Spiritual People, please stop naming and blaming the Universe.

Today as I lay with my leg up in a moon boot after breaking the base of my fibula, I am starting to count the number of times people call upon the Universe to explain the unexplained. This week alone in response to my broken bone, I have heard some variation of it four times (and I have hardly seen a soul). “Maybe the Universe is telling you to slow down”. “I know I said I would come, but you know (gasp) the Universe has other plans”. Sense check: When people’s distant hands type their messages from the Universe or their eyes wander into the recesses of Father Sky as they declare, “The Universe must be sending you a message”, I feel both isolated and also desire to run off to where I cannot hear the next truly unhelpful thought.

After seventeen years of working in the wellness world, I have heard “Universal Truths” laid upon many people’s cold realities like an itchy wool blanket. Thanks, but no thanks. “The Universe” has become code for many things like blame, shame, avoidance of responsibility, spiritual bypassing, and self appointed credentials. The poor Universe tends to be responsible for everyone’s procrastination, tardiness, and throwing up of the hands at the sight of catastrophe. The Universe is also seemingly awarding the more enlightened with their greater material fortunes by law of attraction. It’s usually a full stop, one-sided conversation, where after the Universe postulates the reasons for it all, there are no further questions asked — they sign off or walk off, looking more relaxed, happy, whimsical, even smug.

From the smallest life questions to greatest collective grief, people speak about enormously nuanced mysteries with the authority of the Universe at their back. Lately I have been informed, through these mediums, the reason for the Covid 19 pandemic — things like “The Universe is weeding out fear and replacing it with love” and “The Universe is preserving people who are protected by higher vibrations”. (Are you cringing yet? I hope so. I know some very spiritually engaged people who have died from the virus, though to my knowledge there was not anyone measuring the frequency of their vibration). It is okay that you don’t know a singular reason for every single life, death, or misfortune on this planet. The fact that you are simply here living to tell about your ideas…