Changing the Focus from this World

In junior high, I read a book by Marjorie Holmes, How Can I Find You God? This book inspired me to get on my knees and talk with God in prayer. I also began exploring different paths to God. A teacher introduced us to Buddhist meditation and I experimented, sitting cross legged on the floor of my bedroom chanting “Om”.

In high school we were given opportunities to travel to Quebec, Toronto, and England. In each place we explored the architecture and awe-inspiring structures dedicated to the worship of God. The cathedrals were dark and mysterious. I loved the candles, the pageantry, and the spirit of the places. In Toronto I bought a rosary and practiced praying with it. In Westminster Abbey in England, I saw a woman in prayer whose face shone with the Divine. I had never witnessed something so vulnerable, open, and beautiful.

I very much wanted to belong to a religious community and began a life-long search. Throughout these teenage years, my mornings began with prayer and playing hymns on our organ and singing along. I studied scriptures and prayed again before bed. My soul soared to God. He was with me in the night and walked with me in the day.

Photo by Jude Beck on Unsplash

Life is sacred. God’s perspective is different from ours; a mystery to the human mind. However, we have a spark of God within, placed there by Him. This spark is like a magnet in that it attracts us to our Creator. We desire to seek, cry out to, unite with, love, and serve Him/Her.

When this spark of desire is misplaced, when we do not understand that our beings need to unite with their Creator, the Divine within and without, when we ignore its promptings and urgings and transfer the longing from the Eternal to this world, we become insatiable. Because this world cannot fulfill desire that is for the Eternal, we become gluttons of this world … we place our desire on acquiring monies and the objects and services that monies can give us. We place our urgings on sexual unions not of the Eternal. Because the pain of unfulfilled longing of being connected our Creator leaves us empty and desperate, we drug ourselves, overeat, over-exercise, overwork, and overindulge in all kinds of worldly delights and pleasures. We even may singularly focus and work at an important cause. All this when we are really seeking union with the Eternal.

These objects of impermanence may give us moments of pleasure or feelings of success that equate to happiness in our minds, but these moments are fleeting so we are ever seeking the next, not knowing that to fill the longings we need only to humble ourselves before our Creator and to give Him/Her our hearts and to ask how we may serve, placing life in this world into an eternal perspective. The worldly delights that God has blessed us with are not given to fill our emptiness, but as gifts from our Creator for us to live in this physical realm. Thank the Giver of the gifts, enjoy the gifts as sacred, but no longer transfer the longings of the heart from the Giver to the gift. The gifts will fade and one will feel no fear of loss or pain when they leave, but will remain open to receive whatever else the Creator gives or does not give.

Cease to seek for that which is not eternal and place our hearts at the feet of God. That is my prayer for all those of the world, a world that is so often filled with fear and pain. It is so simple and yet, perhaps because of pride, we resist this humbling of ourselves and giving of our lives to God. As if the world could give us anything of substance that is even a shadow of the blessings showered upon us by the Divine. Why would we seek anything less? And I need to remind myself of this daily.