State of the Church

I’m teaching a class now, “Crafting the Sermon Within You” on Tuesday nights -- you’re welcome to join us. Last Tuesday, we were learning about types of sermons. There’s the ‘no no no yes’ form where you reject a number of alternatives, the ‘oops ugh aha whee yeah’ form [1] where you lead the listener on a journey down into a problem and then out again, the ‘plot and moves’ form [2] where ideas just line up as stories and points leading hopefully to a conclusion. I use that form a lot. Then there’s the traditional deductive form where you announce your thesis, make some supporting points, then summarize in a conclusion. Matt Latimer, one of George W. Bush’s speechwriters, tells us in his book Speech-less, that the former president insisted his speeches use this introduction, three points, and conclusion form, which is why his speeches were usually boring.[3]

So allow me to be boring today -- and give you my conclusion, about the state of the church, first. I think the state of the church is pretty darn good. I think this church is doing better than a great many other Unitarian Universalist churches. For one thing, we’ve grown in numbers, from about 105 members last year, to 122 now, which bucks a declining trend in the Unitarian Universalist denomination at large. Our finances are in good shape, primarily because our gas bill has declined significantly this year. Yes, it’s true that some of that savings is because we’ve had the heat shut off for the remodel, but most of that decline is actually due to competitive gas pricing in this region.

On the qualitative side, I think the church is doing splendidly, too. Now I need to admit I’m a little weak at qualitative evaluation and judgment. I tend to see things through rose-colored glasses, maybe a bit too optimistically. But I’d like to support this conclusion by appealing to our mission statement.

I think the mission statement is the guide-star for this church, or any church, for that matter. UUYO’s mission statement is a good one. Let’s read it together, it’s on the back of your order of service:

"Our Mission is to build a diverse and transformative spiritual community, help people live lives of wholeness, and promote justice, peace, and religious freedom."
Let’s take these three phrases as our three talking points, and see how we are doing and where we need to go on each of them.

The first phrase is “to build a diverse and transformative religious community.” Certainly we are becoming more diverse, and that is exciting. It is also challenging for we are not all alike: we come from different backgrounds, jobs, ethnicities, classes, and faith traditions. But we transform ourselves by living with and loving that diversity.

I think of our reading from Ibn Arabi, a medieval Spanish Sufi mystic and philosopher. His words talk of a kind of spiritual transformation:

"There was a time I would reject those
who were not of my faith...
But now my heart has grown capable
of taking on all forms.
My religion is love.

And he tells us, “whichever path love takes, is the path of my faith".

I see this here! I see people changing in a way that moves from skepticism and rejection, to listening, to finding and following the path of optimism and love. We realize that this is a journey that love’s caravan takes, and we are on that journey. It is a transformative journey that brings us into greater understanding and compassion for one another.

So how is this manifesting? I’m really impressed at the energy level in the congregation. People love to be here. You know it when you come in: people are talking, connecting, reconnecting. There is hope in the air, new possibility, opportunity. We’re being more intentional in how we welcome and include visitors and newcomers, which ranges from things like Marcia Malmer’s new nametag board to improved contact with newcomers by Betsy Johnquest and others. All of us are -- or can be-- part of this transformation.

The second part of our mission statement is “help people live lives of wholeness”.
I struggled when I chose the opening hymn this morning, or rather, when it chose us. It is a favorite hymn of mine, and brings back fond memories of my early days, just joining a UU church. But it suggests something that I’m not sure I completely agree with today. ‘May nothing evil cross this door’ implies that evil, ill fortune, hatred and raucous shout are always out there, outside us. That all we need to do is create a place that is free of all these things, and every casual corner will become a shrine.
If we don’t acknowledge the possibility that these negative things, these shadows are also within us, then we fail to do the work to integrate them, to convert them into something useful, to create wholeness. We need to confront the possibility that we all slip, that we all are unskillful at times, and we address this by providing ways that we can recover gracefully when we do slip. We need to be ready to counter thoughtless but unkind remarks, and to support those who need help responding or reframing what they mean. We need to practice ways of directly addressing people who upset us, rather than complaining about them to others.

The good news is I see this happening all the time. I see people with vastly different working styles coming together on projects, taking the time to smooth out the difficult parts in their work. I see people standing up for others, often for new people, when thoughtless or categorizing comments are made. I see covenants, agreements on how we want to interact and be with each other, being used in groups and meetings.  I see people making room for others, realizing that while the contributions of some may appear to be the Squirrel’s pebbles, and not the Monkeys’ stones, those contributions are still needed and valued.[4]
I’m very gratified that so many people have explored their own growth and wholeness through some of the adult education programs we’ve been able to offer. The eight-week Building Your Own Theology class was fully subscribed, and attendance was typically twelve people -- which is phenomenal. Our Adult Forums have been a solid part of our life together here this year, organized primarily by Lowell Satre. I’m hoping that in the future other classes and ongoing programs will be created by energetic and passionate participants here at UUYO.

At the same time, I hope we can devote more energy to helping our young people live lives of wholeness through our Religious Education program. First a shout-out to Laura Goist, who has provided needed stability and leadership to our RE program for nearly a decade as its director. She is stepping down at the end of this church year and we are searching for a new Director for our RE program in the next few weeks. We will need to be very mindful in supporting and growing our RE program and supporting its new leadership, since we will have both a new Director and a new RE committee. Let’s remember that children and youth are an important part of our diversity. They provide a sense of continuity to our movement that those of us who come out of other faiths may not bring, and they will carry that into our future.

Finally, our mission statement calls us to “promote justice, peace and religious freedom”. I’m sure many of us would consider this third area as our greatest strength, for this is where we are out in the world.

Our Board of Trustees has been reading Mike Durall’s book The Almost Church Revisited. I have some extra copies for those who’d like to read it. One of the points that has energized the board is the idea of a ‘public’ versus a ‘private’ church [5]. A public church is out in the world, doing things. It has a reputation for serving the community and seeking change. It spends a significant part of its resources including money outside of itself.

I hope that our All Church Social Justice Project will be the start of a more organized and clearer public face for UUYO. Special thanks to Susie Beiersdorfer and Steve Oravecz for beginning the process of creating this project. We are at the place in the process where you can suggest project ideas and areas. If you are interested, talk to me or to Steve.

But whatever project we choose to do, and that choice will be made next year, remember that there is a place for you. Remember these words from Howard Thurman: “Do not ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

What the world needs-- what we in this church need -- is for you to come alive. Whether coming alive means working on an All Church project, or working in a social justice area around your own passion… Whether coming alive is ushering or planting hostas or leading a group…   Whether coming alive just being part of the church community by taking classes, coming to worship, or forum… We need you to come alive, by being with us.

So here’s the conclusion. I think we’re doing great. But I also am aware that our work continues, and that we will continue to work on some of our current goals and create new goals as we begin our next church year in September.

I remember visiting a small church in Houston many years ago. They had just bought a building and were very proud. It was strip-mall space that had formerly been a gym and aerobics studio. The sanctuary still had mirrors on one wall, which they covered with paper and cloth on Sunday mornings. I was impressed with this high-energy bunch and struck up a conversation with the finance person at coffee hour. We compared notes, for I was the finance chair at a much larger church. She said, “Do you still have to run stewardship campaigns, even at your size?” I said, “Yes, and it requires quite a bit of organization with all the people involved.” She said, “So it doesn’t get easier, then?” She seemed crestfallen, that growth wouldn’t automatically solve their financial problems.

We don’t grow to make things easier. We grow because we are responding to a need in our community for liberal religion. We grow because people need us, and they come, and they find a spiritual home with us. Our growth is a byproduct of doing good work, of responding to our mission, and serving people that we know and people that we don’t know yet -- people who may not have even heard of us, but who yearn for what we have to offer.

Marge Piercy [6] reminds us that connections sometimes grow underground, that more than half a tree is in the soil, that we too, make connections slowly. The work is done in the dark, or in the background, it is not obvious. What looks like a thicket and bramble is interconnected with our equivalent of runs and burrows and lairs. Of course part of transformation is coming to know, and helping others know that the wilderness of this world is full of what we need, that we need only keep reaching out and keep bringing in. 

She reminds us that after all the work, digging, planting, tending and growth, the harvest does come. And of course, after the harvest, there will be another season, and another year, and more work and more harvest. Many of you know this, you who’ve been here two or three or four decades, you know this cycle well. You, we, all of us show up for the planting, and the tending, and the harvest. We acknowledge the fruits of our work here, we are grateful for its transformative power, and in its season we look forward to a fruitful harvest.

1 Eugene Pier, The Homiletical Plot, 2001.
2 Ronald Allen, Patterns of Preaching, 1998, p. 87-89.
3 Latimer, Speech-less: Tales of a White-house Survivor, 2009, p. 182.
4 “How Squirrel Got It’s Stripes” (used as Story for All Ages) http://www.healingstory.org/crisis/squirrel/how_squirrel_got_stripes.html
5 Michael Durall, The Almost Church Revisited, 2009, p. 3.
6 Marge Piercy, “Connections Are Made Slowly”, SLT #568

Mother’s Day for Peace

My mother was not a sentimental woman, so Mother’s Day was not a big deal in our house.  As a family, we probably celebrated Mother’s Day more after she passed away, as a day to visit the place where her ashes were scattered and to remember her, than we ever did when she was alive.

I think my mother objected to the Mother’s Day focus on motherhood as the primary identity for a woman. She  she found that identity limiting and life-denying. She was one of those closet feminists of the 60s and 70s, active in many related organizations like League of Women Voters and Planned Parenthood, reluctantly active in the Methodist Church, and then only to run the food pantry and occasionally to stir up trouble in their version of Adult Forum. Toward the end of her life, she admitted to me that if she had her druthers, she would have joined the Unitarian Church.

So Mother’s Day was a perfunctory holiday in my house, growing up. I think my mother would have been far happier with Mother’s Day if she’d known a bit about the real history of the day. If she had been aware of that history, she would have known a kindred spirit, another strong woman, an icon, a predecessor in women’s rights and justice work. This woman was Julia Ward Howe, the founder of the original Mother’s Day holiday, then called Mother’s Day for Peace.

Julia Ward Howe was born in New York in 1819, to a wealthy banker. She had family in Boston, and through them encountered Unitarianism, reading and hearing and meeting William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller. She married Samuel Howe, who worked as an educator of children with multiple handicaps. She switched from the Episcopal religion of her youth to Unitarianism, attending Theodore Parker’s church, which was the nexus of the radical anti-slavery movement.

She began a career as a writer, and published anonymously, for her work was opposed by her husband. Marriage troubles continued. They disagreed about attending Theodore Parker’s church, which Samuel considered too informal -- he complained that people read newspapers during the service, and some got up and left during the sermon[1] -- so the family instead began to attend Rev. James Freeman Clarke’s Church of the Disciples. Clarke, a Unitarian minister, became a close friend of the Howes.

As our closing hymn, we’ll sing Battle Hymn of the Republic, written by Julia Ward Howe. This hymn was included in the 30’s era Unitarian hymnal “Hymns of the Spirit.” 

This hymn was published in the Atlantic Magazine in 1862, and increased Julia Ward Howe’s prominence as a writer and speaker, so it’s important to this story. She tells about writing this hymn in her autobiography.

We were invited, one day, to attend a review of troops at some distance from the town. My dear minister was in the carriage with me, as were several other friends. To beguile the rather tedious drive, we sang from time to time snatches of the army songs so popular at that time, concluding, I think, with
"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground;
His soul is marching on."
The soldiers seemed to like this, and answered back, "Good for you!" Mr. Clarke said, "Mrs. Howe, why do you not write some good words for that stirring tune ?" ...

I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, " I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them." So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper. I had learned to do this when, on previous occasions, attacks of versification had visited me in the night, and I feared to have recourse to a light lest I should wake the baby, who slept near me. I was always obliged to decipher my scrawl before another night should intervene, as it was only legible while the matter was fresh in my mind. At this time, having completed my writing, I returned to bed and fell asleep, saying to myself, "I like this better than most things that I have written."[2]

Her story is just another reminder that the middle of the night is good for more than merely sleeping!

We also heard earlier Julia Ward Howe’s own reflection on her work creating the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Howe, with her husband and many other Unitarians, was involved in the Sanitary Commission, the predecessor to the Red Cross, so they were well acquainted with the horrors of the Civil War. So for Howe to see another war developing in Europe, in countries she had visited and loved, pushed her to agitate in opposition to that war, and to all war. She went to work, writing to prominent women around the world, even traveling to Europe, to promote her peace crusade. She initiated a Mother’s Peace Day observance the second Sunday in June, which was held for a number of years.

This Mother’s Day for Peace died out, but the idea of a Mother’s Day was resurrected by Anna Jarvis in West Virginia in 1907 as a memorial day for women. This gradually spread and became a national holiday in 1914.[3]

After the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe became increasingly involved in the work for women’s suffrage and larger issues of women’s rights. She noted in her autobiography, “During the first two thirds of my life I looked to the masculine ideal of character as the only true one. ... In an unexpected hour a new light came to me, showing me a world of thought and of character quite beyond the limits within which I had hitherto been content to abide. The new domain now made clear to me was that of true womanhood, -- woman no longer in her ancillary relation to her opposite, man, but in her direct relation to the divine plan and purpose, as a free agent, fully sharing with man every human right and every human responsibility. This discovery was like the addition of a new continent to the map of the world, or of a new testament to the old ordinances.”[4] Howe cofounded the New England Woman’s Club, and was founder or president of several suffrage organizations, and founded a suffrage newspaper, the “Woman’s Journal.”[5] 

As Howe gained greater prominence as a writer, she began to speak publicly, and even preached on occasion, in churches of various denominations when she traveled. She received much encouragement in this work from her minister, James Freeman Clarke.

At a Unitarian denominational meeting in 1875, she organized a gathering of women ministers, which she held at her home church, the Church of the Disciples. This became an ongoing organization, the Women’s Ministerial Conference.[6] Realize that women in the pulpit were a relatively new phenomenon in this era, so these conventions were an innovation.

Howe’s minister, James Freeman Clarke coined a phrase that, good or bad, became a kind of slogan for Unitarianism. This phrase, “the progress of mankind onward and upward forever”, was the last of Clarke’s “Five Points of a New Theology”[7], and it became an epithet for the kind of rosy optimism that our tradition sometimes still struggles with. I don’t want to suggest that progress toward a better world is not possible, but I think most of us would agree that it is not steady and certain,  and that the cost of progress is occasional regress.

Howe did not live to see the fruits of her work for suffrage and women’s rights -- she died a full decade before the Nineteenth Amendment was passed and ratified. In her autobiography, she laments the loss of energy and vitality in the women’s movement as younger women failed to take up the cause, and as she put it, “Death had done his usual work on our number.”[8]

The Mother’s Day for Peace project also faltered, in part because so many potential women supporters became focused on the suffrage movement.

Howe’s relationship with her husband had always been strained, because of his lack of respect for her talents. Toward the end of his life, he softened his attitude toward her work and apologized for his transgressions, and the marriage became more harmonious.

Unfortunately, Howe’s finances, never fully in her control, were mismanaged by her husband until his death and then by a cousin, to the point that she had to go on the lecture circuit to make ends meet.

Howe died in 1910. Her eulogy was given by Samuel Atkins Eliot II, then the president of the American Unitarian Association.[9]  There is a sad irony here. Eliot is now seen as a misogynist, and one consequence of his leadership was that women were driven out of the Unitarian ministry. As one UUA description put it: “Eliot's ... gender discrimination effectively weeded out Unitarian women ministers for the next 50 years.”[10]

I feel a great personal sympathy for Howe’s story, for there are a few parallels in my own mother’s far more ordinary life. My mother was trained as a nurse, but after she married she was discouraged from working outside of the home, in an era when many women found careers and life choices narrowed. She found some outlets in church work and school, but even these were limited. Finances were a source of friction.

I’m sure her story was repeated by many women in her era.  I think my mother could easily have quoted the poet and said,

“ever since I was small like you
I wanted to be myself -- and for a woman that's hard”[11]

I think Julia Ward Howe could have said that too.

I think all of us as woman or as man or claiming both or neither identities, come to realize that progress in our lives is not onward and upward forever. Rather, as Zamora tells us,

Often I lose my way
and my life has been a painful crossing
navigating reefs, in and out of storms,
refusing to listen to the ghostly sirens
who invite me into the past,
neither compass nor binnacle to show me the way.[12]

Can we find solace in this crossing, even as we suffer to be driven from our charted course again and again? Perhaps we can, whether with our own children or with the children of those we love:

go forward, holding to the hope
of some distant port
where you, my children -- I'm sure --
will pull in one day
after I've been lost at sea.[13]

And so may it be --
May each of us abide,
in brief living instantiation,
part of that long line of creation,
mother to child, and father too,
that carries us all,
in fits and starts,
through storms and torments,
gradually, generation by generation,
onward and upward, in hopeful progress, 
toward that long future destination,
that lives only in our dreams.

Notes:
1 Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, 1899, p. 244.
2 ibid., p. 273-275.
3 http://womenshistory.about.com/od/howejuliaward/a/julia_ward_howe_4_mothers_day.htm
4 Reminiscences, p. 372-373.
5 http://www.juliawardhowe.org/timeline.htm
6 http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/marybillings.html
7 http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/jamesfreemanclarke.html
8 Reminiscences, p. 393.
9 http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Julia_Ward_Howe
10 http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/samuelatkinseliotii.html
11 Daisy Zamora, “Mother's Day”
12 ibid.
13 ibid.

Everyday Meditation

So there’s an old joke that goes:

Two men meet on the street.
One asks the other: "Hi, how are you?"
The other one replies: "I'm fine, thanks."
"And how's your son? Is he still unemployed?"
"Yes, he is. But he is meditating now."
"Meditating? What's that?"
"I don't know. But it's better than sitting around and doing nothing!"

I’m pretty good at sitting around doing nothing, but meditation is something else entirely. I've attempted to practice meditation since college. My early attempts were  unsuccessful -- they were a lot like what Philip Simmons described. Go find a beautiful or meaningful spot and then expect something miraculous to happen. I was always disappointed.  I don’t believe I am the only one who has had this experience with meditation.

But about ten years ago, I found myself in a stressful, stagnant job situation, with a long and painful commute. At a church retreat, I encountered meditation again.  I learned a technique, and began a practice, and have meditated most every morning since then. I'll talk about this technique, called passage meditation, later on.

My key learning is not that Passage Meditation is the right technique for everyone.  A few years ago, that is what I might have told you. My key learning is that I now accept the ordinariness of meditation.  If I am in an ordinary spot, like my chair at home, I close my eyes and meditate for my half hour in the morning, and it is ordinary. If I'm in a beautiful spot -- like last week on the balcony of my brother's home in Puerto Rico, looking off over the hills, and the city, toward the sea, listening to the birds and enjoying the warmth of the sunrise, for example -- I close my eyes, and meditate, and it is ordinary.

What I've learned in my practice is to not seek perfection. I meditate not to seek some kind of blissful experience or nirvana, but for a better day, everyday.  I try to seek my own version of what the Buddha called the 'middle way'. To the Buddha, the middle way was the path between living a life devoted to sensory pleasures, and the life of ascetic denial. According to the tradition, Buddha had left his position of privilege and luxury as a prince to seek spiritual understanding as an ascetic. He nearly starved to death, and came to realize that the ascetic life is no solution either. Buddha's awakening is in part a path of moderation between self-indulgence and denial.

So, in my own practice, the middle way means that I remain faithful to the practice. I try to maintain my half hour of meditation every morning, even when I don't feel motivated to do it. I do slip, and sometimes I have an immediate deadline and meditation time is impossible. But I also do not practice at extreme levels. I do not get up at 3:30 in the morning to sit for 4 hours as one friend described doing for many years. I sit comfortably upright in a chair, knowing full well my body is not able to contort into the full lotus position illustrated on the cover of the Order of Service.  Most importantly: I do not beat myself up when things don't go quite right and my mind does wander. Which it does. Together now, let’s take a closer look at the wandering monkey-mind.

If you’re willing, I'd like to try a little experiment with you. Let’s start by putting your feet flat on the floor. Hands comfortably in your lap. Spine straight. Then close your eyes.  For the next minute, all you have to do is silently repeat your own name. Just that. Very simple! Just repeat your name over and over again.  I’ll sound this bowl to tell you when the minute is up.

ONE MINUTE - SOUND BOWL
So tell us, how many of you were able to repeat your name without interruption for the entire minute?  Show of hands. How many had a few other stray thoughts wandering into your consciousness? How many of you had nothing BUT stray thoughts playing through your mind? You're with me!
Does this show you something of the nature of the mind? The mind wanders here, wanders there, aimlessly and without much logic. It’s like an untrained puppy that’s chasing a butterfly here, a ball over there, and oh look there’s a cat with a tail like mine, I think I’ll just check that out too.   But often these thoughts are stressful – they are about old wounds, embarrassments, things we should have done, or things we need to do, worries about the days to come.

We know that using meditation and related spiritual practices can bring on physiological changes, such as lowering blood pressure and heart rate. More recent studies have shown that it reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol.[1]

A few years ago, Richard Davidson at the University of Madison found that the left prefrontal lobes of Buddhist meditators are more active than those who don’t practice.[2] Now the left prefrontal lobe is associated with positive emotions, such as hope and love for one another. What’s fascinating to me is that the research showed that this heightened activity in the left prefrontal lobe went on all the time, not just when these people were meditating.

One study showed that meditation actually increased the size of the prefrontal cortex and related areas. The researcher, Sara Lazar, at Massachusetts General Hospital, points out "The growth of the cortex is not due to the growth of new neurons, but results from wider blood vessels, more supporting structures such as glia and astrocytes, and increased branching and connections."[3] It is further evidence that meditators, in Lazar’s words, “aren’t just sitting there doing nothing.”

So there is increasing scientific evidence that meditation is good for you and good for your brain. But when I started, I didn't have this evidence to motivate me. I was motivated by the simple awareness that it was good for my mind. I noticed that after a few weeks of practice, I was becoming less stressed out, more relaxed. More importantly, other people close to me began to notice this too. People began to comment that I seemed to have a calm presence, and a steady, joyful nature.

So, getting back to our experiments with meditation earlier-- if the mind wanders all over the place, how do we use meditation to cause it to stop? I think the reality is that most of us can't really get the mind to stop, for more than a few seconds at a time. We want to simply slow it down, to reduce the torrent of thoughts to a reasonable flow, then maybe to a trickle.

What we have to be careful about  though, is  getting annoyed with ourselves when thoughts come up. Then we'll constantly be annoyed and we'll get frustrated with meditation and we’ll give it up. Believe me, I've been there, and gave it up many times in my younger years.

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche offers a more joyful and relaxed approach to meditation, which I offer you today. He calls this objectless attention meditation, and we'll try a bit of it here. He suggests we simply rest our minds. That's his term, we rest our minds. So let's try a short, simple meditation, resting our minds. Please start by putting your feet flat on the floor. Hands comfortably in your lap. Spine straight. Then close or soften your eyes.
Now just rest your mind: "as though you've just finished a long day of productive work. Just let go and relax. You don't have to block whatever thoughts, emotions, or sensations arise, but neither do you have to follow them. Just rest in the open present, simply allowing whatever happens to occur. If thoughts or emotions come up, just allow yourself to be aware of them…. This doesn't mean letting your mind wander aimlessly among fantasies, memories or daydreams. There's still some presence of mind that may be loosely described as a center of awareness. You may not be fixating on anything in particular, but you're still aware, still present to what's happening in the here and now."4 We'll continue for another minute, just resting the mind, noticing but not following thoughts and emotions.
ONE MINUTE - SOUND BOWL

So how was that? Did you seem to have fewer thoughts arise than with the previous exercise? Good! More? Also good!
Sometimes objectless meditation is too much of nothing, and we need to offer our minds something simple to hold on to. This is why many meditation techniques have us focus on breathing, or counting, or resting our eyes on an object. Let's try a meditation on something that's always around us: lets meditate for a couple of minutes on the sounds in the room. Please start by putting your feet flat on the floor. Hands comfortably in your lap. Spine straight. Then close or soften your eyes.

SOUND BOWL
Now just allow yourself to focus on sounds that are around you. Your breath. Your heartbeat. The street sounds. You don't need to identify, or analyze, these sounds. Just be aware. As your mind wanders, just come back to the sounds. If you mind rests in objectless attention for a few seconds, that's OK too. We'll continue with the sounds for a couple more minutes.
TWO MINUTES - SOUND BOWL

I've come to realize that having both objectless and a variety of object attention meditations in our spiritual practices toolkit is good: we can choose different meditations as our situation demands.  I've recently been adding these techniques to my meditation practice for a deeper experience.

My primary meditation technique is called Passage Meditation[5]. It was taught by Eknath Easwaran, a Fulbright Scholar in literature at Berkeley. In this meditation technique, we focus on reciting, slowly and silently, a passage of sacred text, such as Scripture or mystical poetry.

Now it is a little hard to teach this in our limited time, since we do not all have memorized texts in our minds. So lets do a variation. What I’d like to do is invite you into an attitude of meditation, and I will recite, at a slow meditative speed, a text by Lao Tzu, "The Best" So let’s again find our center, spine straight, and eyes softened or closed. Now, just listen as I recite these words. Don’t try to analyze them, just notice them going by.

The best, like water
Benefit all and do not compete.
They dwell in lowly spots,
that everyone else scorns.

Putting others before themselves
they find themselves in the foremost place
And come very near to the Tao.

In their dwelling, they love the earth;
In their heart, they love what is deep;
In their personal relationships, they love kindness;
In their words, they love truth;
In their world, they love peace.
in their personal affairs, they love what is right.
In action, they love choosing the right time.

It is because they do not compete with others
That they are beyond the reproach of the world.[6]

How was that? For some, it might be the perfect form of meditation, for others, it may not feel quite right. We each have our preferred tools in our kit.

There's an old analogy that I think is helpful in understanding what we try to accomplish in meditation. Our minds are like a cloudy sky. Most of the time we focus on the clouds, trying to pick out patterns, wondering if they are bringing rain, and so on. Meditation asks us to focus on the sky beyond the clouds.

Let me extend this analogy. My experience is that meditation lets us move beyond these low cumulonimbus clouds to find, not blue sky, but higher cirrus clouds. Maybe at times there is blue sky, and stars too, but the new clouds are with us too. They are different but they are still clouds. We move to a higher level of mindfulness, but we do not, at least most of us, reach that true awakening or nirvana that the mystics talk about. And that is OK. It should not be a near goal, that is, one we measure success or failure with. It is fine as a far goal, an aspiration, but if we want to make progress in meditation or in any spiritual practice, we need to accept the ordinary everydayness of our own abilities.

In his book Learning to Fall, Philip Simmons wrote about his mountain-top meditation experience, which was abruptly ended by an ant crawling on his back: "I had come for a miracle. What I got was an ant."[7]

He goes on: "Only now, years later, have I come to understand that the ant was the miracle." He says, "It was the ant that returned me to the world, that called me to another way of worship, the way of all things ordinary and small, the way of all that is imperfect, the way of stubbornness and error, the way of all that is transitory and comes to grief. The ant was my messenger, calling me back to a world that in truth I had never left."[8]

So my hope is that in all of our spiritual practices, we begin to find those ants, those annoyances and distractions, and like Simmons, begin to see them for what they are, messengers, calling us back to our place in the world.





Notes:
1 Meditation really does reduce stress, New Scientist Magazine, 13 October 2007
2  The Colour of Happiness, New Scientist Magazine  24 May 2003
3 Meditation builds up the brain, New Scientist Magazine, 15 November 2005
4 Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living, p. 139.
5 see http://www.easwaran.org/page/96
6 Eknath Easwaran, God Makes the Rivers to Flow, 2003, p. 141.  
7 Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall, 2000, p. 35.
8 ibid. p. 35-36.