The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (47 page)

During the Civil War, Harriet was at the peak of her powers. She was hugely creative, in precisely the way de Caussade predicted one would be when led by the spirit. Tubman was constantly coming
up with brilliant solutions on the spot—solutions that stunned her comrades. She had no schooling whatsoever in military affairs, so she was not constrained by any concepts about how things
should
be done. She just trusted her own gut. Her motto was always, “Just keep going.”

This motto, “Just keep going” is instructive. What I find most important, finally, about the Harriet Tubman story is her particular combination of faith and action. These two qualities reinforce each other. Together they are fire and gasoline. We will explore this more thoroughly in the next chapter of this book, when we look at the life of Mahatma Gandhi. But it’s important to note this principle here:
Discerning action strengthens faith
. This is a common thread in all of our stories.

8

By the end of his three-month retreat, Brian had made his decision. (“Actually,” he would correct me, “the decision made me.”) “When I really did finally let go,” he said, “all hell broke loose. Everything shifted.”

Brian and I had not charted this aspect of the process in our lunch. But Brian’s story added a new piece: The hardest work comes in getting to the decision. Once the decision is made, it is as if the decision itself lays down some kind of invisible tracks—and the cart of dharma just rolls forward, sometimes at shocking speed. Forget about trying to slow down this part of the process.

Brian’s dharma life spilled forward dramatically: It turns out that a position within the national church had just opened up—music director at an innovative program to enliven the sacred music in parishes all over the country. The director of the program just happened to be on retreat at the same time Brian was. They got to know each other, and he saw that Brian was the perfect guy for the job. He recruited Brian at the selfsame table where we had worked on our list.

In the five years since Brian’s retreat, he has developed the national sacred music institute into a well-functioning organization. He has been creative in the role, and fully engaged. He brings parish music directors (his authentic tribe) to the institute to help inspire and direct them. He
founded a summer choir camp. Brian is living his dharma: unified at last.

Several years ago, Brian came back to give a sermon in his old parish, and invited me to come. I noticed in his sermon that he frequently used the archetype of “the journey” when talking to parishioners. He used a passage from Exodus that describes Moses and the journey out of Egypt. He talked about the bondage of inauthenticity—the bondage of the false self, the bondage of self-will. And he talked about the exhilaration of freedom. Those of us who have been in bondage and have made the journey to freedom are particularly touched by the suffering of others who are still in shackles. Remember Thoreau: One authentic act of freedom can knock the fetters from a million slaves.

9

Harriet Tubman returned home a war hero. She would spend the rest of her life helping her African American brothers and sisters regain dignity, respect, and freedom. As you can imagine, this was an uphill battle.

As a harbinger of things to come, even as an exhausted Tubman was returning home from the war on a Northbound passenger train—traveling from Virginia to her home in Auburn, New York—she was the victim of predictable race prejudice. She was violently dragged from her coach seat by a conductor who decided that her papers must have been forged. How could a black woman be legally carrying a soldier’s pass? How could she be a “commander”? Harriet was then thrown into the baggage compartment for the remainder of the trip. She would live with this kind of violence for the rest of her life. It did not stop her.

After she returned to Auburn, Harriet focused her mammoth energies on helping the many needy and dispossessed African Americans in her own region of New York. She poured all of her own personal resources into this task—taking many needy folk into her own home. Her dream was to establish a separate charitable institution in Auburn for the neglected of her race. She finally did accomplish this—at the age of eighty-five. She eventually developed the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged—a home that still exists to serve the community today.

In what spare time she had, Harriet Tubman also became a grand
old lady on the suffrage circuit. She was by all accounts a spellbinding speaker at suffrage events. Our friend Susan B. Anthony introduced her as a living legend at the NYS Women’s Suffrage Association held in 1904. One local newspaper described the dramatic scene: “
The old woman was once a slave and as she stood before the assemblage in her cheap black gown and coat and a big black straw bonnet without adornment, her hand held in Miss Anthony’s, she impressed one with the venerable dignity of her appearance.” At the same event, Tubman told the rapt crowd, “
I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say—I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

Tubman struggled to make ends meet until the end of her life. She was never compensated for her war service (an American scandal that has never been repaired). She gave away everything she had. None of the obstacles she faced ever stopped her for long. She just kept moving forward. She always remembered her refrain on the Underground Railroad: “
If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going.”

Later in life, Tubman’s co-abductor Thomas Garrett said something telling about Harriet: “
The strangest thing about this woman is, she does not know, or appears not to know, that she has done anything worth notice.” This quality is an outward and visible sign of true dharma. One does not seek credit. The credit goes to God—the real Doer. Says Krishna: “
Those who follow the path of service, who have completely purified themselves and conquered their senses and self-will, see the Self in all creatures and are untouched by any action they perform. Those who know this truth, whose consciousness is unified, think always, I am not the Doer.”

Harriet, indeed, always said that she did not feel she had any special powers whatsoever, just that she was especially blessed. Not unlike Joan of Arc, throughout her life, Tubman viewed herself as an instrument of God. She trusted in the power of prayer, and in the individual’s ability to seize her own destiny. She believed that any person who sought to could be guided by God’s hand—just as she had been.

“
Each and every person has the light of God within,” she said.

TWELVE

On August 16, 1908, more than two thousand Indian nationals living in Transvaal, South Africa, joined at a local Hindu temple to burn their South African registration certificates. They were protesting recently enacted legislation—called the Black Act—that would dramatically limit their civil rights in South Africa. The thousands of Indian men and women who participated in this action were no doubt terrified, fearing the reprisals of the notoriously repressive South African government. And they were also very likely astonished at their own actions that day, and at the fact that they had summoned the courage to take a risky stand against tyranny. Much of their courage issued from the trust they had in their leader and champion in this action. He was a powerful and compelling little Indian barrister whom they had come to love. He was Mohandas K. Gandhi—who would later come to be known as “Mahatma Gandhi,” or Great Soul, and who would eventually lead 400 million Indians out of bondage to the British Empire. The protest against the Black Act in South Africa was young Gandhi’s first act of mass civil disobedience.

The act of civil disobedience carried out in Transvaal on that August day more than a century ago was more successful than anyone in the Indian community could have hoped. The international press covered the event widely, and compared it to the Boston Tea Party. Gandhi and his fellows had deftly painted the government into a corner—all without
violence of any kind. Even Gandhi himself was surprised at the power—he would later call it Soul Force—of this kind of action. What began that day was his development of the art of
satyagraha
(literally, “clinging to truth”) that would, over the course of the next two decades, change the face of the world. “
Thus came into being,” wrote Gandhi much later in his life, “the moral equivalent of war.”