Give bread. Give wine

Feast on your life…

Derek Walcott, Love After Love

You are invited to live.  You will say that you are already alive. Wisdom teachers will tell you that you are the dead following the dead.  They get into trouble for this. The ego is not flattered but offended. This storyteller is not flattered.

How do you feast on your life?   You give it away with passion.  You cannot give it away without passion.  You cannot turn up at the banquet with a lukewarm attitude.  To feast on your life requires that you engage with consummation rather than consumption.

When you spend your time in consumption you tend to get burnt out rather than burned up.  There is a difference.  The fire that will allow you to feast on your life is the fire of passion allied to service.  This is service in and for the sake of Love.

It is more than the law of attraction it is attraction itself.  It is not the law of attraction in service of ‘little me’ who come to it with a shopping list filled with things to get.  It is the experience, to quote St. John of the Cross, of “the living flame of Love.”  It is the experience of being burned alive by Love.

This sounds horrid!  It is to the ego. The ego wants to serve itself.  It does not want to be consumed by Love and so it creates for you a banquet where all the hungry ghosts of a life not aflame with passion appear.  What then happens is not consummation but consumption.  Ghosts of passions unlived literarily eat you up from the inside.

The story of the talents in the Bible is the story of passion. The Master who is creation gets angry when the talent is buried.  This anger is the fire of passion.   It is not destructive. It is telling us something is out of kilter.  It is compassion inviting you to wake up and expand into fulfilment.

Creation is not lukewarm.  It created you because it is passionate about creation and you are its child.  This passion does not cease.  This passion is not born and thus never dies.  It only changed form.  It knows what it intended you to be, do and have.  It is intelligent beyond your limited sense of intellectual knowing.  It can in one moment change your whole outlook on the world.  It can raise you from the dead and a life of lukewarm existence.

Creation gives. It is always giving.  We resist this giving because it does not quite fit.  We are created to be a yoga teacher and we become an accountant. This was this storyteller’s experience earlier in his lifetime.  We are created for the purpose of giving away who we are created to be.  This is expensive and it goes on forever.  You think you don’t last but you simply change form.  Passion breaks boundaries to take you into the boundless.

There is an unattributed story that circulates.

” A man visits heaven and hell.  In each place there is a table filled with the most beautiful food.  Hell looks like heaven and heaven looks exactly like hell.  Only in hell everyone is starving while in heaven everyone looks happy and contented with a full belly.  When the man asks God why everything in heaven and hell appear the same yet different God ‘answers.’ In heaven everyone is feeding while in hell they are all feeding themselves.”

Here you have a wisdom story. The difference between the two is consumption and consummation. Consummation involves passion for life.  It involves anger used in the service of creation rather than destruction.

In The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide the wonderful Rick Jarrow asks people what they are passionate bout.  If they don’t know what that is he then asks them what makes them angry.  What are you angry about?

Or do you avoid such questions?

Life will ask such questions of you.  This is not a punishment.  It is an invitation to the feast.  If you resist it you will feel uneasy.  If you put away this unease then it will come again.  Only now there is deeper resistance.  This resistance is mirrored in the body.  The body never lies.  You, in your resistance put on psychosomatic armour. Nothing gets in or out.

In 7 Ways to a Wonderful Life this is why we emphasise passion.  The lukewarm life is not for passion but for comfort.  It is a life of self-interest rather than the expansive invitation of interest (turning to Love) in Self (yes, with a capital S.)

Ask yourself this question:

What am I passionate about?

When you ask this be aware of how you feel.  Do you feel alive with passion that wants to give itself away through you? Do not feel guilty if you don’t.  You came into this world of form as an expression of the passion of the Divine for its ability to create.  Very soon you learned that being passionate was not terribly popular.  It still is not.  It goes against the norm.  The norm is lukewarm at best.

Still and all it is a great question and a great invitation.  Ask it everyday with the intention that you use it to feed the hungry in whatever way that speaks to you and you have the ticket to the banquet where you give wine and give bread and you feast on your life.

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