|
Sermon by Rima Snyder Several months ago, there was a participation service here at UUP that asked the question, "What is sacred to you?" My answer included "rocks, trees, rivers and especially sea." The question started me thinking about what things I have valued consistently in my life, as spiritual forces and perhaps as guides. Certainly, I have looked to the natural world for both solace and inspiration for as long as I can remember. Growing up in southern California, I can recall a time when there was an abundance of citrus orchards, and open fields full of fragrant fennel and glorious yellow wild mustard. The mountains were nearby too, and I climbed up paths through the chapparal and the pine forests, exploring my own secret world. There was a waterfall I especially loved that cascaded into a stream that was painfully cold, and then tumbled down through its bed of rocks with a musical rushing sound. And of course there was the ocean, the salt spray making me feel more alive than anything else, the damp sand with a thousand patterns drawn and erased by the waves, the call of seagulls. When I moved to Los Angeles after college, I lived in an area that was poetically known as Mar Vista, which means Sea View. The developers had quite an imagination, but one of the only nice things about the place was that it really was only a few miles from the beach. I would often find myself there after work, wanting some revitalizing after a long day in a city that didn't particularly seem to care about me. I would tell myself "I'll stay for ten or fifteen minutes, then I'll go home." Invariably, I would end up immersed, usually literally, in the cleansing power of the waves. Finally, I started carrying a swimsuit and a towel in the trunk of the car to avoid having to drive home in sopping wet clothes. What I remember most clearly about those times is the feeling I got from being absorbed into something so powerful and so vast; the sense of complete peace. It's the feeling I have had after long periods of meditation when I am able to let go of who I think I am and be part of the larger rhythm of the world. Years later, in 1989, I moved to Maryland where I intended to learn a career, stay for 3 to 5 years and then figure out where I really wanted to be. I considered Boston and Seattle, both water towns. I remember looking at a map of Seattle and being excited by the possibilities it seemed to offer. So many blue areas! So different from where I had always lived. Well, instead of staying in Maryland for five years, I was there for eleven. Some good things happened personally and professionally, and, as is usually the case, life took some turns I hadn't expected. After awhile, I felt a strong pull toward the west coast again. Instead of freeing myself from my own history, and setting myself adrift on the river of life, I had arrived at a point where I could see the value of continuity, and the importance of physical place to me. The time away from familiar places allowed me to redefine myself and decide what I could let go of from my past. The unexpected thing was that it also showed me that I was connected to a specific physical place in a very powerful way. While I lived in the east I often felt disoriented by the lack of vista, of open space. I missed the subtle colors of the hillsides; and the intense green everywhere, while beautiful, could sometimes be overpowering. I missed the ocean! I would take trips to the Eastern shore of Maryland, to Baltimore or to Assateague, just to spend a few hours looking at the waves breaking on the sand. What is it I have loved so much about the sea? It's such a primal attraction for me that it is surprisingly hard to express in words. I think that most of all it's an immediate reassurance of my place in the natural world. I feel at home there, and more than that I feel called by the waves to immerse myself in the present moment, to live fully and be aware. One of my favorite poets, e.e. cummings, wrote a poem about the ocean that expresses this experience of transcendence of ego, the letting go of our small, everyday selves. maggie and milly and molly and may and maggie discovered a shell that sang milly befriended a stranded star and molly was chased by a horrible thing may came home with a smooth round stone For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) The Buddhist tradition talks about the larger self as opposed to the ego. It's a tough concept for westerners to grasp; certainly it's been a tough one for me. But it's an important distinction. Here is what the Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa has to say in his book, "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism;" "Many people make the mistake of thinking that, since ego is the root of suffering, the goal of spirituality must be to conquer and destroy ego. They struggle to eliminate ego's heavy hand, but...that struggle is merely another expression of ego. We go around and around, trying to improve ourselves, until we realize that the ambition to improve ourselves is itself the problem. Insights come only when there are gaps in our struggle. The whole practice of meditation is essentially based upon the situation of the present moment, here and now." In his novel Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse tells the story of a young man who is seeking enlightenment. Siddhartha practices meditation, becomes an aescetic, a merchant, and studies and rejects many teachings, always looking for a way to conquer the Self and "experience the peace of an emptied heart." After much journeying he comes to a river, a place that speaks to him. "Never had a river attracted him as much as this one. Never had he found the voice and appearance of flowing water so beautiful. It seemed to him as if the river had something special to tell him, something which he did not know, something which awaited him." He stays by the river and becomes a ferryman, someone who makes his living taking people across the river. His passengers see this river as an obstacle to be crossed, but Siddhartha finds in it the peace that he has been searching for. Toward the end of the story, he tells his childhood friend, "When someone is seeking, it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal." What I take from this parable is the idea of accepting life as a process. Just as Siddhartha had to directly experience many states of being to arrive at the point where he could learn from the river, we all have issues we continue to work on throughout our lives. After awhile, most of us get better at dealing with these issues, but the larger themes are not things that can be "solved". They come back to us in different guises and on different levels. During my life I've spent a lot of time trying to define for myself who I am, what I should do with my life that is Important, what my purpose is. I've often felt pulled by powerful tides that I have only partially understood; the overwhelming force of emotions, an attraction to the mystical, a search for deeper meaning. In other words, I have been a seeker, sometimes obsessed with solving the puzzle of my own life. There have been magical moments when I have known that I am on the right path. This can happen when I am involved in writing a story or a piece of music, and I have the sense that I am discovering something that already exists, rather than inventing something new. It can happen when I am gazing up at the night sky, carried beyond myself into the stars. At those times, when I am riding the wave of the moment, intuitively aware of my connection to the infinite. there is a feeling of absolute joy. I am, as T.S. Eliot put it, "at the still point of the turning world," and I experience time in a different way. It is similar to being immersed in the ocean, carried along by the waves. But there have been lots of other times, when I've felt frustrated and battered by the undertow, trying to recapture that elusive feeling of rightness. My life has sometimes felt like a turbulent ocean, the ecstatic highs alternating with times of despair. When Norb and I moved back to California, we lived in the Presidio, above Baker Beach. I was amazed at our luck, living in a national park, a short walk from my treasured ocean! I spent many hours walking along the beach, looking at the cliffs across the bay and at the Golden Gate bridge magnificently spanning the water. San Francisco was a wonderful, exciting place too, with all the sights, great restaurants, music and constant activity. After awhile, we started looking for a house, and soon realized we would have to leave the city in order to buy a place. I had a hard time giving up the ocean, although I knew we wouldn't be too far away. When we found a house in Petaluma it seemed like home, and I was happy to discover the Petaluma River here in town and the Russian River nearby. They offered an immediate sense of peace and connection to the natural world. I wondered if I would miss the excitement of life in the city and the spectacular drama of the crashing surf at Baker Beach. Now that we've lived here for more than a year, I find that Petaluma still feels like home, and that I'm generally happy with the pace of my life here. If I miss the ocean, I can drive to Bodega Bay or Point Reyes, and we go into San Francisco regularly to hear a concert, have dinner with friends or visit a museum. In my spiritual life, too, I'm finding that letting go of expectation opens a space for the unexpected. When I'm not trying too hard to figure things out, answers often present themselves. I think of rivers as a metaphor for the everyday flow of life; the quiet "present moment, here and now" that Trungpa speaks of in the practice of meditation. The motion of the river is a constant, as opposed to the ebb and flow of the sea. It offers stability instead of epiphany, contentment rather than revelation. At this point in my life, I can appreciate the tranquility found at the river's edge. I can reflect on insights gained during those times of inspiration, and see patterns that recur like light shimmering on the water. I believe there is value in seeking, in trying to understand the mysteries. The confusion comes from agonizing over whether we have made the right choices and what will come next. Our lives are full of reasons for fear and doubt, both trivial and grave. The recognition of our own mortality can terrify us, or it can inspire us to live more fully. We heard last week from the reverend Ron Cooke that between the Good Fridays, or times of sorrow, and the Easter Sundays, or times of renewal, many people become caught in Saturday, waiting for their lives to begin. All these things have to do with the flow of time, that force which seems to hold such power in our lives. The good times speed by, the times of loss and pain seem to slow time to an agonizing pace. In the moments of inspiration I spoke of earlier, time seems suspended, a constant unfoldng of the present moment. In Perceiving Ordinary Magic, Jeremy Hayward says that in these states, "we experience time as perpetuity." And in the story of Siddhartha, one of the greatest lessons he learns from the river is the secret that "there is no such thing as time." "He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed,
and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every
moment it was new. The river is everywhere at the same time,
at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry.
in the ocean and in the mountains, the present only exists for
it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future."  |