Sermon: the laundry
Hope Unitarian Church
September 30, 2013 (the Sunday after my ordination)
Reading:
“Enlightenment does exist. It is possible to awaken. Unbounded freedom and joy, oneness with the Divine, awakening to a sense of timeless grace – these experiences are more common than you know, and not far away. There is one further truth, however: They don’t last. Our realizations and awakenings show us the reality of the world, and they bring transformation, but they pass.
Of course, you may have read traditional accounts of fully enlightened sages in Asia or of wholly unblemished saints and mystics in the west. But these ideal narratives can be misleading. In fact, in the awakening of the heart there is no such thing as enlightenment retirement. That is not how it happens to us.
We all know that after the honeymoon comes the marriage, after the election comes the hard task of governance. In spiritual life it is the same: After the ecstasy comes the laundry.
Most spiritual accounts end with illumination or enlightenment. But what if we ask what happens after that? What happens when the Zen master returns home to spouse and children? What happens after the Christian mystic goes shopping? What is life like after the ecstasy? How do we live our understanding with a full heart?”
– Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, The Laundry
We often tell the story of the enlightenment of Buddha as if he was alone. He sat under a tree and meditated all by himself. And it just happened. Actually, the story has a very important other character in it. Mara, the god of illusion and evil. As Buddha sits under the Boddhi tree, determined to reach enlightenment, meditating with commitment and compassion, Mara tempts him with the possibility of untold riches and pleasures. Mara let out anger and aggression, fear and contempt, and Buddha overcame all this with such compassion that he rose, enlightened, to teach for 45 years throughout India.
But this was not the end of Buddhas relationship with Mara. Mara returned and returned. Tempting Buddha in every way possible. But each time, Buddha recognized Mara. In whatever form Mara came, Buddha could see through and would ask: “Is that you again Mara?” and Mara would slip away after being recognized.
In some texts Buddha and Mara even become friendly. One story even depicts the coming of Mara to a cave where Buddha is sitting with disciples. Frightened of Mara, the disciples try to scare him off and call him an enemy of their teacher. Mara responds: “Did the Buddha say he had enemies?”
The disciples knew at once that they had made a mistake. And Buddha replies: “Oh, my old friend Mara has come. Won’t you come in for tea? How have you been?” Mara answers truthfully, telling of how hard it is to be evil all the time.
Buddha responds with “Do you think it is easy to be a Buddha? Do you know what they do to my teachings, what they do in the name of Buddha at some of my temples? There are difficulties in either role, a Buddha or a Mara. No one is exempt.” (123-4)
Whoever we are, we are not exempt from hardship. We are not exempt from pain. We are not exempt from the suffering of change. It is the way of the world. Everything changes. Conflict will happen. Everything dies.
No one is exempt. And yet, there are these moments that break through, moments that may be quiet or loud, that may sneak up on you or that you may have worked towards for years. Moments of pure bliss and joy. Moments of deep transformation. Moments of intense healing and letting go of former trauma. Moments where you learn some new truth. Moments where you feel your connection with the earth and all its inhabitants. Moments where you strengthen your connection to another. Moments of enlightenment.
These moments are real. If we allow ourselves to receive them we will know such happiness and peace. If we engage fully with a spiritual path, we will find many of these moments along the way.
But too often we tell the story of just one moment. A flash. boom. enlightenment. finished. We tell the story as if the ending is one of these moments – and what comes next? For many, the return to normalcy after such a moment is hard.
In his book, After the Ecstasy the Laundry, Jack Kornfield uncovers the very real truth that not only was there real life after enlightenment, but there were often real deep crashes or falls into the depths of despair. He recounts the story of a Zen master who had a blissful encounter with the holy where so many beautiful truths opened up to him and he knew peace in his heart… and then, crash.
The master retells it this way: “Some months after all this ecstasy came a depression, along with some significant betrayals in my work. I had continuing trouble with my children and family, too. Oh, my teaching was fine. I could give inspired lectures, but if you talk to my wife, she’ll tell you that as the time passed I became grouchy and as impatient as ever. I knew that this great spiritual vision was the truth, and it was there underneath, but I also recognized how many things didn’t change at all. To be honest, my mind and personality were pretty much the same, and my neuroses too. Perhaps its worse, because now I see them more clearly. Here were these cosmic revelations and I still needed therapy just to sort through the day to day mistakes and lessons of living a human life.” (xvi)
Sometimes the snap back to reality is a crash. A deep fall. Sometimes it breaks up open and sometimes we recoil in fear and hide from the light. Maybe we can hide it from the outside world like the zen master could but those close to us can see we are in agony or really wrestling with something.
The crash is not just because one cannot sustain such heights in life. Yes, it is true that we cannot live in moments of pure bliss, or at least most of us wouldn’t want to. But the reason we crash after moments of enlightenment is more than that.
It is because moments of enlightenment are not the end. They are the beginning of a new chapter of deep spiritual work. Knowing the deep spiritual truths that come in those moments of transformation call us to live them. That is the crash, the depths we encounter. We find out that learning our new truth didn’t mean that we knew innately how to live it, but that knowing it we can no longer go about our day living selfishly and full of hatred and fear because this truth we have learned compels us to live it.
Learning that we are all connected calls us to reach out to the neighbor that we’ve had conflict with and the stranger that begs for change near our work. Learning that our heart is big enough to hold the whole world calls us to love and forgive even those who have betrayed us and knowingly hurt us. Learning that there is great wonder in all of creation calls us to live more sustainable lives where we honor the gifts of the earth and no longer pollute its shores.
It’s much easier to reach one of these spiritually enlightened moments than it is to actually live what it teaches you. But once you have opened your eyes, how can you shut them again. You cannot, if you are truly engaged in living a spiritual life, so you must do the hard work of living in line with your new truths.
Kornfield writes: “For almost everyone who practices, cycles of awakening and openness are followed by periods of fear and contradiction. Times of profound peace and newfound love are often overtaken by periods of loss, by closing up, fear, or the discovery of betrayal, only to be followed again by equanimity or joy. In mysterious ways the hearts reveals itself to be like a flower that opens and closes. This is our nature.” (125)
After I concluded the festivities last week and all of my house guests had departed, I did not want to answer email and do the dishes. I wanted that high to continue. I wanted to feel so connected to something transcendent. I wanted my 3 year old niece to come back. I wanted to keep feeling anointed. I wanted to celebrate more with you.
And yet, our lives are not made up of purely huge moments. What happened last weekend was a once in a lifetime event for me. What really matters is whether I can continue to live as if I’m connected to something transcendent. What matters is whether I can greet everyone I meet as if they are my beloved niece. What matters is how I integrate that beautiful experience into my ministry, into my life.
What truly makes up our lives is how we handle the regular stuff. How much care with take with our loved ones and with all people. How much mindfullness we bring to our work. How we wash ourselves clean with forgiveness after we’ve fallen into the mud. How we do the laundry.
Kornfield argues that it is the integration of what we learn in those enlightenment moments that is so difficult but is the true spiritual work. It’s easy to feel small as you gaze at the majesty of the grand canyon, but can you then live with such humility with your neighbor? It’s easy to see wonder in the smiling face of a baby, but can you see the wonder in their spit up and their never-ending cries as well? It’s easy to praise a sunsets beauty, but can you praise the beauty of all people? It’s easy to feel connected to someone whom you love in a moment of bliss, but can you feel that connection when they’ve done that same annoying thing 30 times in a row even though you’ve asked them to stop? It’s easy to feel the strength of community when we are in celebration together, but can you still feel it when we reach a point of conflict?
United Church of Christ minister Lillian Daniels argued this point, from a slightly different angle, in her devotional that swept facebook last year and caused quite a stir, called “Spiritual by not religious? Please stop boring me.”
She begins by recounting an experience she’s had countless of times of sitting next to someone on a plane who asks what she does for a living. When she tells them that she is a minister, she often hears an explanation of how they are spiritual but not religious, how they see God in sunsets on the beach, how they do not need a church but that they find God everywhere.
She begins her critique of this, of course, by asking if they realize that everyone can see God in a sunset if they are looking, and is upset by the implication that religious people only see God in church. But her scathing remarks get even juicier when she says this:
“Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.
“Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating. Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community? Because when this flight gets choppy, that's who I want by my side, holding my hand, saying a prayer and simply putting up with me, just like we try to do in church.”
Ok, so I admit that I loved this in part because of her provocative style, but she also has an important point. The real spiritual work is learning to live the great spiritual teachings out there. The messiness of church is that we are human, doing our best to live incredibly lofty ideals with other humans. The real work is finding out how we reshape ourselves into people who can live our values in this world that goes so against what we know to be true.
Our society is geared towards fostering our fear of our neighbors rather than our love for them. It is geared towards fostering our greed and desire for ever more stuff with a scarcity mentality that tells us that there isn’t enough to go around. It is geared towards fostering our selfishness rather than our altruism. But here, we try to create a place where we integrate our lofty religious ideals into real life.
What is really special about church is not that we talk about spiritual paths and religious truths but that we attempt to live them out with one another and in the world. Why we come to this place is not to learn new truths but to reminded over and over of the truths that we know to be true but that we are still learning how to make real in our lives. Religious community is about integrating moments of enlightenment with the mundanity of everyday.
So, how do we integrate our most recent moment of ecstasy into our lives here together? What have we learned from the last few months together? How might it change how we might move forward?
We did an incredible thing. Gave such a gift to our faith tradition. We accomplished many not small tasks. But the real work begins now. I’m sorry to say we cannot just rest on our laurels. We have been called to some real important work.
How will we do our laundry?
September 30, 2013 (the Sunday after my ordination)
Reading:
“Enlightenment does exist. It is possible to awaken. Unbounded freedom and joy, oneness with the Divine, awakening to a sense of timeless grace – these experiences are more common than you know, and not far away. There is one further truth, however: They don’t last. Our realizations and awakenings show us the reality of the world, and they bring transformation, but they pass.
Of course, you may have read traditional accounts of fully enlightened sages in Asia or of wholly unblemished saints and mystics in the west. But these ideal narratives can be misleading. In fact, in the awakening of the heart there is no such thing as enlightenment retirement. That is not how it happens to us.
We all know that after the honeymoon comes the marriage, after the election comes the hard task of governance. In spiritual life it is the same: After the ecstasy comes the laundry.
Most spiritual accounts end with illumination or enlightenment. But what if we ask what happens after that? What happens when the Zen master returns home to spouse and children? What happens after the Christian mystic goes shopping? What is life like after the ecstasy? How do we live our understanding with a full heart?”
– Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, The Laundry
We often tell the story of the enlightenment of Buddha as if he was alone. He sat under a tree and meditated all by himself. And it just happened. Actually, the story has a very important other character in it. Mara, the god of illusion and evil. As Buddha sits under the Boddhi tree, determined to reach enlightenment, meditating with commitment and compassion, Mara tempts him with the possibility of untold riches and pleasures. Mara let out anger and aggression, fear and contempt, and Buddha overcame all this with such compassion that he rose, enlightened, to teach for 45 years throughout India.
But this was not the end of Buddhas relationship with Mara. Mara returned and returned. Tempting Buddha in every way possible. But each time, Buddha recognized Mara. In whatever form Mara came, Buddha could see through and would ask: “Is that you again Mara?” and Mara would slip away after being recognized.
In some texts Buddha and Mara even become friendly. One story even depicts the coming of Mara to a cave where Buddha is sitting with disciples. Frightened of Mara, the disciples try to scare him off and call him an enemy of their teacher. Mara responds: “Did the Buddha say he had enemies?”
The disciples knew at once that they had made a mistake. And Buddha replies: “Oh, my old friend Mara has come. Won’t you come in for tea? How have you been?” Mara answers truthfully, telling of how hard it is to be evil all the time.
Buddha responds with “Do you think it is easy to be a Buddha? Do you know what they do to my teachings, what they do in the name of Buddha at some of my temples? There are difficulties in either role, a Buddha or a Mara. No one is exempt.” (123-4)
Whoever we are, we are not exempt from hardship. We are not exempt from pain. We are not exempt from the suffering of change. It is the way of the world. Everything changes. Conflict will happen. Everything dies.
No one is exempt. And yet, there are these moments that break through, moments that may be quiet or loud, that may sneak up on you or that you may have worked towards for years. Moments of pure bliss and joy. Moments of deep transformation. Moments of intense healing and letting go of former trauma. Moments where you learn some new truth. Moments where you feel your connection with the earth and all its inhabitants. Moments where you strengthen your connection to another. Moments of enlightenment.
These moments are real. If we allow ourselves to receive them we will know such happiness and peace. If we engage fully with a spiritual path, we will find many of these moments along the way.
But too often we tell the story of just one moment. A flash. boom. enlightenment. finished. We tell the story as if the ending is one of these moments – and what comes next? For many, the return to normalcy after such a moment is hard.
In his book, After the Ecstasy the Laundry, Jack Kornfield uncovers the very real truth that not only was there real life after enlightenment, but there were often real deep crashes or falls into the depths of despair. He recounts the story of a Zen master who had a blissful encounter with the holy where so many beautiful truths opened up to him and he knew peace in his heart… and then, crash.
The master retells it this way: “Some months after all this ecstasy came a depression, along with some significant betrayals in my work. I had continuing trouble with my children and family, too. Oh, my teaching was fine. I could give inspired lectures, but if you talk to my wife, she’ll tell you that as the time passed I became grouchy and as impatient as ever. I knew that this great spiritual vision was the truth, and it was there underneath, but I also recognized how many things didn’t change at all. To be honest, my mind and personality were pretty much the same, and my neuroses too. Perhaps its worse, because now I see them more clearly. Here were these cosmic revelations and I still needed therapy just to sort through the day to day mistakes and lessons of living a human life.” (xvi)
Sometimes the snap back to reality is a crash. A deep fall. Sometimes it breaks up open and sometimes we recoil in fear and hide from the light. Maybe we can hide it from the outside world like the zen master could but those close to us can see we are in agony or really wrestling with something.
The crash is not just because one cannot sustain such heights in life. Yes, it is true that we cannot live in moments of pure bliss, or at least most of us wouldn’t want to. But the reason we crash after moments of enlightenment is more than that.
It is because moments of enlightenment are not the end. They are the beginning of a new chapter of deep spiritual work. Knowing the deep spiritual truths that come in those moments of transformation call us to live them. That is the crash, the depths we encounter. We find out that learning our new truth didn’t mean that we knew innately how to live it, but that knowing it we can no longer go about our day living selfishly and full of hatred and fear because this truth we have learned compels us to live it.
Learning that we are all connected calls us to reach out to the neighbor that we’ve had conflict with and the stranger that begs for change near our work. Learning that our heart is big enough to hold the whole world calls us to love and forgive even those who have betrayed us and knowingly hurt us. Learning that there is great wonder in all of creation calls us to live more sustainable lives where we honor the gifts of the earth and no longer pollute its shores.
It’s much easier to reach one of these spiritually enlightened moments than it is to actually live what it teaches you. But once you have opened your eyes, how can you shut them again. You cannot, if you are truly engaged in living a spiritual life, so you must do the hard work of living in line with your new truths.
Kornfield writes: “For almost everyone who practices, cycles of awakening and openness are followed by periods of fear and contradiction. Times of profound peace and newfound love are often overtaken by periods of loss, by closing up, fear, or the discovery of betrayal, only to be followed again by equanimity or joy. In mysterious ways the hearts reveals itself to be like a flower that opens and closes. This is our nature.” (125)
After I concluded the festivities last week and all of my house guests had departed, I did not want to answer email and do the dishes. I wanted that high to continue. I wanted to feel so connected to something transcendent. I wanted my 3 year old niece to come back. I wanted to keep feeling anointed. I wanted to celebrate more with you.
And yet, our lives are not made up of purely huge moments. What happened last weekend was a once in a lifetime event for me. What really matters is whether I can continue to live as if I’m connected to something transcendent. What matters is whether I can greet everyone I meet as if they are my beloved niece. What matters is how I integrate that beautiful experience into my ministry, into my life.
What truly makes up our lives is how we handle the regular stuff. How much care with take with our loved ones and with all people. How much mindfullness we bring to our work. How we wash ourselves clean with forgiveness after we’ve fallen into the mud. How we do the laundry.
Kornfield argues that it is the integration of what we learn in those enlightenment moments that is so difficult but is the true spiritual work. It’s easy to feel small as you gaze at the majesty of the grand canyon, but can you then live with such humility with your neighbor? It’s easy to see wonder in the smiling face of a baby, but can you see the wonder in their spit up and their never-ending cries as well? It’s easy to praise a sunsets beauty, but can you praise the beauty of all people? It’s easy to feel connected to someone whom you love in a moment of bliss, but can you feel that connection when they’ve done that same annoying thing 30 times in a row even though you’ve asked them to stop? It’s easy to feel the strength of community when we are in celebration together, but can you still feel it when we reach a point of conflict?
United Church of Christ minister Lillian Daniels argued this point, from a slightly different angle, in her devotional that swept facebook last year and caused quite a stir, called “Spiritual by not religious? Please stop boring me.”
She begins by recounting an experience she’s had countless of times of sitting next to someone on a plane who asks what she does for a living. When she tells them that she is a minister, she often hears an explanation of how they are spiritual but not religious, how they see God in sunsets on the beach, how they do not need a church but that they find God everywhere.
She begins her critique of this, of course, by asking if they realize that everyone can see God in a sunset if they are looking, and is upset by the implication that religious people only see God in church. But her scathing remarks get even juicier when she says this:
“Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.
“Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating. Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community? Because when this flight gets choppy, that's who I want by my side, holding my hand, saying a prayer and simply putting up with me, just like we try to do in church.”
Ok, so I admit that I loved this in part because of her provocative style, but she also has an important point. The real spiritual work is learning to live the great spiritual teachings out there. The messiness of church is that we are human, doing our best to live incredibly lofty ideals with other humans. The real work is finding out how we reshape ourselves into people who can live our values in this world that goes so against what we know to be true.
Our society is geared towards fostering our fear of our neighbors rather than our love for them. It is geared towards fostering our greed and desire for ever more stuff with a scarcity mentality that tells us that there isn’t enough to go around. It is geared towards fostering our selfishness rather than our altruism. But here, we try to create a place where we integrate our lofty religious ideals into real life.
What is really special about church is not that we talk about spiritual paths and religious truths but that we attempt to live them out with one another and in the world. Why we come to this place is not to learn new truths but to reminded over and over of the truths that we know to be true but that we are still learning how to make real in our lives. Religious community is about integrating moments of enlightenment with the mundanity of everyday.
So, how do we integrate our most recent moment of ecstasy into our lives here together? What have we learned from the last few months together? How might it change how we might move forward?
We did an incredible thing. Gave such a gift to our faith tradition. We accomplished many not small tasks. But the real work begins now. I’m sorry to say we cannot just rest on our laurels. We have been called to some real important work.
How will we do our laundry?