The Difference To Me
Sermon by John Sanders
January 2, 2005
I'm a very analytical guy, ... compulsively so. I have a lot of natural analytical ability. Years of studying mathematics honed these skills to a fine point. And a compulsive, internal need to understand why things happened drove me to use these skills to excess. I became Math Boy, who could rationally analyze any problem in any context. They say that if you've only got a hammer then everything looks like a nail. With my math skills as a hammer, absolutely everything was obviously a logical problem that would crumble under the onslaught of my analytical prowess! Absolutely everything ... except ... maybe ... for people.
Twenty-five years ago, Math Boy and I figured out that the world just didn't make any sense if there was an omniscient, omnipotent God up there. Ipso facto! Proof by contradiction! QED! Well, that's all settled, and I'm an atheist. Now what? Well, Math Boy, they don't have churches for atheists, so we're just going to have to sort out all those religious questions ourselves. All we gotta do is figure out the meaning of life! Maybe that'd be easier if we'd taken something besides math courses in college. But, what the heck. Surely this is just another one of those problems that will crumble under the onslaught of our analytical prowess.
Well, the crumbling didn't happen quite as fast as we planned. In fact ten years went by, and it hadn't happened at all. But Math Boy and I weren't discouraged. No sirree! Because about that time, we stumbled across this very church right here, where everybody has a right to believe what they want - even atheists - and they support everybody's individual search for truth. Hey, hey, hey! That meant Math Boy and I might be able to get some help sorting out some of these non-crumbledy questions we'd been mulling over. And indeed, we did get help with that. We learned that there are different kinds of atheists. There are secular humanists who believe there's rationality and will, but nothing else. (Math Boy liked that one!) And there are religious humanists who believe there must be something more than that. Well after all those people issues and religious questions that didn't seem to want to crumble under our invincible analytical acumen, I kinda had to side with those who believed there was "something more" than just rationality and will. All we had to do was figure out what that "something more" was. Well, son of a gun, if that wasn't another thing that refused to crumble under our analytical juggernaught. So Math Boy and I bided our time, mulling over all these non-crumbledy questions on the back burner, and started becoming more active in church life.
Fast forward another ten years. It's the summer of 2000. I've just been elected President of the congregation, and I've been sent off to summer camp to learn how to be a UU President. It's NELS, the NorthEast Leadership School, with a week of training on how to be a UU lay leader. I had an experience there that changed my life.
I was wondering if I'd just hurt someone that I'd been trying to help when a crack had opened in my internal armor. Out came all of the other times that I'd hurt someone that I was trying to help. The crack widened. The outpour turned into a flood, a flood of issues that I'd stuffed away because I hadn't wanted to face them. But I had to face them now because there was nowhere else to put them. I had to figure out what kind of man or monster I was. The mental storm that followed lasted the rest of the day and through a sleepless night. By dawn, all that was left was the core of my being, where nothing was more important than caring for one another.
Later that morning, we had a theology class that described all the different ways of thinking about god. One of these was pan-en-theism, which says that god exists deep within each of us and connects us all, a divine spark that makes us more than the sum of our parts. This was a concept of god that resonated with something I'd sensed in people most of my life - the beautiful illogic of the human spirit. It was the "something more" that I'd been searching for. Some combination of this realization and the previous night's stormy search for the core of my being led to a most remarkable experience.
I became an empty bowl, filling with love. Filling and filling and overflowing with an endless love for everyone and everything. And there was a pervasive sense of peace. I was at peace with everyone. I was at peace with myself, maybe for the first time in my life. I felt a quiet joy radiating out like warmth. Several people told me I was glowing. And there was a sense of wonder that such a thing could be happening. ("Oh Math Boy. I don't think we're in Kansas any more.") We were in some kind of wonderland filled with a sense of oneness, and peace, and love. I felt like Buddha.
It was an exquisitely beautiful way of being. But it couldn't last. There was no way to hold onto it - it wasn't the kind of thing you could hold on to - any more than you could hold on to a sunset as it dissolves into evening. And so it slowly faded over the next two or three weeks.
Maybe if I'd understood what was needed, I could have nourished it and kept it alive. But at the time, I had no idea why it happened. (Math Boy was going nuts trying to figure it out.) As I told different people about this experience, they offered quite a variety of explanations. - "That sounds like the ecstasy of the Sufi mystics. You oughta read Rumi." - Or from a Universalist minister, "That's just plain old-fashioned Universalist Grace." - Or from a friend, "You've had an epiphany! I had one of those too. Let me tell you about it ..." Or did that Buddha-like feeling mean I'd experienced Nirvana? Or maybe it was none of those things ... or all of them.
I spent months looking through poetry and prose about spirituality and religions, particularly eastern religions, looking for a way back to that exquisitely beautiful way of being. But it wasn't until three years later, at the Boston GA, that I came across the UU Buddhist Fellowship, whose GA workshops touched something deep inside and awoke echos of my experience at NELS. And so for the past couple of years, I've been practising Buddhist meditation with a Tibetan Buddhist group in Cambridge and learning more about what happened to me.
I came to understand that the NELS mental storm had so overwhelmed the thinking part of my mind that I had stopped thinking and let a deeper part of me emerge, a part of me that had always known what mattered. The same storm had washed away all of my internal defenses, a lifetime of barriers that I'd built up to separate me from others.
In Buddhist terms, there is a Buddha, or Buddhist Heart, within each of us, a deeper part of us that knows, that has always known how to love unconditionally. And it is this bottomless wellspring of lovingkindness and compassion that connects us to each other so completely that I cannot think of hurting you without hurting myself. It is the source of profound peacefulness, if only we can access this wellspring of love that forms the very ground of our being. What prevents such access? It is the way I think, nonstop, about all the things I cling to or abhor, all the ego structures I build up to protect me, to separate me from friends, strangers and enemies. It's the thinking voice in my head, a voice that never shuts up. In the Buddhist view, the mental storm at NELS washed away all my ego armor and so befuddled my inner thinking voice that it fell silent and allowed my Buddha nature to emerge and get a word in edgewise. This worked for me that one time, but it's a violent and risky way to do that. It's not recommended - please don't try this at home. Instead Buddhism offers a slower but gentler way to accomplish the same thing. The primary technique is meditation, which helps you to still the thinking chatterbox mind and provides insight into the barriers you've set up between yourself and others.
Buddhism is a way of life compatible with all beliefs, and thus eminently compatible with being a UU. But it still may not be to everyone's taste. I've been able to rationalize several things that caused me initial discomfort because the essence of Buddhism illuminates an important episode in my spiritual life. But I've been looking at other meditative traditions as well. And I'm coming to suspect that they all lead to the same place. Whether you call it meditation or prayer or devotional dancing or sweat lodge or chanting or singing or losing yourself in your music or art or crocheting - all of these can let you step outside of yourself, outside of your everyday chatterbox thinking mind and let you touch some deeper part of yourself. And whether you call this deeper part your subconscious, your soul, your Buddhist heart, the Great Spirit, the god within, the Tao or the Spirit of Life, it is a source of love, of connectedness, of peace.
That's the difference this church has made to me ... and Math Boy.
John Sanders
January 2, 2005
Copyright © 2005 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
