The Dryer Buzzer Doesn't Always Wake You Up

I have been home most of the evening because my wife had to work late. After a simple dinner of fried corn bread and butter...very healthy...I started reading the Sunday news...yes, I am behind...and doing the laundry. I decided to take a short nap under the assumption I would be awakened in a reasonable period of time by the buzzer on the dryer. Wrong! I slept right through the dryer buzzer even though it goes off three times before ending its cycle. I am awake now and my wife has just gotten home. Now it's time to save the world with Jack Bauer on "24". Just so your reading of my blog tonight isn't totally worthless, here are some thoughts I have recently received in my in box.

The spirituality behind the Twelve Steps is a “low Church” approach to evangelization and healing that is probably our only hope in a suffering world of six-and-a-half billion people. Do we really need to verify belief in atonement doctrines and the Immaculate Conception when most of God’s physical, animal and human world is on the verge of mass suicide and extinction? Our suffering is psychological, relational and addictive: the suffering of people who are comfortable on the outside but oppressed and empty within. It is a crisis of meaninglessness and the false self, which had tried to find meaning in possessions, prestige and power. It doesn’t work. So we turn to ingesting and buying to fill our empty souls. The Twelve Steps walk us back out of our addictive society. Like all steps toward truth, they lead downward. Bill Wilson and his A.A. movement have shown us that the real power is when we no longer seek, need or abuse power. Real power is not at the top but at the bottom. Those who admit they are powerless have the only power that matters in the world or in the Church. Saint Bill W., pray for us.
-Richard Rohr

The pain, the discomfort, the sickness are what they are. We can always cope with the way life moves and changes. The mind of an enlightened human being is flexible and adaptable. The mind of the ignorant person is conditioned and fixed.
-Ajahn Sumedho, “Seeing the Way”

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

In the afternoon I went out to the old horse barn with the Book of Proverbs and indeed the whole Bible, and I was wandering around in the hayloft, where there is a big gap in the roof. One of the rotting floorboards gave way under me and I nearly feel through. Afterwards I sat and looked out at the hills and the gray clouds and couldn't read anything. When the flies got too bad, I wandered across the bare pasture and sat over by the enclosure wall, perched on the edge of a ruined bathtub that has been placed there for the horses to drink out of. A pipe comes through the wall and plenty of water flows into the bathtub from a spring somewhere in the woods, and I couldn't read there either. I just listened to the clean water flowing and looked at the wreckage of the horsebarn on top of the bare knoll in front of me and remained drugged with happiness and with prayer.
-Thomas Merton "Entering the Silence/Journals Volume 1"