, made my attraction to a dualistic God concept worse.  Calling out to God, “uplifting the mind and the heart to God” as the traditional definition of prayer states—all of these put God at a distance, made spirituality on some level a reaching for something of which I didn’t—nay, I couldn’t—lay hold.  People with OCD are always trying to boil things down to the basics, and I had made God an external authority figure whose machinations were mysteries to be plumbed.  My spiritual life, from emotional impulsivity to the constant striving for insight, was my diseased thinking in pious clothing.

However, it seems that even the prayers of a false self, addressed to a false god are heard by the true God, and it began breaking down this self-imposed dichotomy.  During my years in the monastery, I felt distant from God.  I now see it was because the God I was worshipping was a self-made, ultimately false concept.  I had moments of breaking through my own numbness, though, when I would accurately and cathartically foist what I was feeling on the abyss of divine absence, and in those moments all of the noise in my head would go quiet.  Hearing dry leaves blowing across the porch outside my cell was a great privilege, especially when I was normally so caught up in my thoughts as to miss that entirely.  Those few moments of genuine contemplation gave me the resources to see the ways my self concept and God concept were part of my problem.

I had heard the world, I’d been given moments when the noise of my false-self abated and I was, at least briefly, pure perception.  The God that reached out to me then was truly a power greater than myself.  This is the God that I still follow.  Increasingly, he began to show me that my thoughts about the world were not the world.  

When I attended ACA in Charleston, we all took care of one another.  I didn’t need a sponsor: there were a good number of people in the group that I trusted to straight talk me.  

It stymied me. I was doing all of the things the program told me too, and I was not getting better.  I got angrier and angrier at God, more and more disillusioned with the 12 steps.  Back in Charleston, I had made as “searching and fearless” a moral inventory as I could.  I met with a friend, (a 12 stepping sex addict, who gave me the 24 hour sobriety token that I have in my pocket as I write this), and—over burgers and beer, no less,— I’d taken the 4th and 5th steps.  I listed my faults over french fries, washing them down with a Fat Tire beer while I admitted them to God, myself and my friend.  We laughed at the irony of it.

And like so much of the work I did in those early years, it yielded zero serenity.  I could admit my faults to another—but so can any overly neurotic child, any newly dry drunk driven by remorse. 

When I moved to Chicago, the vibe was much cagier—ACA’s there were focused on living the steps, but less willing to reach out.    I would go to meetings, say my goodbyes, and leave.  People in recovery talk about the dread of asking for help.  They speak about “picking up the 1000 pound telephone.”  Well, in my early days in Chicago, having identified a few people I thought I could trust, I would both pick it up and dial.  Over and over again, I would get answering machines at most.

It’s been five years since my South Carolina friend and I had that beer.   It has taken me this long to see why it didn’t work: I’d enumerated my faults, but I thought living a virtuous life was the solution.  I wasn’t working steps 6 and 7.  I hadn’t asked God to remove my shortcomings, much less done so humbly, and I hadn’t become entirely ready to have God remove them.

Unlocking the solution entailed admitting that I had heard the world, but I had not yet begun to hear myself.  Contemplation had reduced the noise in my head enough to connect with my surroundings, but “refraining from acting Egotistically” was not the same thing as “being myself” anymore than “not drinking,” for an active alcoholic, is the whole of recovery.  

Bill Wilson, in a now famous 1958 AA Grapevine Letter, spoke of emotional sobriety—the healing of the psychic wounds that made people drink in the first place. For Adult Children of Alcoholics, who may not have chemical addictions, recovery means emotional sobriety or nothing at all.

Around the time when the phone began weighing 1000 pounds, I began to notice separate voices in my own psyche…raging voices, belonging both to a child, it seemed, and to an adult.  In my more enlightened moments, I could listen to that rage, rather than stuffing it, and speak gently to that rage, rather than ridiculing it.  When i first heard about “the inner child” that most ACA’s face the task of “reparenting,” I laughed.  It seemed to be a strange, institutionalized version of “multiple personality disorder.”  But, more and more, noting, and beginning to work with my mind’s distinct voices laid bare the work (as yet undone) to form a healthy ego.  Listening to the “dysfunctional family” I’d internalized helped me to see that my God concept needed work.  Doing those two things enables me to approach steps 6 and 7 with new hope that they’re realistic for me.

I could not “humbly ask God to take away my faults” because I viewed him dualistically: as a being separate from myself who may, or may not act when I need him to.  After five more years of paltry contemplative living, while it’s true that the transcendent God is an intelligent, benevolent and personal force, his transcendence is more the ground of my own being than a whole separate being whose favors the faithful curry at cost of great personal effort.  

To whatever degree I have acquired the non-dualistic mind of Christ, I’ve found both God and the redeemer inside myself.  They aren’t separate from me, they’re the source and summit of my better self, the mahatman.  

The message of steps 1-3 is “admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery.  I am hoping that “admitting you’ve distanced yourself from God” is the first step to allowing him to come closer.  I know that God cannot do for me what I’m unwilling to do for myself.  So “humbly asking God to remove my defects” looks more like “humbly asking my better self to willingly give up my faults.”

And these days, I know that the solution to my vices isn’t an extreme and willful pursuit of virtue, it’s growth in non-attachment.  Attachment to Ego makes me cling to the things I don’t like about myself, and push back against them virtuously, even as I’m disgusted by them.

My assessment of my faults, as I approach steps 6 and 7, is deeper and more systemic than it was when I worked steps 4 and 5 years ago.

In buddhism, they’re called the three tanhas: the thirst for pleasure, the thirst to be, and the thirst to not be.  

My deep seated sense of insecurity gave rise to an addiction to affirmation and the character defect of lust—rather than addressing the roots of the issue, I was mediocre at both celibacy and womanizing.  Thirst for pleasure, here I come.

My deep seated sense of abandonment by God gave rise to creating an entirely separate self, whose fuel was the sufficing of needs that couldn’t shore my identity up.  Thirst to be, here I come.

My deep seated sense of my own deficiencies led to that ego using substances to shore them up. It is instructive that I became conscious of my ego on exactly the same day I first considered suicide.  When I indulge in my own addictive behavior, my ego would be, for a moment, silent. Thirst to “not be,” here I come.

I am only beginning to gauge how far my attachment to the tanhas has warped my character.  But in recovery, ACA’s say their character defects become the “stuff” of recovery.  Where I once forced myself on a god I simultaneously made up and pushed away, I’m becoming open to the true God, who reveals himself to be presence when I am present to myself.  Where I once felt my existence rested on desire being fulfilled, I now know that existence is just a bunch of desires laid bare.  And where terror of my false self made made me prize self-extinction, I now know that will come from non-attachment alone.

So my true self is waiting, right now, for me to let go of my own falsehood.  All that I really am, all that’s God, and Christ, and Health: all these will be what’s left when, finally, I learn to let go.

Trust God: New Thoughts on Steps 1-3 of ACA

“Keep coming back.  It works if you work it, so work it, you’re worth it” 

In every 12 step group, after the Our Father is prayed, this phrase closes the meeting.  I love it for how cute it is—I will sound cynical, but overt assertions of people’s worth always strike me as merely schmaltzy.  And I will sound like I’m discrediting healthy 12 step groups, but “it works if you work it” has not always been true for me.  In the beginning, I distrusted what I’ll call the “dogmatism” of 12 step groups.  This “drink the Kool-aid and you’ll be ok” attitude didn’t add up.  In the beginning, I had trouble with God.  I would ask him to take my faults away, and he wouldn’t.  I’d been working the steps, I thought, and my life was still unmanageable. I’d heard the call to give up self, but I continuously sucked at it.

Ultimately, I’d like to take a look at how healthy, (or unhealthy) my working of the steps is.  But first I need to be clear about why I believe the “addict’s problem” applies to me. (A link to the 12 steps of ACA can be found here.  From this point on, I’ll be referring to the three classic divisions of the steps: Trust God, Clean House, Help Others. In steps 1-3, we trust God.  In steps 4-11, we clean house.  In step 12, we help others.)

I self-apply the term “addict” because my interaction with the objects of my addiction follows an addict’s pattern: spree, remorse, resolve repetition.  Interiorly, it’s the same: I don’t always feel things like happiness or sadness—in that regard, I’m pretty numb.  What I do feel is resentment, rage, and self-pity.  That’s all good and well, you might say, but what is it precisely that you’re addicted to?

It took me years to figure that out.

I don’t know why, but my ego--at least on an intuitive level--has always terrified me.  This has been the case since before I had a name for it.  We can talk all day long about how “the ego is a false self.”  That’s true, but when I first experienced it—as loud and ghostly and generated by my head—it owned my ass.  It was all I could see: my own falseness scared me.  

Since April 27th's post "Only as Sick as my Secrets", I’ve told you my identification as an Adult Child results from household dysfunction in early childhood—for which I need to overtly absolve both my parents, who did their best with the crappy programming they’d been handed.  It also results from an oppositional relationship with my own body due to cerebral palsy.  I learned to joke about it, of course, but only to mask the immense difficulty of it all, so I don’t cathart to strangers on public transportation.

I hear a phrase repeated frequently among adult children:  “I feel like I’m addicted to everything.”  I empathize with that. Many of us were addicts before we had substances—or the years of repetitive behavior—to justify the claim.

As the program calls it, “Self Will” is my primary addiction.  But it bends my relationships toward codependence, and makes me use the things of the world like they’re the only water for miles and I’m dying of thirst.  As a result, I behave addictedly with a good number of things.

In my teaching, when I have my druthers, I always teach about the eight evil thoughts: it’s why, when I started Under the Influence, I did a whole set of posts about them.  The “everything” to which I’ve always felt addicted can be boiled down to eight subjects: pride, as I said, but then vanity, wrath, lust, sorrow, sloth, greed and gluttony.

With those eight things, I exhibit all the classic addict traits.  I engage in denial, all or nothing thinking, and unhealthy dependency.  I globalize others’ faults—but not before silently stewing over them for days on end.  I can say for certain that I've spent days fasting, and spent days emotionally eating.  I've given away all my possessions at least once, and I've spent whole days searching the internet for the perfect leather jacket.  I lived in celibacy for 7 years, only to follow it up with a series of relationships that, though all parties were well intentioned, ultimately yielded regret.  The compulsive nature of it all has been exhausting.

To date, the Steps haven’t worked for me.  I attribute that to three things: a dualistic mind frame, idolatry, and a wounded ego.

It’s a function of dualistic thinking to see God as one sees a grocery store Clerk.  It’s a function of dualistic thinking to see our relationship as transactional.  Believing God worked this way led me to see God as separate from and outside myself.  I would “call out to God” (mostly with requests for help) and, when he wouldn’t hear me, I’d get anxious.  Anxiety is one of the natural consequences of trying to hash out an experience of the one God with a cacophony of pious intellectualizations.  An anxiety free relationship with God would be more about me connecting with the ground of my being than about a being who may or may not hear me.  It would be less about talking and more about listening.  Hell, I have a hard enough time hearing what's going on between my ears.  It'd be a bit much, asking God to do for me what I refuse to try doing for myself. 

Secondly, instead of turning myself over to God as I understood him, I made a god of my understanding and turned myself inward.  When God works, it’s imperceptible, even in quiet and peace.  Only in hindsight can I look back and see such quiet as formative.  Adult Child Symptoms replicate Israel’s Golden Calf incident.  That is to say, unable to see God in the present emptiness, I fill my head with noise and call it God.  That turns what would have been “powerlessness” into unhealthy dependency on a false god.  Fractured interpersonal relationships come to echo the broken divine one.  

Third and most recently, new light has been shed on my cynical misportrayal of 12 steppers as saying “drink the Kool-Aid and you’ll be ok.”  I’m seeing now that, in the program, though “Egolessness” is an ideal for all, it’s a lived reality for very few.  12 steppers drank the Kool-Aid—they went to meetings, worked the steps, and talked to sponsors—because they weren’t ok.  To use a phrase that’s long meant “in recovery,” somehow I forgot that, “in the rooms” healing consists of a constant acknowledgement of our desire—nay, our need—to get well.  We all have wounded Egos.  What initially struck me as schmaltzy self-affirmation now seems like a room full of people like me: whose personalities conceal the wounded and the well.  At my best, in recent years, the more mature voices of my conscience have tried to calm my inner child’s tantrum-like insecurities.  Maybe repeating slogans is just the audible equivalent of that move. 

Moving forward—dealing with addictiveness—might not primarily mean “working on the steps” for me.  It might not primarily entail going to meetings or finding a sponsor.  For me, that all smacks too soundly of ego.  I’m more convinced than ever, though, that I’ll never give up a wounded ego to whose healing I've paid no attention.  And I know for certain that the steps, in the end, continue to work on me. 

God, Self and Concepts: Which Transcendence Fits?

Ultimately, I want to explain why I remain a Christian.  In order to do that, I need to call out a particular brand of denial: namely the tendency to find blame God when the error is in my heart.  While I’ll end up talking about my own God-concept, I do believe the “divine blame” to be a universal and human liability.  While I’ll end by examining it as a personal flaw, I need to examine it as a corporate one first.  

The history of religious thought is a dance between dualism and unity.  Every major religion has had a unitive experience of God, only to hash it out doctrines dualistically.  Consequently throughout religious history, wars have been fought over whose God concept is more “correct.”  Christians formulated the Trinity, a concept that owes its life to the Jewish monotheism.  We then turned around and told the Jews they were wrong.  We persecuted them, they pushed back with violence, we both condemned each other.  The Quran says that much of the Torah and the Gospel is correct.  However, ultimately when Muslims heard the call to submit to Allah, they told Jews and Christians they were wrong.  Christians used this as justification for the crusades.  We killed them, they killed us back.

It would be tempting to say “Religion causes wars” and back away from it. But blaming religion, positing a bunch of different God-concepts as correctives to one another, will always be fruitless.  The serenity prayer says “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”  We can’t change God, and we ought to stop trying.

Ultimately, the solution hinges on the connectedness between my God-concept and my self-concept.  Again, the serenity prayer asks for “the courage to change the things I can.”  If God-concepts appear opposed to each other, it is only because the people who came up with them are opposed to themselves.  If there’s anything we can change, it’s ourselves. 

St. Paul is a case in point.  He disagreed with the Christians and it drove him to violence.  Ultimately, his encounter with the Living Jesus led him to repent that violence, saying “what I do not want, that is what I do.”  He’d located the source of his angst squarely with his own incomprehensible self.  “Our lives are hidden with Christ in God,” he said, then he went on to wrestle with that mystery for the rest of his life.

At my dualistic worst, I am oppositional and judgmental.  I wax verbose about God, sacrificing his peace to my nervous preoccupation with his attributes.  I am full of all or nothing thinking.  In adolescence, newly shocked at how powerful—and drastically misused—sex can be, I embarked on what I thought would be Lifelong celibacy.

In my adolescence, through family therapy, I learned about transactional analysis.  In short, this examines the subtle power dynamics inherent in the relational games we play.  I learned how shallow quid pro quo interactions are: I increasingly backed away from people who used this “something for something” way of relating, preferring instead the “unconditional” relationships that characterize adult giving.  All of that is fine, I suppose, but, to date, I don’t surround myself with people who play games.  This is all good and well—at a certain age, it’s natural to start choosing whom I relate with. The rub is that, when I’m honest, I play a few relational games myself.  I can accurately self-apply that bit in the Gospel about removing the speck in my brother’s eye.  I have ignored the log in my own.  I don’t have the life-skills to deal healthily with people who fall short of the better angels of their nature, and I’m fairly sure that’s some kind of character flaw. 

I’ve been convinced I need to work on myself for longer than I’ve known what that looks like.  I’ve spoken elsewhere of the need to rebuild a healthy ego, just as the Jews needed to rebuild the temple.  I suppose that I’m writing this post because I’m getting a sense of how to do that, and it leads me to one conclusion.  The kind of “Self-work” I need to do is best supported by Christianity.  I will try to say why.

But first, for me, a healthy self would be characterized by 2 things:

Transcending and including, instead of opposing and Judging.  If I had the current resources of character when I was a younger man, I might have  healthier boundaries.  A healthy ego can deal with what isn’t ideal, because it knows how to keep itself safe. They may well make it easier to deal with people who can’t, by dint of psychological programming, love unconditionally.  A healthy ego includes my own and others’ character flaws, because it sees them from a higher and wider perspective, and doesn’t over-identify with them.

Open ended questioning:  I need to remember how easy it is to impose my willful little half-baked solutions as a way to work through projects and conflicts.  Both the Gospel and the Quran say “don’t say ‘tomorrow I will do this’ or ‘tomorrow’ I will do that.  Instead, say ‘if Allah wills it, tomorrow I will do this.’  I need to remember that my own ideas are only God’s will if they work best for everyone, and respect everyone involved.

My character flaws would become my gifts:  Among Adult Children, it's said that the principles of recovery are the opposite of our character flaws.  I'm stealing this from Bill P. Todd W. and Sarah S., specifically their book Drop the Rock.  When my higher power acts, I hope he'll do what they say: namely, turn my fear into faith, my egoism into humility, my worry into serenity, etc.  This process has begun, but I'd love nothing more than for it to be on surer footing.

The need for Redemption and assistance: A healthy ego can ask for help, but in my case there’s a bit of a rub.  As an “adult child”—an adult who developed and still operates out of inadequate childhood defense mechanisms—I am predisposed to unhealthy dependency.  I would pass the buck, ask for a redeemer to do my inner homework for me.  I am conscious of the AA saying “God will not do for you what you refuse to do for yourself.”  A healthy self would have to lead to healthy dependence.

The Jewish God concept—in which God is securely identified immanent and personal, is not quite enough for me.  Before I knew how slippery the slope of egotism is, I fashioned a God of my own beliefs and worshipped the dead letters of self-imposed law instead of Spirit.  Again, I empathize with St. Paul, who did much the same.  We both made a God of our worse selves.

I would be a terrible Muslim.  Islam posits a transcendent and impersonal God, as a corrective of the Jewish one.  I have difficulty, when I read the Quran, knowing how Allah’s commands would make me anything less than an immature disciple.  I would follow him, at the expense of myself, thereby bypassing personal work I need to do.

The Buddhist model, with its cries of “Non-self” would do the same end run around developing healthy boundaries.  Buddhism’s teaching of “interbeing” gives me the conceptual resources to see that work much more fluidly, but I would use non-self as a tool of avoidance, I know it.

In the end, I remain Christian. The Buddha was right, selves are mostly illusory, but I am not enlightened enough to avoid acting egotistically.  Whether the hereafter is more like nirvana or heaven—whether my end is a glorified self or an extinguished one-- I need to deconstruct, and reconstruct before I get there.  God concepts and self-concepts are linked.  And if, in the end, I take St. John’s advice—if I remain in Jesus--It’s because the redeemer I need is my own truest, most empowered self.  Perhaps, when I see him face to face, I will recognize that he’s been with me the whole time.

There's a hole in the bucket: A "Dear Liza" Letter to Myself and the Church

When I began on a spiritual path, I wrote a letter to Chrysognonus Waddell, the hermit who introduced me to monasticism.  I wanted to tell him I was considering entering a monastery.  I don’t still possess his return letter, but I remember the essence of it.  He hoped I’d recall something, and I do, to this day. “Remember,” he said “becoming a monk is a choice, not between good and evil, but between two goods.”  He was saying this out of his many years of contemplative practice, and he was absolutely right.  

But I bring it up because my “plans for goodness” became, over the years, increasingly driven by ego.  My own vision of my spiritual path rested, more and more, on treating “lesser goods” as if they were evil.  That made those good things easier to renounce.

So here’s the bit that reads like a PSA:  First off, well intentioned as it may be, rejecting something good in God’s name—this maneuver comes from Ego.  Secondly, goodness does not equal “shouldness”: embracing something good simply because it’s good is just as misguided.  

I spent college going to Mass daily, at the expense of good hang time with close friends.  I said to myself “because the Mass is good, we should attend it daily. In the monastery, that became “because Mass is good, I should even enjoy celebrating it multiple times per day.”  On Easter, there are three Masses available to be celebrated: the “Vigil mass,” the “Dawn Mass” and the “Day Mass.”  In the monastery, we celebrated all three.  Because we could, we did.  I’m not arguing with the motivation: The resurrection is awesome.  But three masses in 18 hours borders on too much of a good thing.

It’s not only in my own Catholic identity that this has been visible and operative.  All of the Catholic Institutions that I’ve attended, worked for, or interacted with—they’ve all had egoic plans for goodness.  The Catholic School I presently work for forces all students, through my theology classes, to sit in adoration of the blessed Sacrament monthly.  I am expected to maintain “proper reverence” among a group of students, over half of whom aren’t catholic.  I end up forcing Catholics, protestants, hindus and the school’s few muslims to be quiet in front of the exposed Eucharist, though they have no belief in it whatsoever.  And this is the case because “The amount of Grace available in the Eucharist is enormous, and God can use Adoration powerfully to draw a person to himself.”  Just like “Goodness doesn’t equal shouldness,” just because “God can act” doesn’t mean he will.  In the end, Jesus learned this same thing, tempted by Satan in the desert.  For Catholic Institutions to build their Catholic identity on the expectation that God will act is tantamount to testing God.  It’s not good P.R. to say “At my school, we routinely ask God to turn stones into bread.”  

Near Greenville South Carolina, there’s a mountain called “Bald Rock.”   The name is apt: it’s just a big, treeless outcropping of rock that affords a wonderful view of the Upstate.  High school kids—and this cracks me up—have graffitied generations of proposals on Bald Rock.  Someone recently decided to memorialize the fact that “Stephanie is a whore” on its smooth surface.  This is why I bring it up: “egoic plans for goodness” would have us out there with solvents, scrubbing the thing.  The result would be beautiful, but we’d end up exhausted, because we’re forcing a rock that isn’t blank to become so.  The cleaning would be compulsive: it would simply cover our insecurities.  Bald rock, made spotless, would afford us no peace.  To overextend the “Bald Rock” example, in the end I can only come to rest, not by planning a graffiti-cleaning party, but by focusing on the fact that bald rock is a rock.

I can tell you this from experience: anything egoic is exhausting.  I can force thoughts out of my head through sheer force of will.  But then my head will be nothing more than quietly full of myself.  In reality, creation was good before our egos forced us to recognize it.  The real rest of contemplation takes place only when we appreciate what is given by God.  We don’t need to do more, think more, or feel more to follow our vocations or do God’s will.  Rest is a matter of doing less, not more.

I think I’ve said this before: my mind works in a very “Obsessive Compulsive” kind of way.  For years, my belief that “faith” requires doing more, thinking more or feeling more aggravated my latent tendencies to OCD.  To this day I live with slight nervous ticks that are the fruit of that mistake.  When we force ourselves to “unite our sufferings with Christ,” or we act on our own ideas about how to “imitate Christ.” we may be guilty of unduly worsening our suffering, and living a life that isn’t our own.  

However those early years in the monastery didn’t just lay bare the problem, they also contained the seeds of a solution.  One day, standing in front of the mirror, I had the thought “how do I unify myself with the crucified Christ while I’m brushing my teeth?”  The answer came, in the form of a clear repetitive thought: “You unite yourself to Christ while brushing your teeth by brushing your teeth.”  4 out of 5 dentists agree: brushing our teeth was a sacred act before sin made us think we had to make it so by forcing ourselves to do, think or feel anything particularly pious.

Remember, goodness does not equal shouldness.  And increased goodness does not equal increased shouldness.  The church has made “embracing the highest good” morally obligatory—failure to do so justifies not only the church’s judgment, but also its condemnation.  

I’ll offer two examples then a third little consideration: First, sex.  Sex, at best, is unitive, procreative, and monogamous.  The popular Catholic mind has translated that into “sex is bad unless its procreative, unitive and monogamous.”  This denies the many ways sex can serve to grow health and intimacy while still being non-procreative.  A catholic professor of mine had a friend once wax frank with him, and ask “don’t you ever fuck your wife just for the sake of fucking your wife?”  My professor’s friend was unwittingly reminding us that “doing things for their own sake” is a fruit of contemplation and a gift from God.

Secondly, and as another example, the Eucharist is “the source and summit of all we do.”  That’s wonderful, but it lead the Church to speak of the faithful’s “Sunday Obligation” and condemn, somewhat subtly, those who fail to keep it.  This heaps guilt on parents who lack the energy to get kids into Sunday-best and to Mass weekly.  It also causes guilt for people like me who are allergic to gluten and can’t receive the Eucharist.  Telling people they should embrace the good does not help them do so.

It is egotistical to demonize any good but the highest good, and it bypasses the contemplative journey’s highest lessons.  The consideration I wanted to offer, the one I mentioned above, is this: unwillingness to embrace a particular good is different than inability to embrace a good, and the church has lumped them together into a teaching that’s highly prejudiced toward “the able.”  If a person is wheelchair bound, placing too much emphasis on when we stand or kneel at mass is not compassionate.  If a disabled person is non-verbal, placing emphasis on saying prayers is silly at best, cruel at worst.  Even insisting that someone correct his habits of mortal sin by force of will—when indeed, it requires long years of prayerful and deep looking into his psychological wounds—this is not compassionate.  Those who know their own limitations avoid this, but those denying their limitations tend to talk louder. 

There is a solution, and—no surprise here—it is found in Buddhism.  In short, instead of “ranking what is good,” Buddhism says that “All good is contained in each good.”  The Buddha taught about the “interdependent co-arising of cause and effect.”  Later buddhist tradition would call it “interbeing.”  Interbeing turns with different gears than the hierarchy of goods does: the teaching states that, looking deeply at a pile of dirt, I can see the rest of earth, the sky that waters it, the future trees that might take root in it, the basic elements of my own existence, and my own Buddha nature all at once.  The microcosm is a door, not just to the macrocosm, but to the cosmic itself.

So the goodness of the present moment—as I’m writing this, it’s an increasingly-caffeinated Saturday morning—leads to the same cosmic awareness the Eucharist does.  This would be a comfort to the parent who can’t get their kids to Mass, and it is a comfort to me, who would have an allergic reaction to the Eucharistic elements.

It should be mentioned that Interbeing is richer than relativism.  It’s not just “All good is accessible everywhere.”  The Buddha would say that Right mindfulness leads to right concentration.  In other words, the bloke who lets go of his Catholic “Shoulds” long enough to fuck his wife for fucks-sake is doing a good thing.  But the Interconnected Dharma may lead him to acknowledge that calling it “fucking” might be a bit more crass than his wife is comfortable with, and he should speak more compassionately.  Buddhism’s sense of morality clearly comes from the Dharma itself.  The West, so often guilty of substituting Ego for God, is much more liable to wax unnecessarily puritanical and call it God’s will.  But it's Buddhism that's right on this score: moral speech is only right speech when it comes from the mahatman, the true self.

To sum up: Egotistical definitions of “the good” will get us only so far.  They exhaust us.  And as obscure as the God-given connection between goodness and moral obligation is, that exhaustion cuts us off from discovering it.  Our inability to rest can lead us, at best, to presumption, and at worse, to substituting ourselves for God.  

Buddhism speaks of “thinking in which all the leaks have been stopped.”  That is to say, thinking that is grounded in the eightfold path, that’s marked by non-self, impermanence, and remembrance of suffering (or “remembrance of Nirvana” in another “transmission” of the teaching.)  Catholic teaching, when disconnected from the prayer journey, leads quickly to selfishness.  All the leaks in this kind of teaching have not been stopped.  The things that Under the Influence addresses, they all leak and come to nothing if they aren’t grounded in prayer, humility and silence.  In the end, it’s only in being similarly rooted that Catholic teaching holds water.