Our Love: An Empty Bucket and A Waterfall
Welcome to our seventh installment of our Summer Camp News Bulletin. This week we bring you a special visionary classroom report is actually from the past. But it wasn’t until another recent vision came down that its teaching was able to fully pour in.
Last week Brad dreamed that we both stood near a well of singing water. One by one we drenched each Summer Camp Guild member in buckets of liquid music. We then remembered a vision that Brad received in 2017 during one of our intensives at Wood Farm Holiday Cottages in Norfolk, England. For some reason we had overlooked adding it to one of our books, but believe that now is the perfect time and place to report it:
I dreamed that we arrived at a large old house. Several other people were there and it was clear that we planned to live together in community. Since Hillary and I essentially live as hermits most of the time, we were worried whether we’d have enough privacy, breathing room, and space to rest.
As Hillary unpacked and chatted with others, I climbed the stairs to what would be our space in the upper room. There a former student of mine, Stephen Parker, was waiting to talk to me. We hadn’t seen each other in years. Stephen had since become a Himalayan monk and teacher of a school of yoga. He had dropped by that day to catch up on our lives.
Just as I was about to speak, I felt a strong emotion well up inside me. Rather than discuss updates about my life, I simply uttered, “All I can say is that I feel like an empty bucket that was placed underneath a waterfall.” I then explained that I was referring to the love that God and I have for each other. When I spoke of this love, however, I didn’t say “my love” or “God’s love.” I specifically said, “our love.” The love I feel for the divine and the love I receive are mutual and inseparable.
The moment I uttered the words “our love,” Stephen was immediately stricken by ecstatic lightning that set his soul on fire and cracked his heart wide open, enough to feel the most blissful love imaginable. When I witnessed this take place, I added, “Yes, this love — our love — makes me feel like an empty bucket placed underneath a waterfall, constantly overflowing.”
‘Tis the Hour for More Our
We all live in-community with one another, whether we like it or not, and whether that community is intentional or accidental. Furthermore, we know on some level that the horizon grows vaster and the light shines brighter when there is less “my” and more “our.”
Our home, our neighborhood, our planet. Our water, our food, our very existence. We all worry sometimes if there will be enough room for us, forgetting that the house is big enough for everyone.
Sometimes this shift from my to our feels good, simple, and easy. Other times, it feels impossible. Human beings are nearly impossible to love when they are only suited in a “big me” uniform covered with merit badges. Yet everyone’s “little me,” decked out in theatrical attire and ready to set a fire, is impossible not to love. On a good day it’s easier to forgive, mend, and reach for higher ground and its vaster stage. Other days, we have to pray harder for something higher to come through – because the performance of “our” love must go on.
Trying to love everyone is too difficult without first drinking from the extreme love waterfall. While pledging to love others — even your enemies — is a sound intention, if it is too purposefully enacted it is guaranteed to be shallow and fickle. Such a performance pleases big me as it conveys trickster sentimentality rather than pure unconditionality.
Big me thinks it’s loving but that affection comes with a lot of conditional fine print. Before we get to the our that includes others, we need to first find the our we share with the divine. Only when the love we feel for the creator is an overflowing bucket can our love for others flow freely – and with enough wonder-working power to truly transform.
Attend to the Rope
The mystic, Edgar Cayce, said that Jesus had a secret prayer: “Others, Lord. Others.” The question is, how do we make room for others? Head straight to the upper room whose dimensions are beyond measure. First and foremost, attend to your rope, the vertical cord that goes straight from your heart to the heart of the Creator. In First Creation, it becomes a waterfall. Make yourself an empty bucket capable of receiving the powerful rush of its singing water from the highest source and force.
This love is so extreme that it is usually only found in a visionary dream. Once you have drunk from that cup, just speaking of it can set you and everyone near you on fire, zapping you with an ecstatic lightning bolt.
Through our love, our quest for a new summer of love becomes possible. Only then do we discover that there is enough space in this cabin and campground for everyone. As always, the Gershwin brothers bring you our final words with perfectly aligned melodic tones that go down swinging—“our love is here to stay.”
-The Keeneys July 12, 2020