What do we want? Answers? When do we want them? Now! We can all fall hook-line-and-sinker for the seductive modern urge for quick fixes and simple answers. Just “google it,” comrade, and hey-presto, the answer is yours for the taking.
The spiritual realm has its own version of the quick fix game. This usually presents as this or that fella, from this or that religiosity code, who claims to have the God answers all neatly sorted and ready to go. Yes, praise the lord alleluia, it’s all on tap, big time, anytime, for the chosen few. You know the deal; you just have to sign up for the tried and tested—or whiz-bang shiny new—one true religion. Then dip into your pocket a little—or more often a lot—and you too can get the answers to the ever-perplexing existential meaning of life questions.
Mark Twain famously said:
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
Clearly, we don’t have any say in the first of these. But make no mistake, dear comrades, the Creator God does! And I’ve had plenty to say about that in previous posts. The second has to do with finding true purpose. Now, this takes time, lots of time, birthed and nurtured in the spiritual experience of life. Rather than quick answers, we shall have to settle for the circle of life and God’s answers that slowly emerge amid the same.
The go to phrase for Ignatian mystics is, “finding God in all things.” The natural world, like us, is a creation of God, and we can find great guidance therein (Job 12:7-10). We are part of nature made from the same God stuff and consequently birthed into deep connection with all that lives and moves on this sacred planet. The Earth is our mother and all its inhabitants, our sisters, and brothers. There is thus a mystical reality in nature that can open our hearts to the life-giving Spirit that flows in and through all created things. I recently posted on Facebook:
The trees in old forests can live hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years. Climate scientists use the rings of these ancient giants to observe the climatic conditions experienced by them during their long, earthy lives. These carbon capturing, emitters of life-giving oxygen, will have known times of lush growth coupled with hard years of unyielding dry. Forest fires may have raged around them and all but roasted them alive, and frozen spells that seemed endless would have seriously stymied their steady growth along the way.
Our spiritual journeys are no less dramatic! They have many seasons. There are dry desert times that bend and re-shape us, and floods that eventually turn into peaceful days of plentiful growth. This is how God’s wisdom gets grooved into the rings of our life. If we want quick answers, we’ve in the wrong game, because we can only gain spiritual wisdom on the long, sometimes weary, walk-through life itself.
“Hasten slowly & ye shall soon arrive,” said the Buddhist teacher Milarepa, many moons ago. Every ancient cypress tree had to pass the seasons; it could not know as a sapling what it knew at a hundred. Time takes time in the God game. There is no done and dusted quick and easy answers. The mystic poet Rilke captures this beautifully, so let’s give the last word on this post to him:
I beg you… to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot yet be yours because you could not live them.((Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1934), 35.))