Text: Mark 9: 49-50
Next June, the General
Assembly of the UUA of Congregations will convene in Louisville. Near the
Convention Center is an intersection of Fourth and Mohammed Ali Boulevard, what
once was called Walnut Ave. There is a monument there to an event that happened
on March 18, 1958, at that intersection, when the great Catholic mystic
prophetic Zen Buddhist inspired social justice peace and civil rights activist
poet monk Thomas Merton had a famous
epiphany some 17 years after he had entered the monastery near Louisville.
It was an epiphany of a
connection between the interior life and the outside world; it was about the
very incarnation of an Eternal Spirit in each and every one and thing; it was
an erasing of what we tend to think of as separate sacred space and time and
vocation and secular space and time and vocation.
About it, he wrote: “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in
the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the
realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs,
that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.
It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in
a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole
illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the
reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of
“separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents
itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a
different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior
life, what have you. [I will break in here to say that for the monastic life,
substitute the religious life, or maybe worship, and also substitute the
activist life, or for a growing number of people who walk neither a worship
path or social action path, substitute the consumer life]. Merton goes on:
“….though “out of the world,” we are in the same world as everybody else,
the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the
world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest. We take a
different attitude to all these things, for we belong to God. Yet so does
everybody else belong to God. We just happen to be conscious of it, and to make
a profession out of this consciousness. But does that entitle us to consider
ourselves different, or even better, than others? The whole idea is
preposterous.
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and
such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness
could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other
men, that I am only a man among others.” To think that for sixteen or seventeen
years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so
much of our monastic thinking. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the
human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which
makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in
becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that
such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds
the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake. I have the immense joy of being [hu]man,
a member of a race in which God…became incarnate. As if the sorrows and
stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what
we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be
explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around
shining like the sun.
“This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it is in
fact the function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity
that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed in the other cares, the
other illusions… My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see now how much it
belongs to them — and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not
just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be
alone, and when I am alone, they are not “they” but my own self. There are no
strangers!
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the
depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can
reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If
only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see
each other that way all the time. "
Merton’s epiphany was an expression of being “salted with fire,” what the
writer of the Gospel of Mark alluded to milennia before in a text that is part
of the weekly readings for today in churches of many kinds. Our hymnal
responsive reading tags it onto the Beatitudes, in a way that points us to how
the Beatitudes themselves are not just about other people and other conditions,
but also about cultivating our own spiritual depths, finding the blessings
awaiting always for us regardless of the kind of day we are having. In Mark the
text reads: “For everyone will be salted with
fire.50Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you
season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.” I am
reminded that a book of essays on Unitarian Universalist Evangelism that came
out in the 90s used that phrase for its title: Salted With Fire. Signalling
that if we want to grow, if we want to have something worth sharing with
others, we need to season ourselves.
Seasoning also has the meaning of the kind of wisdom, the kind of patience
and non-anxious or peaceful presence that comes from experiences of action and
reflection on that action over the seasons. It is the kind of conditioning of
the soul that is able to hold the sufferings of others and of one’s own life
and still be able to be a comfort to others, to be in the world.
Back home in our low income low life expectancy community on the northside
of Tulsa we are known as a very small but externally oriented, mission to and
with others focused, inside-out church. I have preached here before about all
we do incarnating our values in the community, and I have to say that what we
do, or have a hand and heart in doing just keeps multiplying exponentially. (I
would be amiss not to mention our online contest….the nonprofit selected to
represent Oklahoma in 50 States For Good contest….)…But I want today to talk
about a vision not just for a missional community, but what is emerging onto
the new religious landscape even among progressives, lastly among progressives
often, as new missional monasticism.
Those two terms, missional and monastic, should really not be seen as
opposites but as being carried within the other, the way inhaling and exhaling
are two sides of breathing. They are the ends of the spectrum of church itself.
And ought also to be the ends as in the aims. And yet, So much of what we do in
church is to stay away from the poles, the ends of the spectrum, which is where
the energy really is like in the two poles of a Jacob’s ladder, and instead we keep
to the middle, playing at missional, playing at monastic, studying both the
mystic and the prophetic without embodying either, under the pretense that we
are keeping them in balance… but we are too often simply avoiding both by
allowing ourselves to be distracted by the noise of the drama and busyness and
activity of the day, remaining on the surface of life instead going deeply
inward and instead of going adventurously outward.
Merton ‘s life is an example of one who learned to go inward and outward,
and how he intentionally lived on the edges of things and movements and places
even; even in the monastery he eventually moved from the common house to a
hermitage on the acreage, and yet at the same time his social action increased;
on the edges, he allowed the inner and outer life to nourish one another. In a time of cold and hot wars he was on the
front lines for peace, even reminding the peace movement how it too often took
on the characteristics of the Empire at war; in a time and place of
segregation, he was an early ally in the struggle for civil rights; he was a
monk born in Europe and formed as an adult in the United States and became steeped
in the traditions of his faith community but he fully engaged with Asian
religions and was known as a Zen Christian and was an early proponent of
Christian Buddhist mutual understanding and transformation; all the while he
was cultivating and sharing a deep journey into the soul.
Of course where does one begin? In Merton’s case he rooted himself in a physical
place of the interior life and let it motivate him outward; in a case like
Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement and Houses of Hospitality, she
grounded herself in a physical place of mission with the poor and let it
motivate her inward to her own soul’s residence. But each set their life to
reflecting both the inward and outward expressions of what it meant for them to
be a person of faithfulness.
In his “Book of Hours” for daily prayer, Merton wrote this lesson that sums
up for me much of life and the life of our churches, our institutions, and it
also reflects too much the lives of the ones who live in constant struggle for
simple daily life, and the lives of the ones who connect with them and seek to
love them. He wrote:
“We live in a society
whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at
the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the
limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order
to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and
movie studios and all the rest… There
is [however] a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing precisely
because it is so silent: it can’t be spoken. It has to remain silent. To
articulate it, to verbalize it, is to tamper with it, and in some ways to
destroy it. Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is
geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self.
We live in a state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music,
traffic, or the generalized noise of what goes on around us all the time. This
keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our
consciousness is half diluted: we are not quite thinking, not entirely
responding, but we are more or less there.
We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn,
yet not completely available. It cannot be said that we are really
participating in anything and we may, in fact, be half conscious of our
alienation and resentment. Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague sense
that we are “part of something”—although we are not quite able to define what
that something is—and probably wouldn’t want to define it even if we could. We
just float along in the general noise.”
What I seek is to quit floating in the general noise, and to go to the
depths and up to the heights where Love breaks open in every breath.
Like Merton, like his fellow Catholic Peter Maurin who founded with Dorothy
Day the Catholic Worker social justice movement and who said “The problem is
those who think don’t act, and those who act don’t think”, like them we are
discovering and envisioning the power of a peaceful prayerful presence
conducted in what are called the Abandoned Places of Empire, those places like
ours where the realtors don’t want to take you if you have any money at all to
spend on a house, those places in the city where pizza deliveries aren’t made,
those places where you often end up if you can’t end up anywhere else, at least
according to the values of the Marketplace.
We are finding that one of the most important things we can do in our
neighborhoods, moreso even than giving out tons of food each week and working
to seed and nurture renewal projects, as vital as those still are, what we are
finding especially as a way to enter into relationship with neighbors, is to
give out also a sense of Sabbath, a respite from the struggles of the drama in
people’s lives that keep them on treadmills of not thinking they have enough—of
things, safety, friendship, love, forgiveness, hope—never enough to be able to
share themselves with others.
We are finding truth in one of the maxims of the missional movement in
religion that your priority is not to focus on projects but on people. Over and
over, when we and our community are tested, we are reminded that our main task
is simply (but oh how difficult at times) to live in such a way that our love
for neighbors show, that we learn, as Merton did in his epiphany, to see the
sun shining through them and ourselves, that we see even those who vex us in
many ways as part of the Divine and Everlasting Life. A new mantra we took from
a leader of the new monastic movement, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, for those
times and with those people is “Christ, it’s you again.”
Bearing in mind as Theologian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, so many people kill community in the desire
to create it; by loving their idea of community more than the actual persons
who make up the community. And we are finding, and are hoping to embody as we
turn toward the next chapter of our community’s history, the ancient truths
that now we have taken the first move of locating ourselves among the ones
others leave, that spending time with ourselves, alone and continually with one
another and any who care to come by, in silence and common prayer and attention
to Creation, will do as much for our part of the world as those amazing
endeavors will that keep presenting themselves to us. Living a life in a spirit
of abundance in a community of scarcity is The Project, is the curriculum, from
which all else flows. Especially when intentionally owned by us.
To nurture that spirit of abundance, in all the diversity that it
inherently contains, will come in many forms for us—gardening devotion praying
in the dirt, praying the hours of the day and night with a common liturgy,
eating together and celebrating and sharing life’s stories, counseling one another
and teaching one another and risking and failing and being picked up by one
another as we serve others, taking a break from one another too, welcoming
others and suffering the changes that come.
A peaceful presence who has influenced my life, and the life of our free
church movement, someone who embodies much of this synching of the inward and
outward growth of the Soul, is the Rev. Carl Scovel, minister emeritus of one
of our historic Boston churches and receipient of the highest award the UUA
bestows. Among his many publications, Carl has a book entitled Never Far From
Home, a collection of his short radio segments on Boston radio each week. One
of those mini-essays captures this vision I feel emerging in many places among
us. There is even a facebook group exploring UU monastic possibilities; it
comes up often at retreats and revivals and not just among the Christians and
Buddhists among us, though we in the UUCF are talking with the UUBF about ways
in Louisville at GA to jointly commemorate the influence of Merton, and who
knows what actions might emerge from it. They are many who, as Carl Scovel
titled his radio address, are “Hungry For Life With God.” Let me close with his
vision.
He writes:
In the last year I’ve been reading books by and about monks and nuns, men
and women who have left city hall, the college, the hospital, the law office,
the lab, and the church, left their apartments and friends and clubs and
sandlot softball teams and gone to live with other refugees from civilization,
sometimes in a desert, sometimes on a mountain, sometimes in a suburb,
sometimes even in a city. These men and women moved to abbeys in part because
they felt uneasy with the way they lived in mainstream society. But they moved
in part because they hungered for life with God in community with others. The representative
of these men and women whom we know best in this country is probably Thomas
Merton. New books of his appear each year; old ones are republished regularly.
The monks and nuns I’ve met were no such distinguished writers. Most of them
left no literary legacy. Many left only a few sentences and two or three
reported conversations. A few wrote a great deal. I read their words early in
the morning before I read the newspapers.
After studying the words from these monks and nuns, the daily newspapers,
with their dull and daily retelling of the ancient themes of greed, fear,
cruelty, violence, conflict, and occasionally some touching tale of kindness or
wisdom, seem curiously unimportant. I have come to doubt the answer to the
world’s problems will come from academics, senators, presidents, bureacrats,
lecturers, and workshop leaders. I have come to believe that what we must know
in order to survive as humankind will be found in abbeys, monasteries, and
hermitages. Rene Descartes said that all the ills of humankind come from our
inability to sit quietly in a room alone for one hour. Now that’s simplistic,
isn’t it?
Look at the immense problems of global warming, economic injustice,
oppressed minorities of race and class and gender, ethnic rivalries,
overpopulation, vanishing forests and ozone layer, rising tides and
temperatures---I could go on and on. And you could say with some assurance that
no simple solution can be found.
Why do I say abbeys are the keys to our survival? Because they have much to
teach us. People who live in these abbeys must practice three things: solitude,
simplicity, and community. Solitude: a life with God; Simplicity: a life with
few things; Community: a life with people. In all three cases one must devote
one’s life to not being the center of the universe. In solitude we let God
direct our lives. In simplicity we use only what we need. Through compassion,
we give ourselves to others.
No monk, no nun, no human being can teach perfection, but we can try to
live this kind of life. The intention, not the accomplishment, makes this life
a saving life. Dour as it may sound to us, that life has brought deep happiness
to millions of people around the world through countless centuries. I speak as one to whom this monastic life
makes more and more sense. I do not intend to join a monastery. I do not intend
to move to a mountain, wilderness, or desert. My question is: How does one live
this life in the city, in society, in the midst of the madness of civilization?
How can we live these values in the midst of the world? I doubt that God calls
us all to abbeys, but I believe that God calls us all to solitude, simplicity,
and community. It’s strange to think that the abbeys might save the world, but
we have trusted stranger thoughts than this.”
We are still finding our way toward such a vision and a calling, both as a
movement and in our case on a very local two mile area….We are learning all the
time we are serving, serving all the time we are worshipping. What I know is
that the more we plant ourselves outside of what we have defined as ourselves, in
the lives and neighborhoods of those different in many ways from us, the more
we are pulled deep within to prayer and worship in order to sustain ourselves
for mission; and the more we dwell in the silence and peacefulness of being a
part of a blessed Creation, the more we touch and grow that inner silent self
of which Merton spoke, the more we have to offer others in need and the more we
see that life with them and for them is the path of our own healing, because,
as Merton’s epiphany revealed, our inner silent Self is at heart a communal relational Self, as is God’s very Self,
ever opening up to embrace the whole of the world, even us.
