Sacred Activism

Three years ago, almost to the day, I discovered Andrew Harvey anew after having read and loved the opening section of his book “The Direct Path,” and becoming frustrated with the second. “The Direct Path” was published in 2000 and I’m unsure when between 2000 and 2006 I read it, or if it might have been in the phase I went through of wanting to throw all teaching books against the wall. I got it out again today and it looks pretty good. Until getting reacquainted with Andrew Harvey in 2006, I know I’d mentioned several times that I hated books like his where the author draws you in with a first chapter that tells a personal story and then, just when he’s got you, launches into whatever it is he/she thinks you need to know.

Anne Lamott put it really distinctly in an interview once when she talked of books that were helpful being neither honest or dishonest (like guidebooks for parents full of facts). She, personally, was always looking for the honest rather than the helpful and it was why she wrote a few of her books – there were plenty of helpful ones out there but none with that feel of one person’s experience: the good/bad, sad/crazy, horrible/beautiful kind that makes you laugh and cry, feel not so alone, and even at times, gives you a clue as to how to proceed with some grace.

My re-acquaintance with Harvey was a stunning one. I’d been out with my friend Mary the night before. We started off to go to a book signing I wanted to attend and that she was obviously half-hearted about, and had it turn out, for no explainable reason, to simply not exist. I’d seen it in the paper but the bookstore employee didn’t know a thing about it, not one other anxious, book-toting attendee was in sight, and the store didn’t even carry the book. Mary perked up right away and we went across the street for a beer. Sitting outside feeling provincial as we St. Paulites watched the Minneapolis passers by, we talked.

In the morning she called me; breathless. “Did you see the new issue of “Spirituality and Health?”

I said, “No.”

She said, “You’ve got to see this. I’m coming over.”

I’ve got a backyard cabin that my husband built for me, an acceptance of a yearning I had for about a thousand times more solitude than I could get. Mary and I headed there. We sat on the floor. She read me practically the whole article.

“I thought for sure you had to have seen this,” she said, “it’s everything you were talking about last night.”

Over the years since sitting on the floor with Mary, getting as excited as she about what she was reading, I’ve thought of Harvey often. But my brain’s been fuzzy since some mystical experiences of my own. I got, and then lost the journal, my dad died, my grandson was born, I wrote a book and pretty soon I couldn’t remember if it was Andrew Harvey or Andrew Cohen whom I’d so briefly fallen in love with and remembered so fondly.

It was, as far as I know, Harvey’s first public pitch for sacred activism, a vision that is now coming to fruition. I found this out on-line by accident (as seems to be the way I’m finding everything these days). He has a new book and a busy speaking schedule. The book is called “The Hope.” I ordered it, even though I’ve been on a strict no book-buying budget lately. But I hope it’s not a repeat of “The Direct Path.” There’s a point when all the teaching/organizing/institutionalizing begins to wear on you, no matter how spot-on or well meant.

I just want to know more about Andrew Harvey. I want to hear about his vision and what he feels but not have him map out the path for me. I don’t know why. I feel that if I knew why I could probably make a ton of money talking about it, because I think it’s the change that’s in the midst of happening. It’s my version of the Anne Lamott yen for honesty over fact and information.

I’ll let you know what I find when the book arrives, but I know one thing already: Harvey and I share the same feeling of whatever is coming being brought on by the broken heart. The broken, or at least open heart, is the antidote to the world’s deadness, the same-old, same-old, inability, or unwillingness to change that gets us all battered and bruised like old boats tied to a dock in the storm. It’s our hearts we have to follow out to open sea.