Day 21 is about protecting the church. I already wrote yesterday that the “church” is not a physical place or group of people, but the entire world. So, to me, this chapter is really about protecting love and is very much an extension of the previous chapters.
What does it mean to protect love? At its core, protecting love is about living according to your deepest values and desires. This means being honest – with yourself and with others – about who you really are (and are not) and about what you really want (and do not want). So, protecting love means being honest. Protecting love also means allowing others to live according to their deepest values and desires – not trying to control or manipulate others to do our will, and not abusing others for pursuing their own will. It also means: acknowledging when we’ve failed to live according to our deepest values and desires, when we’ve failed to be honest with ourselves and others, when we’ve tried to manipulate and control others, and when we’ve abused others; confronting others who have not been honest with us, who have tried to manipulate or control us, and who have abused us; and forgiving ourselves and others for our transgressions.
Why is it important to protect love? Because we find happiness and joy in this world when we protect love. It’s not about being moral or doing right by somebody else or even sacrifice – it’s about creating our own happiness, peace, and joy. Protecting love is ultimately about healing our own internal divide – about letting go of the false self to become more our true Self. Protecting love is in our own best self interest because it is about about letting go of our own fear and suffering so that love and joy can reign in our lives.
I really struggle with protecting love when things don’t go according to my expectations. No, I don’t struggle with protecting love – protecting love goes right out the window. When things don’t go the way I expect, even small things, suddenly the world doesn’t make sense to me anymore, and I feel fear, but I express anger. Here’s a small example:
Every night at Herräng there’s a daily meeting. On Saturday night, I walked over with everyone else to go to the daily meeting. It was rainy and cold and we had to wait around a bit before they let us into the hall. The hall isn’t big enough for the entire camp to sit in, so if you don’t get a seat up there where the action is, you have to go to one of the overflow rooms where they have a live stream set up. I was waiting for about 20-25 minutes with friends to get into the main hall when they finally started letting us in. The crowd moved slowly up the stairs and at the top of the stairs I got stopped by a volunteer who told me I couldn’t go into the hall with my purse – all bags had to be stored outside in the luggage storage area. Now, a volunteer had come by and told someone nearby that she needed to put her backpack in the luggage storage area, but she said nothing about my purse (perhaps she didn’t see it) and, since I don’t consider a purse to be luggage, it didn’t occur to me that I would be turned away from the meeting for having my purse with me.
They wouldn’t let me in the hall. “But it’s a purse” I kept saying in disbelief and rising frustration. It didn’t matter – I had to go back downstairs and put my purse in the luggage storage area, and that meant I was not going to get a seat in the main hall and I was not going to get to sit with my friends. The situation was not going as I had expected, and I was mad. Fortunately, I’ve outgrown my old habit of dropping explosive rage on innocent strangers, but I still got rude, condescending and accusatory, as if he was out to get me, out to ruin to my evening, this volunteer who was just trying to do his job. Still, for all the grief I caused this poor volunteer, I caused myself even greater grief by being arrogant, superior and entitled – by failing to protect love and choosing to engage in “why me” self-pity instead of simply accepting the present moment as it was and looking for the opportunity inherent in the unexpected.
In yesterday’s post, I finished up by writing about how destructive self-pity is – how feeling sorry for ourselves prevents us from hearing and empathizing with others and destroys relationship. And all that is true, but it is also an incomplete picture. What I didn’t write, because I was too tired and couldn’t gather my thoughts, is the most important part and the part that’s easiest to lose sight of – that the worst damage done by self-pity is not to our relationships with others but to our selves. When we choose self-pity over love, we side with our false ego self and reinforce the internal divide rather than healing it. The damage to the relationship, while an unfortunate and painful byproduct of the choice we’ve made, is merely a reflection of the harm we’ve already done to our selves by choosing self-pity over love.
One of the quotes from this chapter that spoke most strongly to me was something like ‘A critical spirit is a costly vice.’ It’s both true and poetic, and goodness knows I love my poetic truths. But, “a critical spirit” could be replaced with any example of lack of love – truly, any lack of love is a costly vice. And, again, “costly” does not concern worldly things or other people, but refers to the pain we cause ourselves. A lack of love on our part is costly to our self because it causes us pain. It may also cause others pain, but that’s already beside the point.
TL;DR: No tl;dr for virtual book club posts.
