David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2019 by David Spangler. If you no longer wish to receive these letters, please let us know at info@Lorian.org.
The other night I awoke to the darkness of our bedroom. Peering blearily at the clock, I could see, without my glasses, that it was sometime between three and four am. I’m normally an early riser; getting up by five-thirty is not unusual for me. But three or four in the morning? I’d rather not!
I snuggled under the covers and tried to get back to sleep, but my mind decided to play the traitor to my intent. The more I tried to still my thoughts, the more they swirled around with rambunctious glee, gathering in number and intensity. This might have been OK had they been pleasant thoughts. As many others before me have found, though, whatever mental vault we may have in which to store our worries, its door seems timed to open and release its contents when the clock strikes three am.
Normally, when I find myself beset with worrying thoughts, I can respond with humor and a generally optimistic perspective, transmuting them before they can take hold. But this night, that part of me had apparently not awakened or had happily gone back to sleep, leaving the rest of me to entertain my troublesome visitors.
So, I lay there and worried. These days, with climate change, a Presidential election, and the general state of the world, there’s plenty to worry about, and that’s before I get into the personal stuff! I could feel myself working up a fine lather of depression and anxiety.
At this point, I decided I should just get up, get moving with my day, and bring the brighter parts of my consciousness back online. Yet, I was loathe to surrender the warm bed for the cold house and give up on a possibility, however fast it was fading, that I could get a couple more hours of sleep.
Lying there, I decided to turn my attention to my subtle colleagues, sending out an appeal for help with the depressed energies I was churning up around myself. In that moment, I couldn’t help but remember a scene from Dicken’s A Christmas Carol where Scrooge, confronted by Marley and his dire warnings, pleaded, “Speak comfort to me!”
At that moment, it seemed like the whole house around me went still. My worries paused in their scampering, and I could feel the presence of a deep stillness nearby. Ah, it’s working, I thought to myself. Help is coming.
In fact, in the next moment, a being of Light burst upon my consciousness, its presence very clear and defined in the room around me. But instead of the compassionate “Oh, it’s OK, David; everything will be all right” embrace of love and encouragement I was hoping for, I realized this being was impersonal, its energy stimulating. I could sense that it was a loving presence but in a no-nonsense, almost stern way, a power with which to be reckoned. It came close and spoke, and its voice and words, while gentle, were clear and uncompromising. This is what it said:
“I do not come to bring comfort to the personality. I come that the personality may itself be a source of comfort.”
That was it. And having delivered this message, the being withdrew, leaving me feeling as if I’d just had a cold shower and was now shivering but invigorated. I was filled with a sense of “there’s work to be done in the world, so get over yourself!” Which, of course, put paid to any thought of going back to sleep.
I’ve thought of those words a lot in the weeks since I had this experience. Even more than before, I find myself on the alert to see ways in which I can be a source of comfort for others whom I meet or for the things and nature around me. Comfort can take many forms: kindness, listening, honoring, offering a vision of hope. It can even take the form of telling someone what they may not wish to hear but which you know will be helpful.
Mostly, though, I look harder at the work that I do to find ways to help others discover themselves as sources of comfort. With all that’s going on in the world these days, it’s not at all remarkable that we look for comfort, but if we’re all looking for it and no one is standing in their power to be comfort, to be hope, to be joy, to be love, to be vision, to be strong and calm, then where will we find it?
I think we each have the ability to bring that healing to each other and to our world when we can be a source of comfort. We have the power to say that we are here not to be comforted but to comfort, not to be served but to serve. The miracle is that when we make this our calling, we discover that comfort becomes our companion as well.