Wisdom
has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars.
She
has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her
table.
She
has sent out her servant-girls, and she calls from the highest places in
the town,
"You
that are foolish, turn in here!" To those without sense she says,
"Come,
eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Lay
aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight."
Sermon:
Spiritual
life is something that happens, if you let it.This
is an invitation to let it happen.I'm
talking about a felt sense that everything has meaning, that everything
is connected, maybe a feeling of joy and peace that comes with that realization,
certainly a way of living life with rich, full intensity, while at the
same time having a bit of detachment and clarity about it. Maybe there
is something in there about the Divine, maybe not.Spirituality
to me is not about finding God so much as a way of finding engagement,
joy, and peace in the struggles of everyday living.
My
belief is that doorways present themselves as we go through life, also
that it is possible to go places -- physically, emotionally, or whatever--
where doorways are more likely to present themselves and doors are more
likely to open into a deeper spiritual realization.I
got interested in these doorways at an early age even though I lived in
a family of secular humanists who had turned away from church, calling
it a source of division and discord within communities.A
generation later, I see church as having potential for leading communities
to healing and wholeness, and for me, that has everything to do with the
doorway thing.So I really want
to talk about the doorways.
You
have had experiences of transcendence, I am sure.A
baby was born of your body, or the body of one you love.A
friend entered into the arms of death.You
yourself had a close encounter with death.You
lay on the beach with a lover under the stars.You
made love outdoors.You caught the
perfect wave, gliding along in the curl like a mutant sea creature, or
fell freely through hundreds of feet of air before your parachute opened,
or saw the way the sun and the sea and the land all slide together at sunset,
or rode your bicycle to the top of a mountain and felt the earth slipping
away under you on the way down.You
found yourself in a desperate situation where you did not think you could
get out alive, when every fiber of your being bent to survival, and somehow,
you made it through. You made music with friends that somehow moved into
a scary and fabulous realm of beauty.Your
spouse announced out of a clear blue sky that your marriage was over.A
song entered so deeply into your very being until you could only sit and
weep.
And
something happened that transformed the moment forever, and you, too.A
feeling of spaciousness opened around you and within you.Time
stopped.Afterward, you were never
quite the same.How did this happen
for you?…..Let's go there again,
today, and reflect.These moments
are important.And most of us don't
ever talk about them, not wanting people to think we are crazy.Let
me assure you, Wisdom calls out to those who are foolish. Or afraid they
might be crazy. In other times and places, people have taken more interest
in these matters than most people do here and now. Let's go there today,
and reflect.
Doors
open, these doors of the spirit, and people go through them, returning
somehow changed.The ancient Celtic
people believed there was another world that lies somehow below ours, out
of sight, at any rate.There were
special places of contact with that otherworld, and sometimes people went
there. Welsh and Irish myths
that have come down to us from ancient, pre-Christian times, tell of strange
doings at certain places that can be identified even now, many hundreds
of years later.To sit on the Mound
of Aberth in Wales is to court an otherworld experience.Likewise
the mounds around Newgrange in Ireland.To
follow certain animals or birds will lead you to this other realm as well,
a place where time runs differently, a place whose inhabitants have special
powers.Sometimes you go there more
or less on purpose, though it is never exactly of your choosing, and you
can never predict what your experience will be.Sometimes
you are just out doing something in the woods and you end up following
a white dog with red ears or a pair of geese joined at the neck by a length
of golden chain and strange, important things begin to happen.
I
speak from time to time about the experience of Malidoma Some, who returned
to his village in Burkina Faso after years in a French-run boarding school
to undergo a traditional initiation into manhood among his people.His
story of initiation has much of the same quality of those ancient Celtic
myths, of a journey into the underworld, a place that looked much like
the world of everyday, but where distances could be crossed in a short
time that should have taken days to cover, where strange encounters with
powerful beings occurred.He returned
much changed, considerably de-Westernized, ready to take up his responsibilities
as an adult in his community.They
had worried about him because his sie, his soul, had seemed to be
outside his body when he came back from boarding school.They
said of him after the initiation that his sie had returned inside
him, where it belonged.What I mean
to tell you is that there is a whole world beyond that moment of hearing
the song and weeping with joy and pain.There
is a whole world beyond the moment when the car accident was somehow happening
in slow motion.Those who traveled
there and left us stories say it is an important world, also that it is
full of mystery and danger.
Our
little steps through these doorways are experiences of what is called transcendence,
moving out of our little selves into something that is somehow more spacious,
or sensing that something larger than our little selves inhabits our being.
There are people who deliberately go to places where these doorways can
be found, who deliberately go through them to wherever they lead.
Some
of those who pass through these doorways are shamans, people who work within
traditional systems for finding the way in the otherworld.These
are the ways most closely aligned with the way of the ancient Celts or
Malidoma Some's village.There are
modern Western shamans who have recreated a system that allows wisdom and
healing to be gathered by people in our culture in ways similar to those
used by traditional shamans in Africa, Siberia, Australia, or the Americas.They
return with their souls inside their bodies, where they belong, considerably
de-Westernized, with a wisdom they find hard to put into words glowing
in their eyes.
There
are also systems that have been in continuous use for a long time among
people of the great religious traditions.Many
Buddhists and Hindus follow cultural religious practices that have little
to do with these doorways, but some have kept alive systems of practice
that move consciousness to a very different dimension.The
union of a person's spirit with the vastness of the universe is called
"yoga" in Hindu tradition.The tradition
identifies six different types of yoga, of which what we think of as yoga
-- a system of exercises for flexibility and breath control -- is part
of a subbranch of one.In fact, the
Buddha was a yogi, and the two traditions are intertwined.In
the Buddhist way, that experience of spaciousness beyond the small self
is called "realization" or "enlightenment", and the masters of ways of
moving into it have much detailed and subtle knowledge of the path beyond
the door.
The
fundamental technique of yoga in the larger sense and of the Buddhist way
is meditation.Just sitting turns
out to be a dependable way to get to the place where the doorway beckons.Just
sitting can not only put you in the place of ecstatic transformation, it
can help you journey to the wisdom beyond.Chanting,
walking, work periods at the monastery, use of yoga postures and breath
control, all these are aids to the basic discipline of meditation.Other
disciplines may complement meditation as well, tai chi, martial arts, long-distance
running or cycling, musical training, to name a few.
The
yogis tend to convey their wisdom through amazing stories you pretty much
have to be Indian to understand.Mighty
battles and crazy plotlines let you know they are stories of the otherworld,
but what they mean is way hard to interpret.Back
in the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and
Walt Whitman, our own Unitarian ancestors, tried to understand the way
of yoga, and I think they actually did. Still, their insights got tangled
up by their followers in a short time, leaving us a tradition of rather
narrow self-culture, a self-indulgent kind of navel-gazing, rather than
the real thing.
Emerson,
Thoreau, Whitman-- they were called transcendentalists, and that's what
they were, practitioners seeking transcendent meaning in this very world.
They wanted to get out from under the shadow of traditional Christian teachings
and be present to the wholeness and wonder of the universe now.They
wrote of the Self, with a capital S, --the yogis would say Atman, the self
of all that is.But soon, the spaciousness
of that Self with a capital S came to be understood as the little, ordinary
self, and the ability of their writings to guide us toward enlightenment
faded.
The
link with what we now know as yoga in this country is not hard to find.
The body is at the center of it.Soul
is not something imprisoned in the body that will be released to fly away
to God when you die.Body is an
expression of Self with a capital S.The
divine is within each of us.That's
what they mean by "Namaste" -- "The divine within me greets the divine
within you."
Buddhist
seekers have been teaching Westerners about their way through the door
for generations, and their teachings begin to be more accessible than the
fantastic stories of the yogis.In
fact, Christians and others who have studied Buddhism have returned to
their own traditions to find fragments of the same kind of wisdom and build
on them.Thomas Merton, Trappist monk
and social critic, pursued Buddhist meditation as well as Catholic practice. St.
Theresa of Avila and St. Francis of Assisi and others can be read with
the journey beyond the Doorway in mind.St.
Theresa's famous work, "Interior Castle," reads very much as a map for
a journey in the otherworld.
It's
not about being out of the body.It's
about resting body and mind to allow something else to happen.Shunryu
Suzuki, founder of the San Fransisco Zen Center, compares meditation to
using the rest room.(I have to cite
an important authority in order to make this comparison)[1]You
eat, then after awhile, it's good to use the restroom.The
feeling of eating is good.The feeling
of using the restroom is good.You
have an active life, engaged with the world and other people in many ways,
and that's like eating.After awhile,
it's good to meditate.Just to sit
and let all that engagement lift off your mind and your body.
It
takes some doing, to let all that engagement lift off your mind and your
body.Deep feelings arise, sometimes
tears, sometimes groaning, as the busy-ness is released.What
has been buried under the pile of everything you have to do?But
if you keep sitting, they pass.Feelings
of ecstasy come, too, feelings you wish you could stay with.And
as you keep sitting, they pass, as well.There
comes an acceptance of the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows,
to use the words of the Chinese tradition. (I'm told this happens.I
haven't gotten there).The breath
becomes a reminder, even away from meditation time, of the constant alternation
of taking in and letting go.
Most
of us are not going to become contemplatives.We
have things to do, lives to live.But
for most of us, there could be more spaciousness, more presence, more zest.More
moments of transcendence.The yogis
and the Buddhists say, meditate.Action
-- then reflection -- then return to action.Then,
maybe, gradually over the years, maybe something happens.Besides,
being a contemplative does not get you out of hiding from yourself.Jack
Kornfield, whose book After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, was part of
the inspiration for this sermon, wrote:
The
first woman I became involved with after [I left the monastery] was a college
friend who was newly teaching at Harvard.Inside
I still felt like a monk who had no preferences for or against anything,
taking whatever was put in the begging bowl.When
she would ask what I wanted for dinner or what movie I would like to see,
I answered, 'Whatever you like, dear; for me, it doesn't matter.' …This
wasn't just a wise spiritual detachment; she observed that I was afraid
of engagement and out of touch with feeling, and reminded me that I had
been that way before the monastery too.It
was true.I didn't know what I felt.So
she got me a small notebook with the suggestion that I write down ten things
each day that I liked or disliked, until I could start to know my own feelings.Recovering
my feelings was a long and life-changing process.[2]
I
think that for me, recovering my feelings will take a lifetime.For
other people, it's other stuff, like seeing clearly how you relate to others.It
takes withdrawing from everyday activity for a period of reflection to
begin to see what's going on.Not
to think it over, just to let go of it all.It
also takes the company of other people, like the woman in Jack's life.And
not too tight a community -- in the monastery, Jack didn't have a chance
to find out that he was out of touch with feeling.
In
the end, it's not about detachment, it's about letting the heart be opened,
about giving up all the protections the mind has placed around the heart,
and just letting love and all the other feelings be.It's
about empathy and compassion.These
things happen as a life of action has spaces of reflection and meditation
opened up in it.Gradually the sensible
person grows foolish enough to hear Wisdom calling. "You that are foolish,
turn in here!" "Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight."I'm
not at all sure what happens after that. I haven't gotten there yet.There
are masters in many traditions who know the subtle paths of the world beyond
the doorways.Will we be foolish enough
to step inside?