(this sermon borrows liberally from the poem “Mittā – Friend” by Matty Weingast)
My friend Tom shared a story with me several years ago, and it’s stayed with me all
this time. I share it a lot, so indulge me if you’ve heard it before.
He describes a field full of rabbit burrows; we don’t see the rabbits, they’re hiding,
and often with good reason. We’d like them to come out, they bear gifts. So we
come and sit quietly on the grass, not too close, and without particular
expectations. We do this for some time, returning and returning, sitting quite still
and not making a sound.
At some point, the rabbits trust us; more importantly, they understand that we are
serious, we are sincere. They begin to come out, we’re in the field, there’s what we
might call a language of presence. And there are gifts.
—
An important teacher for me is a man named Gil Fronsdal. He often, implicitly or
explicitly, makes a distinction between a thing, and our relationship to the thing.
He once went as far as to say he feels the relationship is more real than the things
being related. I hope that’s fair, my paraphrase; it’s anyway how I understood it.
And as we learn to distinguish the thing from our relationship to it, we can find a
degree of freedom, a creative space. There are the rabbits, and our relationship to
the rabbits.
—
This is a good moment to keep this real, and talk about the kind of meditation I’m
talking about.
There are a million kinds of meditation, approximately. I originally thought I would
start this talk with a kind of survey, giving the lay of the land, as a way of
introducing our theme. But I was afraid of us being bored, and especially of my
presumption in trying to tackle such a thing.
Instead, let me just make a contrast with what I think can be, to some degree, a
popular conception of meditation: a refuge of calm, a relief from our various
sufferings, cutting ourselves off from the world … a place where we can bliss out.
That’s legitimate too, I don’t want to disparage it.
The UUFP newsletter announcement of our meditation group includes an
animated image of a beatific cartoon kitty in lotus position, slowly levitating and
landing in a field of bliss. I’m not sure where it came from but I kind of like it! And
sometimes meditation is like that. I don’t really want to change the image, and so
Bliss Kitty continues to bob up and down every month in our mailbox.
A meditation retreat in this tradition means a week or two or longer of complete
silence, mostly sitting on a cushion, mostly avoiding reading or writing or even eye
contact with others. The days pass slowly, alternating between normal boredom,
stunning boredom, impressive physical and psychic pain, and yes, sublime blissful
moments. Inevitably, every single retreat, there is a moment I simply cannot
believe I am doing this again. Why do we do this? How can I leave early? There’s a
lot of space to think up plausible excuses.
But in returning again and again, gently, quietly, patiently, without expectation, to
our breath while in the presence of the thing – whether it’s a social
embarrassment still badgering us ten years later, or the fire in our knee right now
from sitting too long – we are learning how to relate, perhaps how to make a
friend, using a language of presence.
—
There is a story about the Buddha and his disciple Ananda who are sitting in
meditation together. At one point Ananda moves to sit quite close to the Buddha,
it’s a sweet relationship, and he says Master, I’ve finally understood: half of this
Path is spiritual friendship.
Buddha corrects him, no Ananda, spiritual friendship is the entirety of the spiritual
path. It’s all of it.
–
In my apartment at the moment, there is a low-grade presence of very small fly-like
things, maybe gnats or fleas. They are discreet, I only ever see one or two at a
time, but like, always. At my desk they fly around my face; when I’m reading my
phone in bed in the dark they march across the screen. Taunting me. I want to
squish them, I nearly do. I’m annoyed, I’m worried about an all-out invasion, they
breed and stay until my home is full and I’m forced into the street..
But I have enough presence of mind to wonder, do I have the right to kill a living
thing? Is it reasonable to fear my eviction through vigorous, dogged gnat
reproduction? Why don’t I research a bit how to discourage them away, the way I
learned to do for ants with cinnamon?
But I’m too overwhelmed to find the cinnamon substitute. Instead, I try friendly
coexistence, hi friend, I shoo them away with my hand. I try to let them be.
Sometimes I choose to squish them, gently, with my finger, maybe I say sorry,
friend. I try to make it a choice rather than a reaction.
Have I accomplished anything? Is it silly to wrestle with the ethics of squishing an
insect? I don’t know, but I do know my posture has changed. My relationship to
this tiny living being has been altered. Now I have something I can work with.
–
Relationship is the entirety of spiritual life. It’s here that I begin to understand
Buddha’s words to Ananda: it’s not only human friendship, but our relationship to,
well, everything.
–
I wanted to say another thing about these tortuous blissful retreats. At the end,
there can be a feeling of conquest, we made it! I feel some satisfaction in having
endured, in not actually having deployed my well-rehearsed escape plans. “Sticking
to it” is a fine quality. But I think when a meditation retreat is merely enduring the
suffering, we’ve missed an opportunity to learn how to relate to it.
–
Arriving here, I’m disappointed I haven’t meaningfully countered Bliss Kitty, or the
perception that meditation is cutting oneself off from the pain of the world. I’d like
to briefly suggest that cultivating this capacity for kindly relationship with suffering,
when possible and especially when healthy, is a transferable skill. What we do
internally we do externally. We are furthering connection, not attenuating it.
–
You might wonder what all of this has to do with making your mind your friend…
(around here I feign having somehow lost a paragraph, an important one
linking all this back to our title. As I flip pages, I say under my breath:
“Hmm, this was the important bit about the mind
… there’s the missing paragraph … and my relationship to the missing paragraph”
(And then I mime three contrasting reactions: being angry that I lost the text
… then lightly laughing it off … then simply calming myself and improvising.
Then, while calmly scanning my pages, I ask them to make the connection:)
… so what I had wanted to say about making your mind your friend … maybe you
can complete the analogy to rabbits and gnats and the entirety of the spiritual life.
–
About the time I was deciding I needed to have a spiritual practice — because as
you know, those UUs can believe whatever they want … and because there’s a
corollary: we must therefore take responsibility for our spiritual development —
about this time of thinking about spiritual practice, a friend proposed that we, with
a third friend, learn together how to meditate.
Having gamely persevered for a year, we celebrated by going together for a retreat
at Plum Village, the late Thich Nhat Hahn’s community in the south of France.
There I met Gustav, a priest in the Church of Sweden who was additionally a
serious, long-term Zen practitioner. He’d come to Plum Village with his sitting
group for a similar reason to ours. Several of us ended up in an interview with
some of the nuns living there, and Gustav was asked: what, after all these years of
meditation, had he learned? How had it changed him? After a pause, he said
simply “I like myself better.” It was a beautiful, humble, profound observation that
somehow squared with my vague nascent intuition about how this practice works
on us. We learn to befriend ourselves; this relationship brings gifts.
“Listen,” the poem says,
“I have followed this path of friendship to its end.
And I can say with absolute certainty—
It will lead you home.”