The Strings of Compassion

8 February 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This is the second service in our new experimental format adding Worship Associates to the preacher, to bring more voices and passions into our worship services. We’ve included both their written remarks here. Sloan’s was essential; it really set the tone and level of the entire service, as well as the sermon. Sheri’s comments were at the beginning of the service. They are included to give you who are reading this online or away from our church a better feel for the atmosphere of the worship service.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sloan McLain

Hello. My name is Sloan McLain, and I’m happy to be a member of the Worship Associates.

A year ago today I lived in Thailand, Southeast Asia. I loved my well-paid, respectable job as head of Wichai Wittaya’s Bilingual Elementary School’s English program. I had a small but comfortable network of Thai and Western friends. I felt like my soul was thriving in Thailand’s community-centered, modest, easy-going culture. Moving to Thailand felt like coming home.

But outside – just outside – of the ideal Thailand I searched for and embraced, was the reality of my life behind closed doors – the reality tied to my abusive Thai husband. The more I blossomed in Thailand, the more my husband tore me apart.

It wasn’t all the time. If anyone has been in an abusive relationship, they know it’s down and up. Some days with my husband Nop were wonderful. We’d take road trips in our new pickup, driving on country roads (sing John Denver) leading us through temperate forests and breathtaking mountain views. We’d stop at noodle shops overlooking rice farms; sit on lonely beaches to watch the sunset, stay in luxury resorts with waterfalls outside our windows. Or perhaps we’d stay in town in Chiang Mai, and browse the Sunday street festival.

But those positive experiences with Nop could not outweigh the insults, the demands, the restraints, the anger, and the manipulation, that threatened my life at home, at work, at the mall, in the movie, at my friend’s house, in the truck, at the cafe, and in our own antique shop.

Last March, I planned a trip home to visit my family in Dallas for one month. But as March approached, I watched the dysfunction of my marriage as though I were an anthropologist living in someone else’s home, taking notes on the bizarre behaviors that kept this husband and wife together or, rather, were pulling them apart. I knew the honeymoon bond that once connected Nop and I had been replaced by pain, distrust, fear, confusion, and plain disgust. I was coping with my husband to try and keep our family together – to give my son his father.

But on March 16, 2003, when I walked through the security gates at Chiang Mai International Airport, without my husband, with my baby in my arms, I felt safe for the first time in months; and I knew I couldn’t go back to Nop, or to Thailand. And I started to process the reality that I was moving to America, not just visiting it.

It was time to get a divorce from the man who locked me in the house so he’d know where I was when he went out for drunken business meetings, who threatened to sleep with other women on a regular basis, who announced to my colleagues at school that I was an unsuitable wife and unfit to be a mother.

And yet this week, on Thursday, February 5, 2004, my husband was finally served the divorce papers in Thailand, and I find my heart weeping for him. I’m scared; I’m furious; I’m disturbed by what I’ve gone through the past few years, but my heart aches for Nop – and all other abusers – to be happy and to feel loved – only that can stop abuse in this world.

Buddhists believe that all things are connected; it is only an illusion that we are separate from one another. Therefore, if we seek a peaceful heart, let alone a peaceful world, we must practice forgiveness and compassion toward all beings, since the peacefulness of our own actions affects the degree of peace in everyone else. By opening our hearts, even toward those who embody beliefs we despise or toward those who have hurt us, we start to experience the interrelatedness of life: we learn how to work with our anger and fear rather than get caught up in it. Instead of separating ourselves from what we don’t agree with, we take the challenge of transforming and dissolving those conflicts instead.

I’ve been practicing some form of Buddhist Christianity for the past seven or eight years, and it is the teachings of interconnectedness and “every moment is a new beginning” that help me reconcile the pain I have experienced.

So often it’s my nature to separate life into good and evil, right and wrong, hero and bad guy, as though I understand the difference and the decision is up to me. But no one is completely right or wrong all the time. I can’t override my husband’s honest actions with his dishonest ones in order to satisfy my image of the “bad guy”. I do think my husband’s actions were wrong, but I don’t think I can judge him solely based on his actions during our marriage. Nop had many experiences before he met me, and those experiences and all those that have occurred since March 2003, make up a man who is more than Sloan’s abusive husband.

I’ve learned that if I punish Nop, I hurt myself as much as I hurt him. But what about revenge, a voice inside of me asks? What does revenge really accomplish but pain, I answer? I know from holding grudges in the past, that I cannot heal pain with pain. I didn’t used to think I needed to make amends with someone who’d hurt me. Why give that person the time of day after what he did? But if I look deeper in my heart, I know the only way to heal my pain is to deal with my pain: “work through the pain, not around it.” In other words, it’s not just for my husband’s sake that I’m trying to deal with him compassionately; it’s for my sake as well. And in order to fill my heart with compassion, I must start with forgiveness – forgiveness for the fact that abuse exists in this world, and then forgiveness for the abuser: Nop Yoosupap. Not until I use compassion to forgive my husband, can I open my heart to others, without the fear I’ll be hurt again.

I’m not there yet – my heart hasn’t reconciled the pain; my mind hasn’t forgiven the memories. But I know in my gut, that’s the direction I need to move toward – the more I confront my anger with compassion, the more I can open my heart and free my mind to love again. And if this is accomplished, I’ll be able to bring a little more peace into the world, rather than hate. And if I can continue this practice of forgiveness and face all beings with compassion, my spirit will thrive, just like it did in Thailand.

PRAYER

We are so often hurt when others sit in judgment on us.

Let us remember that we are, all of us, children of God, gifts of life’s longing for itself, and that we are precious unto the world. Let us bless our best selves.

But don’t stop there. For those close to us are also precious gifts to the world. Let us remember to bless them as well.

And all the people we don’t know, even those we don’t like, even those we may hate – aren’t they also precious gifts, even if we don’t want to admit it. Can we bless them too?

Then where shall the blessing stop? Where can we ever say No, these people do not count, these we can ignore; we’re nothing at all like these people? We know the answer is Never. Nowhere and Never. If one is precious, all are precious. If one is to be blessed, all are to be blessed.

If this is our task in life, let us remember one more thing. Let us remember to forgive ourselves our lapses of compassion, even as we forgive the lapses of others. For compassion begins there, in forgiveness – of ourselves, of others. It begins there. Before we can move toward real blessings, it begins in forgiveness. Let us begin.

Amen.

SERMON: The Strings of Compassion

When we began talking about this topic, it was very airy and abstract. Sloan had written a guided meditation for her affirmation of faith, and I was going to reflect on Buddhist teachings about compassion.

Compassion is a subject the Buddhists probably do better than any other religion. It’s the central aim and attitude of the religion, even its great secret. They have hundreds of things they call “metta” meditations. “Metta” is a word that means “friendship” or “loving-kindness.” They sound simple but they’re not. The metta meditation Sloan and Sheri both liked has just five lines:

May you be happy.

May you be peaceful.

May you have ease of well-being.

May you be safe from danger.

May you be free from all suffering.

It sounds like the kind of thing little groups of New Agey people might sit around saying, and grooving on how marvelously compassionate they all felt. But it isn’t a Hallmark card; it’s only easy if you’ve never tried to do it. It’s part of a discipline as high and as difficult as any in world religions.

First, you say a metta meditation for yourself, to heal your own wounds and fears. Then you direct it toward the people close to you, and feel your intimate connection with them. Then you say it for the people you don’t like, are angry at, or even those you hate, to regain an awareness of your intimate connection with them, too. Then for all the people in the world, and all life in the universe.

Somewhere along the line in all this, I was getting confused by all the abstractions, lost in the clouds. So I asked Sloan why she cared about this topic, what it had to do with her real life. That’s when the story came out, the one that became her second version of an affirmation of faith, the one you just heard.

And suddenly, this subject had become very real, and hard to preach about. Hard, because the subject is bigger than I am, and more expansive and inclusive than I know how to be. I would love to think that I set the curve for compassion, but I strongly suspect that it isn’t true.

While reading through that metta meditation, trying to imagine that I had that quality of consciousness and care for people all over the world, I suddenly asked myself how often or how deeply I had thought about the 10,000 to 40,000 Iraqi citizens who have been killed since we invaded their country, or the hundreds of thousands of others who are touched by those deaths. I knew the details, I’d read the stories, but emotionally I had hardly thought of them at all. So I’m not doing very well with loving-kindness toward even some of the most recent and dramatic of the world’s victims.

Closer to home, I asked how often I really thought about all the homeless people begging at every intersection, about the others I drive by downtown, about the estimated five to ten thousand homeless people in Austin, or even the fifty of them who spent the night here during the Freeze Night Friday. Once more, I’ve hardly thought of them at all. Once in awhile, I’ll put the window down and give one of them five bucks, but if I’m honest I’ll admit that it’s usually because it makes me feel better, not because I’m really thinking seriously about their plight, or what a caring citizen or a caring society should try to do about it.

Nor do I really think much about the more than 100 million Americans who have no health insurance. Or the fact that we have the highest infant mortality rate, youth suicide rate and poverty rate for those over 65 of any country in the developed world. If you add all the others who are touched by those tragedies, it must be more than half of our country. If you corner me, I’ll probably try to claim that oh yes, I’m aware of their plight, and I even mention it in sermons. But if I corner me, I have nowhere to hide from the fact that I hardly ever think of it much at all, and I certainly don’t do much of anything about it. And if a tree is known by its fruits, I don’t show much useful compassion at all, and I’m hardly doing anything that might make a positive difference.

The word “compassion” means “to suffer with,” and except for the people whose stories I know on a one-to-one basis, I think the hard truth is that I don’t suffer with many people, really.

If they’re close to me, I can recognize that kind of compassion. My best friend died six years ago, and I suffered with him and with Marsha, his widow. And Marsha, one of the most loving people I’ve ever known, died this past Wednesday of breast cancer that had spread to her brain, and I suffered with her in our recent talks, and with their one son Tyler when we spoke this week. Tyler is 26, and yesterday morning he went to the small cemetery in southern Michigan to see his mother’s casket lowered into a hole. Next to that hole, he saw the gravestone marking his father, who died at age 46. And next to that, he saw the gravestone of his father’s father, who also died at age 46. And I know that for the next twenty years, Tyler will wonder if that’s all the time he is going to have. It’s so very easy to suffer with him.

But compassion at a distance? I don’t have a record that would impress anyone, including me. Maybe you’re way ahead of me here. But maybe you’re not.

I am inspired by Sloan’s attempt to bless her husband. But that’s a terribly high aspiration, isn’t it? It’s not the sort of thing we normally think of doing. And it’s easy to ask, as she asked herself, why on earth we would want to do such a thing. We don’t hear much about really suffering with others, especially those we’re angry with. We hear about defeating them, beating them, but not suffering with them. Instead, we hear slogans like “Don’t get mad, get even.”

I don’t think we have very good models of compassion in Christianity, either. I think of Jesus’ teaching, to turn the other cheek, and I think what a dumb idea! Jews usually criticize that teaching as acquiescence to injustice, and I agree. If you’re in an abusive situation, first you need to get out, then worry about these higher goals. It’s like the instructions you get on airplanes: in case of an emergency, put your own oxygen mask on first, before trying to help others.

And if I don’t like that teaching of Jesus, I think even less of one of Paul’s famous lines, where he actually says “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.” (Romans, 12:20) I’ll admit there’s something sort of nasty about it that is seductive. It’s kind of like a little compassion with a lot of passive-aggressive vengeance thrown in. But I don’t think it’s anything to be proud of.

It helps me to back off and remember why we come to church, what religion is really about. It is about very basic things, you know. Honest religion of any flavor is about trying to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. It’s about using our time here to try and make a positive difference in our own life, in the lives we touch, and in the larger world. Religion is about reconnecting with an attitude toward life that reminds us that we are meant for very high callings, that nothing less is worthy of us.

But these Buddhist aspirations of loving-kindness toward everyone – they are so high I don’t know how to reach them. I fail daily at them; I imagine many of you do too. It gives me a whole new appreciation of why so many Buddhists believe in reincarnation. If we have to rise to a level of compassion that high, it’s going to take more than one lifetime to do it!

I remembered two years ago at this time, when I was in Thailand. I also flew out of the Chiang Mai International Airport that Sloan mentioned; I can still remember it. I remember one of the Thai guides we had in Bangkok, a very spirited woman. She told us that Americans needed to understand that Buddha was not a god, but a teacher. Then she talked about how they were to live in such a way that they improved a little in this life, so when they came back in their next life they would come back at a higher level.

During one of the breaks, I told her I didn’t know much about this, but thought that the Buddha had said the object was to get beyond reincarnation, so you didn’t have to come back for more rounds of “re-death.” “Oh sure!” she said, ” the Buddha can do that! He’s perfect! But me? I’m coming back!” I’d have to come back too, at least a few times.

Since the Buddhist notion of compassion is so very high, and so very foreign to our American ways of thinking, I decided to try a different way of talking about this with you today. You can think of it as “Compassion for Beginners,” or “Buddhism lite.”

It’s a story from my childhood that most of you know, too: the story of Pinocchio. Though I’ve never heard him presented this way, I have decided that Pinocchio was really a bodhisattva with a message for us. I hadn’t read the story in decades, so had to go buy the book and read it again. Let me refresh your memory of this. (The original story was written in Italian between 1881-1883 by Carlo Collodi, 1821-1890. Walt Disney’s original movie of Pinocchio was made in 1940, with a remake in 2003. The original has some elements Disney omitted.)

The old woodcarver Geppetto carved a puppet from an amazing piece of talking wood. So Pinocchio came into the world as a block of wood, but one with awesome potential.

He didn’t actually have visible strings, even though he was called a puppet. But he had invisible strings that pulled him in two different directions. One set pulled him toward selfish fun that hurt those who loved and trusted him. His guardian angel, the blue fairy, even died of a broken heart when he abandoned her! And soon, as you remember, he grew long ears and a tail, and became a donkey.

Finally, he was able to respond to the tugs of other strings, strings of compassion. He seemed to come to his senses. The blue fairy came back to life – luckily, our guardian angels can be resurrected just by a change of heart. He nursed old Geppetto back to health, and in reward for his compassion the blue fairy turned him into a real boy. The puppet, the book says at the very end, was after all “nothing more than just a piece of wood.”

I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but the story tells us – in pretty dramatic terms! – that the choices Pinocchio made determined whether he became a human, or just made an ass of himself. His choices make him a little bodhisattva.

Still, why should we act really big when others around us are acting really small? Remember the five lines of that metta meditation:

May you be happy.

May you be peaceful.

May you have ease of well-being.

May you be safe from danger.

May you be free from all suffering.

It’s asking a lot to expect us to feel that way toward the whole world. Wouldn’t it be more fun, when we’re angry with people, to take St. Paul’s spiteful path and act compassionate just to dump hot coals on their heads? It’s so much easier than really being compassionate. That would take an expansion of character, rather than just a clever way of taking revenge. And aren’t you at least a little tempted by the advice “Don’t get mad, get even”? Don’t lie – your nose might grow!

But think of our little wooden bodhisattva again. When Pinocchio finally acted out of compassion rather than self-centeredness, look how many things happened. It was like the “butterfly effect,” where a small change in one place creates huge changes elsewhere. Old Geppetto was saved, Pinocchio’s guardian angel returned to help him; he became a real human rather than a donkey. He got a life worth living and a story worth telling. It’s a profoundly religious story, through and through. We’re all a bit like Pinocchio.

We all come with strings attached. We must choose which set of strings we’ll respond to, but so much depends on what we choose. And our choice has so much creative power to affect the lives of so many others!

1. Even considered only selfishly, compassion makes less suffering for us. Acting out of spite, even St. Paul’s self-righteous spite, lowers us to the level of the kind of people who hurt us in the first place.

2. Compassion also surrounds those we care for with fresher air. Being loving and kind to an ex-spouse we’re furious with is a gift of love and peace to our children – who are always watching, and always learning not from what we say, but from what we do.

3. And compassion puts less poison into our world. It means that we did what we could to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. That’s our job.

In our culture, the notion of having strings attached is seen as a bad thing. But the Buddhists, and that little bodhisattva named Pinocchio, show us that we always have strings attached. If we follow the right ones, it can make us more human, and help us mend our relationships and our world. Otherwise, like the little puppet, we might wind up just making asses of ourselves.

This does not mean you turn the other cheek when someone is hitting you, or become a patsy for aggressive or passive-aggressive people trying to build themselves up by tearing you down. It just means that, as you act to serve what is precious within you, as you get yourself to a safe place, you try as well to serve what is precious in them, and to recognize that even when they act like donkeys, they are more like us than they are unlike us. They react poorly when they are frightened, just as we do. They can be driven to a hurtful anger, just as we can. And when they feel cornered, they sometimes act in ways that no one could be proud of, just like we do.

How far and wide must our strings of compassion reach? That’s our choice. But those choices determine what we are making of ourselves. Those choices determine what we are making of our relationships. They determine what we are making of our world.

In the end, we are all like Pinocchio, trying to lift what is truly human out of what is “nothing more than just a piece of wood.” Like him, if you reduce us to only the cost of our materials, we’re not much. But also like Pinocchio, we come into this world bearing possibilities that are simply awesome, simply awesome!