Seeking Stillness

Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
December 5, 2004

Sometimes I think that my life is crazy busy—and then I talk to folks who have kids. And then I hear of all the sports practices, music lessons, tournaments, and many varied other activities. And many mature folks among us have lives full of meetings, projects, commitments, and other engagements. Our culture seems obsessed with cramming in more and more activities, perhaps because there are so incredibly many available. There’s an unspoken trend that unless you’re doing a superhuman amount of things in life then you’re not living a full life. I can’t but wonder whether some of us need to step off the merry-go-round of unnecessary activities and cultivate more stillness in our days. As we rush headlong into the Holidays, this is an especially good time to pause and consider how cultivating stillness is at the heart of the spiritual life.

I’d like to share with you three different people. The first is a woman I met. I was madly focusing on several tasks this past week that I don’t typically have on my plate when a homeless woman came in to talk with me. If such visitors are there to talk, not simply to ask for money, it is part of my ministry to provide a listening ear. So here I am in the midst of multi-tasking on a chilly morning, and the thought went through my head to tell this bedraggled, bundled-up woman that I didn’t have time.  I held my tongue. Just as I had talked with the staff a couple weeks earlier, a part of our job is to live out the values we hold. A core value for me is to provide hospitality for those who seek it. If someone expresses the longing to talk, I do whatever I can to make room in my schedule, even on moment’s notice. I must acknowledge that here at Unity Temple we don’t get nearly as many people dropping in unannounced as other congregations, primarily because our building doesn’t look like a church!

When I sat down to talk with this woman of fifty or sixty years of age, I noticed that both her hands and lips lacked color. I was glad that she was indoors. She told me how much she appreciates PADS, the homeless shelter, that they give her three meals a day and a comfortable place to sleep. The reason why she had come in is to express her dismay that the previous two nights PADS turned her away. She explained that when there are too many people, there is a lottery system. Everyone puts in their ID, and the last two nights, she was among the few people unable to enter. Fortunately someone showed her an unlocked cellar of an apartment building with a mattress, so she had a warm place for the night.

I was struck by how clear and sincere she was. She didn’t ask for money. Instead she expressed gratitude for the opportunity to share what she’s been going through. She told me that she’s been homeless since February and about some of the people she has met. She told me that she has received some very nice meals, and that she often shares food she receives with others. Rarely do I get such a clear glimpse of what its like to be homeless from someone so gracious and expressive. I asked her if I could share her story with others and she gladly assented. During the conversation, I realized that she provided me with the opportunity to become still. In an especially hectic week, it did me good to have someone share with me a piece of their longing and struggle. It helped me remember my own priorities.

The second woman I want to tell you about is Maura O'Halloran. Maura was the daughter of an American mother and an Irish father. She was born in Boston in 1955 and raised in Ireland from age 4 and where she went to convent schools and Trinity College in Dublin. She excelled in school and was drawn to social work with drug addicts and the very poor in Dublin. Perhaps she was inspired by the famous woman who had long previously attended her high school, Mother Theresa. After college she moved to Boston and worked as a waitress. When she was twenty-four years old, she decided to travel to Japan to study Buddhism. O'Halloran was the first foreigner and the first woman ever admitted to Toshoji Temple, a strict Zen monastery. She agreed to the rigorous teaching regimen of her teacher—one thousand days of rigors and hardships. When she finished, her teacher proclaimed that she was truly enlightened, quicker than any other monk he had known. She was twenty-seven years old when she received the transmission of Buddhist teaching and identified as an advanced teacher, a Buddha. She left the Temple to return to Ireland to visit family. On the way to the airport, she was at the front of a very crowded bus that was in a horrible accident. Maura O'Halloran was killed.

Her mother received the journals that she wrote during her trip, including the one thousand days of rigorous practice at Toshoji Temple. Her writings published with the title Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind. The journal entries are one of the finest expressions, not descriptions, but expressions of Buddhism I have ever read. She is writing simply for herself. She wrote on one occasion: “I’d be embarrassed to tell anyone, it sounds so wishy-washy, but now I have maybe 50 or 60 years (who knows?) of time, of a life, open, blank, ready to offer. I want to live it for other people. What else is there to do with it? Not that I expect to change the world or even a blade of grass but it’s as if to give myself is all I can do, as the flowers have no choice but to blossom.” She also wrote, “Suddenly I understood that we must take care of things just because they exist.”

Through her meditation practice she reached a stillness that provided profound clarity. In her journal, she wrote, “I’m twenty-six and I feel as if I’ve lived my life. Strange sensation, almost as if I’m close to death. Any desires, ambitions, hopes I may have had have either been fulfilled or spontaneously dissipated. I’m totally content. Of course I want to get deeper, see clearer, but even if I could only have this paltry, shallow awakening, I’d be quite satisfied…. For myself, there is nothing else to strive after, nothing more to make my life worthwhile or to justify it. … So I must go deeper and deeper and work hard, no longer for me, but for everyone I can help.” These words are from an Irish-American bodhisattva, one who is now celebrated in rural Japan as a saint.

The third woman I want to tell you about is Vera Bohle. She was born in 1969 and is from Germany. Her vocation is clearing landmines. After completing her studies at Cologne University, she worked as a TV journalist for a German station, covering horrific situations that she felt powerless to do anything about. At age 29, she decided to become a de-miner. In the last five years, she has cleared landmines in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

When asked by a journalist of Ode Magazine why she was so eager to get involved, she responded, “I suspect it’s nothing more than my attempt to play a positive, active role so I don’t feel like I’m simply a passive victim. I am also eager to represent Germany in the process of peace and reconstruction, given that my country was the source of a great deal of destruction over the past century. My mother experienced the horrors of World War II as a child. She was evacuated and lost her home twice during the bombings, and her father never returned home from the war. But from the moment I felt drawn to this work, I had no desire to analyze my choice. Insight leads to nothing if it doesn’t affect your behavior.”

She later said, “I keep asking myself why I’m doing this work. The risk of an accident is high, conditions in post-war countries are miserable, and opportunities to do something are limited. Every day I see ruins and misery. Women have little say, because here power comes from the barrel of a gun. What am I doing here? I kept asking myself that again and again until I reached the point of simply experiencing it: I do this work and that is all there is to it. Very simple.”

…

Sometimes we are drawn to certain things for reasons even we don’t understand. There is a clarity that comes with surrendering to something beyond our own will, or to put it differently, cultivating stillness provides a vehicle in which to engage life more genuinely by opening to ever wider possibility. I am so taken with Vera Bohle, Maura O'Halloran, and my recent encounter with the homeless woman. I bring their stories together because they each engage stillness in different ways. The homeless woman who seemingly intruded into my busy schedule provided an opportunity for me to listen and to offer some hospitality and kindness. She invited me to be still with her heart-felt sharing. During this encounter, my own priorities were strengthened.

Vera Bohle had an exciting career in international television journalism. She could have simply numbed herself against all that she was seeing, but instead, she answered to inner compulsion to respond to what she witnessed. Her work requires constant vigilance. When she describes defusing a landmine, she says that her greatest enemy is routine, that instead she must be fully present to what she is doing, and this takes a stillness on the inside so that she is actively aware. Indira Gandhi said: “You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.”

The Buddhists have a concept of inner stillness amidst activity. It is often called skillful means. Maura O'Halloran never spoke of this concept but her life and words taught it. She understood Buddhism as a philosophy of practice, a practice of cultivating stillness in one’s mind and life to make more room in one’s life for compassion and mindfulness. Our world needs more people who move through it with skillful means.

Without making space in one’s life for stillness, we are apt to simply run raggedly throughout our lives in a meaningless frenzy. Thomas Merton, a great late Catholic mystic, says, “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

If there is anything I learn time and again throughout my life, it is this: un-centered frenzy destroys my inner capacity for peace and joy. To be an effective or authentic human being, I require space for stillness. Only with nourishing the root of inner wisdom do endeavors become fruitful. This is why in the midst of an extremely hectic day the thirty minutes I took to be still and talk with a homeless woman blessed me perhaps more than it did her.

Sometimes opportunities walk into our lives unannounced, but it behooves us to intentionally set the time aside to be still. That’s what Maura O'Halloran did, for one thousand days. I truly believe she would have led a life similar to Mother Theresa or Thich Nhat Hanh if her life wasn’t cut tragically short.

Sometimes we are drawn to certain things for reasons even we don’t understand. As Ode Magazine notes, Vera Bohle could’ve made a difference in the world by volunteering to build schools or drill wells. Yet she chose something that anyone could do but almost no one does. She isn’t a saint, and she isn’t a reckless thrill seeker. She certainly isn’t naďve given all she has witnessed, and she is fully aware of the dangers of her work. Yet her clarity speaks of a stillness of intention.

Bohle says that some days they defuse only a few square yards. It is slow, tedious work, with great danger. If 50 grenades are defused in a day, there are still an estimated ten million out there in the world. She says, “What I do is a drop in the bucket, but does this realization mean you shouldn’t do it?” Maura O'Halloran comes to a similar conclusion, that the ultimate spiritual goal isn’t to change the world or even a blade of grass but instead to give of oneself to attend to the root of suffering—and thereby the world may be changed.

Sometimes someone comes in to talk with me and shares how they feel a part of them is dead, that they have lost sight of their passion, that they sense their own lives have withered and they are not sure they can get back the joy and the wonder they had when they were younger. They often speak so beautifully of what their heart longs for without even recognizing it. In such conversations, I can’t keep tears from welling up. It is a holy moment when someone stops and articulates a deep, deep longing.

One reason why people avoid stillness is because there may be sorrow to reckon with. At times it is impossible to be still without grief bubbling forth. That’s why this time of year can be so difficult: the darkness invites stillness and the deepening of faith. Theologian Frederick Buechner puts it this way:

Faith could be called a kind of whistling in the dark … a way of paying attention. Page by page, chapter by chapter, the story unfolds. Day by day, year by year, your own story unfolds—your life story. Things happen. People come and people go. The scene shifts. Time runs by. Time runs out. Maybe it’s all utterly meaningless. Maybe it’s all unutterably meaningful. The unexpected sound of your name on somebody’s lips. The good dream. The strange coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life. Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues.

For those of us whose lives are so unutterably filled with activity, perhaps the question to ask is not, “What are you running to?” but “What are you running from?” When you seek stillness and insights emerge, may these insights take root in your own life.

Blessed be. Amen.

 

© Copyright 2004 Alan C. Taylor, All Rights Reserved.