78 Habits of a Hopeful Oblate

I wrote this 19 years ago in January of 2006. At the time, my daughters were 12, 10 and 6. There was a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur to which I would escape for silent retreats. It’s called the New Camaldoli Hermitage and is a wonderful community, very kind and inclusive. I loved attending Lauds at sunrise with Gregorian chants and Vespers at sundown followed by meditation in the circular vestibule with the skylight above the Blessed Sacrament.

There is a’year of discernment’ in order to become an oblate: a ‘lay monk,’ or what I’ve called a closet monk: someone who takes the practices of meditation and adapts them to a life out in the world. They recommend books to study, which I found useful—particularly Bede Griffiths, who was friends with CS Lewis and established an ashram in India for 35 years. His book The Golden String spoke to me of the mystical in Christianity.

Bruno Barnhart was a monk there, author of Second Simplicity: the Inner Shape of Christianity. He wrote about the masculine and feminine of unitive reality. They encouraged the development of your own rituals and practices. I had just begun reading A Course in Miracles and chose that for my morning and evening meditation. And I wrote these as my own practice and intentions.

Eventually my research into the true story of Jesus made it too difficult to reconcile with hymns of praise. I didn’t want to disturb the peace of mind for these monks, who had brought their love and forgiveness into the scriptures. Yet I knew the scriptures didn’t live up to their projections, and that became a lonely knowledge to hold. So I stopped going after a while and became a gyrovague—a wandering monk.

I still believe the Hermitage, at the cliff edge over the ocean, is a vortex. Some of my most profound experiences have happened there. It feels like a place where dimensions change and instead of going the long way around the spiral, you can skip vertically to a whole new revelation. I hope that these practices resonate with you on your circle around the sun in 2025.

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To Begin

1. Make yourself useful.

2. Leave every place you are a little better than you found it.

3. Take small steps. Going the wrong way faster doesn’t help.

4. Find the questions and the answers will be self-evident.

5. Cultivate your desire for the things you have. Develop an appetite, revel in anticipation, covet your partner.

6. Miss your own company. Guard your time alone like a jealous lover.

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Self-Awareness

1. Never swallow a philosophy that’s bigger than your head.

2. Love isn’t blind. Only love sees. To love you is to know you.

3. Like Thich Nhat Hanh, make Not your middle name.

4. We’re all perfect instruments in God’s motley orchestra. Play yourself.

5. Reality exists: face it. The place beyond your worst nightmare might be better than you’ve ever dreamt.

6. You are the missing puzzle piece. Find your shape between the things that engage you. Snap in. The world is waiting for you to complete it.

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Marriage

1. Remember that you’re both doing the best you can.

2. Accept your sacred mission to break the cycle of marital bickering and free all sentient beings from its grip.

3. Estrangement is like snow falling between houses. At first, you’re just too comfortable to go out and sweep. After awhile, it covers the door and you can’t get it open again.

4. When someone has seen you day in and day out, out of sorts and out of shape, snotty, smelly, cranky, disheveled, distempered, and distraught, yet still finds you attractive…celebrate!

5. Don’t expect someone to read your mind. It’s really better they can’t.

6. Be a divine prostitute. Before a date, donate a chunk of change to charity. Then, think of yourself as a hooker for peace and be worth it.

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Body and Soul

1. You’re better than perfect. Perfect is boring.

2. Imagine your day as a choreographed dance. Let the spinning hold you steady.

3. Do one thing at a time, and nothing whenever possible. You’re starved for attention. Give it to yourself.

4. Make your clothing into a habit – wear the same thing five days in a row. Someone has to lower the standards.

5. Picture your soul as a drop that holds the whole ocean. The ego is the skin that keeps you small. Trick the ego. Evaporate.

6. Create a time or a place for quiet, and a time or place for conversation. Without quiet, you have nothing to bring to the conversation.

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Work

1. Make a living, not a killing.

2. What you do matters little. Why you do means everything.

3. Be yourself when you grow up.

4. Look for your job to give you a paycheck, not meaning. Meaning is what you do with your paycheck.

5. Organizing and cleaning are holy activities. Grant yourself some indulgences.

6. It’s difficult to see that the emperor has no clothes when we’re all employed as court tailors.

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Community

1. The person you can’t learn from is the one you’re not qualified to teach.

2. Anger’s a muscle that grows stronger when exercised. So is forgiveness.

3. Ability equals response-ability. More than your share is almost enough.

4. Give those with the answers important jobs to keep them out of the way.

5. Find out the name of every person who waits on you, cleans up after you, or serves you. Ask about his or her family.

6. Start every conversation with a compliment. Follow with a question. Then add an opinion, if you must.

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Kids

1. They’re all your children.

2. Kids appreciate what they’ve earned, and respect those who respect themselves. Insist on reciprocity.

3. If you water the shallow roots, the tap-root won’t go deep. Limit media.

4. We all start out egocentric. It takes learning to be Self-centered.

5. Competition isn’t healthy, even for the winner.

6. At bedtime, answer four questions: 1) What did someone do nice for you today? 2) What did you do kind for someone else? 3) What didn’t go the way you meant it to, that you might feel sorry for? 4) Who would you like to forgive?

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Food

1. Once a day, become hungry. Stay with it awhile, in communion.

2. Get friendly with farmers and ranchers. Come the collapse of the empire, they’ll be the people to know.

3. When thanking God for your food, remember that God took the shape of the farmworker. Hope that the immigration police leave God alone tonight.

4. Don’t let the serpent of bottled water tempt you to care less about clean water.

5. Ingest as little suffering as possible, from the lives of the animals to the treatment of workers to the health of the soil. What you eat is what you do.

6. Run out of things so nothing’s taken for granted. Let the house get hungry and dance at your return from the grocery store.

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Stuff

1. To be unhappy with what you have is to add insult to the injury that they made it and you have it.

2. Take care of your possessions as if they’re borrowed. If you’re not using something, find it a good home. Be radically non-wasteful of the lives considered disposable.

3. Be the press agent for the person who made your shirt. Represent.

4. Look a gift horse in the mouth when corporations offer something free, to see how many Trojans they’re slipping in.

5. Count your clothes. Decrease a little each year. Keep the things no one else would wear and give the good ones away.

6. Don’t go crazy. Go sane by small degrees.

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Money

1. If money were really a unit of exchange, wouldn’t we be doing something for the people whose labor serves us?

2. In a future language, the words to be rich and to give will be the same.

3. The question isn’t how much or how little the worker makes – it’s how much is made at their expense.

4. Money is a verb, not a noun. The action continues after it leaves your hand.

5. Practice sly love. Advertise a product or service for free if a person donates twice its value to charity.

6. Question the existence of money.

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Time

1. Go slowly enough for joy to sneak up on you.

2. Take all the time in the world. Time is all that’s yours for the taking.

3. Let go of accomplishment and certainty. Embrace the tentative.

4. If lives are equal, how can the time of one be worth a fraction of another’s?

5. Contemplation is closing the door to be alone with a lover, who welcomes with open arms, savors with open lips, and hears with open mind. Enjoy.

6. Eternity is in the I of the beholder.

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World

1. The reason to believe in miracles is not because we need God to change our circumstances, but because God needs us to change the world’s.

2. Untangle the knot until the thread comes to you. Cut there, and the rest will unravel by itself.

3. Treat the disease and you cure the symptoms. Treat the symptoms and you mask the disease.

4. Be wary of innocence, who sleeps around with blame.

5. We, in the overdeveloped world, are servants aspiring to be masters, instead of servants conspiring to end slavery.

6. If at first you don’t succeed, aim higher.

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Truth

1. The inverse of love is fear, not hate. Leave no one behind enemy lines, especially the enemy.

2. Truth resonates, like the sympathetic vibration of a piano string. We’re already tuned towards truth.

3. No one can lie to you except yourself.

4. Create your own religion, so you won’t have to borrow empty-handed.

5. Bless the children born this year, as Buddhas-to-be, as emerging Christs.

6. Waking in the night, put your worries in small white boats lit by votive candles. Set them free.

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You can only change what you love. Following in the footsteps of Tessa Lena and Charles Eisenstein, I talk about love, God, meaning and truth as synonyms. I tell the story of how Tessa became qualified to talk about love with no kumbaya, through haunting personal experience. I relate this to Charles on The Bloodroot & the Raven. And I share the confidence of both that riding on the current of current events is going to bring us to the place I call The Great Rest, where we can be who we were born to be.

From A Course in Miracles, I look at what forgiveness is and what it is NOT. I trace my journey from the spiritual exercise of applying this to the face of evil himself, Hitler, and the revelations of my subsequent research into history. I then question the origins of fascism with Mussolini's surprising manifesto. And I answer a commenter who believes we're X missed meals away from murdering our neighbors and the most dangerous people are those who think people are inherently good.