Sermon written by Rev. Junella Hanson, read by Jim Hanson
February 16, 2003

The sermon this morning was written by my wife, Junella. She was a UU minister for over 37 years. She died 15 months ago. I have been going over her writings during the last 15 months to recall our times together. I am in the process of re-reading all of her sermons and this is the second one I've presented to the congregation. Junella had a very distinguished career in the ministry, what with being honored by the San Francisco Church as their Emeriti, and given an Honorary Doctor of Divinity from the Star King School of Ministry in Berkeley.

This sermon spoke to me as I have been attending Spirit Rock Buddhist Center for the last year.

There were two novels I read as a young girl that had a lasting influence on my life. One was James Hilton's story of "Lost Horizon" and as many of you remember that was the story of Shangri-la, an entire civilization that existed, totally self-contained and hidden away from the rest of the world. It was a society where people treated one another with respect and love.. .a society free from all strife.

The other novel which had great impact on my developing world view was Somerset Maughan's, "The Razor's Edge." Quite different from Hilton's novel, this was the story of one man's quest for inner peace, enlightenment ... the tale of an individual's personal religious journey.

Maughan's message was clear: the religious journey is a solitary one. The best one can hope for is to achieve some kind of enlightenment or transcendence, but one eventually needs to return to society, to interact within the strife and chaos and live out his or her new world view and values within the everyday realities of common ordinary consciousness.

In later years, while studying for the ministry I came across the story of Shambhala among the writings of Tibetan Buddhists. Shambhala is a mythical city, a place of complete enlightenment where all people were gifted with the characteristics of compassion and wisdom. It was a Utopia and it remains today in the literature of Tibetan Buddhism for the thoughtful student to contemplate. They are asked the question: "What is the way to Shambala?"

When I was young and very idealistic, I truly believed that states of total enlightenment, nirvana, were attainable and that was what I was going to do when I grew up. I now understand that transcendence is not a fixed state or stage. Rather, it is a process, and consequently no state of nirvana or enlightenment lasts forever. We live our lives in an everyday world, one that seems to require our egos to be carefully attuned to the realities and principles of that everyday world. We can, however, learn, grow, have religious experiences which change us. We can experience moments of enlightenment which effect our world view and help us to realize that the world and the universe are not exactly the way we have been taught that they are. We can bring new knowledge into our everyday reality. We can approach situations with new understandings and new values, but ultimately enlightenment, Nirvana or Utopia lie in the very process of their becoming, not in their attainment.

But still the stories of Shangri-la, the "Razors Edge" and more recently the myth of Shambhala continue to haunt me and I have struggled to find some connecting thread... Some common message in all three of those tales. It dawned on me the other day that the common element is compassion. Shambhala was city of compassion, the people of Shangri-la led lives immersed in compassion and the hero in the story of the "Razor's Edge" had one outstanding quality: compassion.

I now believe that the way to Shambhala is the "way of compassion.

We live in a world that seems compassionless at times. A world that seems to be surrounded by fear and violence. There are so many examples of hate in the newspaper and on television every day. There is no room for compassion when people are struggling for a land of their own and for homes for their children and future generation … When people are struggling for freedom from repression, from injustice, and from civil war. The El Salvadoreans, the Guatemalans, the Sri Lankans, the Haitians. Each day we see faces of refugees seeking sanctuary, fleeing from death and horror in Eastern Africa and Central America. Worshippers are murdered in Belfast. We see blatant terrorism ...guns fired from embassy windows, political kidnappings and torture. There are domestic crisis, resulting in violence and abuse. We see young people and adults ensnared in a drug culture, cities overtaken by deafening noise, people forced into welfare, into soup kitchen lines, into idleness and lives of despair. Our world has become frenzied in its pursuit of fads, polluted by its preservatives and insecticides ... immobilized by the terror of a possible nuclear holocaust .... and that's just one week's news!

I ask myself sometimes after reading the paper, "How can the spirit of Shambhala, the spirit of compassion, insert itself into this morass of human misery?"

There are two forces that I see moving in our world society today. One force is the "good news" that science and mystical religion are joining hands. Science is telling us that matter is an illusion ... that matter is just another form of energy and that all nature is alive. Now that is something that both Eastern and Western mystics have been telling us for centuries; that we are in fact all a part of an interdependent web of energy and being. The other force that moves in our world today is a kind of collectivization through terror ... a 'group think' mentality that offers simple answers to extremely complex problems ... This force is marked by a hate mongering of groups, classes and activities ... That force tends to use fear and terror to collectivize us. And collectivization is not the same as interdependence.

The biologist , Lewis Thomas writes: "the new, hard problem will be to cope with the dawning, intensifying realization of just how interlocking we are. We are not just made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. Our interdependence is exactly that... .a dependence among one another. We do not have solitary beings. Every creature is, in some sense, connected to and dependent on the rest."

We share the chemistry of all the non humans among which we live. Everything that is here is alive thanks to the living of everything else. All forms of life are irretrievably connected. Every time I think about the idea of our interconnectedness I am reminded of a very silly joke. The joke asks the question: "Why did the elephant sit on the marshmallow"? And the answer is, "because he didn't want to fall in the chocolate sauce." Now I know that's very silly.. .but it's also very profound. Our ordinary everyday consciousness leads us to believe that we are sitting on a marshmallow, when in fact, we are completely in the chocolate sauce, marshmallow and all!

And our very survival is based on our learning this lesson. Our very survival depends upon our finding our way to Shambhala . . . to our finding the way of "compassion."

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, fear, confusion and anguish. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human. But that's not all because compassion has many faces. We tend to think of the compassionate person as one who is tender, loving, lenient, mild, easy, merciful, sympathetic and patient... But compassion is an incredibly rich and far ranging religious experience. It literally means to express profound feeling or sentiment alongside another ... to "passion," as it were, with other life. If you are compassionate, then whatever another person is experiencing, you will have room for it in your heart. When someone is in incredible pain, trough you can do nothing to alleviate it, you don't withdraw. When people say, "help me," you stay soft, your hand in theirs, sharing their pain without closing it out. And this is not easy because genuine compassion also means the agility to support or aid another without getting mired in their crisis. There is nothing worse than to have both helper and helpee going down together. Brandoch Lovely phrased it beautifully one time. He said: "We all know that misery loves company, but if everyone joins the misery, then who will relieve the situation? Compassion is the faculty by which we can acknowledge and be present to another's agony without joining it."

Now for some of us, compassion may begin and end with the suffering of others. We all know people who know how to share in our pain but can't support us in our pleasure. One could go so far as to caricature some folk as hunting for the traumas of others so that they can swoop in for the rescue.

But compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human. The new testament reminds us that in order to lead the full compassionate life means not only to "weep with those who weep" but also "rejoice with those who rejoice." The full tide of compassion comes from all the streams of feeling that flow through human existence.

Then there's another face of compassion that we do not usually include in our understanding... Something that is more than comfort and celebration... .and there is a wonderful Buddhist story that captures the color and textures of that other face of compassion: this Buddhist story concerns a certain village whose population was being destroyed by the periodic attacks of a cobra. Soon, a holy person came to the village; the plight of the people was made known to her. Immediately, she sought the snake and urged him to discontinue his destruction. The snake agreed to leave the villagers alone. Days passed, the villagers discovered the snake was no longer dangerous. The word went from person to person; "hey, the cobra does not bite anymore". Almost overnight the attitude of everyone changed. The fear of the cobra disappeared and, in its place, there developed a daring boldness. All sorts of tricks were played on the cobra; his tail was pulled, water was thrown on him, little children threw sticks and stones at him. There was no attempt to take his life by any direct means, only a great number of petty annoyances and cruelties which, when added up, rendered the snake's existence increasingly perilous. He was nearly dead when the holy woman returned to the village. With great bitterness, the cobra implored: "I did as you commanded me; I stopped striking the villagers and now see what they have done to me."

The holy woman replied, "You did not obey me fully. It is true that I told you not to bite the people, but I did not tell you to stop hissing at them."

We do not think usually of a compassionate person as an angry person. Christian theology students spend a lot of time reflecting on Christ's temper tantrum in the temple.. .they try to find ways to justify that temper tantrum in a way to make it consistent with this great man who was the exemplar of unconditional love. But one does not need to justify Christ's temper tantrum, because compassion also includes rage and confrontation. One of my colleagues has referred to it as "regenerative rage."

I'm not referring to debilitating potshots that we sometimes use when we are angry, but rather to constructive critique that comes from our caring. The compassionate person is one who cares enough, cares deeply and enduringly enough , to confront others. If you don't care about someone, you don't risk strong feelings. You flee … you drop our of the relationship.

The compassionate person knows how and when to defy … when to retreat, when to caress and when to shove … when to scream, cry, sing … or hiss.

James Hilton's city of the lost horizon was isolated from the rest of the world. The entrance of people from outside disrupted their community. They had no sense of their interdependence and connections with other people or other places in the world. They didn't know about the slum dwellers in Bombay, the Campesinos in Latin America, the poor blacks in Detroit, or the drug addicts and battered children in Los Angeles and San Francisco. They didn't know about nuclear stockpiles, but we do.

And that's when the spirit of Shambhala calls out to us .... calls us to come and walk the way of compassion....

Loving, rejoicing, anguishing, and hissing all along the way!

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