When we allow ourselves to adore, we become acquainted with the depths of our
own hearts . . . and realize ourselves as love.
Sweep Out the Chamber
of Your Heart
of Your Heart
by Jeannie Zandi
Go sweep out the chamber of your heart. Make it ready to be the dwelling place
of the Beloved.
— Mahmud Shabistari, 13th-century Sufi
hen I was 10, I was in love with Miss Walker. After a series of wrinkly grandma
types who had been teaching for decades, in fourth grade there was
twenty-something Miss Walker at the chalkboard. Miss Walker in short skirts
that showed her beautiful legs, Miss Walker with her electric-curler-created
brown curls bouncing as she walked briskly down the hall. I would sign her name
as if it was mine: Miss Nancy J. Walker. It was the first year I got straight
As, and that was out of my deep adoration which demanded expression — I wanted to give something to she who seemed to lack nothing.
According to the dictionary, to adore is to “worship as God or a god” from the Latin adorare, which means “to pray to.” It is a deep, often rapturous regard that pours from the heart without concern
for social custom or convention and, in its pure form, looks for nothing for
itself but to love and pay homage to the beloved.
For the 13th-century mystic and poet Rumi, the adoration of his beloved teacher Shams of
Tabriz led him into the wilderness of his heart, taking him through the depths
of its dark pockets of longing and pain, and ultimately opening into the wide
vista of his love for God and for all that is. The human heart, hung heavy with
disappointments and sorrows, complete with sealed-off passages and hidden
lonely caverns, longs to be known, to express itself fully in this world. It
desires to bring the love that we are, beneath our accumulated pain and
confusion, to this earthly plane through our eyes and our hands. For some, the
yearning to live as love is so acute that there is no other choice but to
travel this seemingly dangerous road of Rumi.
Traveling this road may mean wholeheartedly devoting one’s life to knowing the oneness of God. For others, it may mean a simple practice
of allowing what we feel to be experienced and touched, without distraction or
minimization so that we may come to know the depths of who we are. The shining
truth and beauty of our hearts leaping at the sights or sounds that touch us
can act as a tractor beam, drawing us onward as we explore and touch every
desolate corner that stands between us and our inner beloved, and therefore
also between us and all of creation.
In India, ashrams exist where a pilgrim can fall completely in love with an
embodiment of God and seek shelter and solace in the haven of regular food,
regular lodging and regular contact with the beloved while undertaking the
heart’s journey. Given that the teacher is one of integrity and clarity, he/she can hold a space for temporarily allowing the devotee to see the teacher as God
on the way to knowing him- or herself as God. The guru holds the space for the
exploration of the longing, desperation, self-loathing, doubt and sorrow that
come from living a human life. This way is revered in India, so a God-crazed
love dog is generally treated by others within and without the ashram with
tenderness and understanding.
The following poem by Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, sheds light on the idea
of a love dog:
Love Dogs
One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
”So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of the souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
”Why did you stop praising?”
”Because I never heard anything back.”
”This longing you express is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of the dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.
In our country, it is rare to find a circle where this tenderness and
understanding are extended to one who deeply hungers for God and expresses it
through great devotion, nor are there many socially accepted containers for
traveling the path of adoration all the way to its end. We Americans tend to
sexualize all adoration (that is, assume that it must be sexual), becoming
suspicious of the man who adores the girl, the woman who adores the woman, the
man who adores the man, etc. Gurus are widely suspected, seen as megalomaniacs
or manipulators, and their followers are viewed as naive sheep. (This is not to
say that there aren’t examples of men who adore girls that we should be suspicious of or gurus who
are megalomaniacs.) The only widely accepted forms for expressing adoration are
within a heterosexual couple or between parents/grandparents and children. The
therapist/client relationship can also be an accepted container for this
adoration to flourish and find its true home in the client’s own heart.
I remember the first teacher I met who allowed others to praise him and it felt
clean. He came from a tradition in India, though he was American, and devotees
were encouraged to write him poetry, to extol his virtues, and as far as I
could tell, he was simply standing in for the Holy while we sang the reverence
that was in our hearts. How wonderful to let loose the devotion I had felt for
so many, but had held inside out of fear of being laughed at, rejected or
rushed to bed, or used to fill someone else’s bottomless pit. For most, our egos are so hungry for validation that we can’t hold space for another to adore us — we are too interested in it, too starved for it ourselves to invite and hold space for its expression. We
think it means something, and something about
us, rather than seeing it as the natural expression of the holy through a human
being.
We have deadened ourselves out of not knowing what to do with the wealth of
feelings inside.
The heart ideally needs a laboratory, in a sense, in its rocky course toward
freedom, where many conditions are held consistent, such as (a) the adored and
the one who is adoring are mutually aware of the holy context — in other words, that this is about God, and the adored holds that container if
the adoring one gets confused; (b) the adored is willing to stay with the
process (as opposed to lovers who sometimes leave); (c) the adored does not
contaminate the container with his or her own personal needs; (d) the adoration
doesn’t lead to anything concrete happening in the everyday world (such as dating,
marriage, etc.); and (e) the adored is able (because he/she knows the
territory) and willing (because he/she loves attending the birth of light) to
witness and offer company through the gnarly parts of the journey without
freaking out. Then the longing heart is free to adore, drool, blither, blather,
be foolish; try its hand at poetry, at praising, at singing; descend into deep
sorrow, feel jealous, try its wings.
Most of us know what it’s like to adore the average human and how much space he or she has for all of
this. We have a certain amount of adoration we can tolerate before our “stuff” comes up, and we want to shoo the loving fan away, make fun of them, be mean to
them, assume they are lying, assume they don’t know us, assume it’s all about us, assume perhaps the person is not “right” for us, etc. The task requires someone who has carved out her/his own heart to
have space for another to play, and for that someone to create and maintain a
clear laboratory for the exploration to proceed untainted.
Though we may not be aware of it at the time, when we are adoring another human
being we are seeing God reflected in an earthly face, and our hearts call to
plumb their depths. What we adore is the reflection of our own divine inner
beauty — in a landscape, a flower, a serene face, a gentle manner. When we allow ourselves to adore, we become acquainted with the depths of our
own hearts, allow ourselves to approach the grandeur within our own selves, and
realize ourselves as love. When our hearts are still cluttered with old pain
and fear, love moves only where it seems safe to move, only under certain
conditions. The swept-clean heart is an indiscriminate lover: its nature is to
love. It loves in every direction; it
is love. It knows itself as love, and its joy is to love. It no longer is seeking
fulfillment from the outside, looking with hungry eyes toward the false gods
through which it was promised fulfillment. Instead, it has burrowed down
through the rubble to the fresh wellspring of the Source and drinks there,
overflowing outward.
What if we let ourselves love what we love? What if, at least within the privacy
of our own solitude, we let ourselves notice what we adore? We have deadened
ourselves out of not knowing what to do with the wealth of feelings inside. I
recently met with a man in my travels who realized he unconsciously had stopped
noticing that half the human race was made up of women. For him, acknowledging
the presence of females almost always had ended in disappointment,
discouragement, desperation and longing, and so on a subconscious level he had
given it up. No wonder so many men gaze at images of women in the privacy of
their own solitude: exposing that vulnerability to another human being even in
the best of conditions can feel daunting, never mind the possibility of freshly
eliciting scorn, fear or the unloading of years of a woman’s pain.
The simple invitation I gave this man was to walk around and notice that some
people are women and to feel whatever was there. The point was not for him to get a woman, which is what men are taught will bring them salvation. The point was
for him to reclaim the wilds of his own heart, to touch and explore them, and
to return to a place where no woman could rival the internal love affair
between him and his Source. Then we drink from our own inner spring, and
relationship becomes a celebration of that rather than yet another attempt to
squeeze a drop of love out of an external source that never will satisfy like
the inner one.
When we adore, we tend to measure ourselves against our projected deity and we
come up short. We are human, wanting, full of flaws, life-size, and the adored
one seems larger than life. If we take the whole journey to reclaim our
divinity, this is a temporary condition: painting our own holiness on another.
Often, instead of honoring this opportunity to feel reverence and experience
what is touched in our hearts, many of us use this flooding of insecurity to
flee. Until the last decade, if I was attracted to someone, my strategy was to look at that person as little as possible and bury any sign
of my attraction. What if the intensity of my adoration was seen, and right
alongside, the squirming and writhing intensity of my self-loathing? What if
the person decided it was something in particular — sexual attraction or an interest in dating or a supply to fill the black hole
within — before I myself had the opportunity and space to explore it? It was better to
stay safe and below the radar, doing damage control on those feelings, right?
Yet the key to plumbing the whole depth of the heart is precisely to dare to
walk through this uncharted territory of squirmy things that rise when our
hearts are drawn out beyond where we can maintain our cool. For many of us,
that territory is gnarly enough to hobble us to the point of hiding forever,
resulting in crowds of people walking around trying not to notice the beauty of
their neighbors — throngs of hearts in hiding. However, the journey through this wild land is
precisely what lets our hearts sing on this sweet Earth.
We can notice where we are drawn, where we love, consenting to have whatever
feelings that come with it flood our bodies as we sit with them and let them
sift and work themselves out. This willingness washes our hearts little by
little until the full blaze that knows no fear is reclaimed, and we walk this
Earth as love instead of looking for it. As Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky) writes,
“Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always
saying, with that sweet moon language, what every other eye in this world is
dying to hear?”
