The Promise Of Meditation

March 16, 2003

Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter, D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH

Reading

Howard Thurman, A STRANGE FREEDOM, pages 177 & 183-4.

Sermon

For most of my life, over thirty years, part of my getting up in the morning exercises has included some meditational reading. Thirty years ago I read for several years a few pages each day of Karlfried, Graf von Duerckheim’s DAILY LIFE AS SPIRITUAL EXERCISE. von Duerkheim begins:

He continues, saying that being a human being is an intentional activity, one that we need to practice if we are going to realize our essential nature.

I have not read von Duerckheim for a good number of years now. Another book I have used has been Thick Nhat Hanh’s wonderful THE MIRACLE OF MINDFULNESS. Today, I open up a book about Thomas Merton’s spiritual journey entitled THE INNER EXPERIENCE. It recounts Merton’s growth in Christian mysticism and his increasing use of Buddhist practices and wisdom

I’m not sure just when my interest in meditation began. My earliest memories come from my college classes with Huston Smith. Smith has been interviewed by Bill Moyers as one of our leading interpreters of world religions. I first took a course on Eastern religions. Smith would recount his experiences of sitting in Zen monasteries. One of my most interesting memories of the time was of Smith's account of conversations he had with Alan Watts. In the sixties, Watts was one of the highly publicized gurus of American spirituality. Smith knew Leary and Alpert of LSD fame in those days. His debate with Watts was about the nature of the mental sate reached by the most experienced Zen monks.

Alan Watts argued that the mental state of the monks was the same as that reached with LSD. Smith disagreed. He thought that while the brain chemistry might be the same, the mental condition was different. The difference between a Zen monk and someone on acid, was similar, Smith thought, to the difference between someone who climbed Mt. Everest, versus someone who had taken a helicopter to the top. The habit of daily practice makes all the difference. All this was heady stuff for me, tempting tidbits about meditation practices.

Huston Smith was one of the least anxious people I have met. If you have met a Tibetan Buddhist monk or someone else who daily practices some form of mediation, you sense they manage their anxiety well.

Managing anxiety is for me a principle benefit of mediation. I want to call upon our Unitarian history to outline the importance of managing our anxiety. One hundred and twenty years ago, James Freeman Clarke wrote the most popular statements of Unitarianism until our present Principles, and Purposes. Clarke had begun his ministry as one of the earliest Unitarian ministers in Louisville KY. Most of his career was in Boston where Julia Ward Howe was one of his closest supporters. It was Clarke who urged Howe to set new words to the tune of John Brown’s Body.

Towards the end of the 19^th century, Clarke drew up what he called the Five Points of Unitarian Belief. Let me give them to you, but please be alerted to the time bound nature of his language.

The first was, "The Fatherhood of God", Sexist, but we can see a point there, maybe saying ‘The Motherhood of Love.’ The next was the Leadership of Jesus. Not bad, but the Buddha’s okay, too. The next was "The Brotherhood of Man," Sexist, but again we affirm humanity.

The next principle was "Salvation by Character." This is the one about managing our anxiety. The fifth was "The Progress of Mankind Onward and Upward for Ever."

It should not escape our attention at this moment that many people from Boston think that the Five Points of UUism are reduced to three, which go:

If you doubt my remarks, you can go to Boston the end of June this year; you will find about 10K UUs exploring the neighborhood of Boston!

Of Clarke’s Five Points, the one we may have lest difficulty with, at least in terms of language, is the Fourth, "Salvation by Character" I think we too readily gloss over this thinking it means that we will get into heaven if we our good. That’s not fully what it means.

Good character for 19^th century Unitarians was about managing our anxiety. The founder of American Unitarianism, William Ellery Channing, looked to the example of Jesus of Nazareth because, as he said, Jesus was calm in the midst of storms. Calmness in the midst of upheavals was the great goal of Unitarian character development. One of the more familiar poems of this outlook is Kipling’s "IF"

For Channing, his meditational practices included reading spiritual literature, or, as he would say, reading religious literature spiritually, rather than critically: two ways of reading the Bible. A great spiritual inspiration for him was nature. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau who developed walking in nature to probably its most developed form as a spiritual exercise. For the New England Transcendentalists, walking along the rivers of New England and up some of its mountains, most particularly Mt. Monadnock in southern New Hampshire was their primary activity, except of course sitting around talking about great ideas.

Today, under the impact of world religions and the hurly burly of the market place, other forms of activity have come into play. Consider for just a moment how I introduce our time of mediation each Sunday morning. I say that I invite you to still your busy mind, rest your anxious heart and center yourself in mediation.

What do you think about stilling your busy mind? I have developed that language over several years as different people have offered suggestions, especially people with busy minds. They didn’t like my calling them noisy. So I say, ‘busy.’ It is not my intention to suggest that a busy mind is a bad thing. Only to point it out.

One of the benefits of practicing mediation is that we realize how busy our minds are.

Wow! How many different ideas have gone through you mind since I spoke. Thich Nhat Hanh, following the Sutra of Mindfulness, says that the mind is like a monkey. Always swinging through the trees. We cannot stop our minds from generating ideas. Try it.

How many ideas did you just have? Mediation does not teach us how to turn off our mind. As we practice, we learn that ideas go in and out of minds. Just don’t hold on to them. Some of these ideas it is really good to let go off. Do you really want to think about that bill you haven’t paid right now? Hmm, let that thought go. Let go of the good idea about spring being upon us. Just notice your mind swinging along from idea to idea. What are you? The generator of ideas? Or the one who notices them?

One of the ideas that may go through our mind is, when does the miracle happen? The Buddhist monk said mindfulness was a miracle. Well, where’s the miracle? Aren’t I supposed to discover my Buddha nature in the midst of all these swinging monkeys?

Waiting for the white lightening often interferes with the simple practice of mediation. It’s not a simple matter either. Because sometimes a good idea does pop up as we relax. Sometimes I sit with that in mind, for as I knit myself together, all of me seeks an answer. My most memorable time was once when we were living in Texas. My then-wife’s family lived in NH. AS the first summer approached, I wondered, how to get us all up there: the two of us, my two step children and my new born son. I hit upon the idea of renting a Pierce Arrow RV or coach. I find out it would cost $5000 a month. I thought, I had other uses for that kind of money.

I sat in mediation, counting my breaths, watching the monkey leaping form idea to idea. Then a great idea popped up. I saw an image of a big white car. I could buy a car said I to myself. Much to my amazement then and still today, is that we went out and bought a big white used Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser station wagon. It was just like the image I saw in my mediation.

At that time, when my son could not yet fully talk, we called him the Boo. So that car that we all packed into to drive two days to NH was called the BooBus. I liked that, because that made me the BooDa.

Lightening, or subtler forms of it may strike during meditation, as during any time. Being open to new ideas is a great benefit of meditation. But these are the lesser promises of mediation, I think.

For me, one of the greatest benefits has been learning to start over again. When we are mediating, we suddenly can become the monkey, swinging through the branches. We have been sitting there, thinking that we are counting our breaths.

One. Two. Three. Four.

One. Two. Three. Four.

All of a sudden we realize we have been off somewhere else thinking about what we have to do next, or about great aunt Hilda. Have we been bad, do we not know how to meditate?

The mind is a monkey. The most natural thing in the world is for us to loose track of counting our breaths. It’s not about good and bad. It’s about practice, learning that our minds carry us away. So we just start over again. And so it is in life. We loose track of our goals, we forget to keep our eye on the prize. Meditation teaches us that that is the most natural thing in the world. Just begin again. Life is always beginning again. Each day is new. Each moment is new. Begin again. Start over. Don’t be worried about it. Fear not.

How important that is. In our reading this morning, Howard Thurman, one of the spiritual giants of the 20^th century, speaks to us,

Learning how to be with ourselves in silence, learning how to start over again and who we are, we learn how to tarry with our selves. And if we can be with ourselves, we can be at our ease with one another.

The reduction of anxiety brings great benefits in our relationships with one another. In his words to us, Thurman takes this to the extreme when he talks about our fears of violence. "As long as [people] react to [violence] with fear, their lives can be controlled by those in whose hands the instruments of violence rest." (Page 177)

One of the things that we learn in mediation is that most of our fears are just the monkey jumping around. If we can respond not like a leaping monkey but as a centered person, much of the anxiety in a situation which drives violence evaporates. As Thurman suggests, can we be centered in something other than our fear? Through a daily practice of mediation we can answer yes. The quality of our relationships is then not driven by fear, but enlightened by trust.

There are promises to meditation. But is it only about counting breaths? Sitting, counting breaths is a common form today. In Emerson and Thoreau’s day, walking may have been among the more popular spiritual exercise. The Unitarian Universalist Church in Concord, MA, where Emerson and Thoreau tarried with each other has a mediation program based on their practices.

Another way of meditation is visually focusing on something, such as Emerson on his roses in our responsive reading, teaching him to be in the moment. Or in our story of the strong man who was so moved by beauty.

Nina Tolley and others will tell you, having something spiritual to read daily is a big help. If I were to recommend one book it would be Thich Nhat Hanh’s THE MIRACLE OF MINDFULNESS. Nina is a student of mindfulness meditation. For us here at St. John’s Nina’s mediation group on Sunday mornings at 9:30 is a place to have mutual support for meditation. During the hour together, people sit for 25 minutes, walk for 10, and then sit for 25 minutes more.

I would like to end with a thought for those of you who may think that meditation is not about changing the world, but mere naval gazing.

Our choir with the director of Cathy Roma is working on a piece of music entitled, "Workin’ For the Dawn of Peace." On the cover is an epigram from Mahatma Gandhi. It reads "We must become the change we wish to see in the world." If we wish to decrease the amount of violence in the world, we need to lower the anxiety in the world. For this, we most start with ourselves, understanding ourselves and our own worries.

One of the great philosophers of the past century, Hannah Arendt, ended her magnum opus, THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM with a warning. She found the origins of totalitarianism in worrying, fretting, anxiety. She concludes, "The famous extremism of totalitarian movements, far from having anything to do with true radicalism, consists indeed in … ‘thinking everything to the worst," in [a] deducing process which always arrives at the worst possible conclusion." (Page 477)

In these insecure times, we do well to heed her warning, improving our management of our anxiety, being calm in the midst of the storm.

An old story tells of a man who for many years attended the Temple every Sabbath. Then he suddenly was not seen in the Great Congregation. A neighbor enquired of him why, asking "How is it that you are no more seen in the Temple on the Sabbath?"

The man responded, "I like not the words that the Master speaks: for he puts not an end to the questions that vex my mind, neither does he provide me with a sure salvation for my soul. He leads us into deep waters and leaves us there without means of rescue.

Now when the this conversation was related to the Master of the Temple, he responded, "Go, tell him that that the Temple stands not to provide life preservers, but is a place wherein one learns how to swim" (BYOT page 7)

So it is that meditation teaches us that we live one day at a time. Sometimes just one hour at a time; and in meditation, one breath at a time.