You can’t have it all.  I know, I know.  People are all the time saying, “I want it all.”  But you can’t have it.  This is where my Buddhist side kicks in, I guess.  It’s the constant desire that makes people unhappy.  And you don’t have to take my word for it.  About having it all, I mean.  The Catholic Church backs me up on this.  There are seven sacraments.  If you follow the rules most strictly, no one can receive all seven.  Holy orders and marriage, at least for much of church history, have been mutually exclusive.  As Paul was rattling on about spiritual gifts in one of his letters, he makes the point that nobody gets them all.  And you don’t even get to choose.  

Humans are acquisitive.  It’s probably an evolved trait.  Think of squirrels hoarding more acorns than they can ever eat.  (By the way, squirrels are the real heroes when it comes to planting trees, and they don’t even mean to do it.  It just comes naturally.)   Life gives us what we need for as long as we have time on this earth.  If you’re reading this you’re living proof.  We fear for the future, however.  What if tomorrow something I need goes away?  I’ve lost jobs and I know the desperation that immediately sets in.  So we want to store up more than we need.  But those sacraments.  Those spiritual gifts.  They remind us of something important.  Something a carpenter from Galilee once said.  It’s essentially the same as therapists have told me: be in the moment.  You have what you need right now.  As a coda: tomorrow will take care of itself.

Those of us who can’t stand incompletion (don’t show me a series of books with one missing!  Please don’t.) suffer from this quite a lot.  Here’s where we need to nod to Siddhartha again and take a deep breath.  Center yourself.  When I was a seminarian discovering Roman Catholicism for the first time, really, and that mostly through the Episcopal Church, I wondered about the sacraments and why, if they were things we should strive for, we couldn’t have them all.  By seminary I was pretty sure I wanted the matrimony route.  As my wife can attest, however, I still crave a monastic existence from time to time.  Torn between two sacraments and I’m not even a Catholic.  I guess I’ve known all along that you can’t have it all.  Those who try for it, if they’re lucky, end up under the Bodhi tree.