Virtues and Vows, a Summary Contemplation

Obedience, Chastity and Poverty, a secret in plain sight. 

In the path of development of the inner priesthood of each individual (towards which the exoteric, outer priesthood has long been a picture), there are golden keys, secrets in plain sight, to help us. These come in the form of the age old vows of obedience, chastity and poverty. 

Obedience, chastity and poverty are old words, words many are not comfortable with in our age of manifestation, abundance, the spiritualization of sexuality, and freedom. At first pass, they seem archaic and overly constricting. But in reality, they express pathways to the development of Faith, Love and Hope,  Hope, which is also the development of our astral, ether and physical bodies to become higher, transformed bodies. In reality, this development is necessary for the next three great epochs of human development, what we speak about in Anthroposophy as Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan or the development, in ancient Vedic terminology, of the higher human states of Manas, Buddhi and Atman. 

We largely, as human beings, can only learn through struggle, so we mostly cannot directly take on the development of Faith, Love and Hope. As a pathway, we can work with the golden keys of each of these virtues, the sacrifices which lead us to them. Christ has taught us, irrevocably, that the pathway of higher development is sacrifice. Sacrifice and growth/beatitude are intimately bound up with each other. Obedience, chastity and poverty lead us into the work of development, the pathways of sacrifice and discipline that help us deepen in unity with God. The high initiate beings who stand behind them do so because they support so fully and tirelessly the development of human beings. 

In working with faith-obedience, we work with Martha, one of the least seen figures in the gospels. She tends to the space and the tasks, she knows what needs to be done, and she is able to do it. She exercises hospitality, the age-old gesture of serving the needs of the one who comes (who in the end is always Christ). She is the true servant leader, showing us the kingship or queenship of the human being, and using one’s capacity in service to others. In its highest form, this obedience is a respiration with the divine, a knowing faith that guides our actions in every moment, in which our king and queenship are collaborations with the spirit world. It is flow, and work, and caring. It is a work with power, and to find our way into it in a true form we sacrifice our pursuit of false forms of power: control, manipulation, coercion, anything which takes away the freedom of others. We also are blessed, in this work, with lifting out of the anxiety for the cares of this world, as Christ directed Martha (and each of us!). How often is our anxiety actually an attempt to exercise control? Will we bow down and serve the prince of this world, who forever shows us the false pathways of power (all the kingdoms of the world), or will we worship and serve God? 

In working with love-chastity, we encounter Mary of Bethany, who is also known to be Mary Magdalene. She is the archetype of the bride of Christ, the unity of the human soul with Christ. She is a deep companion of Christ, and has a bond of love with him deeper than death, a bond which enables her to lean on the stone through Holy Saturday and, through all her grief and anguish, see him with new eyes of soul on Easter morning when no one else can. Union with Christ is beatitude and bliss, and within this union love pours into the human being and the world. It brings about a transformed life body in us, in which we begin to reintegrate with the spirit world after long ages of exile, we begin to bear the tree of life within ourselves, in union with Christ, a warm, healing, uniting force for humanity. But in order to participate in this higher life of beatitude, we first must sacrifice our orientation towards gratification or the pursuit of pleasure. In our indiscriminate pursuit of pleasure, we unite ourselves with gods other than the true God, and endlessly and without satisfaction seek those lower unions, which are never enough. This expression of sacrificing the lower form of pleasure and lower unions, or even desecrated unions, is chastity, which in its elevated form is union with Christ, bliss, and love. Will we cast ourselves down into the hands of others, testing Christ’s love for us, or will we remain steadfast in our love for the Divine, allowing God to choose us, to love us? Can we find a way into the knowing and healing that is available within the somatic realm without turning it into a false god?

In working with poverty, we encounter Lazarus, who is also, after being raised, thought to become John the Evangelist, the beloved disciple. Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, is a great servant of humanity who works with us to ever sacrifice our personal will in order for higher will to work in us. Our personal will appears in acts of ambition, grasping, owning, possessing and entrapping. All of these impulses, in both material and soul realms, must be sacrificed continually in us as we journey through material existence. It is only when we let go of our selfish will, our lower egotism, that our higher self can be born in us. It is a mysterious truth, that our higher self and our higher will are actually a union of our own being with the divine. The empty chalice of our selfhood, our own will, poured out, is then filled with Holy Spirit. The ongoing crucifixions of our egotistical will become rebirths in higher union between our own purified will and divine will. When gifts of Wisdom are given at the level of will, with the grace of divine will uniting with our own, then we then know, without any question, what we must do. This is a different knowing than an intellectual knowing or even a feeling knowing. The reality of divine will, entering us, leads us to tasks of service, whatever they may be. Lazarus-John, standing behind this process of embracing poverty, of sacrificing the lower self and the lower will, to be purified for higher union, is the greatest human servant of human becoming. In our work with Lazarus-John, whom Christ directed, as Lazarus, to give up all he owns and come follow him, as we begin to become more adept at dying and being reborn, recognizing egotism and letting go of our egotistical impulses, we begin to see the interweaving of events, troubles, crises, etc, as a tapestry full of meaning. We begin to understand that it is not by material bread alone that we have life, and that our orientation towards possession and ownership in the material world is a great hindrance to us. As we reorient ourselves, with the help of Lazarus-John and this poverty vow, we begin to exist within a symphony of light and hope, even in the darkest world times. This hope we shall need, to get through what is coming.