by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell
A sermon given June 3,
2007
First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon
Pema Chodron, who is one of my favorite
Buddhist teachers, writes of what she calls “a genuine spiritual experience” in
her book When Things Fall Apart—a book which I highly recommend,
incidentally, when things fall apart. She says that she was
in New Mexico at the time, standing in front of her adobe house, drinking a cup
of tea. She heard the car drive up and the door bang
shut. Then her husband walked around the corner and without
warning told her that he was having an affair and wanted a divorce.
Chodron says that she remembers the sky and how huge it was. She remembers the sound of the river and the steam rising up from her tea. “There was no time, no thought, there was nothing,” she writes, “just the light and a profound, limitless stillness.” “Then,” she says, “I regrouped. <I> picked up a stone and threw it at him.”[1]
When someone asks her how she became so involved with Buddhism, she tells them it was because she was so angry with her husband. In truth, she says, he saved her life. After the marriage fell apart, she tried to get back to some kind of security, some kind of comfortable place. She was never able to pull it off—fortunately for her, she says. She came to know that the annihilation of her old dependent, clinging self was the only way to go. To stay with that shakiness, with that broken heart, with that feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—to stay with that and at the same time, learn to gently and compassionately catch ourselves before we harden into resentment or bitterness—that is the path of true awakening.[2]
We are generally led to spiritual growth out of suffering. We want relief. We find that living as we have been living is becoming increasingly intolerable. So we look for an answer. The answer. The best-seller list is full of books on religion—books telling us that religion is bunk or, alternatively, that Jesus is coming again and soon. Books of advice for living, like The Purpose-Driven Life or this new book called The Secret.
Actually, never mind buying all those books: the answer couldn’t be simpler—and more difficult. The secret (are you ready for this now?) the secret is that each of us has a deep, primal wound—we believe that we are separate from all that is, and separate from one another. We believe, falsely, that we are set apart, alone. The secret—the simple secret—is to return to reality or to our Buddha nature or to what some people would call God—to return to what theologian Paul Tillich called the Ground of our Being, or what is.
But why is this so difficult? Why do people spend years in spiritual practice trying to internalize and then to live out of this simple truth? Well, it’s our pesky ego that gets in the way. Two Sundays ago I mentioned Jungian James Hollis and his statement that most human behavior is an effort to escape anxiety. I think he’s right. So how do we do that? How do we attempt to escape anxiety? We tell ourselves stories. In other words, we construct a reality. Our brains are really good at this, and so they work overtime, keeping us “safe”—from reality.
Of course we already have some basic stories that were constructed long ago, when we grew up, some positive and some not so positive. We elaborate upon these stories, change them somewhat according to our unfolding experience, and construct what is known as an ego. We also call this a “self.” This ego or self then goes about in the world interpreting events, people, words, etc., according to the story that has been constructed. The ego is the “me” and others are the “not me.” Others get to take on all the characteristics that we don’t want to own, or the shadow parts of ourselves.
We find that we can’t entirely escape the realities of life, however—you know, realities like death, loss, betrayal. We can’t escape suffering. Bingo! Like Pema Chodron, we begin to look for a new way.
But some of us are stubborn—count me in that lot. We try for a long time to avoid just accepting who we are and being with reality as it is.
One of my chief coping mechanisms is trying to be good. If I can only be good enough, pure enough, totally unsullied, then the world won’t fall apart. I learned to follow all the rules. It’s not for nothing that I was elected “Best Christian” when I was a senior in high school. I’ve tried all my life to be so, so good—naturally enough, I became a minister. Now this persona of personal virtue I’ve adopted is absolute, unadulterated fantasy, of course. I think I latched onto this particular one early in life, because of the flagrant sins of my charming and handsome father. I mean, somebody had to balance out my daddy’s badness, and it might as well be me.
But the fact is that I have a huge amount of aggression in me. I get in touch with this in certain predictable situations—for example, at the airport, when I find myself surrounded by people separated from one another, connected to their respective cell phones, saying absolutely nothing. I’ve done a lot of traveling lately, and I’ve been stuck in airports for long periods of time—quite recently 7½ hours in Chicago O’Hare.
Let me tell you what happened. So I’m sitting there, packed in with thousands of other people who have had their flights cancelled by too much wind in the Windy City—what the airline is calling “an Act of God,” so they won’t have to give us any food or put us up for the night—when this svelte blonde, perfectly coiffed, and dressed to the nines comes up and asks if the seat next to me is vacant. She sits gingerly on the edge of her seat. She is carrying inside her jacket a live creature that pokes its head out to survey the scene—it is a dog, a little Yorkie, and she begins feeding it a McDonald’s hamburger, saying how little Fifi wouldn’t eat anything else. She engages me in conversation, and I reluctantly put down my contemplative reading and pay attention to her and little Fifi. She asks me where I’m going, and I foolishly tell her. I say, “I’m going to Lexington, KY, to marry my best friend.” And then realizing that she might misinterpret my remark, I add, “I mean, I’m going to do the ceremony. I’m a minister.” Big mistake. She perks up. Fifi perks up. She grills me, with one question after another. What kind of minister? Oh, I’ve never heard of that. What do they believe? That’s interesting. Does it bother you that some of your people are atheists and agnostics? Do you believe in Jesus? I believe in John 3:16—do you know that verse? Have you ever read the Bible? At that moment I truly wanted to get a framed copy of my Ph.D. in theology and smash it over her head. I think I did the verbal equivalent of that. This is not what I call acting from my Buddha nature. So I’m anti-war, supposedly a peace-maker—but I have a huge amount of aggression in me. So what do I do with that? I need to ask myself that question.
But back to this trying-to-be-good thing. Something strange happened this last week. I woke up one morning singing. Now I never wake up singing—I am a grouch in the morning, but that morning I woke up singing, “You better not cry, you better not pout, you better not cry, I’m telling you why, cause Santa Claus is coming to town.” Now I know that it’s June, and that Santa’s not coming until December. Why was I singing this? Maybe it came from some unremembered dream world. I don’t know. It was truly weird. But then I started thinking about the lyrics. “You better not cry, you better not pout.” Well, that was a message I grew up with. We children were not allowed to be angry or sad, ever. No tears. This is perhaps why I value my tears so much now—I allow them free rein, that my heart might remain supple and soft. I know many of you cry during the church service, and I’m so glad that you feel free to do that, free to be wherever you are, emotionally, here in community together. Because being with your emotional reality is surely a path to wholeness and healing.
A month or so ago I did a workshop for mid-life women at the UU church in Austin, Texas. In one of the exercises, I asked the women to make a list of personal losses that they have experienced. It was quite a large group, and after they were done, I went around with a hand-held microphone and asked if anyone had any new insights or “Aha!” experiences that they wanted to share with the group. The first woman to raise her hand was crying, weeping copiously. She could hardly speak. Finally she began. She said, “Joe left me, it was some years ago, and I’ve been sad for a long time—and I’m so happy now, because I realize that Joe is not at the top of my list anymore.” Just knowing what we feel can sometimes move us to a new place.
Another fantasy that we construct for ourselves is the belief that things won’t change—things that we like, situations that make us comfortable. Things won’t change. But of course they do, big time. And it always feels like such a violation, somehow. The other day I was moving a plant, a gorgeous blooming amaryllis, the last of the season, and I hit the stem against something, and the flower just broke off—just like that. For a moment, I considered scotch tape, but no, that wouldn’t work. The flower was so beautiful, and now it was dying. How often is something we love—a vase, a job, a home, a relationship—how often is it just perfect, just the way we want it, only to have things shift and change as we watch, helplessly.
Let me tell you a story about impermanence—and compassion. And this is a true story, told to me by one of the family members. A husband and wife were hosting a fancy dinner party, having brought out all of their best china and silver and crystal for their guests. Everyone was having a lovely time, and then one of the women accidentally broke one of the very expensive crystal glasses. The woman herself gasped in horror. Everyone stopped talking. At this point the host, fearing the judgment of his wife on their guest (for she tended to be judgmental), the host promptly picked up his glass, smiled and said, “Don’t worry about it, happens all the time,” and he knocked his crystal glass against the side of the table and broke it.
The one thing that we can depend on is that we cannot depend on anything—everything in this world is unreliable and temporary. So what do we do? We do not add another dimension of suffering to our original loss by saying to ourselves, “Things shouldn’t be this way” or “What did I do to deserve this?” or go into denial or try to change something or someone who cannot be changed. We learn to go forward, in love, knowing that all is impermanent. I hear the echo of that man’s words at the dinner party: “Don’t worry about it—happens all the time.”
Some of you may have experienced the peace and grace of a Japanese tea ceremony. Even though the pottery used in the traditional ceremony was made of the simplest of materials, clay and basic glazes, the cups and bowls were prized for their clean lines and spiritual qualities. They were treated with great care and respect, and so a cup from a tea ceremony was rarely broken. When one was broken, however, the cup was sometimes repaired with gold, leaving shining tracks clearly to be seen. Rather than trying to cover up the break, the cracks were celebrated, announcing to the world that the cup had been broken, was repaired, and vulnerable to change. And in this way its value was even further enhanced.[3]
Why is it that we tend to deny and to cover up our mistakes? It is so freeing to say, “I’m sorry”; “I misjudged the situation”; “I was wrong”; “I behaved like a real jerk. I hope you will forgive me.” When you break, you change, you mend, you grow stronger.
When we have had enough of the false escapes, enough of the trying to look good, enough of the self-righteousness that divides us from others and from the Holy, we want transformation, and we come to our spiritual practice. We come to pray. Or we come to contemplate. Or we come to sit. And what do we discover? Same old stuff—anxiety, anger, envy. More false escapes, trying to be holier than others, even through our spiritual practice! And so we sit with all of this human stuff. And sit and sit and sit. We give up our “should”s. We say, “I am who I am, right now.” We stop trying to fix ourselves and stop judging and fixing others. For this present moment, this moment of presence, at least, we have broken the illusion that we are separate.
We accept ourselves as we are, in that moment. We accept reality as it is, in that moment, and we ask only for that awareness and that acceptance. The mind quiets, we’re breathing more deeply now, more air coming in. The story that we’re not good enough, not worthy to be loved, goes. The story that everything will stay the same goes. The story that our hunger will one day be met—that goes. And yet, paradoxically, all is well, all is well, with our soul. So be it. Amen.