On an Arkansas-bound flight from the Steel City, I cracked my copy of Les Miserables, Victor Hugo’s sprawling epic about both societal and personal revolution. Perhaps you know the story, but if not, allow me to provide some salient bullet points.

A generous and gracious Bishop welcomes a cruel and hardened criminal, Jean Valjean, into his home for the evening.
After dinner and a few hours of fitful sleep, Valjean wakes, and plagued with the unshakeable thought of stealing the house silver, creeps into the Bishop’s room where he acts on his larcenous impulse.
When captured by the police the following day, he is returned to the Bishop for potential prosecution.
The Bishop covers for Valjean, says that he’d given the ex-con the silver as an investment in his new life. “But Valjean,” he said, “why did you leave the silver candlesticks I gave you?”
Once released from police custody, the Bishop charges Valjean, “Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I am withdrawing it from the dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I am giving it to God!”

On that day, the Bishop embodied a man of right attachments, one who handed his wordly possesions to a hardened criminal in hopes that it might save Valjean’s soul. What was the effect on Valjean, the man who’d been so attached to worldly possessions (along with anger, bitterness, and hatred of society) that he could not help but steal from a man of the cloth?

His conscious weighed in turn these two men thus placed before it, the Bishop and Jean Valjean. Anything less than the first would have failed to soften the second. …[A]s his reverie continued, the Bishop grew grander and more resplendent in his eyes; Jean Valjean shrank and faded away. At that moment, he was but a shadow. Suddenly, he disappeared. The Bishop alone remained.

He filled the whole soul of this wretched man with a magnificent radiance.

Invited into a new kind of life, a life attached to the Divine Love embodied by the Bishop, Valjean cut the attachments to his own lusts. Embracing this Divine Love, the old Valjean died and a man of light emerged.

Jean Valjean’s story shows what’s possible when we let go of our disordered attachments and accept the Divine Love freely offered. Our disordered selves fade and new possibilities emerge. This emergence is captured in a singular concept: Rebirth.

***TODAY’S TASK: ORDER AND FORWARD***

THE BOOK OF WAKING UP —a book on addiction, attachment, and the Divine Love—launches in just a few short weeks and IT’S TIME TO ORDER YOUR COPY. Today:

1. Order a copy or ten at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever good books are sold; and,

2. Forward this post to a friend and ask them to read along.