Excerpt from Chapter 12
How Big Love Can Be
from The World is a Waiting Lover
© 2007 Trebbe Johnson, used by permission

Vincent Rossi, theologian and director of the Religious Partnership for Forest Conservation, has said, "Human nature only finds its true meaning in the Divine nature, which is to say that human nature only fulfills itself when it transcends itself." ¹ Nevertheless, despite the best of plans and intentions, despite the conviction that we follow a journey full of meaning, passion, and serendipity, giving away the gift of self can, like any big undertaking, be arduous at times. Even the Buddha felt some resistance to doing what he knew he had to do. After attaining enlightenment, he remained in a state of solitary bliss for several weeks. Then, when it began to occur to him how difficult it was going to be to communicate to others the truths that he had realized, he found himself wishing that he could just live out his life in the wilderness, alone and at peace, unattached to the strife and sorrow of the world. Such a choice was really never an option, though, and he knew it, for the first of the Four Noble Truths he had understood was that life is suffering. To remain in solitude, as if he could ignore the pain of the world, would have been to betray the very path that had been revealed to him. And so he deliberately delayed his own liberation, and chose instead to rebind himself to the endless wheel of earthly suffering for the benefit of others. This is the true meaning of compassion, an openness to all of life in all its forms. (Personally, I think the Buddha's small moment of reluctance to take on the gigantic task he knows is his alone gives the rest of us the opportunity to feel a special jolt of compassion for him.)

Foster and Little point out that the feelings of discouragement and powerlessness that beset someone setting out on a new path, particularly after a powerful transformative experience, are entirely natural, for "the inevitability, even the necessity of the darkness" must follow the brilliant flare of truth:

The hero/ine learns to live in two worlds. This is perhaps the most important teaching of the Vision Quest. One world is sacred, spiritual, eternal.... The other is mortal, material, and subject to change.

When the Vision Quest ends, the vision quest of life begins. The terms of this quest are that one learns to walk in balance between two worlds, that one seeks to conceive and then to give birth to vision. The willingness to be a channel of vision takes great courage and endurance, and is not lightly assumed. There will be times when you stumble and fall. Then you will want to crawl away to the sacred mountains. These are the times of the greatest potential, when you are looking the dragons square in the eye.²

Even Mother Teresa, who often described her passion for her work in the slums of Calcutta as stemming from being in love with Jesus, succumbed occasionally to despair over her inability to do more to help.

Overriding the discouragement, however, is the force that motivated action in the first place: love. If we court the Beloved regularly, we will come to fall in love with what we are doing, how we are doing it, and for who we do it, and this pervasive sense of love taps out the rhythm of how we proceed. Every step takes us closer and closer to the arms of the Beloved, and every step is a venture onto hallowed ground.

Discouragement, even despair, may accompany the passage, but they need not stymie it. For thirty years a Long Island, New York, native, Pete Maniscalco, has been undertaking periodic retreats of fasting and prayer in a tent he pitches on the beach in front of the Shoreham nuclear power plant. At first Pete's activism was meant to protest the construction of the plant. Later he wanted to call attention to serious flaws in its safety regulations. Now his intention is to elicit support for his vision of creating an educational and spiritual center in the wooded area behind the plant, which both his extensive historical research and his personal experience have led him to believe has been a sacred site for at least 4,500 years. Knowing that one cannot truly inhabit the sacred until one has stared into the face of the profane, this gray-haired grandfather sits in front of his little tent beneath the looming turquoise cooling towers as if they were holy icons. His efforts, and those of the other activists he's collaborated with, have succeeded in bringing about significant change: the plant has been decommissioned, and ratepayers won $40 million in the class-action lawsuit against the local power company. But for Pete there is still work to be done, and he is compelled to bring it about through his singular path of sacrifice, solitude, meticulous study, and activism. Through his vigils before the nuclear facility he performs what Kant called a beautiful act. A beautiful act is different from a strictly moral act, although certainly they can be one and the same. One performs a moral act because he has to, Kant argued, but takes a beautiful act because he is compelled to do so out of love. Under such circumstances, nothing is too difficult.

And, in undertaking, we find we gain strength, inspiration, and courage where we did not know they existed. I was guiding a vision quest in Scotland on September 11, and our group did not even learn the terrible news until four days later, when, dirty and jubilant, we surged into a tea shop overlooking the green, undulant bens, the mountains of the highlands. That night, back at the yoga center, where we had begun the quest, we sat before a blazing fire in the hearth, and each person in the group — a mix of Scottish, Irish, Swiss, and Americans — imagined how they would take their vision home to their people under the weight of this new and unmistakable evidence that, truly, the world was in desperate need of compassionate authenticity. I, too, took part in the exercise and immediately saw myself leading a ceremony at Ground Zero for everyone in the city of New York. The event, held two months after the attacks, was called Attending the City. One feature of it was a commitment made by each person present to bring an act of beauty and compassion to the city within one week. One man decided to bake lasagna and take it to his distirct fire department, which had lost several men when the World Trade Center collapsed. Another would go out to dinner with friends at a neighborhood Afghani restaurant and make a point of letting the owners know that they continued to be a valued part of the community. A woman who had written a poem about the city after the attacks said she would distribute it as widely as she could — on streetlights, walls, and in the impromptu memorials that had sprung up all over the city since the attacks. Another woman would adopt a pet whose owner had been killed. Who knows how many people those acts of love and beauty, laid down in a storm of sorrow, touched?

As for me, the organizing of that event demanded that I negotiate paths I had never before had to travel: renting audio equipment, getting permits from the Parks Department and the local police precinct, asking the Hilton Hotel to donate pens so people could write prayers on the red ribbons I then begged from a merchandiser in the Fashion District, distributing flyers all over the city. But, for once, my ignorance of what questions I needed to ask did not deter me. I was fired with the need to do this thing, and convinced that people would want to help me out. And so they did, so they did.

In the company of the Beloved, we are not depleted by the outpouring of self, but energized by it. Then we can make choices about what matters to us and willingly sacrifice anything that would get in the way of our movement toward it. We modern Westerners do not like the notion of sacrifice. We want what we want when we want it, and we don't care to give anything up to get it. (...T)he Latin roots of the word sacrifice actually mean "to make sacred", so letting go of something we value makes it sacred. The void it leaves will, we hope, be filled with something of even greater value. Hence sacrifice becomes a choice we gladly make. Even though one gives with the anticipation that what is offered will be received and replaced with something else, the giving itself is an act of love. Sacrifice is not asceticism, Rumi pointed out, but love. The Norse god Odin sacrificed his right eye in exchange for the more sublime visionary powers of memory and premonition. Later, seeking an even greater trade of human for divine, he hung himself like an ornament for nine days and nights upon the World Tree, Yggdrasil, that he might be granted the highest mystical wisdom. Majnun gave up social acceptance, rank, and the comfortable mores of the tribe to pursue his beloved Layla with all the wild passion his soul demanded. Vision questers voluntarily sacrifice food, shelter, company, and diversion for three days and nights in order to be empty and available for intensified dialogues between outer and inner nature. A woman I know, Marcelle Martin, whose life centers on writing and leading prayer gatherings for Quakers, has chosen to rent out rooms in her home, take public transportation instead of driving a car, and buy her clothes in thrift shops, that she might have the time and independence to pursue the callings she loves and that do not pay much.

According to Hopi myth, the creator endowed each person with a miniscule hole at the top of their head, a doorway through which they might receive the guidance of spirit. I like to imagine that we also have tiny vents at the tips of our fingers out of which this abundant guidance, after getting heated up in the furnace of the soul, can radiate forth to others. If we hold inspiration's bounty within, we lose touch with reality and become self-obsessed; giving it away indiscriminately, we get depleted. But by leaving both doors open, we welcome the love and guidance of the Beloved and sluice it forth. The result is a constant stream of engagement with the one and the many, the divine and the ordinary, the giver and the receiver. Writing ecstatically of her soul's rendezvous with the young Christ who came to her in visions, Mechtilde of Magdeburg described the sense of renewal she experienced with each ardent encounter: "The more He gives her, the more she spends, the more she has.... The more the fire burns, the more her light increases. The more love consumes her, the brighter she shines."³

References:
1. Vincent Rossi, "Original Sin," Parabola 8, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 17.
2. Steven Foster, with Meredith Little, The Book of the Vision Quest (Spokane, WA: Bear Tribe Publishing, 1987), 53 - 54.
3. Quoted in John P. Dourley, Love, Celibacy, and the Inner Marriage (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1987), 35.