Feng Shui: really?

Feng Shui...whatever. Next Fad.  So then two friends stand in my home and whisper about bad Feng Shui and a colleague with whom I share an office completely rearranges the office (without my permission) stating she did it for "better Feng Shui".  I am furious and say I'm going to change it back.   "Just one week" she begs, explaining that she had did it to emphasize better abundance.  "Just give it one week and see if the phone is not ringing off the hook with more clients".  I find this completely unlikely but agree to leave it for a week in order to end the conflict.  But bizarrely at the end of the week I have been swamped with calls of new clients....now what to think?

I let one of my two friends above lend me her book on Feng Shui which of course is based upon "ancient Chinese wisdom".  I look at the Bagua chart, a sort of tic tac toe grid that one superimposes over ones house or a room:



abundance/finance           reputation/fame            romance/love


health/family                   center/spirituality          creativity/children


self-knowledge/skills       career/work               influential people/travel


I consider the idea that all ancient wisdom must have some value to it or it would die in public awareness.  I consider the 9 areas list and conclude that these are important areas of life.  In fact if one were to list 9 things people care most about or consider most essential to a good life, I must admit this list would be it.

The book lists types of objects to emphasize or expand good fortune in each section, and things which are generally bad feng shui anywhere (dirt, chaos, disorder, dead things...well that makes sense).  Most of this seems nonsense to me.  However, as mentioned in my last post, at that moment in time I was trying to find a partner.  So I review that chapter of the book.  It talks about putting paired objects in that section of the house.  I think of that will be easy I will just move my paired objects to there.  However, after a quick search of my house I discover to my shock that I have only some salt and pepper shakers, candlestick holders and one box my sister gave me with two birds printed on it.  There are however in my home many objects that celebrate the beauty and power of the individual.  Even the painting by my grandmother that hang throughout my house, none have two of anything in them....ahh this is even a multi-generational message in my life.  I have been taught self-sufficiency and independence, even isolation, but not cooperation, partnership or duel  engagement!

This was my first real lesson in Feng Shui.  It is not really about objects, it is about seeing your own consciousness.  In fact I was most persuaded by a place in the book that said: "Do not be ruled by this, have fun with it."  Having had some success in the romance department I decided I need more income in my life, so I turned to the "abundance" section.  First lesson: notice it says abundance not money or income?  As is always the case with Feng Shui one is invited to symbolize the desired outcome.  What does more income actually look like?  What do I want money for?  Good questions.  I also find myself strangely freed.  I was raised in a religion that emphasizes simplicity.  The pursuit of material wealth is bad and not of God.  But this word abundance turns that on its head for me.  Abundance I recognize is of the Divine Provider.  The Source is where all abundance originates from.  So I am freed to consider how to represent this in my home and in fact how to actually accomplish the increase in income I needed to provide for my family.  In fact Feng Shui warns about houses with missing sectors and how to "correct" for this.  As I thought back on homes I had lived in I was amazed to recognize that throughout my mostly poor adult years I had lived in countless homes that were without this sector!

In the influence people section I enjoyed creating a collage of the people who have actually influenced me and their quotes.  Also posting pictures of places I want to travel to.  I have enjoyed thinking about how I think about my self-knowledge, that which I have and that wish I would have.  Same for my "fame" section.  It was also fun to put up pictures of several generations of my family in the family section and equally fun to create a work space for creative endeavors in the creativity section.  I have become many times more creative and recaptured a creative part of my heritage in so doing.  For many of  my clients the real work of feng shui is about clearing away the junk: the messes of an undigested life.  It is an outer work that matches the inner work.

What questions will feng shui open about your life?

What Does the Lord require?

Does God expect things from us? This is an interesting question. In the Old Testament we have the 12 Commandments which are things God requires of us- to be faithful, to not kill, lie, cheat, steal, etc. In fact all great religions of the world attempt to prescribe some sort of ethical moral choices. However, as ethical humanists will point out correctly, one does not have to be religious to have an ethical or moral approach to life and decision making.

In the New Testament Jesus says there is one commandment from God: To love your neighbor as yourself. It is implied that if we love in this way we will not kill, cheat, lie, steal....all of those things that the 12 commandments covered. Again all of the great religions of the world also call us to Love. So is this an interesting coincidence that all religions call us to love and to moral behavior? Or could it be that when prophets and mystics have listened deeply to the Holy One that they have been given similar answers in many different languages?

So there seems to be some answers available about what God requires of us as people in general. But what about as individuals? Many religions also talk about being "called by God" or "being lead" by God. The descriptions of being called or having a leading are remarkably similar across denominational descriptions. People describe hearing a voice or receiving a message, usually directing them to do some particular thing. Sometimes these are messages to serve The Divine in some very specific way and to potentially serve a whole grouping of people. However, sometimes these are very specific individual messages to call a friend (only to discover that this person was in some dire situation), to stay home and not go out (later avoiding a danger), to speak to a certain person (only to discover a job offer), etc. There are also stories of people being lead to certain actions by God with no clear reason that ever becomes apparent why.

A personal example for me would be finding a series of little spiritual nudges to leave the social service agency where I worked as a counselor for 7 years and go into private practice. At the time I was a single parent and the idea of giving up a secure paycheck and benefits for the relative insecurity and unknown terrain, seemed like insanity itself. I however asked for a "clearness committee" - a concept from Quakerism where a few other people meet with you in consideration of critical life decisions. The committee meets in prayerful listening, seeking to confirm or to question that which the person feels lead to. Quakers, who practice a very experiential form of faithfulness designed this process as a safe guard against its members mistaking their own ego, or madness, or random thinking as a leading. Quakerism suggests that when a leading is true that it will have certain characteristics: it will be moral, it will persist over time, the "way will open" (meaning things will fairly easily line up to facilitate forward progress.), there will come a feeling of peace to follow it, etc.

My clearness committee confirmed that it did seem to be a leading and that as scary as it seemed it was still the right path. Feeling like I was jumping off a cliff and clinging to the quote: "When a woman leaps she either finds her wings or crashes to the ground." I turned in my resignation. In the year that followed, it was rough, up and down, including a national downturn in the economy. And yet within a year I was making the same amount I had been making in the agency in less time. Also, I watched the agency I had worked at downsize and lay people off and realized that in the pattern of how they did the layoffs that I would have been layed off. And in fact as I stayed in faithfulness other spiritual lessons were offered to me in my practice.

In a previous post I have looked at the issue of whether we have free will and how that intersects with the Holy Author. So the issue of leadings is an interesting place of intersection of the issue of free will. Everything I have seen written about leadings and certainly my own experience with them suggests that we have completely free will, there is no “have to” about leadings. It is I think like a friend, we may want for them a certain outcome, we may hope for them to act in a certain way, but we can’t make them and we would not see it as appropriate to make them. However, I don’t think life is equally good if we ignore leadings. For one thing we essentially refuse to enter our relationship with God. But as my example indicates faithfulness was in my own best interest. My life would have gone, perhaps we could argue equally well after I would have been laid off and found another job. But it does seem that when we listen and our faithful there is a sort of convergence of God’s will and ours for a goodness.

Some Christians suggest that when we are not faithful God will punish us. I find no examples in my life where I feel God punished anyone, and it indeed seems incompatible with a picture of a loving God. It seems to me that the idea of a punishing God dips into the pool I have previously addressed of our carrying our experience with our parents into how we conceptualize God. If we had punitive parents with harsh punishments we may fear that to not “Obey” God will bring the same kind of punishment. But it seems to me that in interpreting things as punishment we get into the same problem as testing a leading. Can one person know there leading to be true and not of their own mind? Can one person correctly interpret something as a punishment? I think that also would have to be tested against a prayerful body.

I feel instead that a Loving Parent, wants for us our growth, our happiness and a greater Goodness all around us.

How Does God speak?

People often complain that God is silent or at least very unclear!  The God of the Old Testament leaves 12 commandments, parts seas, punishes an innocent man (Job) just because he can, and says clearly you shall have no other God but me.  (ie the claim in strongly made for monotheism.) The God of the New Testament says Love is the only commandment and works miracles through his son Jesus.  (speaking therefore thru a person and also thru miracles.)  Unfortunately, most people do not find these answers very helpful in figuring out the role of God in the daily world they live in.  As always, I encourage people to find theological answers, from where ever you find them, that serve you in your life.

I have a client who says that because she has never heard God's voice she feels God is a Creator who finished the job and watches with mild interest, but is "definitely not interventionist."  For me this simply returns us to the idea of how do you hear Inward Voice?  If we are looking for a thundering voice in the wilderness, commandments on a tablet, a burning bush, or the fulfillment of a prophecy then most people would conclude that indeed God is dead.  But I think we have been done a big disservice by being taught that that is how God's voice is heard.  Most modern clergy would urge people to turn to prayer and listen for answers, but again I don't think much instruction is given on recognizing the answers.

This reminds me of the joke (previously related in another post-clearly one I'm fond of) :  A man is in a flood and he goes on the roof of his house and prays to God to save him.  As he watches the water rising, another man floats by on a log and offers him to get on "no he says, I will be saved."  After a while more a man comes by in a row boat and offers him to get in.  He again refuses saying he will be saved.  With alarm he sees the water now reaching the roof and as he stands ankle deep a helicopter comes and lowers a rope.  He again refuses shouting "I will be saved".  But he drowns, and after he does he gets to the gates of Heaven and he says to St. Peter  "I prayed to God to be saved, why did he let me drown."  And Peter says with annoyance:  "For heaven sakes, he sent you a log, a boat, and a helicopter....what more did you want."

For me this "joke" speaks to the idea that we can fail to hear God's answer to our prayers if we have preconceived ideas of what the answer will be.  Not only do we have to offer the desires of our heart and then let go of the outcome, but we have to be able to "hear" with special ears.  My experience of how God speaks is on bill board signs, thru nature, thru other people's mouths, through lines in various books, thru amazing sychronicties, etc.  But I have had to learn how to recognize the sort of invisible "red circle" around the answer.  One of my friend's told me she had learned to pray and ask for a "very clear unmistakable signs" to be given.  At first I thought "Well that is a lot of hutzpah telling God how to deliver the answer".  However, then I realized: "but I do need for the answer to be clear."  So now I ask that too sometimes.    

I remember hearing a man giving a talk, and he talked about praying for direction as to whether he should go to Divinity School.  He said:  "God if I should go to divinity school send a sign"  A redtailed hawk suddenly flew across the sky.  They were very rare where he lived, but he thought this could be a coincidence.  So he said  "Send a clearer sign."  Then two hawks flew above him.  Thinking it might be the mate he asked for a clearer sign.  He admits that when it got up to 4 he resigned himself that God wanted him to go to Divinity School.

I know there are those who will still say both the joke and the story of the hawks are coincidences, not signs from God.  Those folks will also scoff at the popular practice of asking something in prayer and opening a holy book (or I find any meaningful book will do) randomly to a page and understanding that something in the content of the page contains the answer.  They say:  "wishful thinking.  Reading into it the answer you want, etc."  Except that the friend mentioned in that story did not want to go to divinity school.  He was already examining the question because of other spiritual nigglings he had received.  Many ethical humanists will also argue that this is all just a fancy way of listening to our conscience which is innately human inborn trait.  I do agree it is innate.  However, I also happen to think that having one is one way that God calls us to a certain path.  So the whistle blower who takes great personal risk to serve the good of the many; the spark that makes us tell the truth instead of a lie, the civil servant or the Good Samaritan that risks their own safety to save another, I think listen to the Inward Light that burns in each of us, speaking of the Greater Good that the Creator desires for us all.

But I must also acknowledge that another difference between the skeptics, or the Humanist, and those of us who believe that God does speak to us, is actually having a spiritual experience.  When one has had an experience of an answer so clear and so undeniable that to deny it would be a kind of blaspheme,  or has had an Experience of The Presense that was overpowering, or life changing, or as some would say a second birth, then there is a kind of certainty that comes.  This certainty is not faith, any more than it is faith to believe that the sun exists during the night time.  I have met people whose fear and skeptism was so thick that I do not know how they could have such an experience - how they could notice the log, the boat or the helicopter as a Presence.  In fact I have met people who have gotten in that boat and helicopter and talk about their great good fortune and how they have worked hard for everything they have, noticing not the abundance of Grace they have experienced.  But I have also met people who earnestly seek and long for that confirming Presence and haven’t found it.  I do not know why they have not had it - other than perhaps again expecting it to look a certain way - like Jesus or Mohammad or a parting of the seas.  I would encourage those who seek such experiences to be open to it looking any sort of way, but also being able to answer your question "Is this what I think it is" with at least 4 more hawks.

This is also to say that if you want God to speak to you than you must be in dialogue; you must start the conversation.  Funny how friends never call if you never call them.  So if we ask The Divine Teacher for answers we are much more likely to get them, if we ask the Divine Mother for comfort we are much more likely to get it.  If we ask the Divine Provider for our hearts desire, we are much more likely to receive it.  If we sit silently saying nothing, or even brooding about the lack of communication from God than we are likely to continue to get silence back.  When we put the question out there than we can wait for the answer that comes not immediately, but in a sort of metaphorical language, which is still quite obvious when the answer appears before you.

God the Father; God the Mother

When I was in my 20's I was looking at how I prayed and I realized I started prayers with "Dear Lord"...well this I realized was really messed up!  After all the Lord, was the oppressive master in a feudal system of economic oppression....hardly how I wanted to think of the Holy One!  So I started trying to decide how I wanted to call God:  Father...no that implied God was male.  Mother....no that implied God was female.  Goddess...same issue.  Creator? Nice but seemed to overlook the time with God after creation.  Aba...same issue as Father above.  After I read Yahweh was Hebrew for “the One who cannot be Named” I liked that for weeks...but it simply did not ring for me.  Eventually one day in worship I heard the melody of a popular song that says in one line  "Oh by beloved I'm crying".  I had always thought of that verse as being about a human lover, but it occurred to me that God had to be the Most Beloved.  But even that seemed to ignore other aspect of God - God the Creator, or the Divine Parent, etc.  Then suddenly to the same melody I heard all of the names playing in succession and then I realized they were all the right name!  The problem was trying to reduce God to only one name.  I then saw that what I really wanted to do was be in the present moment naming the Most Miraculous One as I experienced God in that very moment.  From then on this is indeed how I have called The Great Soul and have saved the word God for a coin of the realm when I want to be sure another knows what I mean or when I am simply intellectually talking about God and not relating to my Creator.

In the many years I have spent talking to people about their experience of the Spirit I see however that our concept of God is highly shaped by our own personal experience of our parents.  After all our parents were the first all powerful beings we experienced, and if things went well they were also the first beings we felt loved by.  Unfortunately they were also the first people who punished us, and the first people who hurt us.  So I find if someone had a distant aloof parent they tend to see God that way.  If they had a loving supportive parent they tend to see God that way.  If their parent was very punishing they believe in a God of the Old Testament.  And so it goes.  In fact once I gave a workshop entitled "Healing our Spiritual Wounds" and almost all the wounds people brought were a difficulty in feeling connected to God.   When I asked about their relationship to their parents they would describe a very similar difficulty in that relationship.   So I invite you to consider for a moment in what ways do you see God as like your parents?

So are you just in trouble forever if you had a terrible relationship to your parents?  No, not at all, but it does mean that you need to connect to where in your life have you felt unconditional love or at least most strongly loved.  It helps to then consciously strengthen the connection in your mind between that behavior and set feelings and your concept of God.  That person has modeled to you a small portion of the Divine Lover.  I think this is very important because I think a large portion of people who give up on religion or even on God do so because the images in the Bible often describe an angry, or vengeful or punitive God and that way too easily connects to painful parental images.  Apparently, Aba is Hebrew for essentially Daddy - Jesus calls God Aba in this very familiar and tender way.  I think we need to be able to call God in ways that are familiar and tender because they allow us much more easily to connect to a Loving God!

I think one of the disillusioning and difficult moments of life is when we first realize our parents are not perfect or all powerful!  This I think is its’ own fall from Eden.  In facing the difficulties and travails of life I think there are times when we all need to be able to turn to someone or something larger than ourselves. If we are lucky, sometimes we can lean on a partner, but even they are not big enough for some of the trauma’s and loses of life.  Some of my agnostic friends say  “Oh this is why people make up the concept of God – to have a crutch to rely on.”  I’m not concerned about this.  I’m not concerned because I have been able to rely on The Rock and that has been real.  But I’m also not concerned about it because the pragmatist in me says:  So if we make something up and it helps and we even live a better life for it… then what is the problem?  Studies show that people who identify as religious have better mental health over all and tend to rate themselves as happier on happiness scales.   So is this such a bad idea?

A friend of mine shared with me that her spiritual life was always a struggle - then one day she went to a workshop where she was invited to call God Mother- in that moment she says something revolutionarily changed in her spiritual life.  Suddenly she could see God in her own image.  She could notice the gentle, nurturing, life giving qualities of God.  This is not everyone's experience.  For some of us to give God any gender again traps and makes smaller The Infinite One. 

But I do invite you to examine: is God male or female or genderless in your experience of the Only One?  Is God the Creator of everything , or the co-creators with all of Life?  Is God all powerful, or simply the field of Unity upon which the Universe rests?  Is God the creator of our conscience or is God neutral and unconcerned with the choices of mankind or of a (wo)man? What qualities and traits do you experience in God? How big is the God you know? What names call out to that which you have known in your own soul?  But most importantly, how do we get really personal with the Inward Dwelling One?

Why is There Evil?

"Why is there evil?"  this is a question a client asked me recently, but is also I think one of the most common spiritual or theological questions throughout the ages.  (Right along side of why do we die?)  Various religions answer this differently - because of original sin, because of free choice, because of the devil, as a karmic punishment, because the nature of life is suffering, etc.  Some find one of those answers to be a satisfying answer; most of us I think do not.  For those of patchwork faith (those who construct their own theology as they seek truth where ever they find it) this question does engage a  lot of other questions - like what is the nature of God?  How powerful is God? Is there sin?  Do we have free choice or live predestined lives?  Is there Karma?  Do we reincarnate?

Part of the purpose of this blog is to ask you to engage deeply with all of those questions.  And I will try humbly to answer here the question as I understand it.

I do believe in free will.  If there was not free will we would live lives of fate and predestined outcomes.  So we are free to choose what we do, whether it is good or bad.  Most of us unless very psychologically damaged have consciences, so one psychological answer is: damage results in more damage.  Violence and oppression become passed on. Statistics are pretty clear that those who were sexually abused often become perpetrators; those who experienced domestic violence growing up are at higher risk to act out violently.  

But freewill certainly does not explain things like Enron or Hitler.  The example of Nazi Germany certainly gives us the example of ordinary people in mass numbers doing terrible things.  We see the impact of a whole culture of propaganda, education, youth groups, and societal pressure and punishments creating a cultural normal that did evil things.  A less intense but still powerful example of societal norms supporting evil is slavery in the US or I would argue environmental destruction in our current age.

But even these psychological or sociologic explanations do not account for why between two victims in a family where sexual abuse happens, one goes out and becomes abusive, and the other does not.  Nor does it account for how people in torture centers come up with the things they do.  It also does not address the disturbing answer to the other side of the coin - why do some people become the victims?  It cannot be as easily answered as "in the wrong place at the wrong time"  Yes sometimes, but why are children born with AIDS or drug addiction.   Then we might ask how does a just Creator allow such suffering?

I do not believe God can both grant free will and be all powerful.  So in granting us freewill this means God grants us the power to intentionally or unintentionally cause harm to other human beings, and the power to deny what God might want for us.  Some people are simply there at the wrong moment.  But I also do believe in reincarnation, so I believe we all choose the lives and circumstances we are born into to maximize the growth intentions of this life time.  Which is to say when we live many lifetimes, we do not and cannot learn all there is to learn in just one lifetime.  Just like the learning within one life, some of our early choices effect  or limit the choices available or logical to follow later. 

This is perhaps another way of talking about Karma.  I believe young souls learn elemental lessons about violence, love, trust, truth...which is why as a society we have a lot of struggles in those areas.  But from those lessons we choose more complicated situations, or sometimes opposite situations in order to learn the lessons we need to learn.  Thus two souls in similar circumstances may make quite different choices. So having perpetrated violence in one lifetime we may choose a life where we will be a victim of violence as a way of learning about all sides of violence.  Some people call that Karma.

So back to why would a child be born with AIDS or drug addiction?  I do not believe Karma is a punishment but simply a learning opportunity.  So if one needed to learn about dependency, about meaning based not on accomplishments, about addiction itself, about the overcoming of addiction, etc  all of these are reasons one could choose such a life.

It is still hard to understand why one might be born into famine and starvation: what learning could come of this, or to die in a death camp?  Several writers I have read suggest that in order for us to see Light that we must have the contrast of dark.  They suggest that God allows for our bad choices as contrast that leads to learning for good choices.  These same writers suggest that some souls choose lives of suffering or victimhood as a sacrifice and a contribution to the collective human consciousness and learning.  These writers suggest that the Holocaust and the several genocides since then in Africa and Bosnia are occasions that have laid bare to the world the horror of scapegoating a whole ethnic group, of doing enemy think on such a massive level, of the reign of terror of one group of people turned on another.  Given that the word Hitler is almost a synonym for evil in our culture, it does serve as a powerful symbol in our collective consciousness.  Yes much better that we would have learned the lesson on a permanent level, but there were still souls who did not learn that lesson by the conclusion of WWII or people whose lives were so wholly focused on other lessons during that time (or souls not on earth then) that there were still souls needing to learn that lesson in Darfur, etc. 

Does humanity make any progress or do we just go round in circles?  There is far less child abuse on the planet that 200 years ago, in many cultures it now so widely condemned that it must be hidden.   Studies show that there is less wars being fought right now than ever before in history proportionate to the population.  Slavery while not abolished is also far less prevalent and universally condemned as a "bad" thing.  So it does seem as Martin Luther King, Jr. said that "the arc of history is long and bends towards justice."  Our souls are linked not just in this lifetime to a web of Friends and family, but also through many lifetimes to a collective shared experience and a slow but steady learning curve.

This also suggests to me that how we respond to the suffering or evil that falls over our own life is incredibly important, both for ourselves and for the collective consciousness.   I once watched on tv the sentencing for the Green River Killer, a serial murderer in the State of WA.  Family members were all getting a chance to make a statement to him before his sentencing.  Some were full of anger, condemnation and hatred.  A very few offered him forgiveness.  Most tragic to me was a woman who blamed him for every wrong that had befallen her since the murder of a family member, including her husband getting Alzheimer’s!  What a convenient scapegoat he was for her, and yet she was full of bitterness and misery.  By contrast the man who testified to his faith and that God had given him the power to forgive as Jesus forgives us, had clearly much more peace and also happiness while still clearly loving and missing his deceased daughter.  If we are here to learn, than how we respond to evil either means we learn from the lesson handed us, or tragically we fail to learn, and may dance with that particular evil many more times while trying to learn its lessons.

Have you lived before?

Most people find the question of reincarnation quite fascinating.  There are whole religions like Buddhism and Hinduism that believe in reincarnation as part of their theology.  Christianity does not believing that the afterlife is in Heaven.  Judaism believes that this life is the whole ball game.  The ancient Egyptians of course had very elaborate beliefs and rituals surrounding the belief in reincarnation.  Even though this is a Christian nation which would suggest that the general public does not believe in reincarnation, a 2009 Pew polls showed 24% of Americans do believe in reincarnation.

Why do some people believe in this?  I think reasons range from remembering past lives, the hope to be with loved ones again in another time, to some logic of seeing how nature recycles all atoms in some sort of way and feeling this is the way nature works.   Like most beliefs I encourage people who "don't know" to try this on for an hour or two or a day and see - what does it make sense of if it is true?  How does it sit with you if it is true.

Here is a summery of some things I see that it sheds light on if true:
If we live more than one life clearly there is a learning cycle that is longer than a life time.  This seems to imply that the soul which takes more than one body over time, does retain some memory - if not of a life at least of its lessons.  This to me also helps explain the evolution of humanity over time - a shared memory, not just passed down generationally, but in our shared soul.

It has important implications for morality.  If we are to live repeatedly than the mistakes, or "sins" or evils we do have implications for our future live(s).  I have heard this explained in at least two different ways:1) that as a punishment for actions in a past life we are born into circumstances that will punish us (a Hindu belief taken out to justify a caste system.)  This then theoretically also explains why people suffer - although in a way that to western eyes looks like a blame the victim position. 

The 2nd explanation is that we "choose" our next life as part of a past life review done "on the other side".  Included in this idea is the sense that we arrive at some place of deeper wisdom, compassion and insight while united with the Light/God and that from that place of wisdom we choose the circumstances that will help us learn what we still need to learn or accomplish what we still need to do.  (Some versions say we can see everything about the life we will live, other versions say we will see only the circumstances of our birth- parents, relatives, soci-economic status, country, environment, etc. and thus sort of take our "best shot" at getting the right set up for our spiritual goals.)  As a therapist I know it can be quite "activating" for people to look at the idea that they chose their parents ("those SOBs!  No Way I'm not a masochist!")  But I find even in very abusive situations people are able to see lessons they learned, ways they were shaped that now serve them, or strange silver linings in the hand they feel they were dealt. (or chose?)  In some cases it is actually amazingly freeing and healing to let go of a victim posture and embrace one's whole life, all of it as deliberate and meaningful.  This second position also goes a way towards explaining suffering, but differently - as part of the classroom where we learn.  And here I want to be clear that I do not assume that learning always occurs by positive instruction.  If we burn our hand in a fire we also learn something.

So pick one that makes sense to you - so you got here in this life via that means....then what.  If you are living many lives than the question of karma becomes newly meaningful.  If you treat a sibling or spouse meanly or wrongly how does that show up in another life.   I would imagine one unkind act has no real impact....but a lifetime - yep you got karma.  One set of beliefs says we will pay in another life time but maybe not with that person but just with a similar situation.  Another set of beliefs says we will be in lifetime after life time with that person (sometimes switching roles) till we "get it right"".   It would seem to me that in either case to treat a spouse abusively either risks a life time in which one will be treated abusively by a spouse or like the movie ground hog day has us in "take" after "take" in a marriage with the chance to be abusive or not....  Either way in my mind the efficient course is to act with compassion, and justice now rather than putting it off to another life time. 

It is strange to me that Christianity promotes right moral behavior by suggesting sins will be punished in the afterlife.  I do not see this as powerfully motivating most Christians to act morally.  Yet there is something about the idea that doing evil to another ruins your own karma that does seem to give people pause in their actions.  Christianity also suggests that suicide is a sin and thus attempts to prevent the commission of this act.  Perhaps this has stopped people from killing themselves.  But reincarnation makes the claim that if you kill yourself you will simply return to a life with a similar circumstance or suffering and face the choice again until you learn how not to escape the problem at hand.  This I have known to stop seriously suicidal people from killing themselves.  Rather than being a path out of suffering it then reframes it as a path to vastly more suffering.

So those who are scientifically minded are always looking for proof for spiritual beliefs. I actually think reincarnation has more proof to it than many other spiritual beliefs.  If one is not convinced that the Dali Lama is the same soul reincarnated for successive life times as that generations Dali Lama.  (the proof being that a small child who is the next Dali Lama can pick out possessions of the former Dali Lama out of a pile of objects and answer questions about his life.)  Then one might find interesting the following video clip of an American boy who kept telling his parents about dying in a plane over the ocean in a war, until he provided enough information that they were able to find the WWII records of his life, service and death, and reunite him with a still living sister.  http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Parents+Think+Boy+Is+Reincarnated+Pilot&search_type=&aq=f

The most convincing for me however is a story of an American woman who from a small child on drew pictures and talked of a family she had had in Ireland.  She remembered dying in childbirth very frightened for her the children she was leaving behind.  As an adult her mother helped her find the village and return there were she discovered one of the children still living there and was able to tell him things that he said only his dead mother would have known!

So what would it mean for your spiritual life if you knew you had lived other lives?

Recoknowing..or spiritual nigglings

Recently in a conversation with another person she came up with the word "recoknowing". What is this?  It is a brilliant way to describe the spiritual experience of knowing something on a deep or inner level and being mindful enough to recognize it as truth - truth from the Source.  Not long before in a conversation with a client we addressed the topic of "communication with God".  My client felt very frustrated that there was not/is not enough communication with God.  This of course brought up the question of how do we know when God is speaking?  How do we hear God?  (I have loved the UCC banner from a few years ago that says:  “God is not done speaking.”)

It became clear to me during the course of talking with my client that if we have a very precise, narrow or anthropomorphic idea of what God's communication is like, then a great deal of communication can occur that will go right by us.  It reminded me of the old joke about the person in a huge flood who goes up on the roof of their house and prays for God to deliver them.  First a person comes by floating on a big log and offers space on the log.  The person says no feeling the log is too small and too risky.  Then someone comes by in a row boat and offers help - no the roof dweller says, feeling confident that God will save them.  Finally a helicopter come by and lowers a rope, but the roof dweller again refuses feeling the rope and the ascent to the ‘copter is way to scary.  Eventually the person drowns, and when they go to Heaven they rather reproachfully say to God:  "I prayed for your help.  Why did you not save me?"  God replies:  "I sent you a log, a boat and a helicopter - what more did you want?"

I wonder if we do not often missed God's communication in much the same way, not seeing it in the "ordinary" or human language it may come in.  It has been both a joy and a frustration in my life to try to understand the synchronistic or metaphorical way God may sometimes speak to us.  But if you ask people to tell examples of synchronistic events that have happened in their life - often at very critical turning points, some of the stories will actually send shivers up your spine. 

I have always been both fascinated and horrified at the same time by the stories after 9/11 of people who were suppose to be in the Towers that day, or on those flights who weren't:  the person who didn't go to work that day because he was taking his son to his first day of kindergarten, the woman who broke the heel on her high heels and stopped to have them fixed, the person who went out on an errand, the person who was fired the week before  - or the person who "missed their plane" or more tragically the man who was on the plane because he rescheduled to spend the night before at home with his wife for her birthday.   Are these all simply coincidences or did Spirit speak to each of those people calling them to certain choices they made that day or week?

A friend of mine's young dog chewed on her glasses scratching them.  The only way she could get a new pair was to have another examination done, the first in four year - only to discover that she had severe sight threatening Glaucoma.  Coincidence, or Spirit speaking?  Another friend happened by a series of unusual turn of events to be at a meeting with a man who sold supplemental health insurance.  She heard his pitch for a special cancer rider which could be added to your policy which paid all uncovered co-pays and lost wages if you had treatment for cancer.  Something in her just nudged her to do it.  6 months later she was diagnosed with colon cancer; the policy made the different for her as a single person going through 9 months of chemotherapy.  Serendipity, or the Holy One whispering within?

Some denominations tell stories of the faithful following God's direction so literally that they would come to an intersection in their horse and buggy and wait until they sensed which direction to go next.  John Woolman,  a famous Quaker, journaled of feeling called to go to Barbados to preach against slavery, buying the ticket on a ship and traveling all the way to the port and then at the port getting a "message" that he had completed what God had required of him and turning around going home!  Madness or faithfulness to a message received?

Have you ever felt sort of driven to tell another person something?  Not because you were trying to persuade them of a given point or tell them what to do, but just felt it was important to communicate some information, inspiration or encouragement to another?  This is an almost daily experience for me.  Sometimes the words are sort of shrugged off with a sort of "oh right, whatever", but more often they are received with great gratitude and even sometimes with a "thank you I have been really thinking about this, looking for this communication."  This I think is an example of how God taps us on the shoulder and asks us to minister to each other, therefore using our mouths as the vessels that deliver the messages.

Courage or Serenity

Recently I finished reading the book: The Wisdom to Know the Difference by Eileen Flanigan, a Quaker woman.  It is a book about the Serenity prayer: 
     "God grant me the courage to change the things I can and the serenity to accept
      the things I cannot change and the wisdom to know the difference."  

One of the things that is very clear to me is that we are all "bent" one way or the other by our childhood experience.  Some of us always strive to change things, other anticipate accepting the situation as it is and "letting go" that which distresses them.  But for the most part on either side of this fence I think we do it as a secular activity.  By this I mean I think we do what we do as a pattern, barely considered, and certainly with no thought for the Divine Actor.

What if instead we were checking in with the Creator?  What if we learned to routinely hold the events of our life and are responses to them up to the guidance of the Holy One?  What if we really asked The Holy One to show us when we needed to take action and give us the needed courage to do so,  or to show us that we needed to be still and find peace and contentment with what is?  What if the Wisdom to know the difference is not something that our little brains figure out but something that the All Mighty shows us?

God Who?

As my friends will tell you, for years I have suffered from what I call "God Who?"   This is a state of forgetting God when the chips are down.   It is not, as is the case for some people, that I doubt the existence of God or have any sort of faith crisis.  No in fact if someone would ask me while I'm in a state of fear or anger if I believe in God I would say "absolutely".  But in such states I forget all about God; I'm knocked off center and living in a soup of miserable emotions.  My brain is busy trying to figure out what to do and why things are this way, and "blah, blah, blah."  When something reminds me of God again, whether it is someone else's statement of faith, a sneeze (which brings to mind "God blesses you") or my next faith experience - I'm very quickly "righted" like a partially capsized boat, and brought back to center.  Then I can relate to God and draw upon my faith in dealing with the situation at hand.

Some years ago I came to understand why I have this affliction.  The greatest crisis of my life occurred when I was 11 and my mother died.  I had not been raised with faith and had no particular conception of God.  I think this is true for most children and their childhood crises even when they are raised in a church.   So I had no where to turn - just lost in my pain and fear.   So even now as I feel pain and fear I return to this state where I do not know God.  I thought realizing that would help me not go into "God Who?" mode but it did not help.

I have spend a lot of time sort of beating myself up about this, wondering why I cannot stay in a state of remembering God and trying to figure out how I could not fall out of knowing.   A few years ago I had the helpful realization that throughout time humanity has struggled with this.  This I think is part of the meaning of the story of the Garden of Eden and the fall - we fall out of that wonderful place that we dwell with God (in that case through pride or shame - I imagine different emotions can take different people out of a state of unity with God.)  I realized that this is the human spiritual condition and the reason for the practices of so many religions -to bring us back to a state of awareness and connection to God.   So I decided then that when I noticed with dismay that I was out of connect that instead of judging or berating myself I would simply notice that it was the first step of my returning to God.  That has helped it to be less painful- I don't think it has decreased its frequency.

For a while I was trying a practice of spiritual journaling as a way to try to not "forget" God.  But what I found was that when in a state of anger or fear I did not want to write in the journal because I tended to just write about what was making me feel that way and the feelings.  So I have now decided to try a new path - it is the path of regular contact with spiritual inspiration.  I have resolved to do some spiritual reading each day as a way to connect with God regardless of my emotional state.

What is your experience with God Who?