Experiencing Life

Spiritual Optimism

“Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.

Jump into the experience while you are alive!

Think...and think...while you are alive.

What you call 'salvation' belongs to the time before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you are alive,

do you think

ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic

just because the body is rotten--

that is all fantasy

What is found now is found then.

If you find nothing now,

you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.

If you make love with the divine now, in the next life

you will have the face of satisfied desire.”

                                              Kabir

I love this poem by the Kabir, the mystic poet of India. It tells us the importance of looking life in the face, of developing our spiritual lives right here, right now, and not putting it off because we are too busy. We Americans tend to think that our work defines us, that we are here to do a job. Kabir sweeps that away without the slightest hesitation, saying get into your life as an experience of the divine, love the spiritual optimism that underpins your life. Live it now; don't wait to be 'saved' at the end, having denied life and love all the way through.

I went to see the movie, Trouble with the Curve, last night. It was ostensibly about an old man, Clint Eastwood, losing his eyesight and his young daughter, Amy Adams, trying to help him scout some high school baseball players for the Braves. The story was really about the relationship between father and daughter—about unfinished business—about the misunderstandings and misconceptions we all come into adulthood with. Some of us never confront them, never resolve them, and carry them to our graves as wounds to the spirit. That is a shame and a waste. Whether or not we are able to work through our wounding with a parent, we can surely work through it with a counselor or pastor. The hardest thing to grasp is that it is our work to do, and not our parents' work.

To tell you the truth, I don't know how people get through life without a connection to spirit; without a deep and abiding faith that through all the twists and turns that life brings, there is something profound that holds us in the palm of its hand. Something bigger than we even have names for, who will be with us every step of the way. If you don't feel it now, keep asking to feel it and sooner or later, you will. I guarantee it.

                                                  In the spirit,

                                                   Jane