Earth Day Service / The Gaia Psalms. A meditative celebration of the creatures of the earth and our relationship with one another.
The Gaia Psalms are nine pieces written as part of a special Unitarian Universalist Earth Day Service. The concept of this work is to create an interactive multimedia worship experience that is both moving and simple. This work is in the Gebrauchsmusik (Utility Music) tradition. All the music is written with the beginning or amateur musician in mind. Visual artists have created four altars to the four directions and elements. The children and some youth and adults have made masks of different birds, fish and animals, and there are responsive readings in which the congregation participates. A tree planting on the grounds of the church completes the experience. The pieces were also meant to be spoken over. The minimalist, meditative quality is intended to create a spiritual connection in the listener and move the listener to both celebrate and reconnect as a member of the Earth’s community.
“Gaia” (Guy-ah) or “Gaea” most commonly refers to Gaia (of Greek mythology), the primal Greek goddess of the earth. We chose the title, “The Gaia Psalms,” because psalms are songs of praise and engaged lamentation. This work comes out of NASA scientist James Lovelock’s “Gaia Hypothesis,” which states that the Earth can be thought of as a self-preserving, living organism. The work also strives to remove the duality between science and spirituality. Christian monk Thomas Berry said, “You scientists have this stupendous story of the universe. It breaks outside all previous cosmologies. But so long as you persist in understanding it solely from a quantitative mode you fail to appreciate its significance. You fail to hear its music. That’s what the spiritual traditions can provide. Tell the story, but tell it with a feel for its music.”
Electronic music by Kiya Heartwood, Litany by Meg Barnhouse.
Gaia Psalm: Prelude (Water) – This piece retells the creation story and celebrates the Gospel Of Change. Composer: Kiya Heartwood, Litany by Meg Barnhouse
Gaia Psalm: You know and I Know Composer: Kiya Heartwood, Litany by Meg Barnhouse
Gaia Psalm: (Fire) The force of life courses through all beings. It is one of the many myseries how we can be so diverse and yet have so much in common. Composer: Kiya Heartwood, Litany by Meg Barnhouse
Gaia Psalm: One (many) – The psalm speaks to the individual’s struggle to feel connected and the overshelming mystery of the human experience. Words and music by Kiya Heartwood
Choir (Many, Many, Many, One)
Gaia Psalm: Flight – Our relationships help us rise and they carry us through our lives. Composer: Kiya Heartwood, Litany by Kiya Heartwood and Meg Barnhouse
Gaia Psalm: Seeds – We are all connected and no one can say how much is contained in one seed or one child. Composer: Kiya Heartwood, Litany by Meg Barnhouse
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
The third element of the Eightfold Path of Buddhism is “Right Speech.” What does “right speech” entail?
Right Speech
Today is the third part of the series I started last spring on the 8-fold path of Buddhism. Every week before I preach about something, the whole week of my life previous to the sermon feels like a lesson about that thing. “Right Speech” is the topic for this week, and for the past four days I haven’t been able to talk at all. Enforced silence is hard on me, but at least I didn’t do anything in the past four days that the Buddha said not to do.
Right Speech entails: “Abstaining from lying, abstaining from divisive speech, abstaining from abusive speech, abstaining from idle chatter.”
Usually I tell the truth. Except when I’m being nice to someone about the kind of music they like. Then I have been known to tell a truth that was a lie. One time when I used to work with Pat Jobe for our friend Charlie, I was on the phone with a nice fellow who was going on and on about bluegrass music. I can sing about four bluegrass songs, but if it’s on the radio I can listen to maybe one song before I have to change the station. Pat overheard me saying to the guy, “yeah, I have a special feeling in my heart for bluegrass music.” He started slapping his desk, laughing. He knew what that meant.
When we lie, we damage the bond between people. If you lie people don’t know who you are. If they don’t know who you are they can’t relate to you truly, openly. Lying makes us all sick, the one who lies, and the one who is lied to. We live in a culture of speech. All around us is talking. We read emails and ads and we watch TV and we talk to one another. Almost all ads are lies; almost all TV is lies of one sort or another. To say you will do something and then not follow through is a lie. I’m guilty of that one. Doing what you say you will do makes more happiness and less suffering. To find someone who speaks the truth to us is a treasure. To be a person who speaks the truth will make you a treasure.
Let me say something here. Buddhist teacher Eric Kolvig points out that the Buddha didn’t say “if you lie, you’re a bad person.” Buddhism is not a path of morality, of good and bad. It is a path of noticing, becoming aware. Instead of “good” and “bad,” there is “harmful, increasing the suffering in the world,” and “not harmful,” increasing peace in the world.”
Everyone wants to be happy. Almost everyone. The eight-fold path: right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration, is the way to freedom from suffering, to peace of mind and happiness. If you notice yourself lying, don’t beat yourself up, don’t wallow in the delicious drama of being a bad person, just notice and gently wonder “What would this situation be like if I were to speak more truthfully?” Wondering is so much more effective than trying.
Abstaining from “divisive speech” is the next element of right speech. What is that? It’s anything that drives a wedge between us. If I gossip about her (over there) to you (over there) even if it’s true, then you know something about her that she doesn’t know you know, and you have to not let her know that you know it. If the connection between the two of you is like a road, it becomes difficult to travel a road with that big a boulder sitting in the middle of it. In one of the books I read this week, Rabbi Stephen Wylen says we shouldn’t say things that lower another in the estimation of one with whom you are speaking, unless you are giving a factual warning about someone to prevent harm or loss, and you do that with doubt, like “I don’t know if this person has changed, but he was abusive to his last wife, so you may want to keep your guard up for a while if you go out with him.”
It could be that just talking about someone who isn’t there can be divisive. The Buddhist teachers I read all talked about becoming mindful of talking about an absent third party. Not that it’s always harmful, but it often is, so it’s an interesting exercise to become aware of doing it.
The Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein tells of his experience with this practice: “For several months I decided not to speak about any third person; I would not speak to somebody about somebody else. No gossip. Ninety percent of my speech was eliminated. Before I did that, I had no idea that I had spent so much time and energy engaged in that kind of talking. It is not that my speech had been particularly malicious, but for the most part it had been useless.
“I found it tremendously interesting to watch the impact this experiment had on my mind. As I stopped speaking in this way I found that one way or another a lot of my speech had been a judgment about somebody else. By stopping such speech for a while, my mind became less judgmental, not only of others, but also of myself, and it was a great relief.” building.
The third element in the Buddha’s teaching about right speech is that we refrain from abusive speech. Even when driving? It makes us sick to heap abuse on other people, and it’s likely that we talk to ourselves that same way. That makes us sick for sure. So many hear abusive speech as children, and it sticks in your heart and begins to shout at you in your own voice. When people speak to you abusively, it tells you much more about them than it does about you. They are hurting, they are poisoned, and they can’t even see you clearly, much less speak to you in a way that is about you.
Sometimes we are tempted to tell the truth in a way that is abusive – just to let someone have it. Even when what we’re saying is true, if we using the truth as a weapon against someone, it can do harm. Hard truths should be said in love. Gently. With respect. With the willingness for the hard truths about yourself to be told as well.
In this congregation’s Relational Covenant, we agree to “speak with honesty, respect and compassion.” It’s an important balancing act to have compassion both for the person about whom you are talking and also the person to whom you are talking. In the South, the rule is that you can say nearly any mean thing you want to about someone as long as you say “bless her heart” afterward. I don’t know if you all know this rule or not, but it can be helpful. “He is so homely, bless his heart.”
“That whole family has trouble with the truth, bless their hearts. And they’re bad to drink.” I’m not sure the Buddha would recognize that as mitigating something tawdry you just said, though.
The last element of Right Speech, according to the Buddha’s teaching is abstaining from “Idle chatter.” I read a story about a man who decided he wouldn’t speak if it weren’t necessary, and he was silent for the next thirteen years. That made me mad. How do you decide what’s necessary? Telling your partner you love them every day at least once is necessary, in my opinion. It’s not a situation where you can say “Honey, I told you I love you when we got together and I’ll let you know if anything changes.” Asking someone how their day was is relationship strengthening. Is it necessary? Maybe that silent man wasn’t in any relationship. Maybe he didn’t even have a dog, or a friend. The wiccan teacher Starhawk, however, writes that talking about third parties is community. It’s okay in her book to tell stories about other people, as long as they are true and not harmful. It’s not useless speech to hear interesting stories about mountains someone else has climbed, solutions they have found to parenting dilemas, colorful ways they met partners, decorated homes, started businesses, got jobs, etc. How do you decide what’s “idle chatter?” Humph. Well, I know it when I hear it.
The Talmud says God spoke to the tongue and said “all the other parts of the body I have made standing up, but you I have made lying down, and I have built walls around you.” The word is powerful. It can create and it can destroy. Choose to create. Your inner wisdom will guide you.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
Immigration is an issue that is getting a lot of attention in the public arena. What are some of the elements to consider? How does our stance relate to First UU’s goal of being an intentionally hospitable church?
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There are dying and rising gods all over human history. What might the resurrection be about?
This morning Christians in this congregation and around the world are celebrating Easter, the day of the resurrection of Jesus, when in the Christian faith story, he became not only Rabbi Jesus the teacher, but Christ, the savior of humanity. Often, joining with our Christian brothers and sisters, I preach from a Christian perspective on Easter. This year we are going to look together at the story of Ishtar. The holiday was probably named, not after her, but after a Germanic version of her named Eostra, goddess of the dawn and new beginnings. Her name is similar in many cultures. Astarte, Ashtaroth… these were traveling and trading cultures, and it is likely their stories would have traveled with them. There is even a moon goddess in pre-Columbian culture around what is now Guatemala named Ix Chel, whose consort is a rabbit. They share a similar story: a voluntary descent into death and darkness, of having everything stripped from you, then emerging transformed.
This faith story comes from the ancient lands of Sumer and Babylon, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, modern day Iraq. This five thousand year old story begins as Ishtar is born from the full moon as it touched the river. The first full moon after the spring equinox, that moon we saw in the sky this week, became known as “Ishtar’s egg.” As the poem about her descent into death begins, she bends her ear toward the underworld. The word in Sumerian for “ear” and for “wisdom” is the same, so you could say she was puzzling about the underworld where her sister, Ereshkigal lived. There was a funeral going on there she wanted to attend. Getting ready, she puts on seven things: a dress, earrings, a breastplate, a necklace, a belt, or girdle around her waist, bracelets on her wrists and ankles, and a crown. She leaves her consort, the shepherd king Dumuzi, or Tamuz, and their two sons. She leaves her temples where people worship her, and she arrives at the outer gates of the Underworld. There she announces herself as “Queen of Heaven, on my way to the East.” The chief gatekeeper of the underworld is skeptical and questions her. She replies that she wishes to descend because of her older sister, Ereshkigal, and to witness the funeral rites of Ereshkigal’s husband.
The gate is opened a crack, and the attendant asks her to take off her crown. When she asks why, he answers: “Quiet, Ishtar, the ways of the Underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.” At the second gate the earrings are removed from her ears, at the third gate the necklace from her neck, at the fourth gate the ornaments from her breast, at the fifth gate the girdle from her waist, at the sixth gate the bracelets from her hands and feet, and at the seventh gate the covering cloak of her body. Ishtar protests as each symbol of her power is taken from her, but the guardian says this is the experience of all who enter the domain of death. When her sister sees her she is enraged, and she turns on Ishtar the “eyes of death,” inflicting on her diseases, judging her harshly, insulting her and accusing her. On a meat hook in her sister’s chambers, her corpse hangs like rotten meat. Three days she is down there. Her faithful hand servant, a warrior woman and advisor, charges two small animals with going after her disguised as flies, the lowest form of life. “You will hear the bitter queen of the underworld lamenting, moaning in pain as if she were giving birth. Moan with her and she will favor you. She will want to give you a gift – ask for Ishtar’s corpse. Sprinkle the body with this food and water of life, and she will come alive again and return with you.” They did as she asked, and Ishtar, alive again, was allowed to return with them to the land of the living. Attached to her, though, were two demons, who demanded that she send back a replacement for herself in the underworld. Returning to her palace she found Dumuzi /Tammuz the shepherd ruling, not having missed her. Suddenly she sees the perfect one to give to the demons. His sister, desperate to help him, offers herself, and they each end up spending six months in turn in the world of the dead.
Ishtar and Tammuz are among the many another dying and rising gods, along with Osiris, Dyonisius, Krishna, many of whom were conceived by a virgin, born in a cave, threatened with death when they were babies, and adored as having saved the world with their suffering. Ishtar’s worshippers in the land between the rivers would rise early on the day of the full moon after the equinox and greet the sunrise. Then the families would go hunt eggs, Ishtar’s eggs. They told the children these eggs came from the rabbit in the moon.
I’m not giving you this information to say “Oh, those silly people who believe this literally….” I’m telling you that the archetype, the pattern of dying and rising is engraved deeply in the human psyche. We don’t only see it in nature, in the lives of our bodies. We see it over and over in the course of our living. This story is of hitting bottom, of having the things that matter to you stripped away one by one. Many people in this room have had times like that in their lives, where everything was taken, where they were attacked by their dark inner sister, accused, destroyed, immobilized. There are heroes and sheroes among us: the people who have done the descent. They have hit bottom. They are not afraid of losing everything, because it has already happened. Maybe they have lost all their money, had their children taken from them, maybe they have lost their sanity. Marianne Williamson, renowned spiritual teacher, says a nervous breakdown is a highly underrated way to achieve enlightenment.
The Easter story is the story of losing everything. You are sick in your body or your spirit. Hope seems absurd. Part of you has died. You’re in the dark. Suddenly someone sends a tiny thing down there to help. Does it help by cheerleading and telling you everything’s going to be okay? No. It helps by joining in the moaning of your bitter and angry side. Then a little food and water sprinkled on the dead meat might make it begin to stir. You have been in the tomb and now you emerge. Is it just a human dynamic? Is it just about grass and corn? Is it about the earth or about the earth and more? A liberal Christian humor magazine called The Door offers a liberal Easter hymn. The words say “Jesus Christ is risen today, alleluiah…” in the title they have crossed out Easter and written ‘pretty yellow flower day.” In the verse, they cross out is, and write “may or may not have,” so it reads “Jesus Christ may or may not have risen today.”
I suddenly wanted to title this sermon “Your mama’s a pretty yellow flower.” How can they scorn a flower when it goes through the same things Ishtar did. The same things any dying and rising god does. It has to abandon its beauty, first losing its petals one by one, then its stem turning to slime, it seeds buried in the cold cold ground for a time, the water there tormenting it until it bursts open, then struggling back to the surface, through the dark, being tiny and vulnerable until it grows into its beauty again. That’s a rough journey. Our babies today have had a journey through darkness as well, closed up inside, then going on a harrowing journey to break in to the light. And we will all go back to the earth when our time has run.
As faith stories these proclaim that the Divine One is willing to descend, to empty herself of her power and suffer with us, that as she emerges she conquers the power of death, teaching us that there are pathways from here to there, and the great round continues to be danced. Behold the mystery: All that dies shall be reborn. May it be so in our lives.
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This is a service with special music, drama and a sermon speaking about our common ancestor, Mitochondrial Eve. The First UU Adult Choir performs music by Kiya Heartwood.
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Sometimes you are halfway to a good answer when you finally formulate your question in a helpful way. What are some ways to come up with better questions?
SERMON: GOOD QUESTION
Great teachers are always asking questions. They know that if you give people the answer before they even ask the question, it’s a waste of breath. Socrates is famous for asking questions, so were the Jewish rabbis, so were Jesus and Buddha. This morning, picture me giving you a brightly wrapped box. As you open the box, out spill a pile of smaller presents. Those are my gifts to you this morning: some of the best questions I know. A good question can open your mind; a good question can make you think things you never thought before.
In my work as a therapist for the last twenty years, I can say therapy is certainly a question-driven process, from “How can I feel better?” to “What should I do now?” to “Why does watching movies with monkeys in them make me nuts?”
Sermon writing, much of the time, is a question-driven process. Often the sermon explores a question one of us has. Also, one of the ways I write a story or a sermon is to picture myself in the congregation or in the audience and ask “what would I want to hear about this subject if I were you?”
I had a religion professor at Duke who was in love with questions when my friends and I in the campus Christian organization were in love with answers. He had his work cut out for him. We kept trying to give answers to the ethical dilemmas he posed. He would shake his head impatiently and say we were going to the answer part too fast. I wasn’t used to getting C’s. That’s what I got on his midterm when I answered his question, which was something like “Talk about the meaning of life” by talking about my understanding of the meaning of life. I was frustrated, angry, confused. I thought “Fine, I’ll show him!” The final exam was, I think, “what is the meaning of death?” I answered with all questions. I mean, every sentence was a question. I got an A. I also learned something: I learned how much fun it was to ask question after question, and how one question led to another, and another.
If you have the right question, you are more than halfway to a good answer. If you are asking the wrong question, then you will get stuck. Lots of people come to couples counseling at first asking the wrong question. “How am I being controlled?” “What can I do to change you?” “What is wrong with you?” “What are my rights here?”
Better questions for couples are: “What part of my anger is anger at myself?” “How can I understand you better? How can I help you feel heard and understood? How can we both feel safer with one another?” Other good therapeutic questions can be: “What is your problem doing for you?” “What scary changes might occur if things got better?
When we do a child dedication in my church, I ask the parents “What is your job description for this child? So many of us grow up not knowing what is required of us. The default setting for this is “we just have to be perfect, then we will get our parent’s blessing.’ When you ask parents what they want for their kids, most of the time they will say “I just want them to be happy — you know — have a happy life.” It’s strange, then, that their kids have this sense that they have to be perfect. Anyway, it’s good for both sides for the parents to ask themselves that question. “What do we really want from this child?”
Asking questions is the thing to do when you are in disagreement with someone. Not like “What’s WRONG with you?” But “Tell me more about what you think about this. ” ” What led to you feeling like this?” Try to understand what they are saying before you try to make yourself understood.
If you are feeling attacked or misunderstood, a good thing to do is be quiet for a minute, breathe, and ask this question: “What are you doing?”
I was a chaplain in training at Walter Reed Army Hospital. My trainer was a wild man who asked great questions. If you answered him with “I don’t know,” he would look at you for a second or two and ask “Okay. And if you DID know, what would it be?”
Sometimes the gift of a good question can trick that inner mule you’ve got. Of course, you may not have one. it might just be me….
Another teacher, years later, asked me if I could figure out a system for doing laundry or something. “Oh, I don’t figure out routines very well,” I said. She looked at me somewhat sharply and said,” So — if someone paid you 1,000 dollars to figure that out, how might you do it?” WOW, that made it clear immediately!
What question are you dying for someone to ask you? Is there one? I would like to close with of my favorite questions: Think about a problem with which you are struggling in your life.
THE MIRACLE QUESTION
If you woke up and your problem had disappeared, how would you know a miracle had happened?
How would you behave differently? (be as precise as possible)
How would your family and friends behave differently?
How would they know a miracle had happened?
How would they see the differences in your behavior?
Are there parts of the miracle that are already happening in your life?
How did these things happen?
Can you get more of them to happen ?
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We are living in an extraordinary time and many of us will see significant social progress within our own lifetime… struggles for justice have not been easily won. Join us as we look back in order to move forward.
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The second element in Buddhism’s Eightfold Path is “Right Intention.” Your intention is the lodestar by which you steer your life. What is that, given your understanding of life, you intend to do and be?
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What is fundamentalism? Why is its world view compelling? What is destructive about it? How do you let go, not only of the content of its thinking, but of the structure of its thinking?
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“A Juicy Slice of UU History: Theodore Parker,” “The arc of the Universe bends toward justice,” he said. Parker was a Unitarian minister, a tireless and militant abolitionist, and a proponent of women’s rights.
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The Eightfold Path. Buddhism teaches that there is a way to overcome suffering by coming to an understanding of the way the world is, and by living in a certain way. There is no requirement that you believe in it, they say, you just try it to see if it works.
I don’t know how many of you have seen the classic Buddhist movie “The Matrix.” In it, Keanu Reeves plays a young computer hacker who wakes up to the reality of the Matrix, a vast virtual reality grid that feeds off of human energy. Humans are kept asleep in embryonic eggs while a virtual life is played in their brain. The first message he gets from the deeper reality is: “Wake up Neo!” In the movie, once Neo woke up to the fact that the reality of the Matrix was an illusion, he grew capable of grasping that the bullets coming at him weren’t real, and he was able to move around among them. He was able to move around in the pseudo reality of the Matrix, aware of it as an illusion, more and more aware of the deeper reality.
This is the first of eight sermons, over the upcoming months, on the eightfold path of Buddhism. The Eightfold Path is not like eight steps, or little boxes you check off one by one as you accomplish them. It is a path of eight elements interwoven, braided together, having to do with understanding, practice and behavior that Buddhism says will take you on a journey away from suffering and toward freedom. The first component of the path is “Right Understanding.” “Getting it” is the first and continuing job of the person on this path. You get “wake up, Neo” messages. You catch a glimpse of the truth of how things work. You have a glimmer of a sense that many people create their own suffering, that disquietude lurks at the corners of most lives, that grief, hope, fear, hunger for security or pleasure or acceptance drive people to do what they do and that satisfaction is elusive. A deeper reality crooks its finger at you and whispers in Laurence Fishburn’s voice: “Wake up. There must be satisfaction somewhere, let’s go look for it. ”
One of the things I find most relaxing about Buddhism is that it doesn’t ask you to take any of this on faith. It asks you to try it out and see if it works for you. Buddhism asks you to start with your experience. Most people’s attention is squandered on the anxiety, all the worry, and the fear in their lives. What will happen to us? Am I doing this right? Will people have a good time at my party? Will I get well again? Will I end up a bag lady? I have one friend who is haunted by the picture of people milling around at his funeral shaking their heads and saying “It’s a shame he never made much of himself.” Moment after moment, for most people, is filled with hope that things will go well and fear that things won’t. That life is a rollercoaster. In the words of the poet John Prine “Some times you’re up, some times you’re down, it’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re going to drown.”
Things happen to you, then you make stories about the things that happen: that they shouldn’t be happening, that they are a punishment for something you did, that your life is unfair, that you are unlucky and unblessed. Buddhism says all of these thoughts about what happens, all of the rollercoaster emotion caused by hoping and fearing makes you suffer. There is a way to end the suffering. In your life, you will have pain, but you don’t have to make yourself extra suffering over the pain. The eightfold path, with its eight elements, is the way to train yourself morally, mentally and emotionally, to be free from suffering from the thoughts you have about what happens. Here are the eight elements: right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.
Right understanding, the first strand of the Eightfold Path, “getting it, ” involves seeing how things are. You understand that you suffer because you have attachments to how things should go. You crave, you cling, you hope, you fear. You have hopes that an interview will go well. You are anxious about it. You worry afterward about whether they liked you. If you get the job you worry about doing it well. If you don’t get the job you wonder why they didn’t like you. You have ideas about how it should go. You have interpretations of how it went, ideas from your interpretations, and you suffer over those.
Someone you love is drinking or using again. You worry about how bad it’s going to get. You feel the feelings from when it was at its worst. You interpret your friend’s using as his not loving you, because if he loved you he would want things to be good for you, and things aren’t good for you when he is using. It feels as though he is doing it to you.
In your thoughts is a way you wish things would go. You have fears about how things could be. All of these things, hopes and fears, cause you suffering. When you are anxious about these things you miss a lot of your life: seeing your other friends, you can barely hear what people are saying to you, you don’t enjoy your food, sleep, sex, beauty, things seem garbled and dim. You are suffering. How could that stop?
Wake up. “Get it” that if you calm and focus your mind you can see reality more clearly. “Get it” that what happens happens. There are certain things you can do to make the interview go well, and you do them. Or not. Then it happens. You get the job. Or not. You can interpret it any way you want to. They didn’t like you? Maybe. Maybe they had someone else who was a better fit. Maybe this is not your job, maybe yours is coming. If the job wouldn’t have been a good fit for you, you would have been miserable in it. Is that what you wanted? At times I tell people they need to be unattached to outcomes. You need to do what you do and leave what happens then to the Spirit or the Universe. Usually they respond with “So you want me not to care?” What do you say to that? If caring means you suffer and your suffering adds no good to the situation, do you want to keep doing that? Can you care in a way that holds the outcome lightly? Can you care in a way that understands that your loved ones have to find their own way, make their mistakes, feel your support but not your direction.
Buddhist practice is the foundation of this possibility. Meditation, spending time in quiet with your breathing allows you to see more clearly, gives you spaces between your moments in which to understand what part of this is pain that exists and what part is suffering you are bringing on yourself and can stop if you practice. Some spiritual paths attempt to give meaning to suffering – this one says it can be avoided, eventually, with practice and understanding. Wisdom will be cultivated and ignorance will be shed like an outgrown snake skin.
In meditation we have the chance of seeing the story we are telling ourselves about our life. You can notice the thoughts you are having about what is happening in your life. There are a hundred different stories, and seeing your story is part of getting it. Another part of Right Understanding, of waking up, is understanding the law of Karma. Its literal name is “right view of the ownership of action” The Buddhist teachers say: “Beings are the owners of their actions, the heirs of their actions; they spring from their actions, are bound to their actions, and are supported by their actions. Whatever deeds they do, good or bad, of those they shall be heirs.” The Buddhist scriptures, like the Christian scriptures, talk about results of actions as “fruits.” “By their fruits ye shall know them.” If our lives are like a river, it’s as if we are all living downstream from our actions, and the dirty or clean water that runs because of those actions catches us later. Good actions are morally commendable, helpful to the growth of the spirit, and productive of benefits for yourself and others. Unwholesome actions, to use a more Buddhist word than “bad,” ripen into suffering.
Getting it means that you see that suffering occurs from craving, desire and attachment, that the way to end suffering is to end craving and attachment, that the way to end craving is to attend to the eightfold path of right wisdom and right behavior. To own your actions, your part in any situation, to let go of blaming and clean up what you are putting into the water upstream from where you live.
I have a friend who tells the story of her mother-in-law, Carolyn, at the drive-through window at the bank. The teller had sent out a pen for her to use in filling out her deposit slip. She had dropped the pen, which had fallen underneath the seat of the car. Carolyn could reach the pen, she could get her fingers around it, but she couldn’t pull her hand out with the pen in it. Finally they made a present to her of the pen so she would go on. We are caught like that with our grasping, unable to be free. What is the pen under your seat? What is keeping you from moving? Do you need to let it go? Do you need to drive to a safe place in the parking lot of the bank, get out of the car, move the seat, and get the pen? Either way, you get unstuck, and unstuck is where we want to be.
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Evangelical minister Rob Bell, in his book, “Love Wins,” articulates the concept of God’s unconditional love, and he has been widely condemned for it by the evangelical community. Join us as we explore Universalism’s history and delve into why this idea still causes such an uproar.
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Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
What does forgiveness entail? Does one have to “forgive and forget?” How do we forgive ourselves? Another sermon having to do with our Covenant of Healthy Relations.
Forgiveness makes you strong. A spiritual practice is something you do over and over whether you feel like it or not, in order to have access to your inner wisdom when you need it, in order to be able to keep a heart of compassion, in order to keep your perspective when the going gets rough, in order to be unshakeable. Well, at least, if not unshakeable, a bit sturdier. Bitterness makes us brittle. Cynicism takes our hope. Ruminating on the wrongs done to us, or on the wrongs we have done, steals away our joy in life. A spiritual practice can help us let go of that kind of ruminating. The meditation we just said together is one such practice, and it can help with forgiveness.
Forgiveness is related to both emotional and physical healing. This week I read a study by Alex H. S. Harris and Carl E. Thoresen called: “Forgiveness, Unforgiveness,Health, and Disease” done in 2005 at the Center for Health Care Evaluation, which is part of the US Dept of Veteran’s Affairs. They concluded that hostile rumination was a chronic stressor with negative effects on health. It led to chronic hyperaroused stress response, which, to put it unscientifically, just wears a person out.
Feeling that you have been wronged is not good for you. You need either to talk about it until you can do something about it or let it go and move on. Holding on to impotent anger makes us cramped and closed. “Impotent anger ” is anger that is not doing anything for you, anger that has no fruitful power. Anger’s purpose is to move you out of hurtful situations, protect you from hurtful people, energize you to do what you can to make things better for yourself. Almost any time you are angry, one question that can move you forward is this one: “How much of this anger is anger at myself?”
Forgiveness is difficult because when we are wronged, we stiffen into righteousness. Righteousness is the root of much wicked behavior. We feel that, because we have been hurt, we have carte blanche to hurt other people. We can speak in destructive ways, we can lay waste about us with the sword of our tongue. We feel that, because we are right, we can be brutal.
Forgiveness is also difficult because, as I’ve said before, being righteously wronged can be a semi enjoyable state. We have a picture in our mind of how the one who wronged us should apologize. We imagine conversations where we articulately explain our P.O.V. and the ones who wronged us slap their heads in enlightenment, in realization. We exercise our arguments toward that imagined conversation. We polish our grudges, we repeat them to ourselves; we can drop into the groove of recrimination and resentment at a moments notice, we can do it in our sleep. We lull ourselves with the recitation. The resentment can become part of who we are. Part of our personality’s clothing, our identity. Forgiveness is especially difficult when it is ourselves we need to forgive. We can get addicted to the guilt and pain of going over and over our transgression or our mistake. We hold ourselves to a higher standard than the one we use for others. Other people can forget things, be hurtful, lie or cheat or make a terrible mistake, but not us. It’s hard to accept that we are human and prone to error. If we’re just regular human beings, then how will we be in control of the world? We might rather think of ourselves as bad and still in control than to acknowledge that we’re just regular folks.
Forgiving requires a willingness to look at the harm being done to you by not beginning to forgive. If you don’t forgive yourself, you may not allow yourself to have a good life, which affects the people who love you. And it makes you insufferable when you’re in the “I’m a terrible person” place, because they have to live their lives and spend time reassuring you that you are all right, which equates to dragging you along like a heavy suitcase with a broken wheel. Being a righteous victim does you harm because you have a stiffening righteousness. It does you harm in that you are stuck. You are also stuck to the person at whom you are angry, or to the bad mistake you made. You cannot go anywhere without dragging them along with you. It does you harm in that you feel that other people might hurt you the same way. You become braced. Ready to be hurt, to be left, to be abandoned, to be betrayed. You don’t have to look at yourself, if you are a victim of mean parents or two timing lovers, or if you are just a tragically bad person. You get to be the right about them, about yourself.. Being right is a big part of not wanting to forgive. You can be right, absolutely, and still be hurt by harboring anger against yourself or the person who hurt you.
Jungian analyst, author and teacher Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes: “Forgiveness seems unrealistic because we think of it as a one-time act that had to be completed in one sitting. Forgiveness has many layers, many seasons. It is not all or nothing, if you can do a 95% forgiveness, you are a saint. 75% is wonderful. 60% is fine. Keep working./playing with it. The important things are to BEGIN and to CONTINUE. There is a healer inside who will help you if you get out of the way. For some, temperamentally, this is easy. For some it is harder. You are not a saint if it’s easy, not a bad person if it’s not. You are who you are and you do it the way you do it. All in due time.” Forgiveness also does NOT mean to overlook something, to pretend the thing didn’t happen. Estes talks about the stages of forgiveness.
1. TO FOREGO: to leave it alone. Take a break from thinking about it for awhile Get your strength back.
2. TO FORBEAR: Containment. Don’t act Keep your self-protective vigilance. Have patience. Practice generosity. Ask what would happen if there were grace in this situation?
3. TO FORGET: Refuse to dwell on it, Consciously release it. Some people are wary of this step, and make definitions of forgetting for themselves that include bearing the wrong in mind. At the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, they say forgive, but never forget, because if you forget it could happen again. Only you can be the judge of whether the wrong that was done to you is something you can afford to forget. If not, ask yourself how you can bear it in mind without it continually poisoning you.
4. TO FORGIVE: Regard the other individual indulgently. Give compassionate aid to that person. You don’t think about the incident any more. You have nothing to say about it.
The metta meditation we use is directly related to this. The first step in forgiving is to direct compassion and love toward yourself. Say: May I be free from danger. May I be physically happy May I be mentally happy May I have ease of well-being. Do that for three weeks, then say it about someone you like, about a neutral person, THEN about the one who wronged you. If you can’t, go back to sending lovingkindness to yourself. You don’t have to forgive all at once. Today, maybe, just think about being ready to begin.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
