Rock and Sand and Sky-diving
suggested readings: Matthew 7:21-29 Deuteronomy 11:18-21
Both our scriptures tell us something about getting through life gracefully.
In the Deuteronomy reading, God says to put God’s words in our heart and soul, on our doorposts and gates, and teach them to our children. These images remind us of the demands of daily life: raising the kids, getting up and going to sleep, coming in and going out.
In Matthew, Jesus tells us that those who live by his words are like people who build their house on a rock so that it can withstand storms; those who don’t are like people who build their house on sand, which cannot support them. Jesus’ images remind us of the storms of life, the crises times.
Both of these readings address the questions:
How do we meet the unending demands of ordinary life?
In times of storm, where do we go for shelter (courage, wisdom)?
These are good questions to ponder as we begin the gift of a new year.
The answer:
immerse ourselves in, surround ourselves with, the way of God.
So, what is the way of God?
Of course, we could answer that in many ways.
What I’m choosing to talk about here is this:
We are binding God’s words on our forehead,
we are building our house on a rock,
when we practice non-resistance.
Non-resistance is a good Buddhist word.
We have the same wisdom in our tradition; our traditional way of saying
the same thing is surrender. Or you might hear folks talk about
surrendering to the will of God. Or, we could say the practice
of the present moment, living with what is, with the is-ness of life
as contemporary spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle would describe it.
And that reminds me of a favorite story; perhaps you know it.
A man was walking along a high point of land with the crashing ocean tide
200 feet below.
He got too close to the edge, and the ground gave way under his feet.
He fell, grabbed hold of some scruffy shrubbery, and hung on for dear life,
his whole body dangling over the edge.
He could feel the shrubbery beginning to loosen.
He cold hear the ocean crashing on the rocks below.
With fear and trembling, he called out,
“Is there anybody up there?”
Suddenly he heard a voice.
“This is the Lord speaking. You’ve got to trust. Let go of the shrubbery with
both hands. Just let go, and you will be safe.”
There was a long silence, and then,
“Is there anybody else up there?”
We don’t like letting go. We’re not so much into non-resistance.
We assume life is meant to be smooth.
False..1
Spiritual teacher Mark Nepo says “disappointment is defined by whether or not what happens is close to what we expect.” 2
We thought our marriage would last forever.
We thought only other people got cancer.
We thought we’d be rich by now.
We thought our kids would have turned out differently.
We thought life was going to be easier.
And so, we resist.
We fight. We get angry. We become bitter. We’re give in to cynicism. We
drug ourselves with alcohol or food or work or tv or the internet.
We resist.
We thought we’d be in control more than we are.
It begins to dawn on us that maybe being in control was never part of the
deal! 3
We resist.
The Hindus believe that one of God’s many manifestations is Ganesh.
You may have seen pictures of Ganesh, who has the body of a person but
the head of an elephant.
Ganesh is the provider and remover of obstacles.
Ganesh knows that the obstacles are necessary, are in fact, carriers of
grace.
Ganesh knows that we must go through obstacles if we are to learn the
difference between houses built on rocks and those built on sand.
So Ganesh creates obstacles, and eventually removes them.
In our tradition, we might just call that “God’s timing.” 4
Sometimes,
when we don’t resist what the present moments offers to us,
when we can’t avoid it and so finally,
after we have exhausted all other options,
we agree to face our obstacle, our storm, our pain, our crises,
we find a resourcefulness, a strength, a wisdom, we hadn’t believed in.
One writer tells of a cat he knew who was such a good hunter that
his owner put a bell around the cat’s neck, warning birds and
chipmunks.
It was a designed limitation.
Life seems to come with designed limitations, don’t you think?
But the cat only learned how to be more agile.
He learned how to move without ringing the bell at all!
What was at first a limitation became the circumstance that brought out
a resourcefulness, a strength, a wisdom that he didn’t know he had.5
The lesson life is trying to teach us, I suppose, is that
life is not about getting what we want, but accepting what we are given. 6
That’s how we build our house on a rock.
That does not mean that we stop working for change,
or that we give up in the face of some threat.
Not at all.
It is the serenity prayer,
changing what we can change, accepting what we can’t
and knowing the difference.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in a labor camp in Communist Russia,
wrote his book-length poem Prussian Nights.
He had no pen and paper and was not allowed to write.
But he would compose a few lines each day, carve it into his bar of soap, and recite them over and over.
At night in his daily shower he would recite them once more as the shower
washed the words away.
After years of captivity, he had written the entire book on a bar of soap, memorizing it as the soap vanished. 7(
When we stop resisting what is,
we find a resourcefulness, a strength, a wisdom that be hadn’t believed in.
This is not to say that you don’t sometimes feel the anguish of life,
and shake your fist at the sky.
Non-resistance may not be the first step.
The Jewish thinker Leon Wieseltier describes that,
both the shaking your fist
and the moving on to non-resistance.
“There are circumstances that must shatter you; and if you are not shattered, then you have not understood the circumstances. In such circumstances, it is a failure for your heart not to break. And it is pointless to put up a fight, for a fight will blind you to the opportunity that has been presented by your misfortune. Do you wish to persevere pridefully in the old life? Of course you do: the old life was a good life. But it is no longer available to you. It has been carried away, irreversibly. So there is only one thing to be done. Transformation must be met with transformation. Where there was the old life, let there be the new life. Do not persevere. Dignify the shock. Sink, so as to rise.” 8
The practice of the present moment.
Living in the now.
Surrendering to what is.
Surrendering to God.
The spiritual practice of non-resistance.
This is what it is to build your house on a rock.
In the end, only these things matter, the Buddha taught us:
How well did you love?
How deeply did you learn to let go? 9
And did not Jesus model that for us, on the cross?
When one of my daughters was in high school,
she decided she wanted to go sky-diving.
That was not my idea of a good time, but I gave my consent.
When the day came,
I stood on the ground, neck craned,
watching my precious baby fall out of an airplane.
It was not an experience I care to repeat.
However, the image stays with me.
I want to be the kind of person who sky-dives through life.
Sky-diving, like life, requires preparation, precaution, planning,
being responsible, yes, all that.
But then, when you’ve done all that, you just give yourself over,
you just surrender,
you just trust,
you just let go.
Non-resistance.
What I surrender to, of course, is grace.
That is not a guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen.
Bad things do happen; that goes with life on this planet.
But whatever happens,
in some way it will be ok.
And if I stop resisting,
I will discover the resources, the strength, the wisdom that, before,
I hadn’t believed in.
Non-resistance.
Building our house on a rock.
Putting God’s word on our forehead, teaching God’s way to our children,
Dear God, I surrender to your grace.
May it be so.
Credits:
- Holiness. Donald Nicholl. p. 132
- Facing the Lion, Being the Lion. Mark Nepo. p.101
- Meditations from the Mat. Rolf Gates.
- Nepo. p. 99
- Nepo. p.102
- Nepo. p.33
- Nepo. p.109
- quoted in Nepo p. 133
- eastern wisdom for western minds. Victor M. Parachin. p.146
©2009 Janice Jean Springer
|
