Live the Questions

Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is to live everything.  Live the questions. Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

Rainer Maria Rilke

This has always been one of my favorite Rilke quotes.  Well actually one of my favorite quotes.  I found it when I was young and wanting to know right that minute what my profession should be, and who I should marry, and where I should live.   And someone gave me this quote and it calmed something in me.  It made me realize that answers are not born into us full grown, that life is a process of finding our answers.  It allowed me to patient with myself, to relax a bit which was a very useful thing.  I often see with my clients this same urgency to find the answers to know RIGHT NOW, to be off the uncomfortable spot of not knowing and uncertainty.  That desire to leave the uncomfortable spot of unknowing is yet another way we avoid our questions and the spiritual process.  And yet is even clearer when viewed from the outside that sometimes we need more experience in order to find the right answer.  What would we learn if we stayed with the discomfort?  Can we open to that learning?

It is also true that we can find answers from a head place (e.g. I should eat this because it healthy. I will earn more if I have this profession.  I like this location better).  But finding answers from a spiritual place is a different process.  A spiritual process requires submitting our questions to prayer (as addressed in earlier posts) and learning how to "hear" the answers which by its very nature sort of means living into the answers.  God's timing is often different than our timing and yet perfect.  Sometimes we are held in waiting that seems unbearable and unfair only to realize later that what would have ensued had we moved more quickly would have been disastrous.  Sometimes we are pushed into something that feels too quick, too fast, that we feel unready for...only to see later that very important or precious things could not otherwise have happened except quickly.  Part of the spiritual process therefore is letting go of our own preconceived ideas to hear God's promptings and to act within that timing.  It maybe some comfort to realize that when we feel stuck that we may not yet be ready and to wait with patience and faith.  This is true within a spiritual process, but is not true within a "head" process.

There are many questions that arise in spiritual life: who is God? How do I pray? What happens after death? Why do we suffer? These are also questions that people can feel sometimes very urgent to know the answers too or very concerned about finding the "right" answer.  I think that again the anxious holding of these questions makes it harder to find the answer.  The fear of wrong answers can hold us back from exploring possible answers.  Can we brave enough to try on all possible answers and listen for whether they resignate as Truth?  Then we may live into our answers.

Choosing Our Parents

In my twenties I first read Illusions by Richard Bach.  In it he says: "Every problem has its gift" and other pieces of wisdom that suggest we are in charge of our own life experience, not passive victims to it.  I recall taking the worst event of my life and saying:  "Ok what is the gift of that?"  And strangely I could see it, and I could feel it shifting something that had lived in me as a sort of “victim oh poor me” story.  Something in this same exploration suggested to me that we in fact choose our parents.  About 7 years ago I finally read the Celestine Prophesy.   In this spiritual novel he also suggests that we choose our parents; and in fact he suggests we come to earth with a spiritual purpose and that the parents we choose provide certain lessons, for good or for bad, which help shape us for that spiritual purpose.  He calls this our “evolutionary question” and says we each have one.  He somewhat lays out a method for figuring it out (which I have further developed and have done with numerous friends.)  In the last few years in reading various books by Neale Donald Walsch and then most recently Inspiration by Wayne Dyer this idea has again been repeated that we choose our parents.  (This belief does fit best if you believe in reincarnation and karma.) 

In a previous post: God the Father/God the Mother, I talk about the idea that our concepts of God are often powerfully shaped by how we experience our "all powerful" parents during our childhoods.  These two ideas seem to go hand in glove: that we choose parents that provide a certain spiritual (or not) experience that then shapes our spirituality and the tools and concepts with which we pursue our spiritual task on earth.  This has powerful implications for both how we relate to our parents and our experiences with them, but also for those of us who are parents, how we parent.  Do you see your child as a soul that you have a sacred trust with?  Do you nurture not just their body, mind and emotions, but also their spiritual nature or their soul? 

What are the healing potentials with your parents (alive or dead) if you consider that you actually chose them?  For someone who was treated abusively or hatefully by a parent this may seem a fairly repugnant and nonsensical statement...at first glance.  But keep looking.  I think for example of a friend of mine who was beaten by his father during his childhood.   He says it taught him to question authority and to be strong and to be centered in his own internal sense of truth.  He has been an activist throughout his life and this has served him well.  I think of another person whose parents were not religious at all, but has a deep love of beauty, and how that prepared her to create art which has been a path to mysticism.

For myself, despite believing that we choose our parents, I have been mystified for decades trying to understand why I would choose a mother, a good mother, who would die during my childhood?  It has finally come to me in doing Joanna Macy's Work that Reconnects, that I have learned how to be present to grief and loss unflinchingly and unwaveringly....and that in this time of so much loss on this planet, that those of us who fight for peace and for justice must be able to be present to the pain of the world.  As Joanna says:  "Be willing to have your heart be broken open to the pain of the world; it is what your heart was created for...to connect you to life." So I commend to you the question:  Why did I choose my parents?  How have they, for better or for worse, prepared me for my spiritual purpose in life?

Santa Claus Prayers

I have in past posts covered various ideas of how God might speak to us, and I have also described several people’s experience of asking God for answers and the answers they received.  Various denominations teach various ways of praying from meditation, to chanting, to memorized prayers which are repeated at appointed times, to prayers made on one’s behalf by others, etc.  And again I would ask the reader to consider all these forms and how they fit or do not fit with the Image of the Divine which you have embraced for yourself.  If you don’t know if they fit I encourage you to try these different forms and find your own experiences with them.  I don’t believe there is a right way to pray.  I think you will have to find the way that brings you into intimate and reliable relationship with the Holy One.

Once I had a conversation with a friend where we agreed that the “trap” in prayer is to make the Santa Claus prayer.  This is sort of praying for things.  It seems to me that we need to be clear in ourselves what it is we really need: to pray for a home not a house, for transportation rather than a car, etc. and have faith that the Divine Provider will sort out what best provides for us.  I remember really wanting a baby, but instead being given the Divine nudge to go to graduate school.  As it later turned out after she was born my circumstances changed, and I needed that degree to provide for that baby.  The Provider had known the right order for everything to unfold as it should.

Part of praying in my experience is reflecting on my current situation and being able to name in what ways I need help, and to name the truer need – not the outer package of that need.  It also means seeing my emotional state and recognizing when I need to ask for comfort, recognizing when there is fear, anger, worries, or confusion that I need to turn over to the Divine Comforter.  It can be way to easy to try to carry everything going on in one’s life oneself, or to try to make a partner or parent be Godlike in what we want from them.  This is when it is good to offer up the burdens or the desires of our heart and then let go of the outcome and be able to listen for God’s response.  This listening would be the kind of listening as described in previous posts.

Praying for others, or intercessory prayer as it is called in some traditions, takes into account some of these same qualities (avoiding Santa Claus prayers on behalf of other people) and offering up to God our concerns for others and then letting go of them.  As a therapist I carry concerns for many people; if I kept them all as mine to carry I would loose my mind.  It is the Sheppard that makes it possible for me to be with people’s pain and not be overpowered by it.  Prayer for others is also remarkably effective.  There are studies where people in hospitals have been put in two groups: those not prayed for and those who had people praying for them. Those who were prayed for healed faster and did better.   My partner tells a story of when he had been diagnosed with a tumor pressing on his inner ear and was scheduled for surgery.  Many people prayed for him.  When a finally scan was done to give the surgeon an image to work from, he was called by the doctor to say that in a month’s time it had shrunk to almost nothing and that he no longer needed surgery!

There are of course many different traditions which suggest that prayers be made in a certain way, calling on God by a certain name, using certain objects or postures or rituals to aid the prayer or make it more powerful.  If you find yourself drawn to these traditions it will be important to learn these ways of praying and to be sure that the methods of a religion you are attracted to really assist you. 

I know what God Looks Like

My daughter when she was about 7 told me casually one day:  "I know what God looks like".   "Oh," I said like one who has had a butterfly land on them and does not want to scare it away by to quickly moving, "what does God look like?"  She calmly described for me something that had happened when she was about three, a time when we were camping right down at the ocean's edge.  The water coming up to about two feet below us during the night, and then in the morning it was low tide and it was also foggy.  As we walked along in the fog we could find marvelous things: starfish and barnacles now exposed on big rocks,  little fish caught in tide pools, objects washed up in the night by waves.  There was a mysterious, magical and yes mystical nature to that moment.  And this moment was the one my daughter now described and then pronounced:  "That is what God looks like"  

There are parents somewhere who would have felt the need to explain that that was just "low tide", or to say that there was nothing to see, or to tell them instead about Jesus Christ, or Allah, or to otherwise deny or argue with their child's spiritual experience.  Who is to say that children do not see God more clearly, easily and with less distortion than adults?  For me it was important to simply validate her spiritual experience.  I simply said: "Yes that is what God looks like?"  She has grown up into a young woman who is confident of her relationship with The Holy Mystery and able to tune in to the Inner Voice.

I remember a client of mine who sees auras, telling me that when she was young she tried to describe this to her parents, and they made her feel so crazy for this that first she stopped telling them, and then she stopped noticing herself, till as an adult she had to work hard to reconnect to her ability to perceive spiritual energies.

How were your spiritual experiences or instincts responded to by adults around you?
How do you nurture the spirituality of children around you?
Do you believe that people of all ages can experience the Divine?
What if the Divine does not look the way we think that God should look?

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.