Life Can Be Trusted

Life continues to show me that I can trust…that I can trust Life itself. It is easy to trust Life when everything is going tickety-boo. But what about when Life isn’t going as planned? Or when Life deals us a bad hand? Or when Life seems just damn hard, even cruel? Can we trust Life then?

I have shared in recent newsletters some of the challenges I have faced over the past year with my partner being plunged into long-term care, my selling our home, and moving into an apartment. It has been a challenging year indeed. But as I have also shared, it feels like there is a purification of sorts unfolding. And the longer I walk through this purification, the more I can trust that Life has me gently in His or Her hands and that I am being gently guided—although it feels anything but ‘gentle’ at times.

During a particularly trying day recently, as if on cue, Life offered me at article by Omid Safi, as published on Awakin.org. The article was titled “Don’t Leave Me Raw.” The article began as a beautiful parable about a woman cooking chickpeas in a pot of boiling water. When the woman dropped the chickpeas in the water, the chickpeas starting screaming and yelling to get out of the water, because the water was hot and the chickpeas were burning in the boiling water. The woman gently told the chickpeas that she would only take the chickpeas out of the water once the chickpeas were done cooking.

The parable was a metaphor for those times in our lives when we are going through challenging times and are too quick to want to get out of the ‘boiling water.’ We don’t want to experience the uncomfortable sensations of being burned. But the article goes on to talk about the essentialness of being cooked in these circumstances…

How often we end up being like this. We find the fire of love that cooks us, the fire that transforms us. We begin to cook, to ripen, to soften, and mature as human beings, only to turn away from the love. Being cooked is hard, letting go of our “raw”ness is painful. The ego cannot stand love, and it begs and pleads to be taken out of the fire of love. We stay half-baked, half-cooked, which is to say: half-raw.

To be taken inside another human being at this state causes everyone: indigestion.

We ourselves are the raw chickpea, we ourselves are the fire of love, and we ourselves are the mystic chef/lover who pushes us back into the flame.

May we have the heart, the courage (the word courage comes from root word for having heart) to go through the cooking. May we have the courage to commit ourselves to the flame. May we have the heart to finish our cooking, to make each of us worthy of being inside the heart of another fellow human being.

What a precious metaphor and teaching. Its presence in my life was timely to say the least! Let us have courage. Let us have the courage to let Life lead us through Life. Let us have the courage to trust…to trust in Life.

Robert Meagher has been ordained as an Interfaith Minister and certified as a Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) Therapist. Robert is the Founder and Spiritual Director for Spiritual Guidance and Co-Founder of the Center for Human Awakening.