Like attracts like
I was invited over to someone’s house the other day and when I arrived, I noticed first thing that sitting by the end table in the living room were two books – Eckhart Tolle’s The Power Of Now and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. Then I was led downstairs into an enchanting garden complete with tadpoles and koi.
Both men had been through something – I knew this before I arrived because what had drawn me to one was the postings he made on Facebook. When I met his partner, and heard their story, I knew they had clawed their way to the other side.
Yesterday, the a/c man came to check the unit because the seller had yet to get a sign off on the newly installed air conditioner. On one side of my chalk board I have C.S. Lewis’ quote that hardship prepares ordinary people for extraordinary lives. The man asked if he could take a picture of it. He said people don’t start their lives until they’ve been through something rough. I had to agree.
Last night, friends had come over and one, a handsome Black man, said his mother drilled into his head to say the 23rd Psalm, especially if he was in trouble. She worried about her son, about the possibilities of him dying while being Black, and she wanted some invisible force to protect him.
It’s no surprise his mother picked the 23rd Psalm because more than a prayer to God, it’s about going through something – the valley of death – and you get a keen sense that the Lord, the shepherd, is one with you, not separate from you.
Tolle said in The Power of Now:
The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as “My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false,” or Nietzsche’s famous statement “God is dead.”
The word God has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created, no longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and, yes, almost inevitably a male someone or something.
Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points. Does it point beyond itself to that transcendental reality, or does it lend itself too easily to becoming no more than an idea in your head that you believe in, a mental idol?
The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being.
A while back when I was in the throes of my change of life, I read Ram Dass at the recommendation of my friend, and I will never forget what he said about the journey – as you are moving away from your old way of thinking, you will leave behind people who are not open to your new way of life, but not to worry, you will attract people who are on the same path. And so I have.
I’ve thought often about this as so many have shown up in my life recently that are radiant and in tune with where I am now. And so going back to the psalm, and the reason why I’ve been so interested in it is that a friend called my attention to it a few weeks ago. I’ve been in the throes of changing a fifty year old habit – my nightly prayers.
For 50 years I have said, “Dear Lord, forgive me, if I have this day, done any wrong in work or play, always help me to do what’s right, watch over me all through the night, Amen.”
That’s no longer what I want to say. I want to say Wow, thanks for this fabulous life of mine, for my amazing son, for all the gifts I receive every day. And so I started writing my own prayer, instead of this one that my mother taught me.
But I keep coming back to the 23rd Psalm – it’s simplicity, it’s comforting feeling.
The lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
God has prepared a table for me – as Rabbi Harold Kushner interprets it to mean: “There were people to whom I turned to nourish me when I was getting through this hard time, and they weren’t there for me. And I would have felt deserted and abandoned if not for God. God nourished me spiritually the way my human friends were not able to.”
I say I found the God within me, the force that turned me into a girl on fire (again) and helped me reformat my entire life. As I told the a/c man in my kitchen, everything in my life I feared would happen, did, so I don’t fear much anymore.
I simply am. My friend who went back to Los Angeles said he can’t even bring up God in California because no one there wants to listen, but he’s made a decision that his next partner will be spiritual – as I have. Like attracts like. He told me to write on the other side of my chalk board “I am ___” and fill in the blanks with anything I want to attract to me.
