by Stephen Cope
Brian and I talked about his process that day at lunch. I was caught up in the writing of this book, and was fascinated by questions of divine guidance. I was curious: How do you know the will of God? And when you do think you know it, how can you be certain that it’s not just your own will in disguise? During lunch that day, Brian and I put together a list of how the process seems to work.
1. First of all, “ask for guidance.” As it turns out, this is remarkably important, and it’s something most of us almost always forget to do. It seems that there is something about actually asking that jump-starts a process. And sometimes asking repeatedly is required. Even begging.
2. Then (something else we usually forget) “listen for the response.” It helps, says Bede, to “actively listen.” To turn over every stone in your search for clues to the response. These responses usually come in subtle ways—through hunches, fleeting images, intuitions. Do you think this is all hooey? That skepticism is OK, said Bede. Even healthy. But listen anyway. Allow yourself to be surprised.
3. Next (another good principle from Bede), “When you get a response, check it out.” Check it out with friends, with mentors. Talk about it. This, says Bede, is a classic principle of guidance: Test the guidance. Real guidance will stand up to sustained testing. False guidance—which is usually just our own will trying to have its way—will not stand up to ongoing scrutiny.
4. Next comes a principle that I’ve discovered in my own life: “Once you do begin to get clarity, wait to act until you have at least a kernel of inner certitude.” Wait to act. One thing I’ve learned for sure after a bunch of ham-handed decisions to act is that one almost never regrets slowing things down. We often do, however, regret speeding things up. Important decisions very often cannot be hurried. This is wonderfully exemplified by Arjuna, whose chief courage in the pages of the Gita is shown through his willingness to slow down the action and investigate deliberately and relentlessly. Note: Arjuna, the quintessential man of action, spends the entire Gita on his butt.
5. Once there is “a flavor of certitude,” says Bede, then “pray for the courage to take action.” It’s not uncommon for us to get to certitude and then realize that we don’t really want to take the action. We’re not willing. Or we don’t have the courage. Or it’s too inconvenient. Here’s an important Bede tip: You can pray for the willingness. You can pray for the courage. You can pray for absolutely everything you need along the way.
6. Bede suggests a corollary to #5, and this is a suggestion that both Brian and I really liked: “Let go of the attempt to eliminate risk from these decisions and actions.” The presence of a sense of risk is only an indication that you’re at an important crossroads. Risk cannot be eliminated, and the attempt to eliminate it will only lead you back to paralysis. In important dharma decisions, we never get to 100 percent certitude.
7. Next, we agreed: “Move forward methodically.” Begin to take action in support of your choice. Taking action at this point is critical to keeping the process moving. You will continue to be guided as you take action. Be aware that you are led by faith and not by sight, and that the whole process may be shrouded in darkness. Learn to feel your way along.
8. And finally, of course, the very central teaching of the Gita: “Let go of the outcome.” Let go of any clinging to how this all comes out. You cannot measure your actions at this point by the conventional wisdom about success and failure.
After we had sketched out this list, Brian and I got to talking about the Gita. He’d been reading it, along with de Caussade. He wanted to talk about one of Krishna’s speeches in particular that spoke to him. Krishna says: “By fulfilling the obligations he is born with, a person never comes to grief. No one should abandon duties because he sees defects in them. Every action, every activity is surrounded by smoke.”
Smoke again.
7
By the time the Civil War broke out, Harriet Tubman had become the terror of slave owners all over the South. They were desperate to nail her. The great Boston writer and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson hailed her in his speeches as “a modern-day Joan of Arc,” and set her up as the model of noble action. Harriet herself thought this was all bunk, and took little notice.
After the Civil War began, Harriet’s career took an interesting turn. She was quietly hired by the Union Army to be a war-time spy. She helped to train and guide a whole cadre of scouts and spies who infiltrated the territory held by the Confederacy—mapping it, and observing the movement of Southern troops. Tubman was listed (confoundingly to many at the time) as a “commander” of her men—and she and her spy ring worked directly under the guidance of the Secretary of War.
In the role of Union spy, Tubman continued to free slaves. Indeed, her raids during the war became even more daring than before, supported as they now were by the entire Union Army. There is one practically mythic—but absolutely true—story of a Tubman sneak attack in the middle of the night on a great plantation in South Carolina. During this attack, she spirited away more than 750 slaves onto a Union gunboat, leaving the estate of the great local plantation humiliated and bereft of slaves. This was classic Tubman: She worked stealthily behind the scenes, and then struck when least expected.
During the Civil War, Harriet was at the peak of her powers. She was hugely creative, in precisely the way de Caussade predicted one would be when led by the spirit. Tubman was constantly coming up with brilliant solutions on the spot—solutions that stunned her comrades. She had no schooling whatsoever in military affairs, so she was not constrained by any concepts about how things should be done. She just trusted her own gut. Her motto was always, “Just keep going.”
This motto, “Just keep going” is instructive. What I find most important, finally, about the Harriet Tubman story is her particular combination of faith and action. These two qualities reinforce each other. Together they are fire and gasoline. We will explore this more thoroughly in the next chapter of this book, when we look at the life of Mahatma Gandhi. But it’s important to note this principle here: Discerning action strengthens faith. This is a common thread in all of our stories.
8
By the end of his three-month retreat, Brian had made his decision. (“Actually,” he would correct me, “the decision made me.”) “When I really did finally let go,” he said, “all hell broke loose. Everything shifted.”
Brian and I had not charted this aspect of the process in our lunch. But Brian’s story added a new piece: The hardest work comes in getting to the decision. Once the decision is made, it is as if the decision itself lays down some kind of invisible tracks—and the cart of dharma just rolls forward, sometimes at shocking speed. Forget about trying to slow down this part of the process.
Brian’s dharma life spilled forward dramatically: It turns out that a position within the national church had just opened up—music director at an innovative program to enliven the sacred music in parishes all over the country. The director of the program just happened to be on retreat at the same time Brian was. They got to know each other, and he saw that Brian was the perfect guy for the job. He recruited Brian at the selfsame table where we had worked on our list.
In the five years since Brian’s retreat, he has developed the national sacred music institute into a well-functioning organization. He has been creative in the role, and fully engaged. He brings parish music directors (his authentic tribe) to the institute to help inspire and direct them. He founded a summer choir camp. Brian is living his dharma: unified at last.
Several years ago, Brian came back to give a sermon in his old parish, and invited me to come. I noticed in his sermon that he frequently used the archetype of “the journey” when talking to parishioners. He used a passage from Exodus that describes Moses and the journey out of Egypt. He talked about the bondage of inauthenticity—the bondage of the false self, the bondage of self-will. And he talked about the exhilaration of freedom. Those of us who have been in bondage a
nd have made the journey to freedom are particularly touched by the suffering of others who are still in shackles. Remember Thoreau: One authentic act of freedom can knock the fetters from a million slaves.
9
Harriet Tubman returned home a war hero. She would spend the rest of her life helping her African American brothers and sisters regain dignity, respect, and freedom. As you can imagine, this was an uphill battle.
As a harbinger of things to come, even as an exhausted Tubman was returning home from the war on a Northbound passenger train—traveling from Virginia to her home in Auburn, New York—she was the victim of predictable race prejudice. She was violently dragged from her coach seat by a conductor who decided that her papers must have been forged. How could a black woman be legally carrying a soldier’s pass? How could she be a “commander”? Harriet was then thrown into the baggage compartment for the remainder of the trip. She would live with this kind of violence for the rest of her life. It did not stop her.
After she returned to Auburn, Harriet focused her mammoth energies on helping the many needy and dispossessed African Americans in her own region of New York. She poured all of her own personal resources into this task—taking many needy folk into her own home. Her dream was to establish a separate charitable institution in Auburn for the neglected of her race. She finally did accomplish this—at the age of eighty-five. She eventually developed the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged—a home that still exists to serve the community today.
In what spare time she had, Harriet Tubman also became a grand old lady on the suffrage circuit. She was by all accounts a spellbinding speaker at suffrage events. Our friend Susan B. Anthony introduced her as a living legend at the NYS Women’s Suffrage Association held in 1904. One local newspaper described the dramatic scene: “The old woman was once a slave and as she stood before the assemblage in her cheap black gown and coat and a big black straw bonnet without adornment, her hand held in Miss Anthony’s, she impressed one with the venerable dignity of her appearance.” At the same event, Tubman told the rapt crowd, “I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say—I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
Tubman struggled to make ends meet until the end of her life. She was never compensated for her war service (an American scandal that has never been repaired). She gave away everything she had. None of the obstacles she faced ever stopped her for long. She just kept moving forward. She always remembered her refrain on the Underground Railroad: “If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going.”
Later in life, Tubman’s co-abductor Thomas Garrett said something telling about Harriet: “The strangest thing about this woman is, she does not know, or appears not to know, that she has done anything worth notice.” This quality is an outward and visible sign of true dharma. One does not seek credit. The credit goes to God—the real Doer. Says Krishna: “Those who follow the path of service, who have completely purified themselves and conquered their senses and self-will, see the Self in all creatures and are untouched by any action they perform. Those who know this truth, whose consciousness is unified, think always, I am not the Doer.”
Harriet, indeed, always said that she did not feel she had any special powers whatsoever, just that she was especially blessed. Not unlike Joan of Arc, throughout her life, Tubman viewed herself as an instrument of God. She trusted in the power of prayer, and in the individual’s ability to seize her own destiny. She believed that any person who sought to could be guided by God’s hand—just as she had been.
“Each and every person has the light of God within,” she said.
TWELVE
Mohandas K. Gandhi: Take Yourself to Zero
On August 16, 1908, more than two thousand Indian nationals living in Transvaal, South Africa, joined at a local Hindu temple to burn their South African registration certificates. They were protesting recently enacted legislation—called the Black Act—that would dramatically limit their civil rights in South Africa. The thousands of Indian men and women who participated in this action were no doubt terrified, fearing the reprisals of the notoriously repressive South African government. And they were also very likely astonished at their own actions that day, and at the fact that they had summoned the courage to take a risky stand against tyranny. Much of their courage issued from the trust they had in their leader and champion in this action. He was a powerful and compelling little Indian barrister whom they had come to love. He was Mohandas K. Gandhi—who would later come to be known as “Mahatma Gandhi,” or Great Soul, and who would eventually lead 400 million Indians out of bondage to the British Empire. The protest against the Black Act in South Africa was young Gandhi’s first act of mass civil disobedience.
The act of civil disobedience carried out in Transvaal on that August day more than a century ago was more successful than anyone in the Indian community could have hoped. The international press covered the event widely, and compared it to the Boston Tea Party. Gandhi and his fellows had deftly painted the government into a corner—all without violence of any kind. Even Gandhi himself was surprised at the power—he would later call it Soul Force—of this kind of action. What began that day was his development of the art of satyagraha (literally, “clinging to truth”) that would, over the course of the next two decades, change the face of the world. “Thus came into being,” wrote Gandhi much later in his life, “the moral equivalent of war.”
Civil disobedience, based on the principles of satyagraha, would become a staple of Gandhi’s tool kit for the rest of his life, and would be the central pillar of his strategy to end British colonial rule in India. This satyagraha—this “clinging to truth”—was an entirely new method of fighting injustice. Instead of fanning hatred with hatred, Gandhi insisted upon returning love for hatred and respect for contempt.
Any exploration of dharma that begins with Henry David Thoreau must end with Mohandas K. Gandhi. These two exemplars of “Soul Force” lived a century apart, but with the perspective of time they increasingly appear as brothers. Thoreau’s life and writing—especially his essay On Civil Disobedience and his masterpiece, Walden—profoundly influenced Gandhi. In many ways, we might say that Gandhi finished what Thoreau started. Satyagraha was, after all, the very embodiment of the doctrine of “truth in action” about which Thoreau had written so passionately almost a century earlier.
2
Mohandas K. Gandhi began his adult life as a shy, tongue-tied Indian barrister who failed at most everything he tried. He was plagued by fears and doubts. He was socially inept. At the age of twenty-three, he had left his native India for South Africa—a last attempt to salvage a foundering legal career. (Young Gandhi had become famous in the Indian legal world for once fleeing a courtroom in terror when he had been called upon to present a difficult argument. He later became known as “the briefless barrister,” because after this embarrassment no one would give him a case.) Yet when Gandhi returned to India just ten years later, he was hailed as “Mahatma,” and quickly became the acknowledged leader of the hundreds of millions of Indian people hungry for self-respect, self-reliance, and independence from Great Britain.
How had this transformation happened? What precisely was Gandhi doing between his ignominious departure from India—tail between his legs—and his triumphant return? It’s a great story. The transformation was largely the result of one thing: his discovery of, and devotion to, the principles of the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi himself would later emphasize: It was not just that he knew the Gita, but that he actively put its precepts to work in his life. Gandhi studied the Gita constantly. He chanted it, he memorized it, and he practiced its instructions; he took a frayed copy with him everywhere. It became, as he later said, his “spiritual reference book.” Everyone who knew him saw this: His longtime secretary, Mahadev Desai, would say, “Every moment of Gandhi’s
life is a conscious effort to live the message of the Gita.”
We might say that M. K. Gandhi engaged in deliberate practice of the Bhagavad Gita. He mastered it in just the way that Corot mastered landscape painting, or that Beethoven mastered the sonata form. The battlefield of life described in the opening chapter of the Gita was Gandhi’s canvas, and the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna was his instruction book. Gandhi’s life, then, must be for us an extraordinary living textbook of the Gita. It is where we will fittingly end our exploration.
3
Mohandas Gandhi was a fear-obsessed little boy with big eyes, and mammoth ears that stood out almost at right angles from his body. He was terrified of the dark, and, as he said, “haunted by the fear of thieves, ghosts, and serpents.” He could not bear to be in a room alone, and could not sleep at night without a light on nearby. Gandhi, later in life, acknowledged that as a boy he had been, in his own words, a “coward.” All the other boys on the playground knew it: He was a pushover. One could steal this guy’s lunch money with impunity.
And yet, the later Gandhi was fearless. He was renowned not only for his great moral courage, but for physical courage as well. A central pillar of his later teaching was that fearlessness is a prerequisite for nonviolence. “Nonviolence and cowardice go ill together,” he said. It is fascinating, then, to dig down into the story of Gandhi’s mastery of his fear. How did he accomplish it?
