Of agony and ecstasy

An old friend from my evangelical days asked me what a Unitarian Universalist minister would tell somebody with a terminal illness, maybe a painful cancer. In his own religious background he would have known what to expect: consolation of another life to come, a God who has a purpose for this suffering. I told him I had no answer: no explanation, no promise.

I admit that sometimes we feel kind of naked without an explanation and without a promise. But less false. No reckoning with Life can begin until the delusions are stripped away. Religious people are famous for delusions, things you say, not because you believe them, but because that is what you say, are supposed to say, expected to say, and who knows what will happen if you don't say them.

Never mind that the easy explanations and the promises are dismissive: you hear them, and you know your agony has been, to some extent, dismissed. It is agony. It is Life and Life cannot be explained away, nor can promises be made on its behalf.

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Let us see what happens when we look at Life without the illusions we all use to console ourselves, so that in looking, we do not see. But if when we look, we see, there is immense crisis.

We are dying in a dying body in a dying world, which is being torn apart and our dreams with it, disappointed by forces that make us feel as though our finest efforts are like going to the beach and making castles out of the sand;—no, not of the sand, of the water.

Some of you work in with people in difficult circumstances: it is your life-work, and you are devoted to it. Some are devoted to the work of expanding the circles of human community, so that there are no more pariahs and outcastes and Love displaces Fear. Whatever you do, the evidence comes in daily of the enormity of the suffering, the enormity of the sheer force of fear, resentment, hate.

You do not have to look that far. You used to be able to run 10 miles easily, and now a single mile exhausts you. It isn't fair—I propose that the unraveling associated with age be transferred to some other period of life, maybe adolescence—so our last years can feel like a great reward to look forward to, all troubles long since over with. Good idea?

So I was struck by the force of a few words, penned seven centuries ago by the Sufi poet Rumi—

How much the beloved made me suffer before the work
grew entwined inseparably with my blood and eyes!
A thousand grim fires and heartbreaks—
And its name is "Love" —
A thousand pains and regrets and attacks
And its name is "Beloved."

If the incense and candles do not burn, what use would they be?

O Friend, Love must have a little anguish! The heart must be broken!

The place of darkness and cold
Is the fountain of life and the cup of ecstasy.

A heartbreak shakes the yellow leaves from the branch of the heart
So fresh green leaves can go on and on growing. . . .
Heartbreak pulls up the roots of old happinesses
So a new ecstasy can stroll in from Beyond.

Now — Freud dismissed the kind of thing Rumi is talking about. Convinced materialist that he was — the body was all; some oceanic sense of oneness, some larger existence, didn't make any sense to him, a neurosis. All relationships, to him, had to involve the body. A kind of "wholeness" or "unity" that couldn't be traced to, or linked with, the body, was nonsense to him.

Sure, the simple dogmas of traditional religion often replace the facing of reality with delusion. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this one day in 1923 to a troubled Countess:

Woe to them that are consoled . . . for even time does not console as one superficially says, at most it arranges, sets in order, and only because we later so little heed the order toward which it so quietly collaborates. . . . What we have to do is to face the cruelty of life, and I reproach all modern religions for having handed to their believers consolation and glossings over of death, instead of administering to them the means of reconciling themselves to it and coming to an understanding with it, with its full, unmasked cruelty.

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Yet in Rumi, and Hafiz, and William Blake, and Rilke too, what is at work here is a piece of sublime religious imagination. But imagination is among our highest human-divine capacities. There is more to our existence than we can see and measure. It's more comfortable to us to affirm things that we can kick and they go thunk, but there is more to reality. Mathematics are real, even if you cannot touch them. And what, pray tell, is gravity, or the electromagnetic force? There is more, far more.

So Rumi says he is in love. And Hafiz, St. John of the Cross, and a steady succession of mystics and visionaries. Life is something — that has a "Someone" quality for them.

A thousand grim fires and heartbreaks—
And its name is "Love:—
A thousand pains and regrets and attacks
And its name is "Beloved."

There is an essential hunger in us for imagination and vision because these human-divine powers heal us from our wounds and, far more, turn our wounds into something transformative so that we realize something more of what inwardly, implicately, we are.

So Rilke — in that letter I was reading from just then — continues:

This cruelty is so tremendous that it is just with it that the circle closes. It leads right back into the extreme of a mildness that is great, pure, and perfectly clear as we have never surmised mildness to be, not even on the sweetest spring day.

How is it that this cruelty leads back to a mildness great and pure and perfectly clear? He is bearing witness to something utterly real in human experience. There is indeed something at work in our suffering — if we can imagine it and trust it a little, and work with it.

This religion, this religious community of ours, has so much to do with holy imagination. We dream a world more fair than the one that so notably surrounds us everyday with its greed and warfare. We imagine a quality of wholeness that leads us beyond the pitiful question "Why?" that can plague us in our bad times; leads us on to the creative question Why Not. But simultaneously we must live our private lives with the same imagination, treating our lives as our primary artworks. Our religious imagination is essential to our health.

We are more than we know, more than has yet been realized. The Self that we are is more than we know, more than our conscious ego, the creation of energies we cannot see. It is that perception that lies behind these words of Rumi:

Everything you see has its roots
In the Unseen world,
The forms may change,
yet the essence remains the same.

Every wondrous sight will vanish,
Every sweet word will fade.
but do not be disheartened,
The Source whence they come is eternal—
giving new life and new joy.

Why do you weep?
That Source is within you,
And this whole world
is springing up from it.

The Source is full,
its waters are ever-flowing;
Do not grieve,
drink your fill,
Don't think it will ever run dry—
This is the endless Ocean!

I don't much like the language so popular among Christians and lately UUs as well that speaks continually of humans as broken. Oh yeh, we get broken, sometimes, but we have not ever been in a state of full fulfillment of potential. We have been evolving all our lives from splendor to splendor and that process can hurt but it is creative, at least when we trust it a little and engage it. This life can hurt and sting but we have to trust what is going on, what is trying to unfold in us.

It has been out of pain, and depression, and anguish that so many of the great creators have done their work. I say this for a very practical reason: whoever you are, young or old or introverted or extroverted or highly educated or not so much so, whatever your hurt or anguish — you have to engage it.

The stories fill volumes of artists, composers, poets who — in response to devastatiang sorrow — have entered into a creative process with it and produced their most exalted works. So it is with these artworks, our lives.

When these times come for us, when we feel broken — it is quite a different thing if we can imagine the experience not so much a destruction of ourselves as a breaking-open, like a coarse, dark rock that is broken open, revealing a stupendous crystal at its core.

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A client wrote to Carl Jung:

Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality — taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be — by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all . . . So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating . . . Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I thought it ought to!

There is pain in these lives of ours, but this does not mean a joyless state. We read those like Rumi and Hafiz with astonishment sometimes, or perhaps too much skepticism — because they seem at times way beyond acceptance and equipoise. They are downright ecstatic. But ecstasy, the kind that heals and creates spectacular visions of what might be — this ecstasy is possible for most of us, and those states of Kosmic Consciousness, ultimate Unity, and all-encompassing Love — are not far from any of us. Don't expect them to be sustained — that is not how they work. But in those moments when they come, they re-colour the whole world, give us a more penetrating view of our existence just as a view from an airplane or mountaintop transforms our understanding of the physical terrain.

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There is, says Andrew Harvey, a

beauty of finally embracing life exactly as it is, and of discovering, by embracing it unsentimentally in its extremity, a consolation far beyond consolation, a joy far beyond anything that illusion can give, a courage that illusion cannot provide, and an ecstasy of oneness that can only be found by those who are one with horror as well as joy, pain a well as ease, dark as well as light, shadow as well as illumination. . . . When we have learned to taste the divine even in death, desolation, and defeat, we are then true dancers.

But this requires religious imagination that is willing to look, and imagine, and see beyond the surface of things something that inwardly we know. It is what Theodore Parker was talking about when he spoke of Absolute Religion that does not depend on any Bible or Savior but can be found only in the human heart and soul in the midst of life. And the essence of that Absolute Religion is Love, and it is a Love that transcends even our finest human relationships and makes them possibles.

And so Andrew Harvey goes on to say that the task for us today, and I quote, our task —

in this age is to learn to dance like that, so as to keep love alive in hell. This is not to say that . . . everybody will be convinced and transfigured by our keeping love alive in hell; they won't. Keep the heart alive in hell for the heaven of it, whatever happens, keep the heart alive because it's the most beautiful and noble thing to do. . . . We have all got to consent to go heartbroken into a new kind of loving of ourselves, our bodies, each other, nature, the world . . .

Because love is a thing beyond pain or pleasure, which we do in a world of pain and pleasure. This is as true whether or not you are at this moment experiencing a personal anguish. This love flows from a perception, flows inevitably and inexorably from the perception of One, that all of Life is one, that we are part and parcel of one Life, and that whatever is happening in Palestine or Baghdad or even Washington or the burning forests or the poisoned rivers and oceans is happening somewhere else. Love is what flows from the end of the delusion that all this is happening somewhere else and not in our own cells and bloodstreams and hearts because we are the world, and the world, and Life, is One. Love is an opening of the heart and in this world and in this time and in this Life that means heartbreak, and that is the beginning of ecstasy. That is true whether your anguish be personal or global or both.

The spiritual life is not about going out of this world but rather about coming into it completely and that is why the ancient Hindus of India visualized Life as Kali. Kali, the goddess, the most powerful of the goddesses of the Hindus, who blesses and destroys, frightening, naked except for ornaments like the hand of demons hanging from her belt; — like Shiva, destroying in order to create in an endless dance of agony and ecstasy woven, woven into the texture so tightly that sometimes you hardly know which is which. If you delude yourself she will laugh. If you confront things as they are you can join the play of the gods and revel with them because life is an ecstasy. If you know you are mortal and that you die you can let go and live.

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Life refuses to comply with our specifications, either of plot or characters.

It makes no promises. What happens after you die? You're asking me? Ask somebody who died! What a terrible position for a member of the clergy: I cannot tell you what happens after you die! I don't know! They don't tell us! They go and they don't even send a postcard. That isn't funny, that's tasteless and it isn't funny. Oh, but it has to be funny. We aren't going to tell you what happened after we died — we wanted it to be a surprise! Great. Thanks.

There is nothing to do but to love Life as it is, and to take the part in it that we have been given. "The event," says Emerson in his essay "Fate," "The event is the print of your form. It fits you like your skin. . . . Nature magically suits the [person] to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character. . . . Thus events grow on the same stem with persons; are sub-persons. The pleasure of life is according to the [person] who lives it, . . . Life is an ecstasy. . . . Every solid in the universe is ready to become fluid on the approach of the mind, and the power to flux it is the measure of the mind. . . . To a subtler force, it will stream into new forms, expressive of the character of the mind. . . . How idle to choose a random sparkle here or there, when the indwelling necessity plants the rose of beauty on the brow of chaos, and discloses the central intention of Nature to be harmony and joy."

There is nothing to do but to love Life as it is, and to know that the convergence of you and this moment has consequences, and that Life has brought you to this moment and this moment to you so neither you nor this moment of history may remain the same, so that you may, in this moment, continue the dance of Shiva and Kali, and do what the moment calls for, risking that heart-illumined action prepared to risk defeat and derision because you know and recognize in this moment the One Life that is turning on this moment and what you do in this moment.

To love Life as it is means to accept the ordeals and agony of being a player in it, acting in the moment to transform the moment into an artwork of the Spirit. These are the terms of the spiritual birth that is now demanded of us.

There is nothing to do but to love Life as it is, to do what Margaret Fuller did, which was to announce finally that she was now going to accept the Universe. Sound silly? They've been cackling for a century and a half since Margaret Fuller accepted the Universe, but if it's so funny, why do we all hold out, and resist and not accept the Universe? Sounds like one of those nervous laughs to me.

But that's the scary part, and that's where the ecstasy comes in. The Universe, this One of which we are part and parcel, expression and face, demands a simple, terrible thing: that we let go the illusion that we are separate from it. The `me' in here is that separative, self-centred activity that imagines that one day it will make itself something which it is not. The ecstasy comes when we can see beyond the "me" to Life, Life bigger than Me, Me flowing into Life, Life which does not die, even though I do.

Then in the midst of all agonies and all the pain, then burns a quiet ecstasy:—"It is," says Andrew Harvey,

in those moments or hours in life when we enter, without knowing why, the space of a vast mysteriously ordered calm, as beyond hope as it is beyond despair, that we glimpse the Tao [—the inner meaning of Life and its coherent flow—] and know ourselves immersed in completely and moved by its laws and rhythms. These are always moments or hours when we are—for whatever reason—sprung gently clear of ourselves, of everything we think of as our mind or our biography, or even everything we remember or have formulated of our mystic awareness of things. Something, as it were, vanishes us and what remains is an Eye in which everything that is appears shining in the light of a love so deep and calm we know it to be the love at the heart of all things, that infinitely stable, ageless love beyond all concepts and words, around which all things revolve and in which all things are soaked as if in tears of recognition, wonder, and joy.¹

Silence:—

No words have or ever could describe the astounding fresh purity of these moments of recognition, insight into our true nature and the nature of all things,—

for these moments of recognition, insight

come always in a silence that is itself the condition and law of the mystery that it reveals.

¹ Andrew Harvey, The Return of the Mother, writing about the Tao, pp. 301f.

Readings

First, from Andrew Harvey

Our task in this age is to learn to dance like that, so as to keep love alive in hell. This is not to say that . . . everybody will be convinced and transfigured by our keeping love alive in hell; they won't. Keep the heart alive in hell for the heaven of it, whatever happens, keep the heart alive because it's the most beautiful and noble thing to do. . . . We have all got to consent to go heartbroken into a new kind of loving of ourselves, our bodies, each other, nature, the world . . .

Return of the Mother, 184

Jalal-ud-Din Rumi,
the Sufi poet who died in 1273

(AH ROTM 178)

How much the beloved made me suffer before the work
grew entwined inseparably with my blood and eyes!
A thousand grim fires and heartbreaks—
And its name is "Love" —
A thousand pains and regrets and attacks
And its name is "Beloved."

If the incense and candles do not burn, what use would they be?

O Friend, Love must have a little anguish! The heart must be broken!

The place of darkness and cold
Is the fountain of life and the cup of ecstasy.

A heartbreak shakes the yellow leaves from the branch of the heart
So fresh green leaves can go on and on growing. . . .
Heartbreak pulls up the roots of old happinesses
So a new ecstasy can stroll in from Beyond.

Heartbreak pulls up all withered, crooked roots
So no root can stay hidden.
Heartbreak may pull many things from the heart
But in return it will lavish kingdoms.

Meditate

We gather with hearts that are sometimes broken, gather in solidarity with those who hurt, are torn and in turmoil. How empty can seem our words when we hear them depart our lips in earnest wish that they might administer some grace!

Mystery of Life, that scares us, makes us quake and weep: — we would learn to face you with courage, learn the dance, find the ecstasy of life from which we will see more deeply, release our fears, find the power that is in us and the joy and the laugher, so that we may know the power and the rhythms of Love at the heart of all things, beyond all concepts and words, around which everything revolves, and, seeing, know tears of recognition, and profoundest joy.

Let the windows of perception be opened, and the powers of holy imagination, so that we may understand what splendor might rise from this rubble, and know the promise of the material given.

Parting

Andrew Harvey :

Keep the heart alive in hell for the heaven of it, whatever happens, keep the heart alive because it's the most beautiful and noble thing to do. . . . We have all got to consent to go heartbroken into a new kind of loving of ourselves, our bodies, each other, nature, the world . . .

Go in peace: the work of peace is in your hands.