Category: The Realistic Mystic

Why does God . . .

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment

. . . allow suffering?  If you go to Google and type in “Why does God,” the first autofill answer you will get is “Why does God allow suffering?” When I clicked on that option, I got over 77,000,000 results in half a second.  It seems a lot of people have asked that question and almost as many have tried to answer it.  And they’ve been asking this question for a long time.  

Epicurus, a Greek philosopher who lived in the fourth century BCE, was asking this question before Jesus even walked the earth and long before the Prophet Muhammad received his revelations. Epicurus drew a sharp line between the potential for God’s strength and the capacity for God’s compassion.  He asked, “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.” In other words, a God that would allow suffering he is powerful enough to stop must be cruel.

Ooof. 

On my Google search, the first page of the 77,000,000 responses comes from mostly Christian sources.  The “answers” put forth included “Well, God doesn’t cause suffering, but he allows it” and “Suffering is a way to enter into relationship with God,” and “The message of suffering is that life is hard, but God is good.” That last one especially seems it might be of little comfort when tragedy strikes. 

The best answer I found was one that recognized the compassion and unity that can result from suffering, but also acknowledged that it’s a mystery. Compassion and unity are vital concepts for a fully realized spiritual being, and it’s true that they often seem to rely on crisis and division to act as springboards for their creation. But an omnipotent God could surely find a way to inject my soul with compassion rather than through another’s suffering, right?  Though if no one ever suffered, would we even need compassion?  

Now, in full disclosure, I want to make it clear that I do not have the answer to the question of why God allows suffering. And, I would suggest that you proceed with great caution around anyone who claims to have that answer.  

I’ve had a few times of tragedy in my life, and I know that doesn’t make me special. It doesn’t make me different from you, and perhaps it even offers ground where we can meet. I may not know your pain or your story, but here are nine things I do know, and I can only hope they provide comfort, if not insight.

  1. I know that sometimes tragedy brings out the best in us. 
  2. I know that although there may not be an adequate reason we might accept to explain tragedy, no grand purpose birthing a trauma, there can still be great lessons and awareness that come from these events. 
  3. I know that although my pain is real, my pain is not me.  
  4. I know that it’s possible to be on a spiritual journey and be mad at God. In fact, it can be among the most transformative of experiences if we retain just an inkling of faith. A mustard seed, even. 
  5. I know that love is God, and the tragedy of my past is a prime contributor to the degree of love I can bring into another’s place of pain.
  6.  I know that my suffering has created compassion and tenderness and gentleness in me that I’m not sure I would have had otherwise.
  7. I know that, as the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield writes, “The question of human suffering is central to the journey of grace and redemption.” 
  8. I know that I would be nowhere without grace and redemption.
  9. I know that awakening to the awareness of our higher Self, our Buddha nature, our Krishna consciousness, our Christ consciousness, can bring freedom.

Everything Happens for a Reason . . .

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment

. . . at least that’s what folks say.  But, is it true?  Like many matters of faith, and this is indeed a matter of faith, it’s impossible to prove. If you could prove it, then it wouldn’t be faith.  

Not being provable, however, does not negate the value of a belief. It’s impossible to prove, for example, that Jesus was an actual person who lived, you know, right around the same time someone was inventing the calendar.  There are some theologians who contend that Jesus or Yeshua or Joshua, as he might more accurately be called, was a creation of the early Gnostic Christians, a kind of avatar of perfection, a character specifically developed to be a model and a cornerstone for this new religious belief.  But even if they are right, even if Jesus was a fictional character and not a real person at all, that doesn’t necessarily devalue his role in shaping world thought. Provability is not always the standard by which we can measure value. 

So, what value is there in believing that everything happens for a reason, regardless of whether it’s true or not? 

We tell ourselves that everything happens for a reason because we’re trying to make sense out of things that make no sense.  Sometimes life is a mystery. Sometimes it’s even a tragedy. For people of faith — whether that’s a traditional faith running as a thread through a particular religious tradition or whether it’s a private tendency toward hope — it’s important and even vital for this existence to fit into some grand scheme. We want to see a design, at first invisible, become gradually clearer, like those magic eye pictures that look like nothing more than busy wallpaper until we shift our focus, look through the picture somehow, and then, as if it should have been obvious the entire time, an image pushes through the chaos and becomes clear.

Believing that everything happens for a reason can be the reason we even start the practice of looking for patterns in our lives.  And those patterns are there. Of that, I have no doubt. I’ve seen patterns play out in my own life, and sometimes patterns within patterns, the events of my life acting as so many interconnected cogs in a giant machine. 

Believing that everything happens for a reason can also comfort us when nothing else will.  When we can’t understand anything about a situation, resting in the faith of believing there is a rhyme and reason to it can bring a kind of peace. But, the comfort of “everything happens for a reason” is a personal comfort. It can be a reminder we use for ourselves that everything will turn out okay, but it doesn’t always land quite right when it comes from someone else. 

I overheard someone at a funeral a few years back as they grasped the hands of the newly widowed woman struggling to make it through the unimaginable.  They said, “Well, everything happens for a reason,” and you could almost hear the internal cringe of several of us standing nearby.  Here’s a small piece of advice; do with it what you will. In that situation, the situation where someone has experienced tremendous loss, say that you feel for them, say you’re praying for them, say you’re carrying them in your heart — say just about anything except everything happens for a reason.  Even if you believe it’s true. Even if you know THEY believe it’s true.  Just don’t say it.  Not then. Not ever. Keep it for yourself.  

Actually, I might suggest that when people are really hurting we should set our “spiritual-ness” down and just be with them.  The hurt they are feeling isn’t in their divine nature anyway; it’s in the very human, fragile person they are, and the hurt they are experiencing is real for that person.  Any spiritual attempt to explain it, suppress it, redirect it, or enlighten it is often, in reality, acting to negate it, belittle it, and self-righteously sweep real pain away as if it was insignificant dust on an otherwise shiny life. 

Sometimes people need comfort, true and gentle comfort, not an aphorism or a spiritual sound bite.  “Everything happens for a reason” may be true, but “I’m so sorry this happened to you” is far more comforting.  And human. And real. 

And if our heart is right when we say it, no one will need faith to believe it’s true. 

What Really Matters . . .

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment

Some days, it seems like not much. We have to take care of mundane business or complete work tasks that seem meaningless.  We can even become so entrenched in these mindless tasks that we miss the opportunities for meaningful encounters when they come our way. And as long as we are alive and awake, meaningful encounters will indeed come our way.  

This past week, I went to get my teeth cleaned, a task I do not enjoy. Although I know that clean teeth contribute to my overall health, there is a certain level of meaninglessness that I can attach to this event. Worse than simple drudgery, it’s uncomfortable. I don’t like it. 

But something happened during this particular visit. At some point in the cleaning, for no obvious reason, the dental hygienist began telling me the story of the death of her 19-year-old son, unexpectedly, on Christmas morning of this past year.  The story she told was so stunning and so deeply moving that it was hard to take in. I’m not sure how it happened, but I realized at some point that she had stopped cleaning, and I had stopped breathing. I had placed my hand over my heart as I took in the grief and pain of this mother reliving the unimaginable. 

After a moment, she looked down at me, tears welling in her eyes, and said, “Oh, good lord! I’m supposed to be cleaning your teeth!” I think the moment had caught us both by surprise, and I knew that this new moment of awareness presented a choice to me — to move ahead with the mundane, or to give this holy present moment the full attention it deserved. 

I chose the latter.  

“That’s not important right now,” I said. “Please tell me the rest of your story.” 

And she did. It wasn’t necessarily a story I wanted to hear more of. It was heavy, and it was tragic. But it felt like this moment had been presented to us for this purpose.  It seemed she had reached a point where she needed to release it once again, and it felt like years of study and meditation and spiritual journeying had prepared me for, if nothing else ever, precisely this moment. And what I was called to do was to listen. Just listen. 

I thanked her for honoring me with the story and offered the grossly insufficient condolences that are all we have to give when limited to mere words, and I silently prayed that my willingness to be in that moment with her would offer a balm of some sort. 

She did finish cleaning my teeth eventually, and I left. I was grateful I could be there at that moment for her, but just like every other time when I have been presented the opportunity to serve others, what I was left with when all was said and done was the profound awareness that the experience had also been a gift for me.  I was changed by her story. 

I was reminded that eddies of spiritual energy are swirling around us at all times just waiting for the slight sign of our willingness and our readiness to be pulled into the vortex of what really matters. 

And I was reminded once again that when faced with a choice between the mundane and the meaningful, always choose the meaningful. 

Life starts all over again . . .

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment

. . . when it gets crisp in the fall.  

That’s a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic “The Great Gatsby.” When polled, most Americans pick fall as their favorite season and October as their favorite month. But, what’s this business about life starting all over again? What is there possibly about fall that could feel like a new beginning? The hummingbirds have disappeared in search of warmer weather. The leaves will soon change color and fall off the trees. The natural world is preparing for the sleep of winter. Fall is the beginning of the end, if anything, right? 

According to the Gregorian calendar, the same one we use to know what day it is and schedule meetings, January 1st is the start of a new year. Close to the beginning of winter.  Most of the world observes January 1 as a collective beginning. But, that particular day is not the only new year. 

February 1st, 2022, will be the first day of the Chinese Year of the Tiger. This observance is also known as the lunar new year because it falls on the day of the new moon between January 21 and February 20. 

In India, the New Year depends on several factors — whether a person is following the Hindi solar calendar or the Hindi lunar calendar for one, and the region of India in which a person lives, for another.  For some communities in Northern India, Diwali, or the Festival of Lights, is celebrated as the start of a year. 

The Jewish culture celebrates the New Year at Rosh Hashanah, a two-day event marking the beginning of the lunar month of Tishri in the Jewish calendar, another event determined by the new moon. The most recent Rosh Hashanah began in the evening of September 6, 2021.

The Celtic New Year is Samhain, the Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest season and the start of the new year. This always coincides with the day we more commonly call “Halloween” and continuing into the following day, November 1st, what Christians call “All Saints Day.” 

Many modern pagans mark the passage of time with the wheel of the year and its eight seasonal festivals or sabbats, including the four major solar events — the two solstices, and two equinoxes. These include Samhain, and although many will use this Celtic observance as the start of a new year, part of the beauty of the Wheel of the Year is that it shows the continuous turning of time thus making no day and every day the beginning of a new year.

Beginnings are possible at any time. Each morning can be a new beginning.  Each moment, even.  If you are one of the many who love fall and come a bit more alive in September and October, then you understand how something feels like it’s beginning at this time of year. So, on with the pumpkin spice and on with the hoodies and on with the autumn decor. Let the holiday planning begin. Mark the calendar with travel dates.  

The equinox has passed and taken summer with it. Fall is here, the air is crisp, and life starts all over again.