Thirst
One of my favorite stories has been retold time and time again - it begins many years ago atop a mountain far from here as an eager student finally arrives at the modest home of the Zen master he's been seeking. When the student arrives - still out of breath from his climb - he rushes forward to meet his teacher and asks - how long will it take for me to attain enlightenment. The master looked up from his garden and replied - 10 years. 10 years, the student exclaimed - 10 years, that's too long. What if I really applied myself and did everything you told me - how long would it take then. 20 years, the Zen master quietly replied, and turned back to the weeds. 20 years!! How is that possible? That's longer than the first time I asked! What if I came to live here with you, weeded your garden and cooked your food, read all of your books, what if I became the most devoted student you've ever had - surely that would speed things up. How long would it take me then to achieve enlightenment? My son, I'm afraid that for you, it may take 30 years.
I don't know if you can relate to this student, but I sure can. In describing my quest for spiritual growth - if one were feeling generous they might say I am driven - but one could also - and perhaps more accurately at times - say that I can be a pusher, a rusher, a studier - hunched over my books well past the hour urging my teachers for the answer - searching for the one sure path that will alleviate all suffering and set me on my way to a full-time life of integrity, service, and joy. I want the answer and I want it now, thank you very much.
And I suspect that I am not alone in this. As Unitarian Universalists, many of us are strivers by nature. We value risk, creativity, and novelty. We like to explore all of our options, choose our path and move forward intentionally. We know where we want to go and we're willing to do what ever is necessary to get there. As seekers on the spiritual path toward a renewed world and an ever-enlarging heart, we tend not to slow down easily - not wanting to squander any time once we've discovered that we want to grow - that we want to effect change - realizing, like Mary Oliver, that we've wasted time sulking with our books when we could have been soaking it all in. And in doing this sometimes we rush and we push - like the eager student in the story - unintentionally stalling our progress and missing the wonder and beauty, the potential for awareness and growth that exist all around us. And then our striving can actually stop us dead in our tracks.
I don't know about you - but I've always had trouble slowing down. Vacations and study leaves, time away from work and school - forced or given - result in inexhaustible lists and unachievable goals - read all of the classics, read one of my lists, another - write a 10 minute sermon on the nature of suffering during your one week off - or just this past month, move, get the new house in order, prepare for our first child, write 4 sermons, and attend and present at our movement's annual national conference. Right. Luckily I have learned to let other people see my lists - and with help, they become a bit more manageable.
Now part of me hesitates to even bring up this trouble that I think many of us have with slowing down - I hesitate lest it be perceived only as a luxury problem of the middle and upper class - something not worth the time and attention of this pulpit - something that those struggling each and every day for survival have no opportunity to experience - and while there may be an element of truth in that statement - there is still a kernel worth wrestling with for all of us. A wise person once said that "Man's whole trouble can be summed up in his inability to sit alone with himself quietly in a room." And I couldn't agree more.
Most of us do not slow down easily - and often, I believe, this is the result of a pair of misguided beliefs. The first misguided belief tells us that we will be worth more if we do more. The second tells us that we need more - more stuff, more attention, more of everything - than any one person can use or sustain in their lifetime. These misguided beliefs - along with each of our personal baggage - actually keep us moving faster, doing and saying and striving for more and more, dodging the truth that will surely arrive if only we sit still for just a moment, moment after moment.
The path of non-effort, as the author and teacher, Jack Kornfield, calls it, is just as important as its complimentary path of effort on the journey of spiritual growth. The path of effort is the one that most of us are more familiar with. "In the path of effort," Kornfield tells us, "you purify yourself, you struggle to release all the obstacles to being present, you focus yourself on awakening and illumination so fully that everything else falls away" (does this sound familiar?) but "In the path of non-effort," he writes, "there is no struggle. You open yourself to the reality of the present. To rest in the sense of naturalness is all that is asked. Out of this, all understanding and compassion follow." To rest in the sense of naturalness is all that is asked.
These two paths - the path of effort and the path of non-effort - they work together as the realities of our lives unfold and as we find ourselves alternating back and forth, sometimes in broad swaths as the larger circumstances and events of our lives change - and sometimes each and every day as we strive to find and keep our balance on our journey.
One particular story from the book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, reminds us of just that. It begins in May of 1998, at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center. The center was hosting a benefit for the medical care of Ram Dass - a Buddhist scholar and teacher to many. It had been a year since Ram Dass' stroke and with intensive rehabilitation he could not walk and still struggled to find words when he spoke. Near the end of the day someone pushed the teacher's wheelchair on to the stage so that he could address the crowd - noting first to roars of laughter that he had been scolded that it was in poor taste to come to one's own benefit - and that is exactly why he came.
As he spoke, Ram Dass described his story this way:
"For years I practiced as a karma yogi, the path of service. I wrote books about learning to serve, about how to help others. Now it is reversed. I need people to help me get up and put me to bed. Others feed me and wash my bottom. And I can tell you it's harder to be the one who is helped than the helper!
But this is just another stage," he went on. "It feels like I died and have been reborn over and over. In the sixties I was a professor at Harvard, and when that ended I went out with Tim Leary spreading psychedelics. Then in the seventies I died from that and returned from India as Baba Ram Dass, the guru. Then in the eighties my life was all about service - co-founding the Seva Foundation, building hospitals, and working with refugees and prisoners. Over all these years I played cello, golf, drove my MG. Since this stroke the car is in the driveway, the cello and golf clubs in the closet. Now if I think I'm the guy who can't play cello or drive to work in India, I would feel terribly sorry for myself. But I'm not him. During the stroke I died again, and now I have a new life in a disabled body. This is where I am. You've got to be here now: You've got to take the curriculum." (pp.184-5)
You've got to be here now. You've got to take the curriculum - he tells us - no matter what form it takes. And sometimes taking the curriculum means not doing as much ourselves, sometimes it means asking for help, and it always means living right here, right now, in the reality of our lives.
This living in the reality of our lives, adjusting at times to the difficult truths of interdependence rather than independence - for many of us this path - especially at first - is not a path of non-effort. It can take significant effort to learn how to receive help, to acknowledge and live into the fact that interdependence means not only that we need to help others and try our best to effect meaningful change in the world - but that interdependence also means we must rely on the goodwill and care of others if we are to survive and to thrive.
I like to think of this as learning to accept and live into both sides of the Al Gore coin of interdependence. In his film, An Inconvenient Truth, Gore makes it abundantly clear that the choices we make now effect people living on the other side of the planet, if we cut down a rainforest in South America drought sucks the life out of the African plains, the choices we make today will surely impact many many generations to come. The other side of this coin of interdependence though, the side that I think can often be more difficult to accept - is the obvious corrolary - that whatever other people do, whether it is far across the ocean or here in our own community, intimately effects us as well. We need one another - I cannot say it enough - and as we learn to slow down, to sit quietly alone in a room without running from our thoughts and feelings, to see wherever we are the larger circle of events that brought us to this moment - we will know that we need one another more and more - and we will begin to see the true depth of our interconnection.
"In order to know the truth of interconnectedness," the author Sharon Salzberg tells us, "we need to look at the world with what theologian Howard Thurman calls 'quiet eyes.' It might be through silent meditation that we see the hidden patterns of connection that make up our inner life. It might be through pausing long enough to realize where a plate of spaghetti comes from. However we do it," Salzberg says, "softly receiving reality with quiet eyes rather than pinpointing objects and events as separate and distinct opens up our view instead of enclosing it with predetermined boundaries. We take in what is appearing before reactions and conclusions get fixed. When we relax into this mode of perception, a different perspective on reality becomes available to us." (Faith, 131)
This different perspective on reality that Salzberg talks about sounds a lot like the fruits of Jack Kornfield's path of non-effort to me. "In the path of non-effort," he reminds us, "there is no struggle. You open yourself to the reality of the present. To rest in the sense of naturalness is all that is asked. Out of this, all understanding and compassion follow."
During my month away from church, I traveled out to our Unitarian Universalist congregation in Buffalo to meet with a small group of congregants hoping to form a Caring Community Group to offer support and celebration to folks in their own church. They were starting from the ground up and hoped to learn from our experiences here. As our time together began, I asked everyone to reflect upon an experience in their lives when someone had showed up at just the right moment to offer just the right thing - even if it was simply their presence. The sharing began and went on for nearly an hour as folks eagerly and gratefully recounted their stories. But as we neared the end of our sharing, the minister, my friend, piped in. "Sometimes," he said, "I feel like I would literally rather die than ask for help." Heads nodded around the table. We sat in silence together for a moment until I heard a familiar question coming from my lips. "Yes," I said, "but where is the growth for you?"
As I asked the question I could not help but hear it echo in my own mind, in my own life. Was I talking to him, I wondered, or was I talking to myself?
Earlier that same week dear friends and members of our church community had urged me to reach out, to ask for help as the daunting task of moving from our old apartment to our new home was fast approaching. But I'm not even in the office this month, I thought. Surely I can handle this myself, and surely, that is what everyone else would rather I do. Who wants to carry boxes and clean out cupboards in this heat? But my friends persisted. People will jump at the chance to help, people like to be on the helping side of things, they told me, and besides, everyone knows that this church moves its ministers, its been doing it for years - you are not the first and you surely will not be the last minister who's boxes have been schlepped up and down the stairs by dozens of congregants.
I thought about this for awhile, wrestling ultimately, when I was able to get quiet with myself, with the fear that lay not far beneath the surface of my reluctance. What if I ask for help, I wondered, and it doesn't come? What if I am left looking and feeling needy, still standing alone with an overwhelming task ahead? Those were the thoughts that kept me frozen - and once they were seen and brought out into the light they disappeared like the proverbial monster in the closet.
Ok, I finally said. I need help. I will lean into the growth for me. And so the call went out - and was answered more lavishly than I could have ever imagined. From the cold lemonade and fruit that arrived on my doorstep in the midst of the move on a 90 degree day - to the beautiful paint job in my bathroom - to the boxes moved and the apartment cleaned and the chandelier hung - to the folks from our church that I ran into in airports all over the country on every leg of my journey to and from General Assembly - to the many kind thoughts sent our way - I have simply been overwhelmed by the help we have received - and in the midst of all of the chaos and unpredictability of this past week - I have tried to heed the call of the spiritual teachers we heard from this morning - to step back and look with quiet eyes through all that has unfolded and all that is unfolding - to truly see the many ways that the universe and all of you have provided exactly what I needed - to step away from the struggle and the striving and simply experience the naturalness of it all.
And in the moments when I have missed the mark - when the old fears and anxieties creep back in through the cracks, I find myself leaning in to the words of the poet Rumi that we heard earlier today. As the man cries out to his god over and over - Allah! Allah! - his lips growing sweet with the praising - he is crushed temporarily by the cynic - who proclaims that this God has never responded. As our friend falls into his fitful sleep the guide of souls appears to him - reminding him that his cries out are enough, his empty cup is enough, his longing is enough to keep him connected in this whirl of life and of love.
May we rest in the sure knowledge that on some days, our longing is enough. May we slow down in this lazy days of summer and give the path of non-effort a try - solving the problems of the world as we learn, moment by moment, to rest in the naturalness of it all, to grow in understanding and compassion, to take the curriculum as it comes, to see the world in a plate of spaghetti, to sit alone quietly in a room. May we be so blessed.
Amen.
July 1, 2007