Commitment & Bliss

"Commit your way to something good that makes upon your life the great demand." These are the words of Howard Thurman in his book Disciplines of the Spirit. "Commit your way to something good that makes upon your life the great demand."

The notion of "the great demand" reminded me of spiritual teachings I had previously gleaned from New Thought minister Mary Manin Morrisey who often asserted that /a life dream in which we could imagine every step along the path to the goal/ was not a large enough dream. Our dreams need spacious gaps of unknowing, where our faith and The Mystery can symbolically have tea…and brainstorm foot falls and wheel tracks that we could not originally have imagined.

In Disciplines, Howard Thurman speaks of life itself as an irrepressible, robust, vital force manifesting / everywhere conditions are even remotely sustainable. He asserts that the mature discipline of commitment is the practice through which each of us can harness life's robust energy as fuel for our own intentional becoming. Thurman asserts: "It may be that only in the experience of commitment is an authentic sense of self born."

In the great conversations between the myth-scholar, Joseph Campbell and journalist and minister Bill Moyers. Campbell proclaims: "People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of …the rapture of being alive." Campbell further asserts " that if you …follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you. " According to Campbell, invisible hands come to support you, when you commit to following your bliss.

"Commit your way to something good that makes upon your life the great demand." For Thurman, it is commitment that invites those invisible and supportive hands, commitment that taps into life's robust energy and helps us access the thriving rapture of being alive.

To what, therefore, are we committed?

In moving forward at the end of the semester, I ask myself again: To what am I committed? How committed am I? And how do I frame the dream-language of my own intentional becoming?

To become a Unitarian Universalist minister?
To be of service and to be sustained?
To intimately Know and show the face of the Divine.

How does life force infuse each notion of my path? And how am I with myself and with you, embodying each of these dream-phrasings?

To become a UU minister?
To be of service and to be sustained?
To intimately Know and show the face of the Divine.

How can I access and inspire the rapture of being alive?

In Thurman's voice at the start of the service, we heard that the duck* can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because the duck rests in the Atlantic. The duck has made itself a part of the boundless by easing itself into just where the edges of the boundless touch the edges of the duck. We heard that "A cat can make a hearth-rug a haven in the Infinite."

How can I streamline and fortify my sometimes frenzied human strivings, so that the journey becomes for me, and so also I become, a haven in the infinite? To this great demand, especially, I devote the power of my commitment.

*we heard a recording of Howard Thurman reading Donald Babcock's The Duck

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