Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Jack R. Harris-Bonham
2 October 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.
INVOCATION:
This is the place. This is the time; here and now the Mystery waits to break into our experience:
To change our minds, to change our lives, to change our ways;
To help us see the world and the whole of life in a new light.
This is the place. This is the time.
Here and now let us praise the Mystery by joining together in song.
CENTERING:
At the center of our service and at the center of our lives we take this time to light candles of memory, of hope, or because we feel troubled, blessed, conflicted or simply because we wish to add a little light to this world.
PRAYER:
Most gracious and loving SPIRIT, we gather together this morning as community – community in search of meaning, in search of hope, in search of itself. In these trying times when there exists so much pain and poverty, so many opportunities for us to act responsibly, help us to winnow out the seed of action from the chaff of talk. Help us to bring into focus the things that we need to do, to quiet the cavalier voices of those who see poverty as a part of character, and to raise our own standards when it comes to acting upon what we believe. We believe that those on the borders of life deserve more than existence. We believe that the dominant culture must open its arms and embrace those that stand at the margins looking in. Help us Great Spirit to see our connections to all that exists. To see that where we live is precisely how we live, that the gathering of the wounded, the hungry, and the poor is as much for us as act of redemption as it is for them.
Now, open our hearts and our minds so that the unexpected and unforeseen can find its way into the solutions of our lives. Prepare us for the magnificence of the moment.
We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is precisely, everything. Amen.
SERMON:
One afternoon while I was sitting in my garden two dogs came down the path to the place where I was seated. I like dogs, I always have. The shorter of the two dogs sort of broad in the chest and bandy legged came over to me and demanded some attention from me with her nose; the way dogs have a tendency to do. So – I scratched her back. She arched approvingly. My eyes then wandered over to the bigger black dog with the yellow close-set eyes of the wolf. I mean I like dogs, but it pays to be wary. It was then I noticed that the big black dog was wagging her tail. I stopped scratching the little dog’s back and the big dog stopped wagging her tail. I scratched the little dog again and the big dog wagged her tail again. So I did a little experiment. Do you know that each and every time I scratched that little dog’s back the big dog wagged her tail? Finally, the big dog came over and I scratched her back and the little dog took the part of the tail-wagging friend.
And I thought, How wonderful, how absolutely wonderful! Scratch one dog’s back and all dogs wag their tails. If only human beings could learn this trick. Now, the dogs in my back yard weren’t going through some difficult machinations coming to the determination that what was good for one dog was good for all dogs. No! They were connected at a heart level and at a heart level we all know that what is good for one is good for all.
We can learn a lot from our animal friends. The great Jewish thinker, Martin Buber, in his seminal work, I AND THOU, speaks of the intimacy that he one evening experienced with a cat. He writes in this work;
“Sometimes I look into a cat’s eyes – The beginning of this cat’s glance, lighting up under the touch of my glance, indisputably questioned me: “It is possible that you think of me? Do you really not just want me to have fun? Do I concern you? Do I exist in your sight? Do I really exist? What is it that comes from you? What is it that surrounds me? What is it that comes from me? What is it?” The world of It surrounded the animal and myself, for the space of a glance the world of Thou had shone out from the depths.” (Buber, I and Thou, p.97-98)
When was the last time you watched a dog lie down? Sometimes they plop down, but a great deal of the time they turn in circles. I have had this explained to me as the vestiges of their primitive natures. When they lived on the steppes and the savannahs, when they were more jackal, hyena and wolf than dog this circling, pawing and circling was the process by which they pushed down the grass and made a bed for themselves.
In today’s sermon we will be doing a lot of circling. We will be pressing down the tall theological, religious and symbolic grasses of several traditions. The outcome will hopefully be that in the end, when these words have finished being spoken from my lips and received by your open and willing hearts, in the end we will have found the bedrock of a potential religious center, a place to lie down, rest and view the dizzying activities of the world that surrounds us.
When my family lived in Sacramento, California from 1952-1959, we quite often made our way to San Francisco. If you’ve been there you know the tourist stuff to see: Knob Hill, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Trolley cars, Haight-Asbury, Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and Seal Rock. If you were there back in the 50’s and 60’s you’ll remember that there was a restaurant called the Cliff House across from Seal Rock. Up the street from the Cliff House along the ocean there was Suttro’s. Suttro’s was an amazing place with seven stories of exhibits from player pianos to mummies, and all these layers surrounded an arboretum that on the ground floor was an ice-skating rink. Yet, given even this plethora of interesting sights and things to see my favorite place was the Fun House – south from the Cliff House across the street from the ocean.
My favorite attraction at the Fun House was a huge disk that sat on the floor. Everyone who wanted to could sit down on the disk, and when a horn went off the disk would begin slowly to revolve much like a merry-go-round. But this was no merry-go-round because there were no gaily-painted horses upon which to ride, there were no carriages within which to safely sit, in fact, there was absolutely nothing to hold onto except the others who were riding with you. And as the disk revolved faster and faster brothers held onto sisters whom they would in no wise ever be seen touching in public, and estranged wives and husbands clutched onto one another for dear life, but to no avail.
Centripetal force would have its way, and eventually everyone was thrown from the disk, everyone except those who had found their way to the center. It wasn’t hard to find, right there it was from the beginning. Not to sit directly on the center meant that the centripetal force would eventually pull you and little by little until you’d lose the center and be thrown off.
What I am suggesting to you today is this: Finding our religious center isn’t simply something that would be nice to have on Sundays, or when we feel especially religious, no! Finding our religious center is finding that place in our lives from which we can view the rest of the crazy, chaotic, confusing and brutal world flying by. Finding our religious center will allow us to have a new vision. We will no longer clutch at the people, places and things that surround us as if they could support us, stabilize us and give us meaning. Finding our religious center means that the banter of midway will still be heard, but we will be less inclined to find direction there. Finding our religious center means that the sirens of life – all of them – will begin to become an opera of desire, want and lack. We will finally reach that place in ourselves where what the world thinks we need, what Madison Avenue wants so desperately to sell us, what the drug companies want us to ingest – all these maddening monologues of the barkers of life – every one of them change from clamor to simply the musical harmony of the spheres. Think of it this way. If a playwright writes a scene in which all his characters are talking at the same time – no one will be able to understand anything. When a libretto for an opera is written, there are scenes in which all the singers sing at once and there is no problem because harmony takes the place of understanding.
When I worked on my Masters in religion at Florida State University my thesis was on non-verbal communication in Zen Buddhism. I was Dr. Richard L. Rubenstein’s assistant – the Richard L. Rubenstein who wrote the popular book, After Auschwitz. This is what Dr. Rubenstein had to say about Buddhism;
“I first became conscious of my affinity with Buddhism as a result of an encounter with Maseo Abe during a job interview at the University of British Columbia in March 1970. In the Vancouver lectures, I expressed my ideas about the “death of God” explicitly and unambiguously. The next day I met with the religious studies faculty. As was so often the case, the faculty consisted primarily of conservative white Protestant males. Not surprisingly, my ideas made them uncomfortable, especially ideas such as God after the death of God as the Holy Nothingness.
“As the faculty questioned me, I noticed a small, thin Japanese scholar seated on the floor in the corner behind me. He became increasingly agitated as the discussion continued. Finally he stood up and said, “I’ll have you know, what this man is saying is the essence of Mahayana Buddhism.” “That’s strange,” I replied. “I haven’t studied Mahayana Buddhism.” “That proves my point!” was his response.” (Mitchell 184)
Zen Buddhism is often described in this manner –
A special transmission outside scriptures,
Not depending on words or letters,
Directly pointing to the human heart,
Seeing into one’s true nature.
What is true nature? It sounds like it might be a soul. It’s not a thing. Your true nature isn’t rolling around inside you like a marble inside a guitar. Zazen (seated meditation) isn’t turning yourself upside down or inside out till you lose your marbles. For Zen Buddhists to express their true nature they sit. It’s practice.
I like to play tennis and was a good, steady player while attending Yale. I played tennis with older men, women, men my own age, and younger men. On clay, grass, asphalt and cement. There was only one way to get better. Practice.
To be here and now in the here and now seems idiotic and commonplace. Yet, most of us do not live in the here and the now. Coming back to the moment and the breath is the awakening of one’s true nature. There’s nothing special about it. It simply is.
Artists have described this as being in flow. For seven years I sat at my computer and wrote over 30 screenplays. No one forced me to do this. It was a drug. To be in flow with story, with character, with writing. I’ve said it before – so much of my writing is simply stenography. Once you suspend “disbelief” anything is imaginable.
And it is disbelief that we must suspend. It sounds like – to create – we must suspend belief – must make believe, but the truth is, most people disbelieve their ears, eyes, nose, tongue, heart, lungs and body. Most look for clues outside themselves on how to behave.
We must suspend our disbelief.
And as we suspend our disbelief who is it or what is it that we hope to find at this religious center of ourselves?
A great majority of the world’s religions talk about a soul or something like a soul. In the next few moments I am going to discuss what some of these world religions have to say about the soul. The list I will discuss is in no way exhaustive. If I leave out your particular religious flavor I apologize.
“The soul is a “non-material or non-tangible part of a person that is the central location of his/her personality, intellect, emotions and will; the human spirit. Most religions teach that the soul lives on after the death of the body.” That’s from the World Encyclopedia.
From the Dictionary of Buddhism we have the definition of anatman as “the key Buddhist doctrine that both the individual and objects are devoid of any unchanging, eternal, or autonomous substratum.” In other words for Buddhists there is no abiding self, no soul.
However there is a concept known as Buddha-nature.
The Abbot at Zen Mountain Monastery, John Daido Loori says this about Buddha-nature.
“Rather than positing an original defect or sin that needs to be transcended, in Buddhism we begin with the assumption of inherent perfection. Our practice is to return to the inherent perfection that’s originally there. There’s nothing to be transcended. There’s just a lot of baggage that we need to unburden ourselves of.”
You see originally within Buddhist thought there was a lot of discussion about one’s potential for becoming a Buddha – realizing one’s Buddha-nature. Finally, within Mahayana Buddhism we get this notion that there is no distinction between practice and enlightenment. To sit in meditation is to be enlightened. It’s there – this Buddha-nature – this soul with a no return ticket – this thing that we’re born with, but also dies with us.
A present day Zen Master has this to say;
“We usually assume that the world existed long before we were born and that our birth is our entrance onto the stage of an already existing world. At the same time, we often assume that our death means our departure from this world, and that after our death this world continues to exist.”
Now here’s where it gets real interesting.
“My true Self lives in reality, and the world I experience is one I alone can experience, and not one, anyone else, can experience along with me. To express this as precisely as possible, as I am born, I simultaneously give birth to the world I experience: I live out my life along with that world and at my death the world I experience also dies.” So there’s no soul to live on, but more importantly there’s no world left for this soul to be departed from.
The Holy Koran is quick to remind us that everything is a drama that posits only one soul.
“The entire drama of this single soul serves only to express the Divine Attributes of the Hidden Treasure of Love.” (Holy Koran 31:28) So the next time you hear that the Koran teaches hate and separatism you tell them about the single soul that serves only the Divine Attribute of Love! That, my friends is what the Holy Koran teaches.
Within Judaism God breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of man and he (man) became a living soul.
By the Maccabean period in Jewish history the Greek concept of the immortality of the individual soul was incorporated into Jewish thought. Not that everyone thought that way. In fact in Jesus’ time the Pharisees believed in life after death while the Sadducees denied it.
All of Greek neo-Platonist’s thought is an attempt to describe how everything comes from the ONE – much like light from the Sun.
Paul Tillich, arguably the 20th Century’s greatest Protestant theologian, says, “the soul is not primarily an immortal substance, but the principle of movement. It is the principle which moves the stars, so the stars have souls; (it is) the principle which moves the animals and plants, so they also have souls; (it is) the principle which moves our bodies, so we have souls; (it is) the principle which moves the whole universe so there is a world soul.”
The essential thing about the individual soul and the world soul is, according to Tillich, the concept of its being ambiguous, doubtful, uncertain, and capable of multiple interpretations. To me, Paul Tillich begins here to sound a lot like the UUA.
The same present day Zen Master again;
“At it very essence life is contradiction and the flexibility to forbear and assimilate contradiction without being beaten down by it, or attempting to resolve it (that flexible ability) is our life force.”
I think this is good definition of soul – a life force that’s flexible enough not to be beaten down by contradiction, flexible enough to assimilate contradiction without attempting to completely resolve it.
Within the Jewish mystical tradition, the Hasidic myth of the creation says that in the beginning everything was God and then, God exploded. That which was most like God went furthest from God – much as like poles of a magnet repel each other.
The former Rabbi and now death of God theologian, Richard L. Rubenstein, explained that Sigmund Freud stood on the shoulders of these Hasidic Rabbis when he came up with his theory of psychoanalysis. For a person to be whole that person would necessarily have to go deep into the darkness of the unconscious and find that spark of him or herself that when brought to consciousness would make them whole again, make then one again, make them God again.
Conclusion: How do we find our souls, our religious center? Why don’t I tell you what happened to me, how I found my way to this place of grace.
I wanted to be a preacher since I was 10 years old. From the age of ten till eighteen I sat on the front row of church and took notes on what the minister had to say. When I entered college I lost three things; my sobriety, my virginity and my God!
When I graduated in 1969 the war in Vietnam was raging. Catholic Priests and brothers Daniel and Phillip Berrigan were convicted of destroying selective service records; both Woodstock and Altamont happened that year; The United States landed a man on the moon and I had a decision to make – leave for Canada or find a way to avoid the draft.
Just as others are proud that when called they answered the call, so, too, am I proud that when called to serve in what I saw to be a war of genocide that I did not answer the call. I attended Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University – two thirds of the class that year were draft resisters. It was at Perkins that I discovered Zen Buddhism.
Given a high lottery number I jumped from Perkins to the Religion Department at Florida State University, then to Starr King School for the Ministry, Berkeley, California, then to the peace time Army and Military Police School at Fort McClellan, Alabama. I felt like a pinball in a pinball machine. But I finally dropped down into a hole that I couldn’t get out of – the lights were going off and the bells were ringing and I had another decision to make. I had to learn how to manage my drinking.
I went to my first AA meeting in Denver, Colorado in 1977. The first person to speak was a lovely young woman. She was missing an arm. The next person to speak was a successful looking young man. He was missing a leg. I left that meeting and went directly to a liquor store. Obviously I didn’t have a problem with alcohol, I had both my arms and legs.
Two years later, December the 23rd, 1979, I quit for good. I traded my pistol in for a typewriter and I began telling stories on paper instead of in bars.
Ten years after sobering up, in 1989 I entered the Yale School of Drama and got a formal education in telling stories. I graduated from there in 1992 with a Masters of Fine Arts in Playwriting. Twenty years after sobering up in 1999 I got fed up with the Hollywood system and decided I would write a one-man show about Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, the Confederate Civil War general. I taught homeless people Bible Study for one year because Jackson had taught a black Sunday school class when he was a professor at VMI. I became a Presbyterian because he was a Presbyterian. Flooded by childhood memories of what Jesus had meant to me I became a Christian again after 30 years of being a Buddhist.
In 2004 after nearly three years of Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University, I realized who Jesus was – a man who saw that the Kingdom of God was located within the human heart. I found my way to the Maria Kannon Zen Center in Dallas where I became a student of Ruben Habito Sensei.
The path I now walk is no different than the path I have been on my entire life with one exception. I know now where the power lies; I know where God, or whatever you wish to call our ultimate concern, lives. There is only power by living in the present moment. For me to live in the past through regret or wishing I could do it all over again is to put myself in the victim’s seat. To live in hope that things will someday be different is to put myself in a place of fear. Future – Events – Appearing – Real.
What I learned is that we must stop looking outside ourselves for anything – anything at all. How do you know when you’ve reached your religious center? Trust me, you’ll know. No, better than that. TRUST YOURSELF!! You’ll know – it’s that place where you experience a peace that passes all reasoning and understanding.
There are times when looking for our souls and our religious center is a little like wandering the streets as homeless persons all the while being the children of the richest family in town. Once we have found our religious center there is no end to our resources.
So – what I’ve told you about the soul and our religious center is incomplete, ambiguous and perhaps even contradictory, but such is the essence of life.
I want you to do something for me? Place your right hand over your heart.
Now put your left hand on the person’s shoulder to your left. At the end of the rows just figure it out – this ain’t brain surgery. Let us pray.
Great Spirit we come before you today as a group, a community of seekers, questioners, rebels and malcontents. Hollow second-hand answers aren’t for us. We want to know for ourselves. We want a special transmission outside of scripture, not relying on words or letters, pointing directly to the human heart.
We sense that we have been given something that yearns to know exactly what that something is. Some of us call this soul, some call it intellect, some mind, some Big Mind. Some of us have no name for it. As we are connected physically as one community help us to realize that we all have our spiritual questions. Some of those questions were addressed this morning, but some of them were not and, quite honestly, we still question. Yet help us to remember that when one dog is satisfied all dogs wag their tails. At this moment, right now, within the sacred, the boundless, the timeless, let us feel with our right hand our hearts wagging within us. For truly what has been good for even one of us has been good for all of us.
Amen!
BENEDICTION:
May the road rise up to meet your feet,
May the rain fall softly upon your face,
May the wind always be at your back,
And may the peace that passes all understanding rest in your hearts and minds while we are absent one from another.
