Becoming ONE

"In the face of everything life has to offer, to become ONE with the Universe each of us must share in its confusions and work through its conundrums to the point of spiritual maturity."   ~ Welcome to the Wisdom of the World ~


Interesting to realize that I was thrust into DEEP spiritual thinking at a remarkably young age.  At age 7, I was introduced to the first GREAT SPIRITUAL TRUTH that I can recall hearing.  


At 11, my brother, Ian, died a sudden, violent death.  Death & violence at his best friend's house, where they'd been horsing around, as 11 year old boys do.  


Gone.  


And there I was, at 7, left to make some sense of it.  Left, I realize now, with a family whose approach to any sort of upset was to turn aside from the unpleasant.  (For all the years after that unimaginable calamity, Mom would tell about how she had to put aside her own feelings to be support for the parents of his best friend, who felt overwhelmed with grief that it had happened in their house, under their watch.  I saw my father weep over Ian's death, never Mom.)


So how splendid it was that Kenneth Stroh - only Kenneth Stroh - made the time to talk openly and forthrightly to a little girl about the big reality that her brother was gone.  And when I asked him how Ian would look when I saw him in heaven (was I wondering if there'd still be a gunshot wound to his head?), "Mr. Stroh" explained that he wouldn't look like the Ian that I knew in this life, but that I'd recognize him immediately by his loves.


And that answered what was apparently my biggest question.  It worked.  And worked incredibly well.  Although at 60 years, am still a little awed by how fully my 7-year old understood & accepted what Ken said.  Incredible that a really little kid was comfortable with BIG QUESTIONS - to which I also expected good sound answers.    


It wouldn't be until the early 1990s that the 7-year old's connection with BIG QUESTIONS came back to the fore.  Forty years - wow!  Oh, I kept asking them, just never got any answers.  So I figured it was something amiss me, with my lack of any intellectual depth.


Sometimes I grieve those lost years, when I could have been collecting a range interesting experiences & knowledge, as much as I do my lost brother.  I never developed the quality of mind that opens up & extends conversations that revolve around ideas & concepts.  Never developed a storehouse of topics & life experiences which could serve as bridges to others.  Some part of me still yearns to be the sort of person others enjoy talking with over a lingering glass of wine, but I never learned the grace of charming, engaging conversation.  


Here comes the all-glorious BUT  ~  whatever I turned out to be is what John Richard Murphy fell in love with & married.  And that trumps every other wish for something else I might have entertained at one time or another!!!


And why was I allowed the great gift of GETTING that we're created in order to share in life's confusions, to work through its conundrums, that only by so doing can we get to the point of spiritual maturity, of oneness?  It felt - still feels - like others around me were invested in brushing aside the very things I perceived as learning tools, as paths for getting to ONE.  


Which leads me to, "(Our spiritual process) is the task of becoming awake to the Divine, to the natural, to the wisdom that even now lies within us, waiting only to be tapped."  ~ Welcome to the Wisdom.... ~