1.7 The part of you that always loves you enough to fight for you
In my twenties, I heard self–help teachers say, “Listen to your heart.” And I heard friends say it. So I decided to try it.
Whenever I had an important decision to make, I made sure to ask myself explicitly…
What’s deepest in my heart right now?
But…
Mostly I didn’t know what.
I had spent my childhood obeying shoulds…
So my heart was a stranger.
Then one rainy night when I was filled with too much sadness to be able to get to sleep, I stood at my window in the dark long past bedtime looking out at the backs of the apartment buildings that ring my block, watching one light go out, then another, as those other folks went off to bed.
I thought about how the day had been too much for me and how this human world is too much for me, and I asked myself my question but this time with a shift…
“What’s deepest in my heart always?”
And the answer was right there…
The part of me that always loves me enough to fight for me.
Which gave me a lot to think about over the following months, and years, and still.
Given my repressive Calvinist childhood, where I learned to despise myself, it did not compute that I could have a part of me that always loves me. But I wanted that. So I decided to do whatever it took to make it come true.
And what did this always-part ask of me? It wanted me to fight. Me, the compulsive nice guy.
Fight had never been one of my words. Not that I hadn’t taken stands for what I believed in. I had done that despite being such a shy person. But of all the things it could choose, why did my heart want this? Why fight?
Oh, because we are in a fight. We’re in a fight with despair, and despair is a terrible enemy.
Because it’s not just a feeling…
Despair is the consequence of the deep structure of our operating system.
I realized that if I could find my fight, I could turn it against the innate despair that comes with being human. So far, so good.
But then what about love? Weren’t fight and love opposites? Wouldn’t they cancel each other out? And what about compassion, that sweet, vulnerable incarnation of love, what would fight do to that?
I had learned well the conventional church version of compassion which insisted that no matter what, you must always be polite, mild–mannered, reasonable, undemanding, and never rock the boat. But…
That’s not compassion, that’s submission.
No wonder I was always grinding my gears in my activist endeavors. I wanted to fight for what I believed in, but I was always held back by my compulsion to make nice. For example, in the 1960s during the protests against the Vietnam War, I remember marching on the Pentagon….
A wave of us surged through the bushes and over the crest of a hill and suddenly found ourselves facing rows of soldiers in battle gear, their rifles leveled at us and tipped with very real bayonets. I could see it in their eyes that they were scared. And god knows I was scared. The pounding in my ears told me that. I wished I could have held up a sign that said, “Sorry, I’m really a very nice person but this war is so wrong and actually immoral that I feel duty-bound to protest. How about if we talk and find common ground?”
I knew a few activists who loved demonstrating. It was sport for them. The rowdier the better. But for me, it was always steeped in sadness. I couldn’t get over it that my country, which I so wanted to love, was doing such bad things.
Years later my gears were still grinding when I did my child abuse prevention work. We were busy going from school to school in our local area teaching children self–defense, specifically…
How to stop bullies, how to get away from molesters and kidnappers, and how to get help if you were being abused by a familiar person.
And we were so successful, or rather the kids were so successful putting our lessons into practice, that word got around and then we got a call to come to Sacramento to draft legislation to provide funding for prevention training everywhere in the state.
We had no idea what we were getting into. We were so naïve we thought no one could possibly oppose children’s safety.
And they didn’t exactly. Our opponents said they were all for keeping children safe, but what they didn’t want us to do was…
To teach children to say no.
Especially if that meant sometimes disobeying adults who were in authority over them. They wanted children to grow up submitting to the status quo.
But the whole point of our work was to teach children how to fight for themselves, and…
The stand I took for children’s safety was absolute.
No one could back me off that. It was as deep in my heart as anything.
At the same time the full force of my own childhood was hammering me…
“You have to be nice. You have to keep everyone happy. Including your opponents. You have to make them like you. You’re not allowed to upset anyone no matter what kind of threat they are to your work.”
I was supposed to win over our toughest opposition politely, no ruffling of feathers. No matter how mean they were to us, I was not allowed to hurt their feelings…
I was supposed to nice the bullies into being nice.
Which never worked, not even once.
Something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be the children. Luckily there were dozens of activists and thousands of parents who took that stand, too, and together we did the work to get the legislation passed and secure the funding, and then we spent years doing the work.
These days when I talk about compassion, I feel the need to add a modifier and call it fierce compassion, to be clear what it is I’m giving my allegiance to.
I know my childhood church would not have wanted me to marry those two words together, but you know…
Jesus was not a nice guy.
He opposed the Roman Empire, which was the superpower of his day. He opposed the takeover of his country and the brutality of the occupying army. He refused to bow to the hierarchy of his religion. He spoke out against the High Priest who was colluding with the Roman rulers.
And, most essentially, Jesus took a very public, noisy, and uncompromising stand on behalf of the poor, the outcast, and the downtrodden—a dangerous stand to take because the Romans insisted on a quiescent population living in subjugation.
It was the moral fierceness Jesus demonstrated and his outspokenness that earned him a very hard death.
I grew up on Jesus. He was my model for compassion. He was the first activist I ever heard about. So why didn’t I simply inherit his fierceness? Because I had been taught a contradiction…
Worship Jesus, but don’t you dare follow in his footsteps.
Worship Jesus, but obey the church.
And in my church…
There was not one person who was the kind of radical troublemaker Jesus was.
It would not have been tolerated. Every Sunday morning, we sat stiffly in our pews, slogged through hymns, and endured stultifying sermons. That’s what we did instead of going out in public to oppose injustice.
Yet, even though our minister taught submission, there was still Jesus. And without knowing what was happening…
I developed a crush on his fierceness.
Which included his anger. He was angry at the oppression of the Romans; I was angry at my church for keeping love so small.
But as a grown–up, I saw myself keeping my anger small. Miniscule. I was scared of it. I put a lid on it but it was still in there, simmering, building up pressure. And if anyone got angry at me, my stomach clutched and my knees got wobbly, because I didn’t have a solid place to stand within myself.
The people I looked to for advice didn’t help. A relationship expert I followed said anger is always wrong, always a mistake, so eliminate it from your life. The anger management gurus I listened to weren’t teaching how to manage anger, as in how to make it work for you, they wanted to make it gone.
Anger is called a negative emotion. But the purpose of emotion is to move us to meet our needs. The word itself is mostly made up of “motion.” And this can get confusing. Love, which we call a positive emotion, is sometimes bad for you. Like if you fall in love with someone abusive.
But if your anger motivates you to meet a genuine need, how can we disparage it by calling it negative?
An emotion in and of itself is neither good or bad, what matters is the consequence it leads to. Martin Luther King, Jr., said…
“Like the spark that ignites the fuel in an engine, anger is the stimulus that initiates action.”
Gandhi said…
“As heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.”
I can look back at my life and remember times when I put anger to work for a good purpose—like preventing child abuse. I called it passion, but it was an angry passion. It rose up from the depths.
It came to me as a primal NO…
Abuse has to stop, it just has to.
And it came as a primal YES…
Children have to be safe, they just have to be.
I remember when I first heard the Dalai Lama say, “My religion is kindness,” I was so happy that in a world where so many behave as if their religion is nothing more than hate speech, a world–famous religious leader was putting kindness first.
Yet kindness is not enough, not in a fight with despair, not in a fight with evil. So while lovingkindness, that sweet watchword of Buddhism, is a good start…
What I find I need is lovingfierceness.
And, really, if I care about people, how could I not be angry about exploitation, abuse, poverty, warfare, and racism? And about the death of our species.
Here’s the lesson I finally learned….
The more you’ve got nurturing anger working for you, the less chance you’ll get sucked into the destructive rage that despair generates.
Because these two are opposites.
In many of the classic hero’s journey stories, the hero venturing out into the world happens upon a mentor who is a wise and helpful figure. By contrast, I found my mentor in the deepest place in my heart. Which I call my always–part. And which is the incarnation of my love of nurturance.
But wait a minute…
What if you search for your always-part, but can’t find it?
First, I would say look for even the tiniest glimmer of it…
It’s like when you’re building a fire at your campsite. You set a spark to the nest of very fine tinder you’ve prepared, and then blow very gently and carefully on the flame, feeding it just the right amount of oxygen so it grows into a real fire.
For some of us, getting to know our always–part is like that.
Or…
Maybe it’s like when you wake in the morning and you have the merest trace of an important dream in your twilight consciousness, and you close your eyes and keep your mind calm and you hold that trace in soft focus until it returns full force.
And now, I can see that I need to amend what I said earlier about not knowing my heart. I remember an evening where I went to a networking event and said something stupid and felt embarrassed and so drove home in familiar agony.
As I climbed the stairs to my apartment, I started saying to myself…
“But, Richard, you have such a good heart, such a good heart.”
Which meant that in the deepest place in my heart, as raw and unformed, or deformed, as I was, still I wanted love to win. Always that.
And that meant I wanted a different me. A me who was masterful at love. A me who could go out in the world and infuse it with love.
But mostly I wanted a me who could treat himself with love. And I started repeating that mantra whenever I had a bad day and was down on myself.
It’s clear to me now that this was the always–part of me unburying itself, pushing its way out of the silence in which it had been trapped in my childhood. This desire for love to win has been with me since I can remember.
And I’m telling you all this as a way of saying, when looking for your always–part, look deep.
But what if you look deep and still can’t find even a glimmer? Then…
You get to make it up!
And…
As you live by it, you will make it real.
