The Answers to Your Questions
ON THE LUNAR NEW YEAR 4723
People who visit mystics and psychics come with a list of questions. Those questions boil down to looking for solid answers about the future of one’s love life and one’s financial life. If those are your questions when you contact me, save yourself the time and effort.
I am not your guy.
Other people may be. However, that is not a part of the universe to which I chose to have ready access. It’s not that I couldn’t look long and deep for you. It’s not at all unusual to see an answer before the question is asked. In my experience it’s simply not a spiritually profitable place to be because we tend to get stuck there. The month of January has always been an especially good time for answers with the start of a new year on the Julian, Gregorian and Chinese calendars. On the Chinese calendar this year of 4723 is the year of the wood snake. It is supposed to be one of flexibility and creativity in our wisdom, transformation and personal growth.
From a purely spiritual — mystical, if you will — perspective, that is the definition of every moment of every day of every year of our lives. In our personal and private lives we constantly hear that we are to let go of something. Whether it’s an idea, a way of living, a physical thing long cherished or newly found. It’s not just that this is a good thing for us to at least try to do every day. It’s a good thing to do today. How easy it is to forget that when we let go of something, we’re making room for something else in our lives. While initially we may conjecture that whatever that new thing in our lives will be utterly awful, in fact that often results in not being even remotely true.
The best things in life can come to us when we let go of what used to be the best things in life.
Regardless how easy or difficult the questions of life appear to us, there is one basic answer to them all. The answer will appear to our questions. It is doubtful that they will appear when and how we want them, but they will come in the time of the Divine. That, much to my particular chagrin, is how life has been. No matter how long, loudly or obnoxiously I complain, life is still that way. Not long ago I gave God a one day deadline for a positive response with an action plan. It only took six months to receive the initial portion of the answer. The rest of the question will come. Eventually. Like molasses in January. In the Artic.
The Divine gives us the answers we need gradually, as we are ready to take the knowledge and turn them into action.
In our humanness we forget that life is always looming and uncertain. Demanding answers from God, other people, nature or whatever else we think of is all very well and good, but even King Canute could not command the waves. It was all well and good to be the ruler of England, Denmark, Norway and parts of Sweden, but the oceans do not obey mere mortals.
Our unrealistic demands flow out of the ideas we had in childhood about life, about spirituality, about almost anything that we encountered before adulthood. It is hoped that throughout our adulthood we will write a new playbook for the emerging life we discover. What it’s like to be in the workforce. A new and evolving view of children and other adults, often heavily reliant upon what we learned as children. Nonetheless, growing and deepening our appreciation of the beauties of existence. The wonder of that is how we learn to shed off those childish ideas bit by bit.
It is difficult to let go of childhood insecurities and resentments. We need to let go if we ever hope to grow up. When we don’t, when we cling to our childish thoughts and behaviors, we hobble ourselves. We remain self-indulgent and immature in our emotional and spiritual lives.
In my thirties I was told by a spiritual director that my thinking and behavior were immature. I was behaving like a child. My spirituality was stuck in the second grade while physically I was an adult man. I might have a good job and live in a nice apartment in a good neighborhood, but all of that meant nothing. I had not grown up spiritually. In my spirituality I was thinking and behaving like a little boy. That meant, in turn, that I was emotionally stuck at seven years old.
That stung.
Worse than that, he was right. When someone else is right about our emotional and spiritual maturity being that of a child, it’s a hard thing to hear. No matter how right.
We’re left with decisions. Some people choose to remain where they are in their lack of psycho-spiritual maturity.
I wanted more. I needed more.
Inside I had long felt an aching want for more something or other in my life. I didn’t know what it was called. Until my spiritual director gave it a name, I had no idea that I was not spiritually fit. Nor did I begin to grasp the extent to which I was spiritually unfit.
Gradually, with an increase of listening, of prayer and meditation, I began to appreciate what you had and where I was in life. Almost daily I took to taking long walks at lunch or after work. Even though I was in the middle of a noisy city I could let go, separate myself out from it. I walked just to walk. It was how I became more hopeful concerning the direction my life could take.
Where I had been was not enough. I had spent thirty years there. That’s far too long of a time by any measure. It was time to move forward.
Questions began to pile up on my walks. Questions regarding everything in my life from how I had managed to survive so long to what I was doing living the life I had. Every time there was another question an answer was provided. It’s fascinating how, when we are searching deep into the very core of our beings and higher than the skies, we can hear what we need to know so much more easily than when we are stuck in our past.
