by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given June 22, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP 

Good morning!

We come today

to give thanks, to make confession, to be strengthened,

that we might live out of the highest that is within us.

Come, let us worship together.

Lovingkindness is a term which comes from the Buddhist tradition, and it is a concept which has been more and more compelling to me over the last few years.  It seems like a kind of handle to me for my own spiritual growth, a way to open into something that might make my behavior more consistent with my theology.  You see, though I believe that love is the greatest good, kindness—which should be a manifestation of love—is not really my strong suite.  In the first place, my temperament is not suited to kindness—I am passionate and have strong likes and dislikes, strong opinions.  I am aware that I carry around a lot of anger, especially these days, with the current economic and political climate.  I have placed my bets more on truth, and truth sometimes runs head-long into kindness, as a value.  It is possible to bring the two together—truth and kindness—to know when to speak and to know how to speak, but that is not always easy to do.  At least, for me, it isn’t.

For example, I remember the time when I was visiting Lexington, Kentucky, after living in Berkeley, CA, for a few years, and was invited out to dinner by a group of women friends who are very dear to me.  My very best friend among them all said to me, with great enthusiasm, “We’d like to take you out to this new Thai restaurant here in town.  It’s just great!  Do you like Thai food?”  Well, of course, I do, and I accepted gladly—not really considering that Lexington is not known for its ethnic cuisine.  Six of us sat around the table, and the steaming bowls of food were served.  To be brief, I have to say that the food was terrible.  It wasn’t just mediocre—it was soggy and greasy.  Awful.  I was planning to eat and converse and not refer to the food.  But as soon as we started eating, my best friend looked at me with a big smile and said, “Well, how do you like the food?”  Everyone stopped eating, chop sticks hesitating in the air, waiting for my response.  I didn’t know what to do.  They must have been able to read the distress on my face.  Finally I said, “Well, it’s different from what I’ve been having in Berkeley.”  Their faces fell.  They were silent.  They so wanted to please me, and they knew they hadn’t.  I felt like a real jerk.  So much for truth.  A kinder response was in order.

Let’s explore the concept of lovingkindness for a moment.  What does it mean, anyway?  It is a way of being, a gentle behavior coming from a deep regard for others.  It emerges from an understanding that all persons have a spark of divinity, a holiness within, not just some people, but all.  A few weeks ago there was a march in N. Portland, to protest the Kendra James killing.  The march ended at the spot where she died, and some of the African American ministers addressed the crowd.  One declared, “They said she was a crack addict; we say she was a child of God.”  To walk in lovingkindness is to believe in the spiritual potential of every human being.  Or as we would say in our Unitarian Universalist purposes and principles, we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

The Bali word for lovingkindness is metta, so Buddhists speak of doing a “metta meditation.” It always starts with ourselves, for if we reject parts of ourselves, then we will surely visit these negative feelings on others as well.  The yearning for happiness, which we all feel, is nothing more than a reaching for union, for overcoming our alienation, our feelings of separateness.  Metta leads us to embrace all parts of ourselves, all parts of others.

That’s relatively easy to do when the other people in question are people like ourselves.  People we enjoy.  People who are well-informed and funny and smart and have good middle-class manners.  People who have been nice to us.  Our friends.  Our children.  But lovingkindness asks us to go beyond that, to understand the deep holiness of everyone and to act accordingly.

I had an interesting experience in consciousness-raising the summer my son Madison did a cross-country trip on his bicycle.  I was anxious the whole time he and his friend were on the road.  Every time I passed a bicyclist on the road during those two months, I thought of my son, of the cars that were passing him.  I prayed that they would take care.  I saw each cyclist, not as an impediment to my zipping along to my destination, but rather as a precious and fragile person, one whom I would make every effort to protect.  Each one became my son.  I ended up praying for a lot of cyclists during that time.  I was relieved when Madison called me from Idaho, saying, “Mom, we’re tired.  Could you come and pick us up?”  I was disappointed in myself that I could not maintain that keen sense of caring about all cyclists once my son was off the road, and safe. 

We need so much in this society to move beyond the personal—our family, our friends, our home, our taxes, our children’s well-being—and to understand that every child, every human being, no matter how ragged or desperate or dirty or ill of body or of mind, all are precious and have dignity and are of worth.

There are many variations on the metta meditation, but I’ll share with you the one I’ve been using each day for years:  “May I be safe and protected from inner and outer harm.  May I be happy and peaceful of heart and mind.  May I be strong and healthy of body, mind, and spirit.   May I take care of myself gladly during my time here.  May I find peace.  May my heart open like a flower.”  Then if you wish, you continue to say these same prayers for others.  “May my parents be safe and protected,”  “my friends,” “my relatives.”

But then you come to the most difficult piece:  “my enemies.”  It’s hard to call down blessings upon our enemies:  “May my enemies be well, happy, and peaceful.  May no harm come to them, may no difficulties come to them, may they always meet with success . . . .”  Wait a minute!  May no difficulties come, may they always meet with success??  They’re trying to do me in!  No way do I want them to meet with success! 

Actually, people we might call our enemies are our greatest benefactors, in terms of our spiritual growth.  It’s easy to care about those who love us, it’s a huge spiritual challenge to get beyond our own pain and to wish love and peace for those who have hurt us.  The Buddhists would have us turn from anger and hatred, for such feelings keep us from receiving spiritual blessings ourselves, make us lose patience, lose rationality, close down our hearts.  And truthfully, those who “hook” us the most deeply with negative feelings are often the very ones who touch some unfinished piece of psychological work within us, and so invite us to grow by examining our overwhelming reaction to them.

This is not to say that we should ignore bad behavior or fail to draw boundaries with people.  We should acknowledge the difficulty, act appropriately to discourage the behavior in question, and at the same time focus on the positive.  If we can do this, we can often forge a connection with the person. 

Sharon Salzberg, Buddhist meditation teacher and author, tells the story of her traveling as a young woman by rickshaw through the crowded streets of Calcutta. As she moved through a winding alley, out of the darkness suddenly stepped a huge man who blocked the rickshaw and attempted to drag her out of her seat.  Terrified, she felt helpless to act, but her companion managed to repel the attacker, and the rickshaw driver was able to continue on.  Later when Sharon told her meditation teacher what had happened, he said gently, “Oh, Sharon, with all the lovingkindness in your heart, you should have taken your umbrella and hit that man over the head with it!”  “Compassion is not passive, compassion is not weak,” Salzberg reminds us.  “[Compassion] is the strength that arises out of seeing the true nature of suffering in the world.  Compassion allows us to bear witness to that suffering, whether it is in ourselves or others.”

In doing metta work, the question emerges, “What is real power?”  In this culture, power is too often seen as power over, winning, getting our way.  But being able to be compassionate, to love in spite of the difficulty of the circumstances, is a much greater power, and is life-giving to the one who is able to discipline the heart this way.  Some of you may have seen the film Adaptation.  One scene near the end held a powerful spiritual message for me, and I thought about it long after I left the theater.  There are twin brothers in the film, both played by Nicholas Cage.  They are having a heart-to-heart conversation at one point, and one brother—the smart one, the good writer—says to his more fun-loving counterpart, “You remember that girl you loved in high school?  You were talking with her one day, and when you walked away, she turned to her friends and made fun of you.”  And the brother responded with something like this: “I know that. But that didn’t have anything to do with me—that was her stuff.  I learned a long time ago that the important thing is not who loves me, but who I am able to love.”  Wholeness doesn’t come because people love us, but because we are able to choose to love, and we make that choice.

Because our culture makes it so difficult to be in community, to belong, we often approach our spirituality in a way that simply reinforces a sense of separateness. A cartoon with the caption “Buddhist Personal Ad” read like this “Tall, dark, handsome Buddhist looking for himself.”  Meditating itself can become competitive, a kind of race to enlightenment, led by a starving ego.

Pema Chodron, Buddhist nun, and my favorite Buddhist writer, tells the story of a young man who had been on a spiritual journey for many years.  He was “awake but smug,” says Chodron.  He was full of spiritual pride.  He began complaining to her about his girlfriend, who was having difficulty giving up smoking.  She suffered from anxiety which was triggering an old eating disorder.  The young man kept advising her to be strong, to not be afraid, to be disciplined.  And she kept telling him, “I’m trying.  I’m really trying.  I’m doing the best I can.”  He became angry with her because he didn’t think she was trying hard enough.  He said to Chodron, “I know I shouldn’t be getting so angry about this.  I know I should be more compassionate.  But I just can’t help it.  It gets under my skin.  I want to be more understanding, but she’s so stuck.”  Then he heard himself say, “I’m trying. I’m really trying.  I’m doing the best I can.”  As he echoed his girlfriend’s words, he got the message.  He was humbled, and he was able to be compassionate toward his friend.[1]

I think genuine compassion often comes when we see our own limitations.  When we become parents, we duly note our struggles to parent well, and then we begin to understand what our own parents were up against. Or a lover leaves us, and we remember the ones we left, and perhaps not so gracefully. Compassion begins to edge out blame, and our hearts move toward forgiveness.  Everybody has limits, and by and large people are doing the best they can.  We all blunder, we all hurt others.  A huge step in maturing spiritually is understanding and accepting human limitations, our own and those of others.

Pema Chodron tells the story of Dan, a meditation student she was working with who had a serious alcohol and drug problem.  He was doing really well, and then he went on a binge.  She went to her teacher Trungpa Rinpoche and blurted out how disappointed and upset she was with Dan.  Well, Rinpoche got really angry—and as Chodron put it, “[His anger] completely stopped my heart and mind.  He said being upset about Dan’s binge was my problem. He told me, ‘You should never have expectations for other people.  Just be kind to them.’  He said that I should just help Dan keep walking forward inch by inch . . . invite him to dinner, give him little gifts, and do anything to bring some happiness to his life—instead of having these big goals for him.  He said that setting goals for others can be aggressive. . . . When we do this to others, we are asking them to live up to our ideals.  Instead, we should just be kind.”[2]

Our true Buddha nature cannot be experienced in a kind of vacuum.  Spiritual growth takes place not in isolation, but more often in company, in relationship.  Our emphasis in this church on social justice is intentional and is grounded in the spiritual.  We are not a political organization, we are a religious one—but we cannot fail to note the suffering of our brothers and sisters and still claim to be a spiritual community.  I seriously question a spirituality that sees no end except a kind of “feel-good faith.”  Conversion—and I mean by that the giving of one’s self over to the Spirit—conversion leads to compassion.  It leads to caring.  It leads to justice.  There is no other way.

Pema Chodron gives this analogy.  She says, “I think that all of us are like eagles who have forgotten that we know how to fly.  The teachings [remind] us who we are and what we can do.  They help us notice that we’re in a nest with a lot of old food and old diaries, excrement and stale air.  From when we were very young we’ve had this longing to see those mountains in the distance and experience that big sky and the vast ocean, but somehow we got trapped in that nest, just because we forgot that we knew how to fly.”[3]

It’s easy to get trapped in the nest—the nest of consumerism, the nest of others’ expectations, the nest of addiction.  But lest we forget our eagle nature, lest we forget how to fly, let me suggest a few simple steps.  Continue to attend church on Sunday.  Here you will be with companions who care about you and who are traveling a spiritual path—it may not be your same path, but you will be supported in your own particular journey.  Here you will be reminded of your highest values and encouraged to live by these values.

Choose a spiritual practice, and follow it daily, whether it be Buddhist metta meditation or prayer or journaling or reading scripture, or whatever.  Even 5 minutes a day will make a difference.  Go to the same place at the same time each day and make known your intentions for the day; pray that you might be used for the good that day, pray that you might be kind to all you come upon. 

When you interact with others during your day, ask yourself, “What does kindness ask of me now?”  If you come upon someone who is difficult or rude, ask yourself, “How is this person suffering, that he or she is behaving this way?”  And again, “What does kindness ask of me now?”

Whenever you encounter another sentient being, see the beauty that is there.  Be with that beauty.  Know the holiness that is there, and know the holiness that you are.  Speak and act out of that deep knowing.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, forgive us when we do not love ourselves enough, when we fail to honor the Holy within ourselves and so fail to honor the Holy in others.  May we grow in our capacity to care and may we grow kinder each day, in word and in deed.  Amen.                                                 

BENEDICTION

Go now, and see the beauty and the holiness in each person you look upon.  Go in love and go in peace.  Amen

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Copyright 2003, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.