I have certainly felt like that at times. To engage in sacred activism, we need to maintain open hearts – open to some of the harsh realities of the world, and seeing enough of those realities that we can be informed and motivated to try to help change things for the better. Sometimes though, it can become overwhelming. We can’t be actively engaged in everything – and being open to too much can leave us feeling overwhelmed or paralysed. So we also need to filter and focus on a small number of issues that we feel passionate about – maybe only one or two.

While filtering and focussing can help manage our time and energy, the process of filtering itself can take its own toll. I find that with just clearing my emails, going through my Facebook and Twitter feeds, watching the news, or opening a newspaper – the headlines alone often send torrents of pain and sadness into my consciousness. Maybe you’ve had a similar experience.

One solution of course is just to block it all out – and I can understand why many of us do that. Some spiritual teachers actually encourage people to avoid the news or anything ‘negative’ – which is another way of counselling us to turn away from those in need. The way of sacred activism demands instead that we engage with some of the pain of the world and to respond to it with active compassion. The key of course is ‘some’ of the pain. We have to filter. But one of the challenges with even effective filtering is that we may not notice the creeping sadness and rising anger. Over time, it can make us feel jaded, bitter, cynical and frankly, not a lot of fun to be around.

So this is a two-fold challenge for those of us who want to maintain open-hearted, compassionate engagement with some of the world’s pain.

First, we need to remember to draw deep from our spiritual practices – prayer, meditation, yoga, dance, music, making art – in order to be refreshed enough to be able to pour out love and compassion without burning out. In one of his talks in Turkey, Andrew Harvey told this story:

I once asked Mother Theresa in the late 80s how she did what she did – I’d been to Calcutta and it takes an enormous amount of courage just to stay in Calcutta. She said, “Honestly, I don’t do it. What I do, is that I get up at 4.30 in the morning and I spend an hour and a half just gazing at the host, and I fill up. And then quite consciously during the day, I give away everything that I’ve had, then go to bed totally empty and exhausted. Then in the morning I get up. I fill up. I give everything away. I go to bed exhausted. I get up. I fill up. I give everything away. I go to bed exhausted.” The Dalai Lama gets up at 4.00 every morning and practices for two hours, so that he can be this bonfire of love and generosity. That just doesn’t come naturally. That’s something that he works on. I didn’t come into this room without praying deeply beforehand. I do it because I love you and respect you and I want to give the best of myself. I want to be absolutely here. That doesn’t come naturally. It’s divine work. You breathe it in, in order to be able to breathe it out in acts of love and compassion. And you must give it all! All! Because if you give it all, you create a bigger space of emptiness to be filled. And then if you give it ALL, you create an even bigger space – and so on.

Second, we need to actively cultivate joy and celebration.

One of my favourite movies is O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and on the soundtrack is a song, which at one level can be taken as a naïve Pollyanna-ish view. But at another level it is a work of spiritual genius. You probably know the song:

There’s a dark and a troubled side of life;
There’s a bright and a sunny side, too;
Tho’ we meet with the darkness and strife,
The sunny side we also may view.

[chorus]
Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side,
Keep on the sunny side of life;
It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way,
If we keep on the sunny side of life.

Tho’ the storm in its fury break today,
Crushing hopes that we cherished so dear,
Storm and cloud will in time pass away,
The sun again will shine bright and clear.

Let us greet with a song of hope each day,
Tho’ the moments be cloudy or fair;
Let us trust in our Savior always,
Who keepeth everyone in His care.

(Written in 1899 by Ada Blenkhorn.)

I have some issues with the last line, (if it’s talking about ‘care’ in the sense of protection from misfortune, I don’t think that’s really how things work – but that’s for another post!), but overall I think there is a certain genius to this simple song. It holds two important aspects of reality together.

It looks the hard times square in the eyes and says, “Yep, there’s a dark and troubled side of life, and storms that can take away everything we hold dear.” That’s how the world is. That’s how the Universe is. There are no guarantees. Misfortune happens – and it doesn’t only happen to people who are bad, or who deserve it, or who attracted a bad reality with their thoughts, or who didn’t set their intention right, or who accumulated bad karma – all of these are forms of victim blaming. Sometimes shit just happens. I don’t believe God or the Universe minutely calibrates each hurricane, drought, bushfire or disease according to who deserves what. This song was written in a relatively prosperous country in an era when young mothers often died in childbirth, babies and young children were regularly lost to to disease, and when a poor harvest meant a long, hungry winter. They didn’t have the modern luxury of a spirituality of privilege which blamed victims for ‘attracting’ misfortune.

But here’s the thing: they remembered that there’s another side of life too. We mustn’t allow that darkness or fear to shape our life. Misfortune or calamity doesn’t necessarily mean you’re out of step with God. It doesn’t necessarily mean there is something wrong with you. It’s not necessarily a ‘sign’ at all. Storms happen – that’s life – and this storm too will pass: “Storm and cloud will in time pass away, The sun again will shine bright and clear”, so “Let us greet with a song of hope each day.”

We need to remember to cultivate the strength and compassion to be open-hearted, to draw deep from our spiritual practices and also to cultivate the joy that makes life worth living and celebrating in the first place.