Introduction: The Gift

We all share a remarkable gift. It has been around for a long time--longer than any of us can remember. It is the gift of being human. A great part of the gift is finding it--the discovery of whom you really are. It is a gift of the Universe.

Humans--Homo sapiens--comprise the most diverse, creative species this Earth has ever created. Driven by our insatiable curiosity and need to understand--to find meaning--we have developed this quality into a great strength. However, it is both a blessing and a curse… we are at risk of annihilating ourselves because of the curse! To survive, we must turn every shred of it into a blessing--by choosing good over evil, love over hatred, and peace over conflict. We shall succeed as soon as we remember that our strengths and talents are a divine gift. Then we shall remember that all lives are sacred; for it is only by forgetting who we really are that we have arrived at the violence we perpetrate.

You and I--all of us--have been here since the beginning of time. The stuff of which we are made, and the time in which we find ourselves have been here since then. It does not matter how you define that beginning, be it Genesis 1:1, the Big Bang, or the cracking of the Cosmic Egg… they are all different interpretations of the same thing.

Neither you nor I created us. So, regardless of how we may feel about ourselves, let us agree to give ourselves permission to know that nothing in this created Universe is an accident. The Universe is an intentional Being that is the source of our bodies, our minds, our souls and our spirits--our being. To presume otherwise is dangerously naïve. To presume that we are but an accident is fatally flawed thinking that removes all meaning from our lives.

We humans who claim to be children of Abraham tend to believe that that Uncaused Cause, out ofwhich the Universe flashed into existence, is curious and bemused about our existence but is not involved in it. This is the legacy of the legend of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3 of the Bible, the Torah, and the Qur’an. Consider this hypothesis: all of the so-called “negative” experiences we have created, including our great wars, we have perpetrated on ourselves because of our fear that we are a shameful accident of creation. This is a perfect example of “stinkin’ thinkin’”… it presumes that the unmanifest Creator is incompetent. If the manifest Creation had ONE tiny flaw, it would wink out of existence. How quickly can we correct the error of our thought?

Let us choose to look at our lives differently. Let us see ourselves as gifted with those lives by the Creation, Itself, complete with all of their challenges. Henri Nouwen, Dutch Catholic priest and mystic (2006), has a four-part answer to the vital question, “Who are we?” He says we are a call, a blessing, a breaking, and a gift. He amplifies this by saying that we have been called to life by Life itself, and, being thus called, Life has blessed us. However, he continues, Life will break us, and out of our breaking, we have a gift to give life that is determined by how we see our breaking: if we see it as a curse, we will give a curse. If we see it as a blessing, we will give a blessing; so, he admonishes, put the breaking back under the blessing.

The early 20^th century German poet, Reiner Maria Rilke, admonishes us to “take our well-disciplined strengths and stretch them between two poles; for inside human beings is where God learns.” Later in that century, the French Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, tells us “our duty as (human beings) is to behave as if limits to our ability do not exist; for we are collaborators in creation.” These three, and others with like minds, are leading us to become aware of why the Universe created us. When I was a teenager, I saw that change was constant, and our experience of it was an indestructible gift to those with whom we shared it, and to the Creator, Itself. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry (The Song of the Universe) make a compelling case for this idea that “inside human beings is where God learns.”

Let us then adopt the attitude and belief that the life you and I share now is a divine gift promised at the beginning of time. Not too long after we are born, we forget how the Gift came to us. The challenge and reward of our life is to remember. This is our healing. When we realize that we are this divine Gift, our only response is to discover the ways in which we can return the gift--the way to serve--and “our rewards always come in exact proportion to the level and degree of our service (Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich)”. An infinite abundance delivers them to us. Knowing that abundance, we need only accept the rewards with gratitude, and live the life promised us from the beginning. It is all The Gift. Enjoy it; it is your blessing. Share it, as Stephen Post and Jill Neimark (When Good Things Happen to Good People) tell us, for in the giving lies the secret to healthy longevity.