Month: August 2025

I think that trauma is sometimes used as a defense, an avoidance of dealing with our deep unease, discomfort, suffering. The avoidance of “triggering” is often used as an excuse for not addressing deep trauma.

Everyone of us carries in us the remnants of trauma in the form of discomfort and unease. Any experience that triggers this personal suffering is an invitation to embrace and deal with the suffering that we carry. If someone or some situation triggers my unease, then I have the opportunity to address what some would call trauma.

Intent in triggering is important. To trigger trauma in someone with malice or inattention is not an act of compassion. Disrespect is not compassion. Compassion expressed in events, words or experiences that trigger my discomfort may actually be something that helps me overcome the trauma and discomfort I carry. By becoming mindfully aware of my discomfort and suffering I am taking an important step in moving away from the harmful effects that trauma has on me.

We can help one another by helping make us aware of the trauma and discomfort we carry. Loving compassion frees others from suffering. Assisting with awareness can be an act of compassion. At the same time, each of us has to face our own internal discomfort and take steps to embrace it with mindfulness. Awareness cannot be forced on us. A principal step in adddressing trauma is to engage it with deep mindfulness.

The notion of triggering is overused and is often an excuse for avoiding discomfort.

In recent years, I have often said that I was a monk for about 12 years. But that isn’t quite true. I may have been introduced to what it means to be a monk over a period of 12 years. But I still am a monk and never stopped being a monk. I may have my black robe and white rope sash on a hanger in the closet, and I no longer put it on. I took it off about fifty years ago. But being a monk is still part of my body. I am a monk through and through with all the embracing of the transcendence that implies.

I realize this because my dreams keep reminding me of that abiding monk nature. I often wake with an aching feeling of separation, with a feeling of having left something behind. The discomfort of that separation has shown up when I wake many, many times. I now realize that it has been my own Dream Maker pointing me in that direction.

My Dream Maker is me. For me, my Dream Maker is reminding me, asking me to embrace what I think I have left behind. My Dream Maker is telling me that it is my nature to be linked to the transcendent as a way of life. My every waking moment is attached to the aspirations of the young monk that I was fifty years ago. Those aspirations still guide me every day and remid me that all is transcendent. There are no longer the confining walls of a monastery. There is no duality, all of reality is in the roundness of all I perceive. This is the perspective of a monk.

My life of a monk was symbolized by the black-robed community of men that I was part of. Leaving the dogma of the Catholic Church was never a problem for me. I think I set that aside years before I disrobed. I chose to follow my own inner voice, my own intuition. I made the dogma fit into my view of the world, and not the other way around.

But leaving the life of a monk was harder, and actually never happened except in my decision to no longer live with other black-robed men. I loved the community nature of our shared vision about what it meant to be a Franciscan monk. I did not love the Catholic dogma that infused itself into that community of men. So I left, and I found other ways of experiencing community. But I have remained a monk.

I have sometimes said that I never left the priesthood, but I have left the priesthood of the Church. When I say that I am still a priest, I have meant to say that I am a vehicle to the transcendent. Saying that I am a monk is just another way of embracing my role as a teacher, seeker and guide of transcendence. I aspire now, as I have for seventy years, to be a way to experience the transcendence nature of things and to help others experience the same through me.

Perhaps my Dream Maker can believe me that I have embraced my being a monk. Nothing has actually changed except the way I think about who I am. I still consider myself a priest, but a priest who shares and teaches what it means to be a monk in the world outside a monastery. I am a monk learning to love the world in many ways outside the confines of monastic life. I make up my own rules for my daily monastic life.

I am a monk who constantly falls in love. I am a monk who lives outside the monastery walls.