Serendipity As part of my duties as a hospital chaplain, I say prayers with the pre-surgery patients who request it. One day, I was on the prep unit, visiting someone, when I saw another man being prepped. There was nothing special about him, but somehow I felt he would want a prayer. Still, he hadn’t asked for one, so I returned to my office. It wasn’t long before his name appeared in my inbasket for a visit. Returning to his bedside, I introduced myself. He was friendly, enough, but he didn’t seem to know why I was there. “Did you ask for a chaplain?” I asked him. He said he…
-
-
Life Stages and Spiritual Growth
Learning Right from Wrong Living with my two- and four-year-old grandchildren reminds me that, not only is childhood about discovering the shapes and movements and idiosyncrasies of the world, but also about learning to manage one’s inner experience and behavior. In the best of all possible worlds, we receive help labeling those strange sensations in our chest, the rumblings in our belly. Maybe they’re fear, sadness, rage, embarrassment, frustration. Once we give them a name, we can figure out what to do with them, how to express them in word or picture, in play and movement. Then there’s morality. We have to learn what our culture deems proper, what our…
-
Being that Leads to Doing
No Thing There’s a story told of a Bodhisattva who went to the mountains to meditate and teach. He had special powers, such as flying and hearing people’s thoughts. He built a Sangha, and five hundred holy men came to there. One day, when the chief follower brought half the community into the woods to gather food, the Bodhisattva lay down to die. As was the tradition, those who had remained behind sat with him, and as the end came near, they asked him, “What was the greatest thing you achieved in your lifetime?” “No thing,” their teacher said. Then he died. Nothing? Their teacher accomplished nothing? He must have…
-
Magic and Magical Thinking
When Magic Ruled In the days of myth, when the land was wild, and the animals talked, and the people knew the shape of time and the color of laughter, and the gods spoke from the grass and the clouds and the creek, magic filled the pores and cells of every creature and every stone, and the people and the cosmos were one. Magic was the thread. It connected the creation to the gods and embedded humans solidly into the natural world. As it wound its way through everything, magic made the universe whole. Sometimes it was huge and dangerous, for it could trap people as easily as save them.…
-
Gratitude Amidst Oneness
Our Instinct to Survive We humans are born with an instinct to survive. When our lives are threatened, we get anxious and fight back or seek assistance. That’s because we perceive ourselves to be separate individuals. Many of us understand ourselves to be unique and valuable, as well. Even if we believe in a life after death, we tend to want to preserve our individual, unique, and valuable self. A number of religions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Pantheism, teach that this belief in an individual self is an illusion. If so, it is an illusion that has a purpose. It keeps us going in the face of hardship and…
-
Enlightenment and the Bird who Sang
A Sad Bridegroom The story dates from Medieval days, a Jewish cautionary tale told for those who seek the secrets of the gods. It does more than warn us about the dangers of hubris, however. “The Bird That Sang to a Bridegroom” also suggests that once we see the true nature of the universe, we cannot remain on earth. Normal human relationships will be impossible, and God will send Death to bring us home. It is as if, once enlightened, we might feel a generalized love for all humanity, but our individual loves will fade. In this tale, a couple have just gotten married. The bridegroom escorts his new wife…
-
Acting Out of Anger and the Power of Love
Acting Out of Anger For some reason, I’ve never been able to stay angry very long. The energy dissipates, and the resentment fades away. I suspect it’s because my attention span isn’t long enough. I get bored with the same old story, so I’m not likely to keep bitterness alive by rehearsing the injustice of it all. Nor can I convince myself of my own infallibility, so feeling self-righteous and aggrieved doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. That doesn’t mean I don’t get angry, though. Indeed, as recently as fifteen years ago, I liked my aggressive outbursts. Being a shy person, I didn’t act out in public, but…
-
Promises We Make, Break, and Renew
The First Covenant Some scholars argue that the first covenant God made was with Adam. This was not a joint covenant, like most modern marriages in Western cultures. Before my husband and I got married, for instance, we collaborated on our vows, considering together the promises we would make. God, however, did not consult with Adam before deciding on the rules of the covenant. Instead, he decreed that Adam should till the garden and keep it, and that he — and Eve, once she was created — must not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Should they do so, they would die. As the story goes,…
-
The Love that Saves
Does Love Save? During a recent sharing circle, the question of love came up. What kind of love can save the world, we wondered, and how we might learn to love in that way? Saving the world is a sweet idea. I’ve written about how joy could save the world, so why not love? Yet to think we can save an entire planet is also absurd, at least if by saving we mean that one day there will be peace and cooperation everywhere, respect, and generosity, and a deep, abiding kindness. Such values exist in pockets in every country and in every village, but so does animosity. All these and more are part…