Hidden deep inside the post-Summer of Love lyrics of the Rolling Stones 1969 hit “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” we find a microcosm of spiritual life, hiding among the words of the familiar refrain:

You can’t always get what you want,
You can’t always get what you want,
You can’t always get what you want,
But if you try sometimes, you  might find
You get what you need.

Most days, the items on our want list far exceed the necessities. I once had a corporate mentor explain the decision process on doing the horrible tasks of running a business (anything from cleaning the toilets on Sunday morning to firing your business partner who was also a cherished friend) as:

“If your life depended on it, could you do it?”

Sometimes our spiritual path may lead us to ask the other half of that question:

If your life depended on it, could you do without?

The discernment between the two is never easy, and is a path filled with hurt feelings, (both physical and emotional) poverty, or just a path before us strewn with a whole bunch of “gotchas” that will (as the Stones would have described it) bring us down.

The discernment comes to us in our times of quiet when we give ourselves a chance to listen more than to ask, when we pray with our hands open to release our pain rather than cupped to receive a present, and when we stay within the “Prayer Closet” until we begin to add to the arsenal of things that we need to make the universe better, rather than our wish list of things to make us feel better.

In the end, creating that change within us and then outward to the world, that is where the feel-good comes from.

A prayer:

Christ Jesus,

Sometimes,
we think we do not have
what we need
to move forward in our lives.

But you send us
the Holy Spirit,
who awakens
vitality in us.

The Spirit
makes us free to
love evermore
those whom you entrust to us.

- Amen

Keep the faith!