‘WHERE’s your God when my mum was in a care home not knowing where she was, surrounded by other people dying from cancer?’, a fun-loving but realistic gentleman I was talking with asked this week.
He wasn’t asking the question directly to me, but was referring to the fact that Mormons canvass at his door.
This is the classic ‘suffering’ question. How can there be an omnipotent, benevolent God in charge of the whole show when outrageously unjust and horrific things happen all around us?
First point I’d make is that understanding spirituality from the point of reference of a physical world doesn’t compute.
Neither does the version of spirituality presented by orthodox churches and religions.
We are spiritual beings having an experience in a physical world.
To accommodate the 3d reality here, we must take on a body and be removed from everything outside of this planet.
It’s very like human beings landing on the moon (I’m unsure whether we ever did, but that’s another story).
To do so, you need a spacesuit and need to conform to a different kind of existence.
You can’t just turn up in a shirt and tie and expect to live and move exactly the way we do here.
The moment we agree to come here and go through the ‘birth’ process, we forget who we really are.
For the purpose of this experience, we believe this physical world is all there is.
This is a universe where ‘free will’ is a binding principle and that applies here in our daily lives.
We have ‘free will’ to decide what we do, day by day, minute by minute.
But so does everyone else – and their decisions sometimes infringe on our lives.
Some of those decisions harm us, others benefit us.
The greed and lust for power we sometimes exhibit in our individual lives is reflected worldwide by the state of communities, even countries.
The perilous situation in our world today is a direct result of ‘free will’.
That’s why we are at war, or almost at war, with each other – in the same way as individuals jostle for position and power.
We have all the resources we could possibly need to feed, clothe and house everyone.
But some insist on grabbing as much as they can – and the result is some live in mansions, others die of malnutrition.
‘God’, or the divine, universal consciousness, ‘source’, however you refer to it, does not dramatically intervene as that would be a contradiction of ‘free will’.
But we can ask for help or guidance, as is our ‘free will’, and it will be given to us. Perhaps not in the form we expected!
The other apparent contradiction is that this is clearly a time-limited existence operating alongside ‘eternity’.
We are clearly not meant to live here forever.
Would we honestly want to?
So ‘death’ is a reality. But ‘death’ as we know it is merely another version of ‘birth’.
They are not opposites, as we commonly view them.
One is our form of transport into this physical world, the other our escape route from it.
Only then can we become reunited fully with whom we really are – a spiritual being.
It’s not a one-off extraordinary moment of enlightenment.
‘Free will’ still exists in our lives away from earth or, more accurately, on a frequency not needing a physical body.
At first, we may still believe all the same things we did whilst we were here.
I believe quite strongly that a lot of folk refuse to believe they are actually ‘dead’.
Seeing their own physical body motionless and without life but still being conscious makes no sense to them.
They have been materialistic all their lives and only believed in what they could see, touch and feel.
Their journey will be a gentle and slow one as, like all of us, they have to choose to move on.
My friend’s mum in the care home was at the beginning of her transition from the physical world to the spiritual.
Yes, she was suffering – and I can’t make light of that – but she was on the eve of being welcomed back to herself and, quite possibly, her god.
This physical life only makes sense in the context of a greater and eternal whole.
You’ll either ‘get it’ bit by bit, here and now and live with the joy of knowing who you are and the fact there is perfect justice within our greater existence – or it will come as the most incredible of surprises to you when you ‘die’, or are ‘re-birthed’.
As with all things, folks, it’s entirely up to you……..