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<===== Original Message From ordinarylife-owner@yahoogroups.com ===== ORDINARY LIFE - Thoughts and Ideas to Help You Live a Happier Life ====================================== Summary of October 21, 2001 ====================================== Dear Folks ? This week's gathering focused on how, in light of our present circumstances, can we learn to practice a true present and enjoy the good that is all around us? We must develop Wisdom about the way life works, Skill in making life work for us, and Faith that will sustain us in all times. The blackest, bleakest day in Christian history was essential for the brightest. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Full text of the presentation ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Noticing and Enjoying Strawberries In the e-mail preview of our time together today I told the following story. It is a very famous story from the Buddhist tradition: The story is of a monk who was fleeing a tiger. He ran to the edge of a cliff and, being unable to stop himself, went over the edge. On the way down he caught the branch of a tree. He had been saved. He looked down and, way below on the ground, was another tiger. He must hang on with all his might. No way to go back up and certain death below. As he was hanging there, he glanced aside and saw a strawberry on a bush growing from the edge of the cliff beside him. He let go of the limb with one hand, picked the strawberry and savored it. This story, of course, is a parable. It is told to illustrate the importance of developing the ability to enjoy a true present. Our present circumstances are certainly chaotic are they not? How are we to develop the ability to enjoy the delicious strawberry that is just within reach? Indeed, how can we develop the ability even to notice that the strawberry is there? That's what our time together is going to be about today - developing the ability to notice and enjoy strawberries even when things fall apart. Let me begin with some preliminary observations just to make sure we are all on the same page. In the last fourteen years, I have given almost 700 different talks. That's a lot. Does anyone have that much to say? The answer to that is, "No!" Twenty years or so ago, working with my teacher/mentor Carlyle Marney, I came up with something of a creed. I could put the entire Christian faith in less than fifty words. Here they are: God is in our history with a searching love. Jesus Christ is central. The cross is unavoidable. Church is a community of believers and there is no salvation by one's self. That is to say, faith is relational. Discipline is required. We can live an assured hope. That is to say, there is a saving possibility in every situation. That, from a Christian perspective, is what we have to talk about. What changes is our understanding of it, our circumstances and us. One of the things that has changed, of course, is that on 9/11 we began to be forced to notice what is going on around us. Mostly, however, we have seen just tigers chasing us and a huge abyss below us with more tigers. You don't hear much talk about delicious strawberries. Indeed, we are frantically looking for the branch to hold on to. I hope that you get at least that much here. I was working out at my athletic club on Wednesday and was struggling away reading about Methodist Polity while doing the stair- master. On a recumbent bike in front of me was a man - I admire him for his spunk; 82 and still working out daily - who was pontificating about how to deal with our nation's current crisis. He went on and on about how "the only way to fight terrorism is with terrorism." Like you, I have seen the newspapers, magazines and listened to the programs on radio and television. I found it funny as all get-out that on one of the television news magazine programs this past week they were talking about how we were becoming a nation of terrorized people. Hello! They are the ones who are stirring up the fear. "What should you have in your survival kit? Stay tuned for the news that follows." Give me a break. Yet the fact is that our government officials are saying more terrorist attacks are likely to take place in this country. How do we live with that? I do not want to ignore or deny the tigers chasing us or the abyss. I do want what my teaching is about to help us notice and enjoy the strawberries. This circumstance that we find ourselves in can be the perfect teaching moment for us. We don't like this because we have come in our culture to value comfort so much. But the feelings of loss and fear that we have experienced since 9/11 can show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly what our spiritual work needs to be. Not only has an emphasis on comfort seduced us away from reality but also so has the need for each of us to appear to the other that we've got it all together. Let me be very clear: spiritual practice isn't about being good; it is about waking up. One day Gabriel was walking about in the heavenly realm. He came upon God and it was apparent that God was very depressed. Gabriel said to God, "What's the matter?" God said, pointing to the earth, "Look at what a mess they have made of everything. Nothing is going like I had hoped it would. I'm going to destroy the lot of them." "But you can't do that," Gabriel said. "And why not? I'm God, the Almighty. I can do whatever I wish." "Because," said Gabriel, "you promised." "I did?" "Yes. At the time of the great flood." "Well, then, I'm going to get rid of most of them. Send someone to go over all the earth and find the truly righteous. Give to each of the righteous a small brass plaque so that when I send the angel of death to destroy, the angel of death will be able to distinguish the righteous from those who are not." So Gabriel did as he was instructed. And, do you know what the brass plaque said? No? You didn't get one either? Our eyes have been opened by the events of 9/11 and following. We hate it. We want to run. In the past we have run. We have used all sorts of things to escape the way life is. One of the things we've used is humor. I don't think I heard one single joke about the Oklahoma City bombing, did you? I'm beginning to hear some about aspects of our current crisis. Conan O'Brien said, "It was reported today that Osama Bin Laden has 50 brothers and sisters. Which absolutely shocked me because I had no idea he was Catholic" Jay Leno said this: "You read about all these terrorists, most of them came here legally, but they hung around on these expired visas, some for as long as 10-15 years. Now, compare that to Blockbuster; you are two days late with a video and these people are all over you. Let's put Blockbuster in charge of immigration." Here are some more Leno lines: "The U.S. Government has said they are now going to go after the terrorist's electronic banking system. You know what they should do? They should transfer Bin Laden's funds to my bank. They'd mess up his deposits, screw up his statement and nickel and dime him to death with service charges." "More and more facts coming out about Osama bin Laden. You know, he never sleeps in the same place two nights in a row, just like Clinton." We have other ways of protecting ourselves from "what is." Each and every one of us has wanted to be able - and this is the first principle of Ordinary Life - to be an exception to the way life is. We have wanted to get a leg up on life and in the process we only cause ourselves more suffering. So we protect ourselves from the pain by all sorts of addictions. We work furiously to get those things we have been taught will make us happy - when we finally have them. We are committed to happy endings and trying to make them become realities robs us of the very life we say we want. If we can't manipulate the situation, what can we do? Three things: we must develop wisdom about the way life is, skill in making life work for us, and a faith that can sustain us at all times, especially during the times when there seems to be no rational reason to believe at all. To do any of this takes creative imagination, the ability to see things out of our usual way of seeing them. I will stoop to almost any means whatever to get you to think "outside the box" in spiritual terms. If we are going to experience and participate in the abundant life, - if we are going to notice and appreciate the strawberries - we have to use our minds. And our spirits. Last Sunday in our dialogue time together I reminded you that the central facet of the Christian faith if a belief in the resurrection. There are, as you might imagine, many different views and interpretations of the resurrection from very conservative folks who believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus to those very liberal Christian who see it as a metaphor of a new life that is possible in the now moment, made available by faith. Some folks get caught up in fights about which of these positions is correct. I'm not interested in that. I want to offer you and me insights and methods that will assist us in living as fully and freely and bravely and beautifully as we possibly can. One of the teachings we can get out of 9/11 is that none of us knows how much longer we have to live. We have hopes and assumptions but not real knowledge. What do you want to do with that time you have left? What I want to do with that period of time is create life-enhancing events and experiences for myself and you. That isn't the only thing I want to do but it is the main thing. With that in mind let's take a step in that direction. In order for there to be a resurrection in Christian theology, there first had to be - crucifixion. The crucifixion was the early church's version of September 11. Now, I know this is a very imperfect analogy. But bear with me a moment. The crucifixion of Jesus took place on a day that soon began to be called "Good Friday." Why call it good? I know, "good Friday" is a corruption of "God's Friday." But the phrase "good Friday" has stuck for a reason. After all, it would be just as easy to say "God's Friday." Why is it called good? What could be good about it? What could be good about it for us? Because when you look at it, it seems to most assuredly a holy mess. One of Jesus' disciples deals with his disappointment and frustration by betraying his teacher. He careens out of control, eventually committing suicide. The politicians of the day dealt with the events of the day in a way that foreshadows quandaries that we see in things like the some of the decisions in the Middle East we are paying such a price for now. They arrest Jesus, then attempt to release him, then hear his case, then consider the religious opposition to him. The religious community fares no better as they function in a dither. They orchestrate a way to honor the letter of their law but slaughter the spirit of it. Then they completely lose control as the man they most want to abolish is labeled their king. The climate is emotionally explosive. Nerves are set on edge. Peter takes it out on an innocent bystander by cutting his ear off. Pilate has second thoughts but is afraid to trust his better judgment when he sees how vicious the crowd has become. And the crowd is unruly, uneasy, in that volatile state that precedes bedlam. The evening news reports that nature itself is out of kilter, torn by violent storms; darkness comes at mid-day. There is confusion and chaos about this so-called Good Friday. We have trouble with confusion and chaos. We are creatures of order. Control is most important to us. Our ideal person is one who has it all together, as we put it: one who has everything under control. To lose control, in our view of things, is a form of sickness. One of the things we hope and pray for is that as we get older we won't lose control of our bodies or fall victim to some disease where we lose control. We would rather die. Certainly we don't want anyone else controlling us either sick or well. Good Friday is chaotic. The day is nonsensical. But maybe, just maybe that is precisely what the day is about - a kind of confusion and chaos that our minds, to say nothing about our hearts, can't organize. Chaos comes and we are in panic. Our need to make sense out of it goes into overdrive. When we ourselves lose control and go outside our values, and we do, the complex mixture of pain and shame is overwhelming. A few years ago as I was leaving the house to go to work, the phone rang with the news that during the night a drug crazed kid had, apparently at random selection, broken into the home of two friends of ours and bludgeoned them to death while they slept. Just two weekends before they had gone on a retreat with this Sunday School class. The event made me crazy trying to make sense of it. You just never know who or when or where things might suddenly stop happening. Jesus is brutally murdered by truly good people just doing their jobs. And we look at that and it makes no sense to us. We want to organize it and explain it with some political or psychological or theological premise. We always end up exasperated. One of the problems with the story of the crucifixion of Jesus is that we who do so love to be in control are comforted because we already know the end of this story. Yet I will assert that we who do so love to be in control really do not know what to do with this day. It is for that very reason that we call this day good. It is good in the sense that it is good for us. It is good for us to be made to stare into this mess which is so far beyond our control. It is good for us because it reminds us of what happens when our design runs amuck. It is good for us because it reminds us that we are not in absolute control even when we think we are. It is good for us also because it reminds us of our origins and our ends. Now pay attention: There is theological construction under way here. Put on your hard hats and thinking caps. The only other place in the scriptural tradition that invites us to contemplate such a formless, chaotic, and unfathomably dark mystery is the Genesis story which tells us that in the beginning "the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." We are reminded that we are children of chaos, born of its confusion and fashioned out of its corruptible elements, called by the spirit of God from the tumult and shaped by God into whatever order we shall ever know. The great discomfort of Good Friday then is not the pain we inflicted upon Jesus, not even the sorrow of his death but the reality of the chaos it reveals. It is, most assuredly a holy mess. But notice that our tradition sees within Jesus what they called the "new Adam." If Jesus be the new Adam, then Good Friday, so filled with chaos is also the first day of the new creation. The crucifixion and the turmoil and the confusion surrounding it constitute the raw mass of chaos from which a new order is made. And the humble, humiliating lesson that awaits us is that this new order, like the chaos, is beyond our control. Admitting this has never been easy, especially in our culture, and especially for those whose lives are built upon making sense out of things and staying in control. So I invite you to take your place in the midst of the chaos, to pay homage to the nonsense. If we could just let go of those instinctive inclinations to probe the chaos or grasp it, we might find ourselves in all of it. And if we could go through life and come before God in this manner, we might know the wisdom that would set us free. We might actually be strengthened to face, in humility, the overwhelming chaos and the numbing nonsense of our own time. I heard someone say the other day, and this is so typical of us when things don't go to our liking, "I don't see how a God of love and justice could allow the events of September 11 to happen. I can't believe in God anymore." Folks, it is not God who is put to the test here any more than God was put to a test on Good Friday. It is we ourselves who are put to the test. And when we have seen this truth and made it ours, when we have given up our vain attempts to undo history, to guarantee the present, or to predetermine the future, we might see more clearly that we are the creatures and God is the creator. Maybe that would make each day a new creation for us. Maybe we could even be quiet enough to hear what God says after every act of creation, creation out of the chaos, "It is good." So there it hangs: a beautiful delicious strawberry. Got the faith to reach out and taste it? God, let's pray that we do. No matter where you go this week, no matter what happens, remember this: You are carrying precious cargo. Watch your step. ====================================== Ordinary Life is a gathering that provides an opportunity to develop an enlightened heart and an awakened mind to the reality of the present moment. The gathering meets on Sunday mornings at 9:45 am in Fondren Hall at St. Paul's UMC - 5501 South Main, Houston, Texas and is taught by Dr. Bill Kerley. If you would like more information - Contact Bill Kerley - E-Mail - Bill@bkspeaks.com Web - www.bkspeaks.com Voice - 713-663-7771 Fax - 713-663-6418 Mail - 6300 West Loop South, Suite 480 Bellaire, TX 77401 ============================== You can access the archives of these newsletters by going to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ordinarylife You can add someone you know would be interested in receiving these on- line newsletters by sending that information to - Bill@bkspeaks.com I'll make sure they are added immediately! 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