Holy Ground – Message – April 26, 2009
‘Praise Song’ for Earth Returning

-- A Celebration of Living on and Rising Above Earth –

The week started chilly and ended with summer temperatures. Typical April! Its contrasting gifts surprise us, even though we know a late frost is followed by an early heat wave, and vice versa.
Of all the months, April has the sharpest edges. Oh, we love crisp edges. The poem we heard captures this edginess with graceful, humorous words. ‘April cold with sudden anger. / Ever changing, ever true – /
I love April, I love you.’ Oh, we need humor, we need grace, a hearty laugh as we watch our loud, beautiful, contradictory world rise and fall in ever changing waves.

On Earth Day, John and I were at a birthday party for a 90 year old, a gracious lady born shortly before my mother who died last summer. I adapted the Aril poem for her. As the poem, the party was both, a celebration of our fleeting existence on earth, as well as a rising above our fragile notions of life and death. Old age and spring passion forever want to be friends -- our friends.

Dear friends, in this Earth Day season, it may prove fruitful to dig deeply in the confounding soil of our existence. ‘Ex-istence’ is a useful word here because its Latin root implies a stepping ‘out’, a standing up in some measurable, conventional form of body, place and time, In other words, for us to ex-ist, we are thrown into the ex-perience of perpetually shifting conditions of seemingly ‘external world’ ex-perience, conditions that turn out to be mirrors of our mind’s fluctuating perceptions. Oh, how long it takes us to learn the ‘outside--inside’ conundrum. Em-bodied life is not the stable, trustworthy ‘entity’ or ‘thing’ we thought it was. This is the cue which finally shakes our mind sufficiently so, to be able to bend our will and seek refuge in the zero circle, where, finally we surrender our weapons of ‘mass destruction’’
i.e. our untrustworthy perceptions.

Deep in our mind, deep in our fragile bones we have known this to be true, that ‘life’ is not what it seems, what it promises. In fact, if on anything, people on earth agree on this terribly unstable, conventional notion of ‘life’ defined in terms of inherently changing, i.e. separating attributes of age, race, culture, religion, opinions, all competing for turf and attention. The deficient gods and goddesses of our making gave us ‘limited natural resources’, after all. Plants, animals, mountains, people, all organisms are doomed by ‘natural selection’, unless they/we fight for their/our particular life- form to survive and multiply.

And still, the stunning daffodils in our gardens are pure pleasure. We delight in their transient beauty--
a brief explosion of color, then demise. And we thank them for their kind, bittersweet teaching that life on earth entails changing conditions, rising and falling. And still, the daffodils and tulips rise each spring singing praises to Mother Earth, stirring our hearts to welcome joy. We return their favor by giving thanks. For in their blooming we finally see ours. After a long winter, spring flowers take us straight to heaven, that subtler spirit realm where we are charmed by true yellows, reds purples, blues. How blessed are the flowers that seem to suffer neither birth pangs nor death agonies. They come and leave without fanfare, without complaints. How blessed are we who finally get it!

Dear friends, we are the flowers. What we see ‘outside’ is a reflection of what our mind holds. The beauty of flowers extends from our mind, as does their dying. As the Buddhist text says, all things that change –flowers, seasons, bodies, wars – our existence obeys the same laws as the flowers. ‘So everything has its coming forth and passing by; nothing can be independent without change.’ We remember Thich Nhat Hanh’s idea of ‘inter-being’. For our limited intellect, this rigorous, wholesome logic is impossible to follow and accept. Ok intellect, be quiet for a minute, I now commit to practice the mode of ‘inter-being’: I leave separation behind, for I am part of all that rises and falls. No matter the form ‘life’ takes, I am joined with all life beyond life’s manifestations. How reassuring to invite inter-being into our mind and our interfaith circle this morning.

We learn through contrast. In recent services, the sharp psychoanalytic insights about ‘human nature’
by Paul Fleischman stunned and inspired us. This local author and Buddhist practitioner tells us that our yearning for peace is a paradoxical –contradictory-- struggle because ’it rubs against the scales and feathers of our animal vigilance …’ The animals we love and fear live in us. ‘Peace’ he continue is not just a more or better way to be human …. Peace is … a determination to become less human…’ ‘Praise song’ for spring flowers rising from the weary fields of our mind, fields to which they return, where they rest and rise again.

Startling fragrant flowers of insight and truth! They shake our inner ground; they throw us off the wheel of convention, of complacency, of karma. Buddhists call this changing field of ex-perience ‘dependent origination’. Sounds a bit heady and abstract, but the concept is grounded in a long tradition of learning and experience. The teaching also resonates with our reading from of A Course in Miracles. Jesus, too, uses strong words: ‘Each thing you value is but a chain that binds you to the world, and it will serve no other end but this … The world you see holds nothing that you need ….’ We have lived long enough, dear friends, to know this is true. And yet, how can it be so? Yes, it is sad that every-thing is in effect worthless, yet how relieving to realize, finally, the fleeting things of this world are not our home, are not who we are.

Jesus is talking about our attachment to things, the cause of all suffering. All ideas of attachment, detachment and inter-being are such useful teachings for us. As we go through our busy days, let us practice these thoughts with spring fervor, as there will always be interferences – aches, disappointment, sorrow, unmet wants, loneliness. To meet these challenges productively, this is all it takes: ‘Pause and be still a little while, and see how far you rise above the world, when you release your mind from chains and let it seek the level where is finds itself at home. …. Free wings and it will fly in sureness and in joy to join its holy purpose. Let it rest in its Creator there to o be restored to sanity, to freedom and to love.’ How gentle, dear friends, how gracious, how easy! This is our resurrection exercise for spring. Amen.

Holy Ground – Readings – April 26, 2009
‘Praise Song’ for Earth Returning

-- A Celebration of Living on and Rising Above Earth --

 1. – We begin our readings with an April poem by Ogden Nash.
It comes our way via an email- poetry-group Marianna is a part of:

Always Marry An April Girl
Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor,
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing, ever true --
I love April, I love you.

-- Ogden Nash --
--- PAUSE – GONG --

2. – The following reading is from the Buddhist tradition --words from the Dharma teaching according to Satyama Buddha:

‘Rain falls, winds blow, plants bloom, leaves mature and are blown away. These phenomena are all interconnected with causes and conditions, and are brought about by them, and disappear as the causes and conditions change.

One is born through the conditions of parentage. His body is nourished by food: his spirit is nurtured by teaching and experience.

Blossoms come about because of a series of conditions that lead up to their blooming. Leaves are blown and away because a series of conditions lead to it. Blossoms do not appear independently, nor does a leaf fall of itself, out of its season. So everything has its coming forth and passing away by; nothing can be independent without change.’

(see ‘The Teaching of Buddha’, Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, Kosaido Printing Co. Ltd. Tokyo, 2001)

--PAUSE – GONG ---

 3. – In our last reading we hear from ‘A Course in Miracles’, sections from Lesson 128. In the April meetings, the Holy Ground Course group struggled with this teaching where Jesus addresses the austere, perennial question of life on earth:

The world I see holds nothing that I want.

The world you see holds nothing that you need … nothing that you can use in any way, nor anything at all that serves to give you joy. Believe this thought, and you are saved from years of misery, from countless disappointments, and from hopes that turn to bitter ashes of despair. …

-- Each thing you value here is but a chain that binds you to the world, and it will serve no other end but this. For everything must serve the purpose you have given it, until you see a different purpose there. The only purpose worthy of your mind this world contains is that you pass it by …

Escape today the chains you place upon your mind when you perceive salvation here. For what you value you make part of you as you perceive yourself. … Nothing here is worth one instant of delay and pain; …

--- ‘Pause and be still a little while, and see how far you rise above the world , when yourelease your mind from chains and let it seek the level where it finds itself at home. It will be grateful to be free a while. It knows where it belongs. But free its wings, and it will fly in sureness and in joy to join its holy purpose. Let it rest in its Creator, there to be restored to sanity, to freedom and to love.

--- Give it ten minutes rest three times today. And when your eyes are opened afterwards, you will not value anything you see as much as when you looked at it before. Your whole perspective on the world will shiftby just a little, every time you let your mind escape its chains. … Be still and rest.

Protect your mind throughout the day as well. And when you think you see some value in an aspect or an image of the world, refuse to lay this chain upon your mind, but tell yourself with quiet certainty:

 This will not tempt me to delay myself.
The world I see holds nothing that I want.