michal's musings

Buddha and Christ are the teachers…. They teach about salvation.  They both give and teach the way of salvation but they always point into something greater than themselves. Buddha is teaching about this eternal Buddha. The Buddha exists in each one of us.  Christ teaches us about g-d the Father and points into the Kingdom of G-d that is among us.  Both of them are my teachers. I look at Buddha through the experience of Christ and I look at Christ through the experience of Buddha. Buddha means enlighten – knowledge. Christ means anointed – holy. What do I desire? I desire to be enlightened and anointed.  

Time with god… Sometimes I wonder who and what is god. I know, I am a Catholic priest and I should know the answer to this question but I don’t know it. I know what my church teaches about it. However, from my experience god is bigger than what my church wants me to believe about him/her/it/them/us. As a Christian I look at god from my experience of Jesus. He is in the center of the way I relate to god. Why Jesus? Because I was born Catholic and this is my faith. If I would be born in the Middle East I would be Muslim. If I would be born India I would be a Hindu. If I would be born in the Jewish household I would be a Jew. If I would be born in Japan I would be Shinto/Buddhist.  If I would be born in an atheistic family I would be an atheist, etc…   I challenge myself as a Christian to appreciate other views of g-d and other ways of relating to him/her/it/them/ us.  So, what do I do with g-d? 1)       I try to discover g-d in myself and others – to look for that div

“Intimate love is the true temple that we all desire. This longing seems to be hardwired into our beings in spite of our survival instincts. You have to want to love and to be loved very badly or you will never go to this strange temple and will never find your True Self. So God obliges and creates you in just that way, with a bottomless and endless need to be loved and to love. Today, the Feast of Epiphany, is symbolized and enacted by three important men who fell to their knees, finding themselves seduced by the vulnerability of God—sleeping in straw among the animals. (Richard Rohr, OFM) ” http://cac.org/intimacy-2016-01-06/ Loving oneself is one of the hardest things for me to do.  I just do not know how to do that. I need to learn or start practicing with few simple actions: 1)       spending more time with and by myself 2)       be patient and learn how to love spending time with myself 3)       be creative with this time, e.g. no TV, radio, iPod, etc 4)      

“Intimacy is another word for trustful, tender, and risky self-disclosure. None of us can go there without letting down our walls, manifesting our deeper self to another, and allowing the flow to happen. Often such vulnerability evokes and allows a similar vulnerability from the other side. Such was the divine hope in the humble revelation of God in the human body of Jesus. My mind and mouth stumble to even imagine it or dare to think it could be true. Yet Christians dare to claim this reality. Such human intimacy is somewhat rare and very hard for all of us, but particularly for men and for all who deem themselves to be important people, that is, those who are trained to protect their boundaries, to take the offensive, and to be afraid of all weakness or neediness. God seems to have begun thawing this glacial barrier by coming precisely in male form as Jesus, who then exposes maleness itself as also naked, needy, and vulnerable. Most cultures would say that is mind-blowing, hear

Usually when I think about addiction I think about sex, porn, alcohol, food, drugs, etc. I think about things that come from outside of me. However, watching and studying about codependency I have leaner that codependency can be an addiction, too.  It comes from insight. It is the way how we think about ourselves and others. Yes, it is being created by the external environment. In that sense it is similar to other addictions.  But this one can be only controlled from within. Yes, one can say/write that all addictions are controlled from within. This is true. They all start from the combination of something dysfunctional between the outside world and insight world/experiences.  And, all of them need healthy external and internal boundaries.  So, perhaps addictions are not that different from each other.  Codependency is a very interesting topic for me.  It is something I might be/am struggling with. 

Time for oneself… We give times to others. We spend time with other. We do things for others. I feel guilty when I am by myself.  It feels and it looks selfish. But, it is not. Also, spending time with oneself looks like wasting time. It doesn’t look productive and it does look and feel boring. Time for oneself can be the most important investment we can make.