COMMITTING TO COMMITMENT

Either you are going to jump off the high diving board or you are not.  You can aspire to jump, intend to jump, plan to jump, decide to jump, climb the ladder to jump, step forward on the board to jump, stand at the end of the board ready to jump, but until you actually jump you haven’t jumped.  The same with committing to the spiritual life.  Aspiring monks remain only aspiring monks until they actually step through the monastery door. 

Commitment means not allowing yourself to be compromised by other interests you may have.  It brings to mind novelist Christopher Isherwood who was an initiate for twenty-two years of Swami Prabhavananda’s Vedanta Society of Southern California.  Isherwood participated in the spiritual practices and lectures at the Society, and did much writing and editing for them. 

For example, he edited their two books of essays, Vedanta for the Western World and Vedanta for Modern Man.  He translated with Prabhavananda the Bhagavad-Gita, Shankara’s Crest Jewel of Discrimination, and the Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali.  He wrote a biography of Ramakrishna title Ramakrishna and His Disciples, and a memoir of his association with Prabhavananda titled My Guru and His Disciple.

Yet, despite all this, and the regular urgings of Prabhavananda, Isherwood never fully committed to Vedanta.  This is to say, he never took vows.  He even wrote a novel titled A Meeting by the River where an alter ego of his goes through the taking of final vows.  But, in the end, Isherwood had too many outside interests, his novels, his screenplays, his love affairs, that the final plunge was simply not in the cards for him.  He was up on the high diving board but never off the end.