Perhaps the main reason that calls are ignored is that, instinctively, we know the price they’ll exact. In order to make good on authenticity, we’re going to have to give up something dear, whether that’s a job, a house, a relationship, a belief, a lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed, the prestige of being a big fish in any sized pond, security, money, precious time, anger at somebody, or just the pleasures of cynicism.
In recent years, a lot of people have taken as a personal motto and policy-statement Joseph Campbell’s admonition to “follow your bliss,” believing, perhaps, that by doing so their lives will be blissful. Unfortunately, it’s more about following than about bliss. That flat-out truth is that if you follow your bliss you’ll have your bliss, and nothing else is promised. Not that having your “bliss” is a trifle. It’s something grievously few people possess. But all calls lead to some sacrifice (even just that in choosing one option, you close the door on another), and some calls lead to much sacrifice, which may feel anything but blissful.
If you’re unwilling to make sacrifices, though, you can end up losing a great deal more than whatever you might have sacrificed.
The natives of some Asian countries have a tradition of trapping monkeys, which they eat, by using a gourd tied to the ground, with a small hole bored in its side, into which they place a piece of fruit. Monkeys reach in for the fruit, but by grabbing it, and thereby making a fist, they can’t get their hands out of the gourds. The natives then bag them. If the monkeys would only let go of the fruit, they could escape, but for some reason this doesn’t enter their monkey minds, and it costs them their lives.
What disturbs me most about this scenario isn’t so much the demise of the monkeys, but that I’m only a notch up the evolutionary ladder from these nincompoops. I often find myself acting as if I, too, am hardwired with the same suicidal attachments.
We have to be willing to surrender, and it’s no coincidence that at all times in all cultures throughout history, the wisest among us have said the same thing of surrender: that it’s about liberation, not defeat! Historically, surrender involved giving up the transitory for the sake of the transcendent. It has been a way of literally dis-possessing ourselves in the hopes of bringing good graces down upon us. The question sacrifice asks is, “What are you willing to give up to ensure your own unfolding, and the unfolding of what is holy in your life?”
Unfortunately, surrender is typically seen as deprivation----belt-tightening, inconvenience, the tossing of virgins into volcanoes. It has a reputation like that of discipline----one of punishment. This meaning certainly holds for anyone whose religion has, as its central icon, the image of a man nailed to a cross.
Rather than being an isolated act of appeasement, however, sacrifice is an essential fact of life. Rock crumbles to dirt that feeds plants. Grain is crushed to make flour. Snow melts to become water that nourishes the Earth and makes for good river-rafting in the spring. This fact explains why the Hopi Indians buried their dead in the fetal position. In dying, we come back around to life. Each time we sacrifice----each time we let go of something, die to an old way of being, relinquish our grip on the fruit----we are practicing for bigger and bigger surrenders, and eventually for what M. Scott Peck calls “the final vocation”: growing old gracefully, and----a tough call----dying. We all owe God a death, Shakespeare once said, so we owe it to ourselves to practice for the occasion whenever possible.
One way we do so is by tending to the small surrenders that come our way almost daily: letting go of a bad mood, making a choice or a compromise, forgiving someone, parting with fear and saying the truth in a moment, spending time with our kids instead of working late again.
Every sacrifice, though, every step toward action, every response to a call necessitates a leap of faith and is done without knowing the outcome. It is, as the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard described, the epitome of anxiety meeting courage. It was depicted in the story of Jonah by him leaping bodily overboard a ship, which seems like madness, yet consider how often, in following our own calls, we’re told by others that we’re crazy.
I take Jonah’s gesture, though, to be a metaphor for knowing that at some level an ultimate kind of sacrifice to our callings is required of us. What will be demanded is everything, our whole selves. A part-time effort, a sorta-kinda commitment, an untested promise won’t suffice. You must know that you mean business, that you’re going to jump into it up to your eye-sockets and not turn back at the last minute.
You must know this because, especially in making the leap from vision to form, you will be tested and suffer setbacks, occasionally severe. When we begin taking steps toward authenticity----or love or compassion or any high calling----every devil in hell will come out to meet us. Only when a vision is tried by the mortal world is its true worth revealed.
How will you fare, for instance, when the higher calling meets the bottom line? What will you do when what seemed so meaningful in the solitude of introspection or retreat or an altered-state suddenly begins to unravel in the cold light of practicality, of having to pay the rent and go to work and shuttle the children to day-care and music lessons? What will happen when the backlash hits, when you’re bombarded by the implorings of old roles and responsibilities, by the blank stares of loved ones, by fear and doubt and impatience----yours or others’----and by the sheer force of entropy in your life?
What happens when you discover, too, that you yourself are the prime saboteur, that whenever you have a breakthrough, it’s followed by a breakdown, that you unconsciously blow a fuse every time you think too big, move too fast, get too excited, run too much juice through the system, as if you’re sending up balloons in a room whose ceiling is studded with nails.
It is equally disconcerting, however, and as much a test, to realize that you can have what you want, which in most cases is true, if the call is. It is discomfitting to realize that if you really wanted, you could quit your job tomorrow. You might be in a pickle, but you could do it. You could get on a plane and fly to the Orient this week. You could pack a few things and take a retreat first thing in the morning. You could leave this marriage tonight. You could start saving the whales or the children or the planet right now!
What you run into when you realize this, of course, is the paralysis of freedom.
