Post by IncogNITO on Nov 17, 2009 16:10:29 GMT -5
I cam across this while going through a database of homilies and sermons trying to get something together for Sunday. I liked it.
Peace in Your Heart
Jean M. Rowe, December 2, 2001
Neshoba Unitarian Universalist Church
Cordova, TN
A colleague quoted Rabbi Bunam recently: “Seek peace in your own place. You cannot find peace anywhere save in your own self. When you have made peace within yourself, you will be able to make peace in the whole world.”
The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han says almost the same thing: “If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can blossom like a flower and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.”
He likes to use the example of a small boat crossing the Gulf of Siam, for in Vietnam, there are many people, called boat people, who leave the country in small boats. Often the boats are caught in rough seas or storms, the people may panic, and boats can sink. But if even one person aboard can remain calm, lucid, peaceful, knowing what to d and what not to do, he or she can help the boat survive. His or her expression – face, voice – communicates clarity and calmness, and people have trust in that person. One such peaceful person, then, can save the lives of many.
“Our world,” he says, “is something like a small boat. Compared with the cosmos, our planet is a very small boat. We are about to panic because our situation is no better than the situation of the small boat in the sea. You know that we have more than 50,000 nuclear weapons. Humankind has become a very dangerous species. We need people who can sit still and be able to smile, who can walk peacefully. We need people like that in order to save us.” And then, Nhat Han adds: “Mahayana Buddhism says that you are that person, that each of you is that person.”
Jesus said it simply: “The kingdom of God is within you.” In the Gospel of Thomas, found at Nag Hammadi, Jesus says: “If those who lead you say to you, ‘Look, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will get there first. If they say, “It is in the sea,’ then the fish will get there first. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the Living God. But if you will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.”
If you will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.
It is the people who know themselves, and love themselves, and care for themselves, they who have peace in their hearts, who radiate warmth and peace and joy and calmness. And as they radiate this good energy, they affect those around them, who get stronger too, and more effective. The good spirit, the peacefulness, the ability to solve problems and face life’s difficulties multiply and multiply.
Why is this? Why can a few peaceful people change the world? Or as Jesus put it, how can one lump of leavening help the whole loaf to rise?
Think of people you have known who are really calm and peaceful. People who are very comfortable with themselves. It is difficult to upset them. They don’t take sides. They listen carefully. They are respectful. They radiate wellbeing even when they may have a serious illness. They are patient and kind. It affects their whole environment. You feel better, more peaceful just being in their presence. They let you come and go at your own pace. They are accepting. They understand…themselves and you, too. You feel more at peace, and you come to watch your words around them.
This is how it happens. Those who live with peace in their hearts radiate peace, and others keep peace in their presence.
What is their secret? Lots of quiet. A spiritual life. A sense of their own authority, their own worth. Thich Nhat Han says it is the fruit of meditation, mindfulness, sitting quietly. St. Paul says it is the fruit of living the life of the spirit, rather than the life of the flesh.
Now, let’s look at the opposite. Those without peace in their hearts. The dispirited, the sickly, the worried, the over-reactive. Those who live on the surface and do not find joy in living.
For example: I know somebody who complains a lot. Even when it’s a beautiful day and he’s in good health, he has plenty to eat, he has friends to play with and interesting things to do, he complains. He complains about other people. He compares his situation to other people’s situations. He adds gloom to the environment. He finds ways to worry about what might happen. He adds to the sense of uncertainty in the world. I don’t want to be around him. He cannot help me or the people around him. There is no peace in his heart.
What can I do to help my friend? Conventional wisdom says: I’ll clue him in. I’ll point out what he is doing, and he’ll see and change his ways. If I coach him and give him even more to be thankful about, he’ll change his tune…. But it doesn’t work that way. This is not how he will find peace in his heart. He’ll have to find it in his own way. He’ll have to come home to himself, or not. But my anxiety won’t help him. He’ll just dig in his heels and complain about how I just don’t understand. In the meantime, I must pay attention to my own heart.
I know somebody else who likes to be sick. The sicker the better. When she is sick she can’t work, she can’t pay her bills, and she gets deeper and deeper in debt. Other people get angry and she throws up her hands? What can I do? I’m sick. Other people get upset and try to help her but she stays out late and smokes while she coughs and then she worries about her coughing. Her family and friends worry about her but they cannot make her want to be well. There is no peace in her heart.
What can I do to help her? Conventional wisdom says: I’ll talk to her; I’ll offer to help her, and I know she’ll begin to change. But it doesn’t work that way. All I can do is pay attention to my own health.
I know a mother who worries about her children who are now young adults. Her daughter is selfish and takes advantage of her. Her son is a loner who has no friends and spends all his weekend time with his parents. The mother wonders why her children cannot grow up. She’s in a stew because her life seems controlled by these children. There is no peace in her heart, nor in her children, to say nothing of her husband. But what can I do, she asks, they’re my children and I love them? Obviously, they need me.
Cultivate your own heart, your own life, your own peace and joy, I say. Go on a trip with your husband, I say. But they NEED me, she says. I can’t leave them alone. There is no peace in her heart. She is busy taking care of others. She must find her own peace.
There was a rabbi and psychologist named Edwin Friedman—he died recently-- who understood very well that people don’t change and become whole and healthy because the people who know and care for them want them to change. They change because they want to or have to. So what are we to do, then, if they don’t want to change? The answer is simple, but very hard to do: it is to tend to our own lives. It is to say what needs to be said, honestly, even angrily, if it comes to that—and then leave them alone. It is for us to cultivate peace in our hearts and let the other change or not as they will.
If we do not tend to our own lives; if we agitate and worry and stew and rescue and negotiate, they do not have to do anything. We do everything and lose our own peace in the process. And then nobody is any better off. If we are on the little boat in the Gulf of Siam and we worry and stew along with everyone else, then we have no peace and we cannot exert leadership and are in danger of losing our lives as well.
Friedman helped us to see this through stories. Lots of stories. One story is about a man who is growing a holly tree. Oh, how he takes care of his little holly! He plants it beside the corner of the house where it is protected from the winter winds, and when it thrives, in the spring he carefully digs and balls and bags it and moves it into the sunshine. The little holly droops and loses a lot of leaves. Worried, the man feeds it and waters it, checks every limb to see if it is alive, checks with the experts and inoculates it against diseases. Fall comes and the tree looks worse. The man tries everything. He prunes and feeds and waters, and the tree looks worse than ever. Finally, he gives up, but not before he does something drastic.
Not sure whether the limbs are live or dead, he starts chopping them off. He is too disgusted to be careful. He just prunes out what seems to be diseased, including parts of the trunk. Then he goes off with his family on an extended vacation. “I’ll dig it up when we get home,” he tells his wife, and then gets busy and forgets about the tree. Imagine his surprise, when he returns and discovers that the little tree, left to its own healing process, has sprouted new branches and leaves everywhere it had been cut.
When he was most himself and stopped worrying, the tree managed to tend to its own healing.
Friedman asks us these questions about ourselves: How does love sometimes trigger the disintegration of the loved one? How do efforts to control another become an adaptation to the other’s weakness? Why does dependency kill? Why is it the nature of craziness to drive those who try to understand it in others crazy? How does support weaken? Or challenge become a form of caring? When does responsibility for others become irresponsible? How do words lose their power when they are used to overpower?
What did he say? That when we try to help we may be controlling? That we would do better to tend to ourselves?
In another story, Friedman uses the analogy of dominoes. Thousands of dominoes, lined up, one after another. When a breeze comes, the dominoes take a sharp breath and think about what they dread most: that they will topple. And one day it happened. Domino 10101 teetered, shook, pivoted on its corner, righted itself and then fell flat against its neighbor. The sequence repeated several hundred times before all the dominoes recognized the malignant state of their condition. As the process continued, some gave in without a fight. Others pretended it wasn’t happening. A few became so anxious they fell over before it was their time. Some tried to mobilize all their energy to hold up or push back its falling neighbor, but it was to no avail! The continuing force was to great for any individual domino’s weight and size. Some thought of mobilizing so much extra force that they would lie down before the wave and so create a back lash. But nothing worked until suddenly, things stopped, reversed, and finally, somehow, with lessened energy, the dominoes remained upright. “What happened, all the dominoes wanted to know? How did you do it? What formula did you use? What force? What did you see that we didn’t?”
“I’m not sure what the difference was,” said the domino that had not been dominoed. “All I can say is that while each of you kept trying to hold your neighbor up, my concern was that I did not go down.”
To spread peace, we have to start with ourselves. We have to heal ourselves before we attempt to heal others. We have to become an oasis, a still place, a channel for the greater spirit. It is often said that the important thing in a crisis is “don’t just do something; stand there.” In the cultivation of peace inside, we have to be still and know ourselves, as all the wise ones who ever lived have said. Be still and know.
Be still and know thyself. This takes time and this takes time out. Time just for you, alone, by yourself to know who you are, what makes you angry, your feelings, your fears, your longings, your foibles. And then, slowly, quietly, accept yourself. Know, accept and love yourself…and then you may begin to have peace in your heart. First, you have to let go of controlling yourself, and you have to let go of controlling others. And second, you have to clarify your perceptions. Much anger and anguish come because we do not see things as they are but as we think we are.
The Buddha tells a teaching story of a man who was away on business when his whole village was burned down by bandits, who also took away the man’s son. When the man returned home, he saw the ruins, and panicked. He took the charred corpse of an infant to be his child, and he began to beat his chest and weep uncontrollably for days. Finally, he had the body cremated and carried the remains in a velvet bag.
One day the real son escaped from the robbers and found his way home. He knocked at the door of his father’s new cottage, late one night. “Who is there?” asked the anguished father. And the child answered, “It’s me, papa. Open the door, it’s your son.” In his agitated state of mind, the man thought someone was playing a trick on him and refused to let the boy in. Again, and again the father refused to let him in. Finally, the boy went away and they never saw each other again. The Buddha said, “Sometime, somewhere, you take something to be the truth. If you cling to it so much, when the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will not open it.”
To seek peace, you must let go of controlling yourself, controlling others, and you must be open to real truth. And then, gradually, you will find peace in your heart, the peace that passes understanding. You become a peaceful place for others to find peace, so that they can become peaceful and clear, as well. And it will multiply. The choice is yours.
So may it be. Amen.
Peace in Your Heart
Jean M. Rowe, December 2, 2001
Neshoba Unitarian Universalist Church
Cordova, TN
A colleague quoted Rabbi Bunam recently: “Seek peace in your own place. You cannot find peace anywhere save in your own self. When you have made peace within yourself, you will be able to make peace in the whole world.”
The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han says almost the same thing: “If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can blossom like a flower and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.”
He likes to use the example of a small boat crossing the Gulf of Siam, for in Vietnam, there are many people, called boat people, who leave the country in small boats. Often the boats are caught in rough seas or storms, the people may panic, and boats can sink. But if even one person aboard can remain calm, lucid, peaceful, knowing what to d and what not to do, he or she can help the boat survive. His or her expression – face, voice – communicates clarity and calmness, and people have trust in that person. One such peaceful person, then, can save the lives of many.
“Our world,” he says, “is something like a small boat. Compared with the cosmos, our planet is a very small boat. We are about to panic because our situation is no better than the situation of the small boat in the sea. You know that we have more than 50,000 nuclear weapons. Humankind has become a very dangerous species. We need people who can sit still and be able to smile, who can walk peacefully. We need people like that in order to save us.” And then, Nhat Han adds: “Mahayana Buddhism says that you are that person, that each of you is that person.”
Jesus said it simply: “The kingdom of God is within you.” In the Gospel of Thomas, found at Nag Hammadi, Jesus says: “If those who lead you say to you, ‘Look, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will get there first. If they say, “It is in the sea,’ then the fish will get there first. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the Living God. But if you will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.”
If you will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.
It is the people who know themselves, and love themselves, and care for themselves, they who have peace in their hearts, who radiate warmth and peace and joy and calmness. And as they radiate this good energy, they affect those around them, who get stronger too, and more effective. The good spirit, the peacefulness, the ability to solve problems and face life’s difficulties multiply and multiply.
Why is this? Why can a few peaceful people change the world? Or as Jesus put it, how can one lump of leavening help the whole loaf to rise?
Think of people you have known who are really calm and peaceful. People who are very comfortable with themselves. It is difficult to upset them. They don’t take sides. They listen carefully. They are respectful. They radiate wellbeing even when they may have a serious illness. They are patient and kind. It affects their whole environment. You feel better, more peaceful just being in their presence. They let you come and go at your own pace. They are accepting. They understand…themselves and you, too. You feel more at peace, and you come to watch your words around them.
This is how it happens. Those who live with peace in their hearts radiate peace, and others keep peace in their presence.
What is their secret? Lots of quiet. A spiritual life. A sense of their own authority, their own worth. Thich Nhat Han says it is the fruit of meditation, mindfulness, sitting quietly. St. Paul says it is the fruit of living the life of the spirit, rather than the life of the flesh.
Now, let’s look at the opposite. Those without peace in their hearts. The dispirited, the sickly, the worried, the over-reactive. Those who live on the surface and do not find joy in living.
For example: I know somebody who complains a lot. Even when it’s a beautiful day and he’s in good health, he has plenty to eat, he has friends to play with and interesting things to do, he complains. He complains about other people. He compares his situation to other people’s situations. He adds gloom to the environment. He finds ways to worry about what might happen. He adds to the sense of uncertainty in the world. I don’t want to be around him. He cannot help me or the people around him. There is no peace in his heart.
What can I do to help my friend? Conventional wisdom says: I’ll clue him in. I’ll point out what he is doing, and he’ll see and change his ways. If I coach him and give him even more to be thankful about, he’ll change his tune…. But it doesn’t work that way. This is not how he will find peace in his heart. He’ll have to find it in his own way. He’ll have to come home to himself, or not. But my anxiety won’t help him. He’ll just dig in his heels and complain about how I just don’t understand. In the meantime, I must pay attention to my own heart.
I know somebody else who likes to be sick. The sicker the better. When she is sick she can’t work, she can’t pay her bills, and she gets deeper and deeper in debt. Other people get angry and she throws up her hands? What can I do? I’m sick. Other people get upset and try to help her but she stays out late and smokes while she coughs and then she worries about her coughing. Her family and friends worry about her but they cannot make her want to be well. There is no peace in her heart.
What can I do to help her? Conventional wisdom says: I’ll talk to her; I’ll offer to help her, and I know she’ll begin to change. But it doesn’t work that way. All I can do is pay attention to my own health.
I know a mother who worries about her children who are now young adults. Her daughter is selfish and takes advantage of her. Her son is a loner who has no friends and spends all his weekend time with his parents. The mother wonders why her children cannot grow up. She’s in a stew because her life seems controlled by these children. There is no peace in her heart, nor in her children, to say nothing of her husband. But what can I do, she asks, they’re my children and I love them? Obviously, they need me.
Cultivate your own heart, your own life, your own peace and joy, I say. Go on a trip with your husband, I say. But they NEED me, she says. I can’t leave them alone. There is no peace in her heart. She is busy taking care of others. She must find her own peace.
There was a rabbi and psychologist named Edwin Friedman—he died recently-- who understood very well that people don’t change and become whole and healthy because the people who know and care for them want them to change. They change because they want to or have to. So what are we to do, then, if they don’t want to change? The answer is simple, but very hard to do: it is to tend to our own lives. It is to say what needs to be said, honestly, even angrily, if it comes to that—and then leave them alone. It is for us to cultivate peace in our hearts and let the other change or not as they will.
If we do not tend to our own lives; if we agitate and worry and stew and rescue and negotiate, they do not have to do anything. We do everything and lose our own peace in the process. And then nobody is any better off. If we are on the little boat in the Gulf of Siam and we worry and stew along with everyone else, then we have no peace and we cannot exert leadership and are in danger of losing our lives as well.
Friedman helped us to see this through stories. Lots of stories. One story is about a man who is growing a holly tree. Oh, how he takes care of his little holly! He plants it beside the corner of the house where it is protected from the winter winds, and when it thrives, in the spring he carefully digs and balls and bags it and moves it into the sunshine. The little holly droops and loses a lot of leaves. Worried, the man feeds it and waters it, checks every limb to see if it is alive, checks with the experts and inoculates it against diseases. Fall comes and the tree looks worse. The man tries everything. He prunes and feeds and waters, and the tree looks worse than ever. Finally, he gives up, but not before he does something drastic.
Not sure whether the limbs are live or dead, he starts chopping them off. He is too disgusted to be careful. He just prunes out what seems to be diseased, including parts of the trunk. Then he goes off with his family on an extended vacation. “I’ll dig it up when we get home,” he tells his wife, and then gets busy and forgets about the tree. Imagine his surprise, when he returns and discovers that the little tree, left to its own healing process, has sprouted new branches and leaves everywhere it had been cut.
When he was most himself and stopped worrying, the tree managed to tend to its own healing.
Friedman asks us these questions about ourselves: How does love sometimes trigger the disintegration of the loved one? How do efforts to control another become an adaptation to the other’s weakness? Why does dependency kill? Why is it the nature of craziness to drive those who try to understand it in others crazy? How does support weaken? Or challenge become a form of caring? When does responsibility for others become irresponsible? How do words lose their power when they are used to overpower?
What did he say? That when we try to help we may be controlling? That we would do better to tend to ourselves?
In another story, Friedman uses the analogy of dominoes. Thousands of dominoes, lined up, one after another. When a breeze comes, the dominoes take a sharp breath and think about what they dread most: that they will topple. And one day it happened. Domino 10101 teetered, shook, pivoted on its corner, righted itself and then fell flat against its neighbor. The sequence repeated several hundred times before all the dominoes recognized the malignant state of their condition. As the process continued, some gave in without a fight. Others pretended it wasn’t happening. A few became so anxious they fell over before it was their time. Some tried to mobilize all their energy to hold up or push back its falling neighbor, but it was to no avail! The continuing force was to great for any individual domino’s weight and size. Some thought of mobilizing so much extra force that they would lie down before the wave and so create a back lash. But nothing worked until suddenly, things stopped, reversed, and finally, somehow, with lessened energy, the dominoes remained upright. “What happened, all the dominoes wanted to know? How did you do it? What formula did you use? What force? What did you see that we didn’t?”
“I’m not sure what the difference was,” said the domino that had not been dominoed. “All I can say is that while each of you kept trying to hold your neighbor up, my concern was that I did not go down.”
To spread peace, we have to start with ourselves. We have to heal ourselves before we attempt to heal others. We have to become an oasis, a still place, a channel for the greater spirit. It is often said that the important thing in a crisis is “don’t just do something; stand there.” In the cultivation of peace inside, we have to be still and know ourselves, as all the wise ones who ever lived have said. Be still and know.
Be still and know thyself. This takes time and this takes time out. Time just for you, alone, by yourself to know who you are, what makes you angry, your feelings, your fears, your longings, your foibles. And then, slowly, quietly, accept yourself. Know, accept and love yourself…and then you may begin to have peace in your heart. First, you have to let go of controlling yourself, and you have to let go of controlling others. And second, you have to clarify your perceptions. Much anger and anguish come because we do not see things as they are but as we think we are.
The Buddha tells a teaching story of a man who was away on business when his whole village was burned down by bandits, who also took away the man’s son. When the man returned home, he saw the ruins, and panicked. He took the charred corpse of an infant to be his child, and he began to beat his chest and weep uncontrollably for days. Finally, he had the body cremated and carried the remains in a velvet bag.
One day the real son escaped from the robbers and found his way home. He knocked at the door of his father’s new cottage, late one night. “Who is there?” asked the anguished father. And the child answered, “It’s me, papa. Open the door, it’s your son.” In his agitated state of mind, the man thought someone was playing a trick on him and refused to let the boy in. Again, and again the father refused to let him in. Finally, the boy went away and they never saw each other again. The Buddha said, “Sometime, somewhere, you take something to be the truth. If you cling to it so much, when the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will not open it.”
To seek peace, you must let go of controlling yourself, controlling others, and you must be open to real truth. And then, gradually, you will find peace in your heart, the peace that passes understanding. You become a peaceful place for others to find peace, so that they can become peaceful and clear, as well. And it will multiply. The choice is yours.
So may it be. Amen.