Deciding for Love
An Advent Story
I want to share with you a true story. It is an Advent story – a story about the coming of the light in a dark world. It is a story about a man named “Isaiah,” who, like his namesake prophet, knew something about the absence of God, hidden by sin, and what it feels like to cry out to the Most High to tear open the heavens and come down.
The story is related by Andrew Harvey. When he was 28 years-old, Andrew made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and met Isaiah, a Jewish mystic and local guide. Isaiah brought Andrew through all the major sites in Jerusalem over the course of several days. One afternoon in the garden of Gethsemane, toward the end of their time together, Andrew noticed for the first time the numbers tattooed on Isaiah’s arm. Isaiah then told him his story.
Isaiah was imprisoned at Auschwitz during the Nazi regime. His father, mother, and sister all died of starvation there. He was left alone, tortured regularly by a particularly sadistic guard. There was little hope that he would survive.
“In Auschwitz,” Isaiah reported to Andrew, “I discovered that there was one thing I was even more terrified of than death. When you are living in an atmosphere of terror, you realize that all the fears you shrink from in ‘normal’ circumstances are relatively minor and that there is one terror that everyone has which is overwhelming, and that hardly anyone ever talks about because very few have gone through enough to find it out.”
Andrew, feeling a little terrified himself at this point, asked, “What is that terror?”
“The terror of Love,” Isaiah replied, “of Love’s embrace of all things, all beings, and all events. Everyone pretends they want to know and experience Love, but to know and experience Love is to die to all our private fantasies and agendas, all our visions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ Everyone who comes to that death is dragged to it kicking and cursing and screaming and weeping tears of blood, just as Jesus was in this garden.”
“I was only twelve. What did I know about anything, about God? All I knew was that I had to decide, once and for all, whether the horror I saw around me was the ultimate reality or whether the joy and tenderness I could still feel stirring inside me was the truth. I knew they couldn’t both be the truth: If the horror of the camp was the reality about human nature and life, then what was stirring in my heart was some kind of mad joke. If what was stirring in my heart was real, then it was the horror that was the mad joke.”
Isaiah struggled with this question for months. He wept over it, wrestled with it like Jacob with the angel, wrestling for his life. He started to pray. Nothing happened. No insight. No consolation. But he kept on praying. Then early one winter morning he heard a quiet voice say to him, “You must decide.” What did that mean? He wrestled with this for another week.
Then, as he told Andrew, it came to him. “I understood that I was always free to decide whether the world I was being shown was the real one or whether the world I felt in my heart was the truth. When I really thought about it, the second choice was even more frightening than the first. What if Love was the real choice? Would I have to love the guard who had beaten me? Would I have to forgive the apparatus that had killed my parents and hundreds of thousands of others? Would I even have to forgive in some mysterious way God Himself for having allowed these horrors to take place?”
“Then, one morning, I awoke and knew quite simply what I had to do. I had to choose what was at the bottom of my heart, the fire I felt there when I thought of my mother, or our cat at home, or the flowers and vegetables in our kitchen garden. So I went out into the camp yard, covered in snow, with a gray lowering hopeless sky overhead, and, closing my eyes, I screamed with my whole being silently, ‘I choose Love! I choose Love.’”
“And then it happened. When I opened my eyes, a sun not of this world had come out and was blazing in glory all around me; the snow along the barbed wire glittered like diamonds, and the air was sweet and hard like the skin of a cold apple against my cheek. The guard I hated came out of another building at that moment, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t see me, but I saw him and – this was the miracle – I felt no fear at all, and no hatred, only a burning pity that scalded my eyes with tears. I did not feel vulnerable as I had feared; the Thing in me that was crying was stronger than anything or anyone I had ever encountered. It or He felt like a calm column of fire that nothing could put out.”
“Somehow I survived for another year until release came. Whenever I could, I would gaze at the way the ordinary light changed on the ground, along the wires, and on the roofs of the huts and the crematoria. I knew now Whose light it was a reflection of. The fire in my chest did not leave. It has never left. I have tried to live and breathe and act from it and from its laws.”
“I doubt if we will meet again. You are leaving tomorrow and I am in the last stages of cancer. I am not afraid. The Glory is here always. I see it with open eyes, every day. I am not unique. There are thousands of us, maybe millions, all over the world, of all kinds, classes, sexes and religions. The Glory gave me life and It is giving me now my death; but through another death long ago it gave me a Life beyond all dying. And it is into that Life that I am going.”
Then Isaiah imparted four teachings to Andrew. “Pain can be terrible beyond any human description, but it is transient. Bliss is eternal.”
“Evil is real, but only in its dimension that includes this world; the Glory shines forever here and everywhere in a way evil cannot stain or defeat.”
“Horror has its day, or year, or decade, or century; the Sun of love has never, and will never, set.”
“Whatever you have to go through to come to know this beyond any shadow of a doubt is worth it.”
I don’t know if you have sat in darkness and the shadow of death. Few of us have experienced anything like Isaiah, although, truth be said, when it comes to the Dark Night of the Soul, comparison is not helpful. But we if we are at all awake, we at least see the darkness that others experience. We wonder where God is. And all of us, like Isaiah, must decide.
When we decide for Love, we become human. I would like to suggest that Jesus has something like this in mind when he tells us about the coming of the “Son of Man” – the human being – after a period of suffering. The light shines even in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. We can choose Love. We can choose to remain human, even in the dark. It is through those who choose Love that the light shines in the dark.
Andrew Harvey shared the teaching of another mystic, one of the great Christian mystics, Father Bede Griffiths. Father Bede once told Andrew, “The second coming of Christ is not going to be the return of a Star Wars avatar, but rather the rising of the golden yeast of divine love consciousness in millions of beings who have been stripped of their illusions by the dark night and connected through its anguish to the power of all transforming love.”
This is the “second coming” that we see with the eyes of the awakened heart, and that we wait for in the dark.[1]
[1] The stories of “Isaiah” and Father Bede Griffiths are related by Andrew Harvey in his book, Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 2002), p. 5- 8.
Wow, what a powerful story. Thank you for sharing it.