I’m not an original thinker.  Spending most of my life trying to understand my own spiritual journey and helping others understand theirs, I have listened to many voices:  some in conversation, some in books and articles, some from lecturers and in seminars and sermons and some in counselling sessions with people who are hurting.  Whatever wisdom I have is part of a collective of what many many people have discovered themselves and offered to others to help them on their way through life.

People have invited me into their lives to help answer some of their questions.  Behind most of the questions people ask is one word.  Why.  That word is spoken out of a longing to understand our circumstances and a desire for accountability.  When we ask “Why?” we are assuming that someone knows the answer and that someone is accountable to us for what happened.

I long ago gave up on trying to describe or access a satisfactorily comprehensive philosophical or religious theory to explain the why.  Every explanation seems to point to an unanswered mystery or blames the victim or tries to corkscrew a way through God to get to some ephemeral truth.   Of course we want mysteries solved.  We know that none of us are fully the authors of our suffering.

Most of us come to the conclusion that we may or may not arrive at an answer to the question.  We make an uneasy peace with ambiguity.

Once you release yourself from trying to understand “Why?” you make room for the more pressing question, “What am I going to do now?”  I hope that you have found or will find someone around you who re-phrases the question into “What are we going to do now?” A few of us want to have every opportunity to be by ourselves to recover.  Most of us want to know that we are not going to have to face a painful future alone.  We won’t.  Everybody hurts.

If you’ve ever sat around a campfire with others you know how easy it is to talk about nothing and everything.  You might be with a group of kids at a summer camp, watching the embers glow in a rusty truck wheel in a campground, on a beach after sunset, at a cottage with your fishing buddies or in a Provincial Park leaning against a canoe.  There may be marshmallows dropping into the fire or you may be sipping instant coffee made out of lakewater (the only time instant coffee ever tastes good).  The topic of conversation doesn’t matter, there may not be any conversation at all.  You’re just there listening to each other or the night around you and it’s peaceful.  I’d like this blog to offer a few minutes here and there of sitting round a campfire together.  Pull up a log, grab a blanket to wrap around you or a stick to poke at the coals.  Draw closer to someone else or sit off by yourself a bit, put your feet close to the heat or find a place where the flames barely illuminate your face.