by Michael Lerner
We sat in a circle in front of the fireplace at Pacific House our retreat center overlooking the Pacific at Commonweal. Forty alumni and staff of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program gathered in the sacred Easter Passover week for a CCHP Alumni Day. A white candle in a small cup burned at the center of the circle.
Commonweal Executive Director Susan Braun asked each of us to bring two objects to the circle. One would be symbolic of the challenge of this time in our lives. The other would be symbolic of the gift of this time.
One by one, we placed our two objects in the circle. We spoke, as we placed each object, of our challenge and our gift. Simple questions. Responses came from deep within us. Words spoken into a candle-lit circle resonated with memories of weeks together in the Cancer Help Program.
I wish I could tell you what others said. Stories of anguish, of hope, of loss, of courage, of gratitude. Stories of loves found and lost, of friends found and lost, of surgeries and chemotherapies, of being buoyed up by prayers, of children, of a new puppy. Circles of trust are confidential. I cannot say more.
I can tell you what I said. Or at least what I meant.
The gift in my life is the infinite preciousness of each day. Our Havanese puppy Rafi licking our faces when he decides it is time to get up. Early morning sun warming my face as I stand on the porch. Biking to work through birdsong and foxes. The beloved community of our work. Simple dinners, sharing stories of our days. And reading, often into early hours of the morning, those whose voices speak to us across the ages.
Then I spoke of the challenge in my life. For many years, I said, I have often experienced an acute sense of contradiction between love and will in my life. It is a conflict between how I feel in many situations and what I am called to do. The conflict goes back to college years. I wrote a poem then that started Must I give up love to act? Is to feel what you exact? That question has remained, quiescent at times, then insistent again. I have experienced this conflict as a barrier to a deeper wholeness in me.
Speaking of this conflict was not easy. I was taking a risk. But there was something in me that wanted to confess to this ancient struggle in my life. Others in the circle were taking risks. So would I.
When we had each said our piece, Susan Braun, who was conducting the circle, asked us to take one of our objects back out of the circle, hold it in our hands, and reflect on what it meant to us. Then she asked us to hand our object to the person on our left, and to receive our neighbor’s object from the person on our right. Slowly, our objects, symbolically charged with our greatest hopes and fears, passed through the hands of each person in the circle. When they came back to us, our objects were hallowed with the loving energy of the whole circle. We had been heard, and felt, and seen by each other. And we had wished each other well.
Weeks passed. Then one day in my study, reading a sacred text, I had an experience. The experience was that this book had fallen into my heart. I could see the book in my heart. It was a small golden volume opened to a middle page. A sense of peace and clarity flooded through me. Within minutes, I noticed something. Though I had not been thinking of my old conflict of love and will at all, it came to me that the conflict had resolved. A healing had mysteriously taken place.
In the days that followed, I sensed that something had opened within me. Surely I would again face times when the claims of love and will would resurface. But I was, somehow, no longer stuck in inner anguish over the tension between compassion and action. If I could remember to act with a wise heart, I thought, I would be doing the best I could.
I cannot know how this healing took place in me. I know in the Cancer Help Program that when we share our deepest wounds, they often begin to transform—and sometimes even to heal. Is it simply, as is often thought, that speaking our truth into a circle of trust causes the healing? I have no doubt that is sufficient in itself. But I wonder—may it not also be that the love and prayers with which we are received also actively contribute to the healing?
This conflict of love and will is not mine alone. Truth be told, it permeates many of our lives. How many of us struggle with the competing demands of family and work? How many of us, balancing work and family, give short shrift to the equally urgent question of our true purpose in life—and who we really are?
Existential psychologist Rollo May wrote, in Love and Will, “the striking thing about love and will in our time is that, whereas in the past they were always held up to us as the answer to life’s predicaments, they have now themselves become the problem.” May saw our failure to understand the relationship between love and will as the heart of our present dilemma.
The great Italian psychologist Roberto Assagioli saw love and will, along with creativity and wisdom, as cornerstones of his transpersonal psychology—called Psychosynthesis. Assagioli noted that people with a preponderance of will in their personalities are often deficient in the expression of love, while those in whom love predominates are often deficient in the development of will. Wisdom is finding the right relationship between the two.
In truth, the conflict between love and will goes back to the beginning of human history. Arjuna felt it in the Bhagavad Gita as he stood in his chariot on the battlefield facing friends and family. He did not want to fight and kill those he admired and loved. Krishna had to explain to him why it was necessary. Krishna’s explanation became one of the greatest sacred texts of all time.
As for the sacred book that sank into my heart—naming it would be a disservice to this story. Many sacred books have nourished my heart through the years—the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, the Bible, the Dao Te Ching, to name a few. Leibnitz and Aldous Huxley called the universal teachings within all the great traditions the perennial philosophy. My experience was that the book that dropped into my heart contained them all. You may have a book that you carry in your heart. If you do, know that was the book that dropped into mine.
I have been through these mountain top experiences before. I know they often fade. To serve life you may have to turn your back on the light and walk back down into the valley. Our acts, rather than a mountain high, define who we are. But the teachings we carry in our heart guide our hands and feet. How powerfully the teachings remain in our hearts—and how we conduct ourselves in the dark times when we feel abandoned by the light—these are the great questions of the inner life. Yet I sense that each time we go to the mountain, some residue of the light we experience there clings to us. We change in lasting ways, even if the numinous power of that moment fades. When the light returns, we can welcome it back, the sign of the peace of the spirit.
This is why I love the Commonweal Cancer Help Program. I have met most of my teachers in a circle of trust with a candle burning bright in the center.
The Cancer Help Program is supported by generous grants from the Kresge Foundation, the Morning Glory Family Foundation, and an extraordinary number of individual contributions from Cancer Help Program alumni and other Commonweal friends.
