The Rapture of Living

“People say that what we are all seeking 

is a meaningful life.

I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking.

I think that what we’re seeking

is an experience of being alive…

actually feeling

    the rapture of being alive.”

                                               Joseph Campbell

Living isn’t easy. Especially for the old, disabled or isolated.  All too often that means most of us. Getting out of bed, can be an act of courage. These challenges provide lots of opportunity. They can lead one straight down the rabbit hole, or through some paradoxical wonderland. The choice is ours, but it is such a large one, that it takes a lot of souls, plus Life to make. The rapture of living is gained through the magic of loss — a pinhole in reality — that it takes many human angels to pass through.

Have you ever asked yourself why it is so hard to live fully, and why, when you are fully alive, it is so hard to sustain it?  Living fully is tricky. Living fully alone is almost impossible.  Oh, that doesn’t mean solitude isn’t essential. It is. But, being here, completely, with no foot out the door, no hiding, no spiritual bypass, no patent happiness, no made-up face, in the moment, that is an achievement that is beyond most of us. For good reason. 

Rapture is like wildfire. It relishes fuel, and goes where it will, to get it. Strangely it is the broken-down places, the collapsing dreams, the failed identities, softened-up resolves — the ripped open that feed it. The rapture of living appears after the storm clouds of being broken open. As a rule, we humans don’t take easily to being that vulnerable. We are prone to personalizing so much failure. And, by and large, we don’t know, though we sometimes sense it, that the place of our limitations is the place of our possibilities.

Life, like the light, pours through the cracks. The rapture of living is not an attainment. It isn’t some sanctioned x-sport. It is the background of our being. The baseline setting that is always there, just beneath all of the errors and bad advice we tend to live by. It is the little green shoots, that break-up all of our assurances.

Being broken open, saturated with grief and uncertainty, and finding others who are similarly afflicted, that is the surest way to notice how finely each of us is held in the great tapestry of Mystery. Life comes surging through the openings. Breakdown is often breakthrough. We aren’t savvy enough to celebrate it, but the calming breeze of newly freshened air blows through us anyway. Life feasts upon our failures, and in the process, re-vitalizes us. 

The rapture of living responds whole heartedly to our willingness to go to the place of our most humble secrets. And, when we share them with each other, then we discover that rapture can become a maelstrom, a bursting forth of energy, a release, a freeing, of our truest nature. Rapture of living is infectious when openness breaks out.