Ask, Seek, Knock.

I remember being told at the impressionable age of five or so that we could not possibly hide from God. He saw everything we did, heard everything we said, and He even knew everything that we thought. I was amazed. I imagined digging a small hole in my back yard - just big enough for my small self to fit into - climbing in and covering myself with dirt, and knowing He could still see me! I think it was that same year that I asked my mommy about a pregnant lady sitting on the green crushed velvet couch of our family living room in Springfield, Illinois: "Mommy, why is that lady so fat?" I was told "She swallowed her purse." I saw that she had no purse, and, disarmed by my mother's typically quick and convincing response, I was too dumbfounded by the possibility that it might just be true to ask any further questions.

It was perhaps a decade or two before I had the information to understand the truth about the fat lady's purse. When I finally put personal experience with fat, pregnant ladies together with that long-forgotten question of my childhood, I felt a very satisfying relief: a deeply buried, if minor disturbance was quelled. It was like a forgotten splinter had finally come out. As for the little boy in his little hole in the backyard, he has spent nearly four decades in that hole wondering and waiting for his relief.

Relief did ultimately come, thank God, but not without a strong and steady undercurrent of confusion and doubt through the years of waiting. You see, I had also been told, and gullibly believed, that God loved me. All powerful God, Merciful. I could call him my friend. But how could I, in the "hole" I called my life, believe that an All Merciful, Loving God was watching?

It was not much later in my young life, reading Catechism in the third grade, that I learned I there might be practical value in being able to talk back to this incredible, all-seeing God. I was told "Ask, and ye shall receive. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and it will be opened unto you." This seemed like an awful lot to expect, but I was still at an age when I believed that Santa Claus could drop down the chimney with gifts once a year, so why not? My understanding was that God's workshop could crank out a lot of amazing stuff--including Santa Claus and the North Pole and any number or flying reindeer to boot.

You may anticipate my disappointment when Christmas came that year, but I sure did not. When I wrote my letter to Santa Claus, I read it to God for double insurance. My ecstatic confidence was crushed when neither pony nor Roy Rodgers outfit materialized, not to mention all the other great stuff I didn't get.

When I asked my mother about it, she said that God (and, I suppose, Santa) wanted me to have what was "best" for me. She said that even if I didn't understand why I couldn't dress like Roy Rogers, I should certainly understand that a Pony would never be happy in the city. So, what happened to "Ask and ye shall receive"? Was there a secret that God was keeping from me? Meanwhile, I suspected that mother was against my having a pony. Was it possible that she'd prayed against Santa's bringing it? I mean, just exactly who gets first dibs on "receiving"? It was as if I had a splinter in my foot that I could not get out, and which my mother insisted I live with.

Another irritating splinter was added in the year after I graduated from College. I had moved to the beautiful western mountains of Washington State with the idea of taking a year to "find myself" before going on to law school. I began to wander from my Christian roots a bit. I read about "Create your own reality." I heard people could have whatever they wanted just by "positive thinking!" I joined this with Christ's saying "These things and more you can do," "Ye can move mountains..." I read "Think and Be Rich." I remembered splendor granted to the lilies of the field. I was told "hold the idea in mind, and it will happen!"

I tried everything - without ever thinking that what I was doing was some variation on the praying implied in the admonition to ask, seek and knock. Ultimately, I was satisfied that some of this stuff actually worked. To put it simply, I could that asking yielded receiving - but I could still not see exactly how. Also, I guess I wanted the one-to-one sort of instant correlation that Jesus and his apostles had gotten. I spent a lot of time wondering and wandering.

It was while I was reading a novel that I picked up that third splinter. In that now-forgotten book, some minor character was reported as being a bit crazy, spending all his life trying to live up to Saint Peter's admonition to "Pray without ceasing." From my angle of approach, this became splinter which caught deeply.

I'd always considered Saint Peter to be a pretty serious guy - I didn't think he was kidding about this. I was just as gullible as ever, and this splinter went in as deeply as any other had. I began to wonder if there might be a link to my constant connection with the eyes of God and the making of miracles. If it was possible to pray without ceasing, what, or who, would be praying while I was asleep. What could Peter really mean? I could see, praying while I was washing the dishes, or while I was driving to the airport, but how do I do it while I'm calling the cat? What about when I am sleeping on the couch?

Some Christian friends told me that I was taking it all too literally: "Lighten up," they said. "Pray whenever you can, and remember to be thankful for everything." Did I listen? No. I just continued to wander and wonder and wait for clarification.

In the meantime, rather than waiting around for doors to open after I knocked, I decided I'd better take business into my own hands. I left Washington state, foreswore my legal ambitions, canoed down the Mississippi River, and ultimately found myself in the carpentry profession in Iowa City, Iowa. For years I worked my own business and made an excellent living. I picked up plenty of splinters that I could actually remove with a tweezers, and I more or less forgot about my small collection of metaphysical splinters. I could sense I was getting help in my life every now and again, but I was not convinced that God was always aware of me as I lived on in the "hole" of my life. Moreover, try as I might, I still had not found a convincing correlation between what I "prayed" for and what I got.

Then, one sunny day in early March while I was looking out my window at the beautiful New England coastline, I got something! I was trying to visualize how All That Is (I said I'd wandered) might more fully manifest Its power and perfection in my life. It was on my mind that everything emanates from All That Is, even those things that we judge to be good or evil. I was also considering what I'd heard from Eastern philosophy that the "Tao" was an undifferentiated unity of perfection and that the "Te" were its manifestations brought about by a splintering of the great "Un-carved Block". How could I get "All That Is" to deliver me all the "Te" of my dreams? For that matter, why didn't I already have them? All these splinters were agitating at once.

There was a cut crystal hanging on a fishing line in my window and wiggling restlessly as the sun's heat rose along the inside of the pane. It sprinkled the room with a multi-colored spray of light. By chance, a purple light beam came to rest for several seconds on my eye. I looked down this beam of light at the crystal and wondered if I would go as blind as if I were looking directly into the sun. I looked around me(to avoid going blind)at all the dancing colors on the walls and furnishings of my "hole" and wondered. Perhaps God's power was like the light of the sun, shining purely and equally onto and into everything, and perhaps I was like the crystal, uniquely cut by "nature and nurture" to "create" selected bits of color from that pure light, shining these onto the walls of my hole life as I found it

After years of wandering and wondering, I'd finally realized a way to see an intimate unity between God, my own being, and the physical reality with which I had to deal every day. How could it be that I was unhappy with the lights that danced around me? Why couldn't I find a better-paying job? Why couldn't I fit into my old blue jeans? There must be something awry within the system.

First I thought of polishing the crystal so that nothing of God's power and beautiful perfection would be lost on the way through. I soon realized that the light would always remain divided into its component colors as long as the crystal existed at all. Could I "meditate" the crystal out of existence so that only the pure light came through the space that had been occupied by the crystal? It seemed like I, myself, might have to go out of existence with that plan. I decided I was not up for that, if it were even possible.

I somehow found enough faith to concede that perhaps I was on earth living, as it were, as this very particular cut of crystal for some very particular reason. There must be something right about my very particular life, and that I'd best stay with the project until I knew what exactly it was. Meanwhile, I got to wondering how I could, or did, effect the "colors" I saw in the world around me.

That's when I felt a jab from the quietly festering "constant prayer" splinter. Looking at that crystal at that inspired moment, I realized that it was my condition as a whole that comprised my prayer: my state of mind, my habits of thinking and reacting, the overall state of my conscious and unconscious desires. Just as I was approaching mental overload, I realized that whether I liked it or not, I was indeed always praying, and God's light-power was always granting. The blue sky was beautiful, the couch was soft, the house was warm with the late afternoon sun. I fell asleep.

When I awoke, it was nearly dark. There was still a hint of red and purple in the sky outside my window. The far end of the color spectrum, I thought, passing through the filter of the atmosphere. My eye caught the crystal again, and I was again overcome with the incredible responsibility of my constant prayer. Who could handle such a thing? Well, was anyone actually NOT doing it?

I walked to the window and held the crystal in my hand. Still only half-awake, I saw a drop of paint on one side and spontaneously thought of the belief in limitation; the frosting of dust over it suggested fear and doubt. I looked to the interior of the crystal and saw that some hard drops to the floor had introduced internal cracks and fissures; suggesting to me the reality of separation and the feeling of powerlessness. I also saw, in its many finely cut facets, the highest of my aspirations and dreams; the calling of my in-born purpose; and, as well, the joy to be found in simple pleasures - not least of which was the seashore and the beautiful sunset outside my window.

As I considered all of this, a hint of bitterness arose: so many of my prayers had been left unanswered. I immediately understood that they had not. I realized that I had painted upon that surface enough contradictory images or prayers, that God's power, ever-enabling what we hold up before His glorious light, could give me only all of them at once. The powerful light made no selection, no judgment, no choice. It just gave me everything I believed I could have.

Since that day, I have been calmly and carefully watching developments in my life. I no longer doubt that my prayers are answered. In fact I am often amazed and entertained to see just what I have been praying for as the answers come rolling in. I have worked to polish and clean my crystal as best I can, and I have accepted guidance and healing for the cracks and fissures that my life has wrought.

In the years since that day of the dancing lights, I have wondered why I must cling to the image of the crystal. Perhaps it is because the snowflake-like uniqueness of each crystal; this is as close as I have ever gotten to expressing a belief in fate. Yet who has not wondered, like me, what part we take in creating the crystal plan of this life? And as for fate, I now willingly accept that dust and paint splatters that life and my loved ones lay on me. I yield to the compromise that is life, while I know that at any time all I have to do is ask, seek or knock, and I WILL get a response.