SAYING YES TO LIFE, EVEN THE HARD PARTS

SAYING YES TO LIFE, EVEN THE HARD PARTS

A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford

Delivered on the
4th of May, 2008

at the
First Unitarian Church of Providence

Text

This past week I facilitated a service at the cremation of a child who lived four hours. I first wrote “of a child who lived only four hours.” But I realized that what I was feeling and wanted to express is that there was no need for the modifier “only.”

The parents both identify as Buddhist so I found myself gathering materials out of the Zen tradition. And I came upon this story collected as a koan in the old Chinese anthology the Blue Cliff Record. “Great Master Ma was unwell. The temple’s superintendent visited and inquired after the venerable’s health. Ma replied ‘Sun-face-Buddha. Moon-face-Buddha.’”

That’s the whole case. It is helpful to know that in Buddhist legend a sun-face-Buddha lives for a great length of time—I’ve read eighteen hundred years; I’ve heard ten thousand. The point is simple enough: a life of wisdom of great length. A moon-face-Buddha lives for a single day and a single night. It is interesting to know that Mazu, Great Master Ma, one of the most wonderful of our Zen ancestors in fact died shortly after this encounter with the superintendent. He lived long, for a human, and it was a Buddha’s life.

As is four hours.

One old teacher of Zen said if you cut a golden staff near the foot, it is gold. If you cut that staff in the middle, it is gold. If you cut it at the end, it is gold.

But often our experience seems a little different.

The Diamond Sutra gatha, another important text in the Zen tradition, sings, “So listen to this fleeting world, a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.”

Some can hear this and think it is telling us the world is maya, illusion, and infer we need to abandon it in favor of the real beyond. And that is the teaching of some spiritual traditions.

But not the ones that inform my life. Not Buddhism, not Unitarian Universalism.

Rather, our lives are fleeting, a star to be glimpsed between passing clouds, a bubble dancing on a rushing river, a flash of lightning, a flickering lamp. The phantom, the dream—our lives—are also true, but only in so far as we give them a substance they do not possess, an identity separate from all that is.

What they are, what our lives are, yours and mine, are immediate exact expressions of the great empty, of the place without name. And in that, all are joined, all are one. And whether we live a hundred years, or four hours, that immediate expression of truth as one life, remains truth.

So terrible, so sad, so beautiful.

(Reprinted from Winter 2007 UU World)

As you know from the reading, last year I accompanied a family in the wake of the death of their child, a baby who lived only four hours. Sharing in such sad events is common currency for a minister of any faith. It certainly wasn’t my first experience of death and hurt. Not by a long shot. But, there was something particularly moving about this young couple, such lovely and reflective people. I was deeply moved by both the depth of their hurt and how they met it full on. It was so powerful. And it just tore at my heart.

As I’m both a minister and a writer I found my way of processing all this was putting my thoughts, my feelings up on my Monkey Mind blog which I consider an increasingly important part of my ministry. Surprisingly to me, not long after, it was picked up by the UU World and slightly edited was published in their Winter 2007 issue. Considering it was really a reflection on deepest hurt, I felt pretty good.

To be honest, I felt better than pretty good, because that wasn’t the end of it. First the original blog entry was nominated for a UU Blog award and then it actually won an award from Blogisattva, which as they say honors “excellence in English-language Buddhist blogging.” I had passing thoughts of how this was the way Robert Fulghum began, with a newsletter column about fundamentals learned in kindergarten. I began to imagine something along the lines of “All I really need to know I learned sitting on a Zen meditation pillow.” With those various bits of praise I began to wonder if I would need to perhaps adjust my hat size up a little. Well, actually some friends suggested maybe a bit more than a little…

Then in the Spring 2008 issue of the UU World in the letters to the editor section one commentator stated what she thought about my little reflection. After noting this was the first anniversary of the death of her child she wrote “Ford’s conclusion that four hours is as good as 100 years and that a golden rod cut near the foot of a golden statue is just as gold as if cut anywhere else rang hollow.”

My hat size shrunk just about instantly. First, I felt terrible that what I wrote poked into her personal wounds. Obviously my reflection did her no good. Then, I felt defensive. As she outlined her grievances, she mischaracterized what I actually said. So, there was a brief flash of indignation coursing through me, as well.

Of course that’s how it works. Whatever we who preach actually wish to get to, our precious thesis is often not what people ever hear. As likely as not, some sentence or even a clause in a sentence stops the hearer cold. And whatever the preacher hoped for is lost. Instead the listener, triggered by that word or sentence or image begins to follow her or his own current of thought and feeling down a very personal path.

Not that this is a bad thing. Over the years, I’ve received as much praise as blame for these personal sermons, as it were, that people have constructed while I was holding forth. So I have no complaint. Although as I’m aware of how often this happens, I do try to be careful about my choice of language and image, so that at the very least, I don’t inadvertently push people toward unnecessarily hurtful reflections. As best I can.

All that said; the writer of the letter was particularly concerned that she be allowed her personal grief. She didn’t need to hear about dreams or illusions. And, what I need to accept, it didn’t matter what it was I actually wrote. That’s what she heard, that’s what she read. And that’s what she felt was so important to challenge that she took up pen and paper and responded.

She wanted her grief, her sorrow at the loss of her child. Unfortunately, I know this particular sorrow. I, too, have lost a child. And I wish this experience on no one. There’s an ancient Chinese blessing: grandparent dies, parent dies, child dies. To have it happen in any other order is an affront to the human heart. The death of a child is among the hardest things we have to face as human beings. And it is impossible to deny it, or the hurt, a hurt that never goes away.

And. And there is something more.

I think of this “more” as a deep yes at the heart of life. Trying to describe these yeses, perhaps all of us have felt, and to which I’m calling us to reflect about, I think of Leonard Cohen’s song, Hallelujah, which sings of David standing before the Lord, now a king, but also old and broken, filled with so much heartache. Failure and success taken together, and now, at the end of it all: just a burning moment, everything that happened in his life reduced to a heart naked unadorned hallelujah.

Today I want to talk about that hallelujah, that yes which seems to bubble up in our human hearts when we allow ourselves to be totally vulnerable. Not pretending it’s all pretty and nice. But taking it whole and in that finding a yes. Here today I want to hold up three such yes moments, three hallelujahs we might find at the center of our lives.

Here I find myself thinking of a wonderful little book called Saying Yes to Life (Even the Hard Parts) by Ezra Bayda with Josh Bartok. Actually, what I want to cite here is by Thomas Moore, who you may recall as the author of Care of the Soul. He wrote the forward to Saying Yes. And in that foreword Thomas Moore suggested the spiritual enterprise, the quest for meaning and purpose in our lives means “loving life when it seems to be a mess and not just when it’s going smoothly; opening fully to the unwanted…” Now there’s a real challenge.

We, of course, don’t need to invite difficulties; they come on their own, without any effort on our part. Heaven knows. The question, the only question, I believe, is how do we meet these things that happen? The first yes I think, is found in not turning away from what is. It is letting our joys be our joy and our sorrows be our sorrow. Embrace our joy. And, this is the hard part: don’t turn away from our sorrow, either. I’m not saying be passive. I am saying be present. There is a healing in this that is essential to a healthy life. And if you go away from our time here today with nothing more than this, I’ll feel I’ve been useful. But, as they say, “Wait, there’s more!”

This vulnerability also opens us up to a second yes. By embracing the sacred whole, we gain a perspective that means our decisions on where to go next will be a little more gentle, a bit wiser, and this is so important: a lot more useful. This is because our full presence to what is reveals that each thing is joined. We’re actually all in this together.

In Martin Luther King’s wondrous words “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Here we find the yes not just in our hearts, but; it seems, at the heart of the world itself. Your sorrow becomes mine, and mine, yours. I suggest a whole theology of social engagement can follow our encounter with this yes to the world. Sometimes, to me, this yes feels as if it were written upon our hearts from before creation. I believe it is the intuition that inspires our Unitarian Universalist image of an interdependent web of which we all are apart.

And, finally, please let me hold up one more yes, one more hallelujah. It is the one that has caught my heart, and driven my life. It’s very, very hard to put to words. Although I feel Leonard Cohen’s song, Hallelujah, comes pretty close. But others tell of it, as well. I think of that hymn of the goddess, “Thunder, Perfect Mind.” I think of the poems of longing and love sung by Rumi. I think of Job’s encounter. And I think of the Desert Fathers, Christian monks and really, nuns as well, who fled to the Egyptian desert in the fourth and fifth centuries of our common era, seeking deepest wisdom.

What remains for us today are some writings, telling anecdotes, collected fragments of conversation and briefest homilies. My introduction to them was from the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s selection and translation, Wisdom of the Desert. Over the years I’ve found I return to this little book over and over again. Although the particular story I want to recount today I found in a different collection, Yushi Nomura’s Desert Wisdom.

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said – (Elder), as much as I am able I practice a small rule, a little fasting, some prayer and meditation, and remain quiet, and as much as possible I keep my thoughts clean – What else should I do? Then the old man stood up and stretched out his hands toward heaven, and his fingers became like ten torches of flame. And he said: If you wish, you can become all flame.

There are several ways one can take this little story. One way can be literalist and with that literalism either find comfort in hearing about miracles or to dismiss it as mere hogwash from wishful thinkers. Neither of these literalist encounters means much to me. Rather, I think it is about what can happen when we don’t turn away, when we embrace it all, even the hurt.

In this little story we’re being encouraged to find something and to do something. The set up is simple enough. A serious student of the spiritual way describes his (could just as easily be her) path. It’s clean. Live by a simple rule, nothing extravagant, just what it takes to hold the heart and mind to one’s purpose. Live with prayer and meditation and, I think wisely, a constant fall back to silence.

Here we find the yes of letting our joy be our joy and our sorrow our sorrow. Here we see the yes of our knowing, bone and marrow knowing we are all bound up together as one. And all this opens us up to the third yes. It is a hallelujah that echoes from within our hearts and fills the cosmos. It is not “hallelujah in spite of the difficulties and sadness,” not “hallelujah anyway,” but just plain in the face of it all as it is: hallelujah.

These are the flames – this hallelujah is the deepest yes. It is the true knowing of our lives. If we open our hearts fully to everything, turning from nothing; then, perhaps, just maybe, possibly, we’ll find those flames.

Certainly, at the end, I feel, these flames are what its all about. These flames are the burning power of presence, the transforming power found in our not turning away. Here we find the possibility of change, not in denial, or wishes, but based in who and what we really are: flames. Here, in these flames, I feel, we come face to face with God.

And for that, how can I say anything, but hallelujah!