Damn I hate doing the right thing sometimes

So Friday I get a call from my oldest sister telling me my youngest sister visited my dad in the nursing home Thursday which is a good thing but she also left dad a book, “30 Minutes in Heaven”. First off because of the dementia dad hasn’t been able to read a book in quite awhile, second my dad has never been a religious man, he believes in God in his own simple way but nothing more than that. My oldest sister told me my younger sister told dad “you want to go to heaven don’t you”. My words to my oldest sister were something along these lines “oh for fuck sake, he doesn’t need this kind of crap to confuse him or stress him out anymore than he already is”.
My youngest sister has always been self righteous, opinionate and self serving, thinking she knows what is best for everyone else in the family, one of those who points at the splinter in someone else eye while ignoring the log in her own eye. In January of 2007 she admitted herself to a treatment facility for alcoholism; it was there that she found God. Up to this point she was pretty open to the idea of a universal God, one that was all inclusive and didn’t need blood atonement from his son. As she has progressed in recovery through AA she has become very much a Bible thumper, thinking the God of the Bible is the only God. Since we live in a small AA community we sometimes attend the same meetings. Over time we have grown further and further apart, she talks about God in the biblical since in meetings and I talk about spirituality in general. I don’t talk about Buddhism openly, but I do talk about the Dharma without people knowing that is what I am talking about, usually in the context of suffering, ego, selfishness, mediation, right speech, right mindfulness, right view and awareness. It has taken some time but I have finally stopped think that people are judging me by what she says, talk about ego, but because I knew her before she still gets under my skin because I knew the person who was a lot more open minded, someone who was a lot more unselfish when it came to her family. She has become a person who has less and less to do with her family and spends her time with church, AA, AA friends and work. She rarely visits my parents and only calls a couple times a month. She has pretty much stopped talking to me, we see each other at meetings but she doesn’t approach me and I have taken the low road and stopped approaching her but I always say hi in case she wants to approach me. My selfishness is that I feel she needs to spend more time with my parents and find out what is really going on with them instead of making assumptions based on only a few hours a month.
I really wanted to take a copy of “The Art of Happiness” by His Holiness the Dalai Lama or “The Tao of Pooh” to put on dad’s dresser just to spite my sister. I know this is wrong thinking and I had a hard time not obsessing over it. I had small battles going on in my head most of Friday, battles between right and wrong. At the meeting I went to Friday night we discussed the Serenity prayer, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, he courage to change the thinks I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” This prayer always comes back to me; I have to use the tools I have to change my suffering, anger in this case. My anger in part is due to the fact that I perceive that my sister is harming my dad who I have been rather protective of the last couple of years because of his health, I am selfish because I don’t trust others best intensions based on their perceptions of what is right for him, there is a part of me that is being a martyr, damn I hate admitting this, because I have been doing the biggest share of the footwork pertaining to my parents well being and because of this I want things to go my way. I can accept the other Bible thumping members of AA but I can’t accept my own sister being one. I can’t accept that she doesn’t have balance in her life, I see her suffer needlessly, my selfish suffering wanting to fix her suffering. Not sure where all this is going to lead, we are like 2 sword fighters standing at ready waiting for the first one to make a move and commence the battle. It doesn’t have to be this way but I am at loss on how to handle it, so for now I won’t, I will just take care of what is in front of me to do and when my discomfort with the her comes up do my best to release it and fertilize what could become a resentment if I let it.
None of this messes with my staying sober but it does mess with my inter peace. I guess it is time to grab the cushion and see where mediating on it goes. I know that by writing this out I have uncovered some things I hadn’t thought about before.

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