ELEVEN
ELEVEN
Most families have dharma teaching-stories. Of course we don’t call them that. But think for a moment of your own family’s dharma stories. These are usually tales of the courage and character of some colorful forebear, who against big odds thrived in her authentic calling. When these tales are told over and over again they develop a flavor of myth. The young people at the grown-ups’ table on Thanksgiving roll their eyes when they hear them for the twentieth time. Still, these stories creep into our psyches, and help to form our sense of what might be possible for us.
In my own family, my grandmother, Armeda Van Demark Crothers, was the teller of these tales. She told them at Sunday dinner, or seated in a wicker rocking chair on the front porch of the family summer cottage. One of her favorites was the story of my great-great-great grandfather, Dr. Elias Willard Frisbie. Dr. Frisbie lived from 1799 until 1860 in the little town of Phelps, New York—the upstate village where I spent happy weeks and months as a kid, and where my grandmother lived out her entire life.
Elias Frisbie was an ardent abolitionist, and his house was a hub on the so-called “Underground Railroad” during the decade leading up to the Civil War. The Underground Railroad—as every tenth-grader in Phelps knows—provided a network of invisible support to fugitive slaves from the Deep South all the way to Canada. My grandmother told stories of Dr. Frisbie’s risky commitment to this invisible road to freedom, and of his involvement with fugitive slave Harriet Tubman, whose own home was in the nearby village of Auburn, New York. Grandma emphasized: By helping runaway slaves, Dr. Frisbie put himself in serious danger. His actions were in direct violation of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
Grandma knew great dharma material when she heard it. She told tales of the midnight movement of fugitive black faces through the woods around Phelps; of near encounters with police; of the dreaded slave catchers who occasionally haunted the little village and surreptitiously surveilled suspect homes. Her tale usually ended with the story of a triumphant parade in Phelps—a parade of slaves and their white supporters—that went right up the center of town. Dr. Frisbie was at its head. And the moral of the story? Do what you know is right even if you have to take risks. The fine Dr. Frisbie was hewing to his high ideals.
Grandma’s story worked its intended magic. Dr. Frisbie—and Harriet Tubman and her network of freedom fighters—captured my imagination. And the lesson I took from the story could have come from Krishna himself: A guy has got to do what a guy has got to do.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve become intrigued with Elias Frisbie’s interactions with the near-mythic figure of Harriet Tubman. Grandma didn’t know enough about Frisbie’s relationship with Tubman to include the details in her official story, but I’ve learned as much as I can about them, and I now weave these nuggets into the original story when I tell it to my nieces and nephews. This, I suppose, is how a family’s dharma story evolves.
2
Harriet Tubman—a diminutive, unprepossessing, and mammothly determined fugitive slave—was the most famous rescuer of slaves in the American South in the decade between 1850 and 1860. She carried out a string of at least nineteen daring raids into slaveholding territories—leading her enslaved family and friends (and practically anyone who dared to come) out of bondage in the South and all the way to freedom in Canada. Her hair-raising journeys became the stuff of legend—and were made more notorious by the fact that Tubman was herself a fugitive slave and subject at any time to recapture and the horror of reenslavement. (Actually, Tubman would most likely not have been reenslaved had she been caught. She would have just been hung. By the time the Civil War erupted there was a price of $40,000 on her head—and she was hated and feared by Southern slave owners.)
Stories of Tubman’s raids into the South are toe curling. By all accounts, she had an uncanny ability to evade danger. She could evaporate into thin air with a whole troop of fugitives (and she sometimes led as many as ten or twelve out at a time). She had a second sense about when to move and when to stay under cover—hunches that often defied common sense. She had an unerring sense of which riverbank to follow, which house might be safe, which house might harbor danger. There are edge-of-your-seat accounts of her accidentally coming face-to-face with former masters during her forays south—once on the very plantation from which she had herself escaped. These stories always end with her avoiding recognition through some clever spur-of-the moment disguise: pulling a bonnet down over her face, or putting her nose in a newspaper (though she could not read a word).
When one drills down into these tales, one finds that they flesh out in vivid fashion one critical component of dharma: the issue of “guidance.” Harriet was widely believed to have been guided directly by God—called by him, and guided by him every step of the way. Within months of her near-miraculous escape from a plantation in Maryland, she had the distinct sense of a call, a voice inside that said, “Harriet Tubman, I want you to help free others.” Tubman answered back to God, “Find somebody else. Can’t do it. You kidding?”
The stories of a “call” such as Harriet received are omnipresent in the spiritual and religious world: Jonah and the whale, Moses in Egypt, St. Paul on the road to Damascus. “The Call” is an archetype of the spiritual imagination. It is nothing less than the call to be absolutely yourself.
The call to Harriet was repeated over and over again—as it has to be in these stories, since the first response is always “no.” Of course, in this particular story Tubman finally said yes, but very reluctantly. Doubt and indecision are always a central aspect of “call” stories, and Arjuna is our antiheroic example. Harriet decided that if she were going to respond to this nagging call, she would have to put herself in God’s hands, because she had no idea how to pull it off by herself. “If you’ve called me to this, Lord, then you’ll damn sure have to do it, ’cause I can’t.”
Harriet followed her guidance. She prayed. She listened. And she found the guidance she received stunningly reliable. Eventually, Harriet learned to walk by faith, not by sight. And her faith was, apparently, contagious, for everyone else began to trust her as well. Fugitives whom she helped free soon enough learned: If she says go, go. If she says stay, stay.
A moment-by-moment trust in Divine guidance is central to Krishna’s teaching. He teaches: “To know when to act and when to refrain from action, what is right action and what is wrong, what brings security and what brings insecurity, what brings freedom and what brings bondage: These are the signs of a pure mind.”
To know when to act, and when not to act.
Harriet Tubman’s dharma story allows us to examine the question of guidance. How does Divine guidance actually work? Is there really such a thing? Is it from God, or is it from an ineffable Inner Self? Is it available even to us?
3
Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in 1825. (Her mother had arrived on a slave ship directly from Africa, and was bought by a Maryland family named Pattison.) As a girl, Harriet learned the central facts of slavery: Your body is not your own, your life is not your own, your labor is not your own, and your family is not your own. This last fact was a source of particular suffering for young Harriet. She learned early on that your kin can be sold “downriver” at any moment, and you have absolutely no recourse. Once sold, families were rarely reunited. Tubman watched as her mother’s family—sisters and brothers—were auctioned off in front of her, while the family stood by in horror and agony.
How would one manage the violence and powerlessness of such a life? Harriet’s mother managed it by developing a sustaining faith in God, and she taught this faith to Harriet. The entire family was illiterate, so they never actually read the Bible, but they learned Bible stories by heart—especially the Old Testament stories of the suffering of God’s people in Egypt, and their eventual escape into the Promised Land. These stories were made vivid in Harriet’s imagination in chants sung rhythmically while at work in the fields, and in stories told at night huddled together in the slave cabin.
Harriet would need every ounce of her mother’s faith: When she was only five years old, a “Miss Susan” drove up to Pattison’s plantation and asked for a young girl to take care of a baby. Pattison sent Harriet off with “Miss Susan” that very instant—to a new and harrowing home far from her parents. This experience of sudden exile was repeated over and over again throughout Harriet’s childhood. By the time she was fifteen she had had many masters, though she eventually ended up back at Pattison’s. She said later, “I grew up like a neglected weed—ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.”
By the time she was in her teens, Tubman had become a field hand—which she vastly preferred to being a house slave. In the fields, she developed physical and mental stamina, and enjoyed the taste of the personal power this brought her. Outdoors—where she was not so directly under the shoe of the master—she began to get a taste of freedom. She wanted more.
In 1849, Harriet learned quite by accident that for the previous decade she and her family had been held illegally in slavery, for they had—unbeknownst to them—actually been freed by Master Pattison’s will at his death ten years earlier. Pattison’s heir had conveniently neglected to inform them of this. The discovery of this outrageous betrayal made Harriet blind with rage. What to do? She turned first to her faith. She decided to begin a prayer vigil for the soul of her master (Pattison’s heir), whom she now knew to be a charlatan of the worst sort. She prayed fervently that his heart would be changed.
His heart was not changed. But Harriet’s was. Tubman learned a lesson: She saw that she would have to take an active role in God’s plan for her. She could no longer be only a passive supplicant. She needed to learn to skillfully combine prayer and action—a most Gita-like insight.
Harriet came to believe that she had a moral duty to free herself. She had not only a right but a duty to be free: “I had reasoned this out in my mind,” she said later. “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one I would have the other.”
For years before her escape, Harriet had recurring dreams of her flight to freedom. In the dream, she was “flying over fields and towns, and rivers and mountains, looking down upon them ‘like a bird,’ and reaching at last a great fence, or sometimes a river, over which she would try to fly … “It ’peared like I wouldn’t have the strength, and just as I was sinkin’ down, there would be ladies all drest in white over there, and they would put out their arms and pull me ‘cross.’ ”
This dream of flight to freedom was, of course, a central theme in African American spirituality, and often included the image of a river (usually the River Jordan) and visions of crossing that river—or of ascending into Heaven. Freedom and death were closely linked in the spiritual imagination of slaves. Their songs were filled with these images:
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see?
Coming for to carry me home,
A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.
When Harriet was twenty-seven, she learned that her master intended to put her up for auction. This was the last straw. She decided to make her move. It appears that Harriet planned her escape very methodically, and then quietly slipped away from her master’s estate on September 24, 1850. She was immediately pursued by slave catchers.
Harriet’s escape was extraordinary by any measure. Most fugitive slaves were men, but Harriet was a woman still in her twenties. She had never been out of her home county. She knew no more than most slaves did about the path to freedom. She knew only a few pieces of slave lore: She knew to move at night, she knew to follow the riverbanks leading north, and she knew to follow the North Star. She had often heard the song filled with clues about the route to freedom: “Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd.” The drinking gourd referred, of course, to the constellation we call The Big Dipper—whose two end-stars point to the North Star.
When the sun come back and the quail calls,
Follow the drinkin’ gourd.
For the old man a-waitin’ to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinkin’ gourd.
The riverbank make a very good road.
The dead trees show you the way.
Left foot, right foot, travel on,
Follow the drinkin’ gourd
There’s another river on the other side,
Follow the drinkin’ gourd.
When the great river meets the little river there,
Follow the drinkin’ gourd
One can only imagine the terror of this young woman as she tore stealthily through the brush and woods of nighttime Maryland—the sound of bloodhounds baying in pursuit. She had a price on her head: On October 3, 1849, the Cambridge Democrat newspaper published a runaway slave notice: “MINTY, aged about 27 years, is of a chestnut color, fine looking and bout 5 feet high.” (Tubman’s birth name was Araminta: thus, MINTY.) Readers were advised that Minty would fetch $50 if she were captured in Maryland, or $100 if she were found out of the state.
By her own accounting, Harriet’s long journey out of the Maryland/Delaware peninsula was done entirely on foot—moving northeast along the Choptank River. (“The riverbank make a very good road.”) It’s most likely that she then received help from Quakers in the region—and it’s almost certain that she made contact with members of the already-formed Underground Railroad, who helped her find her way to Philadelphia.
Philadelphia was, of course, the city of brotherly love. It was a promised land for fugitive slaves, and a mecca for black reformers. Harriet settled in to her newly adopted city as best she could. She was free, yes. But she was also penniless, and in constant peril of recapture.
The second act of this drama comes almost immediately on the heels of the first. In late 1850, after a number of months of freedom in Philadelphia, Harriet got word from Maryland that her niece, Kizzy, was about to be “sold downriver” into the Deep South—precisely the way Tubman’s sister had been many years before. This was a fork in the road for Harriet. She decided that she must put her own freedom on the line to help rescue her niece. She must go back into Maryland—a slave state where she herself was wanted as a fugitive—to help with the rescue.
Harriet did not make this decision lightly. She was awash in doubt and fear—and terrified at the prospect of recapture. But she knew that she had to act in spite of the fear. Tubman realized that her fate was tied together with that of her family and indeed that of her whole people. She came to understand that she could not have freedom just for herself. Her entire race was at risk if any one of its members was enslaved. At this point, Harriet’s own personal journey to freedom expanded vastly to include the potential freedom of her whole people. She decided that she would let herself be used by this great work.
Very little is known about Tubman’s rescue of Kizzy. It appears that Harriet’s brothers in Maryland assisted effectively in the abduction—and that Kizzy narrowly escaped the slave auction by days or even hours. Astonishingly, Tubman was able to navigate the completely alien streets of Baltimore. She managed to locate help, find a safe house, and eventually guide Kizzy to freedom with her in Philadelphia.
The success of her first rescue lit Harriet’s dharma fire. She now felt her calling intensely. She made a second trip in 1851, and on this trip rescued one of her brothers and two other friends. By this time, she had begun to make strong connections within the network of the Underground Railroad. She slowly began to master the abductor’s art: evasion, disguise, secret underground channels, forests, and riverbanks. She would become very familiar indeed with the drinking gourd.
Tubman now got to know the network of thousands of white abolitionists like Elias Frisbie who were willing to put their own safety on the line for her. This silent, intrepid volunteer army had developed a network of “stations” or “depots”—a clandestine network designed to support the movement of fugitive slaves all the way from the Deep South to freedom in the North. The network included so-called “stationmasters,” “conductors,” and elaborate transportation schemes for “cargo.” “Depots” could be hidden rooms in basements, like Dr. Frisbie’s, or hideaways in attics, barns, potato cellars, even caves. There were secret tunnels and fake closets. Fugitives were transported alive in coffins, crates, and barrels.
Most conductors on the Underground Railroad only conveyed slaves from one depot to the next, and they often knew little about the full extent of the network. The less they knew, perhaps, the better. There were, however, a few heroic “abductors” who ventured deep into the slave states to personally extract slaves. Tubman was one of these. Almost all of the rest were white men. But then there was Harriet Tubman: a small, quiet, uneducated woman—but a force of nature. Or we might better say, a force of dharma. Her reputation eventually eclipsed all the others’.
Harriet slowly began to dedicate her entire life to this work. She made at least one trip a year—sometimes two—deep into slave territory. She often rescued at least ten fugitives at a time. She kept to the back roads and never traveled by day. She always made her trips in the winter, when the nights were long and dark. Eventually, Tubman decided that Canada was the new Canaan. “I wouldn’t trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer,” she said, “but I brought ’em clear off to Canada.”
Astonishingly, the funds for Tubman’s trips came almost entirely from her own work as a cook and a domestic. She worked to save money during the spring and summer, and then during the fall, she would plan her trips—carrying them out when the nights became longest.
5
Tubman came to believe that she would be guided by God at every step along the way. The images she used in talking about her “journeys” were saturated with spiritual archetypes. She used bible stories of the Exodus to create a context for her journeys. She used the great spirituals as cues for “troops” to move or stay put, to show themselves or hide themselves away. She prayed regularly with her fugitives. Though as we’ve seen, Harriet was illiterate, nonetheless she could quote extensively and accurately from the Bible, and was keenly aware of the significance of characters and incidents from both the Old and the New Testament.
Harriet Tubman was widely believed to be protected by angels. Over the years, an air of mystery and awe began to grow up around her. Said fellow abductor Thomas Garrett, “Harriet seems to have a special angel to guard her on her journey of mercy … and confidence that God will preserve her from harm in all her perilous journeys.”
Most of the really dramatic accounts of Harriet’s “guidance” came from others—not from Harriet herself, who was remarkably quiet about her methods. Garrett said, “I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul.”
Harriet’s so-called “second sight”—her reliance on guidance—would become legendary among fugitives, and among the network of conductors and stationmasters on the Underground Railroad. Fugitive slaves whom she freed later told remarkable stories about their adventures with her. In the midst of a flight, Harriet would suddenly insist that the troop of fugitives stop and hide themselves away. Then she would start out again in an entirely new direction. Later, they would discover that they had narrowly escaped capture. Tubman said about these moments, “When danger is near, it appears like my heart goes flutter, flutter.” She told a friend that she believed that her uncanny “second sight” was a gift that she inherited from her father, who was apparently known for prophecies and guidance.
Her biographer, Catherine Clinton, gives us a classic Tubman story: “During one trip aboard a boat, a ticket collector asked Harriet and her companion, a fugitive named Tilly, to step aside while he took others’ tickets. Tilly was wild with fear, but Tubman kept calm and prayed, ‘Oh, Lord, you have been with me in six troubles, don’t desert me in the seventh.’ She kept murmuring prayers, and to Tilly’s great surprise, the incantation worked: The ticket collector let them proceed, and they made it to their destination without further interference.”
It was fitting that Tubman came to be called “Moses,” for the Old Testament Moses underwent remarkably similar trials, and the Moses story is likewise full of conflicts between doubt and faith, and eventual reliance on God’s usually inconvenient will.
How, precisely, does this experience of guidance work? The great seventeenth-century Jesuit writer, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, speaks directly to this question in his spiritual classic Abandonment to Divine Providence:
“When God becomes our guide he insists that we trust him without reservations and put aside all nervousness about his guidance. We are sent along the path he has chosen for us, but we cannot see it, and nothing we have read is any help to us. Were we acting on our own we should have to rely on our experience. It would be too risky to do anything else. But it is very different when God acts with us. Divine action is always new and fresh, it never retraces its steps, but always finds new routes.”
Divine action is always new and fresh. This is a startlingly accurate insight by de Caussade. Responding to the “freshness” of divine guidance requires a certain docility of the will, flexibility, and a kind of radical trust. This trust is particularly required, because, as de Caussade says frequently, when we are led by the spirit, the guidance we receive is often shrouded in darkness. Krishna grasped this same point. He says to Arjuna: “These actions are enveloped in smoke.”
The yoga tradition is full of teaching stories about divine guidance, and in these stories, sure enough, this guidance is always enshrouded in darkness, in “a cloud,” or in “smoke.” In one of the greatest of these yoga tales—told in countless versions—a pilgrim is on an important journey. He travels only at night, and carries a lantern, but the lantern only illuminates the path just a few feet ahead of him. He knows that this slim illumination is all he needs. He does not need to see the whole path ahead. He trusts that he can make the entire journey seeing only the immediate next steps.
De Caussade picks up the theme: “When we are led by this action, we have no idea where we are going, for the paths we tread cannot be discovered from books or by any of our thoughts. But these paths are always opened in front of us and we are impelled along them. Imagine we are in a strange district at night and are crossing fields unmarked by any path, but we have a guide. He asks no advice nor tells us of his plans. So what can we do except trust him? It is no use trying to see where we are, look at maps or question passersby. That would not be tolerated by a guide who wants us to rely on him. He will get satisfaction from overcoming our fears and doubts, and will insist that we have complete trust in him.”
One of the most difficult aspects of faith is the suspension of one’s own preconceived ideas about how to proceed. The willing suspension of preconceived plans and schemes is absolutely required, as Harriet Tubman discovered. These plans—our plans—are then gradually replaced by a growing trust in moment-by-moment guidance.
Harriet’s trips were characterized by this very “shroud of darkness,” and also by stunning acts of creativity all along the way. When Harriet and her current band of fugitives finally reached the suspension bridge that led her party across the Niagara into Canada, she would routinely lead the party in songs of thanksgiving, great spirituals, and hymns of praise. She understood that a successful trip was not her doing. She saw clearly that she was “not the Doer.” Thanks should be given!
6
Remember our friend Brian the priest? When last we left him, he was on the floor of his own particular chariot. He was, you will recall, caught in long-standing inner conflict: Should he make a belated choice for what he knew was his true calling as a church musician? Or should he remain in the now-familiar role of rector of his small parish church? It was not a black-or-white choice by any means, as you will recall. He was in many ways well suited to the role of rector. He knew that he was being useful in the role. His family was proud of him. But his deepest aspirations had not been realized. He felt empty, dissatisfied, and deeply afraid he would die without having fully lived. Brian had lived with a quiet sense of self-betrayal for twenty years. As he reached his forty-fifth year, he could begin to see that his life would at some point end. And he wondered more and more frequently: Is there still time for me to be who I really am?
Around the time of his forty-fifth birthday, Brian became seriously depressed. He was paralyzed—like Arjuna—in the face of two courses of action, both of which now seemed difficult. The more he thought about it, the more impossible the situation seemed. He became more and more paralyzed. He started to drink heavily.
Finally, out of desperation, Brian did something very wise. He requested a leave of absence from his post as rector. His depression was his “second sense” kicking in. Something in him simply refused to go on. This refusal was a wise inner move: When you are enveloped in doubt, it is sometimes best just to stop. When in doubt don’t! Instead of moving forward in a daze, can you allow yourself to stop and experience the pain of the doubt? Can you investigate the doubt itself? This is precisely what Arjuna had to do. The entire dialogue of the Gita happens in a kind of “time-out” for Arjuna, as he explores his doubt. All forward movement is suspended, and an intense inquiry takes place.
“Suspending forward movement” was not that easy for Brian. The bishop had a shortage of good priests upon whom to call, and he was not pleased to let Brian go. The bishop, like Brian’s mother, wrote Brian’s doubts off as a midlife crisis. “Priests have these crises of faith,” said the bishop. “He’ll get through it.”
In spite of the resistance, Brian entered into a time of inquiry. This was itself a pivotal act of faith. Sometimes just stopping can be the act that allows the solution to emerge. Brian spent three months at a Jesuit retreat center. I had given him de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence before he left, and also one of my old copies of the Gita.
I visited with Brian after he had been at the retreat center for a month. We had lunch together in the refectory. He’d been studying de Caussade’s book, and he’d vigorously underlined this passage in it: “Now it is surely obvious that the only way to receive [guidance] is to put oneself quietly in the hands of God, and that none of our own efforts and mental striving can be of any use at all.”
None of our own efforts and mental striving can be of any use at all. At all? Brian had come to feel the wearying truth of this.
De Caussade nails this point: “This work in our souls cannot be accomplished by cleverness, intelligence, or any subtlety of mind, but only by completely abandoning ourselves to the divine action, becoming like metal poured into a mold, or a canvas waiting for the brush, or marble under the sculptor’s hands.”
Brian had to surrender his will. He had to be willing to do what he was called to do. And he had to put everything on the table. Nothing held back. This meant that he had to be willing to continue being rector if that was the guidance he received, and he had to be willing to bring everything he had even to that vocation.
Several weeks into his retreat, Brian made another smart move: He entered into a relationship with an old priest/confessor at the center. (Notice once again what a pivotal role mentors play in dharma decisions.) Father Bede had been a monk for forty years, and he was now the chief spiritual director at the retreat. Bede was sanguine about Brian’s situation, but forceful. He gave Brian the same message repeatedly: “For the sake of God, boy, let go of all this obsessive worry and fretting. You are powerless over such a mess.” Bede had faith that Brian would be guided. And Brian, who had much less faith, was able to hitchhike on Bede’s. Slowly, and as a result of pure desperation, Brian began to loosen his grip on the outcome.
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 and 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.