Musings

Tanking and Tuning Up

This week at our church, our volunteers served up a great free meal for the diners at our weekly Wednesday Community Lunch.  And during the meal, we handed out small tanks of propane to those who wanted them.  Our diners were delighted and grateful.  Many of them are either homeless or are living on semi-seaworthy boats that are anchored-out in Richardson Bay.   Cooking can be challenging in such circumstances.  Our deacons  bought a supply of small propane stoves which we had distributed  earlier.  This Wednesday, we offered refills for those who needed more gas.

                  

I’ve heard people say they come here to recharge their spiritual batteries, and I hope they get the juice they need from us.  But on Wednesday, I’m sure people left church with full tanks!  There is even more power available here than I had presumed.

         

But the church isn’t just about filling us up when our spiritual energy is depleted.  This also is a place where we learn to go a lot longer and farther without running out of power.  Here we can tune-up our souls so we’ll be more energy-efficient.

         

When we learn to practice compassion and patience in challenging circumstances, we aren’t as drained as we were in the past.  When we forgive ourselves and others, we save a lot of spiritual energy that was wasted on resentment.  When we return evil with kindness, we save all that energy we would have wasted on the endless spiral of spite. When we calmly pause before responding to the difficult words of others, we save lots of energy that we would have wasted by being verbally reactive. 
   

Just as much of our nation’s energy shortage could be met by conservation, our spiritual tanks will stay fuller longer if we don’t waste our fuel on anger, repressed feelings, hidden expectations, gossip, and back-biting.  The energy saved can be used for positive purposes.
 
We come here to top off our tanks, but also to tune our souls to run smoothly and cleanly.  We come here for adjustments so that our tanks won’t drain nearly so fast.  So that we’ll be able to do more of what our church did on Wednesday – sharing energy with others who need it!

         

 

Faithful Thinking

      

As I look back over my life, I feel a certain embarrassment  at how often I’ve been wishful but faithless. Wishing I was omnipotent, I would take on projects I could never  complete. I lacked the faith to work hard while being realistic, so that I could accomplish more in the end. Wishfully I put on a happy face, denied  disasters that surrounded me, and plowed ahead as if they weren’t there. I lacked the faith to admit defeat, grieve my losses, learn from my mistakes, and change direction, which would have been better for myself and others.

             

At least I’m in good company. Is it any wonder that we avoid facing the chaotic,  unpredictable, and unfair facts of life? We want to think that prayer or positive thoughts can magically fix  anything that is wrong. We want to think that a loving God will supernaturally intervene in the soupy mess of the universe and make things good for us, if we just ask him or her in the right way. But even Jesus had to learn otherwise,  and learn it the hard way. On the cross,  he complained, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It wasn’t fair. He’d lived a good life, prayed hard and well,  shown compassion to others. Others were  praying for him, too, asking God to step in and spare him. Jesus, like the rest of us, suffered from a  surfeit of wishful thinking and a deficit of faith.  

      

On the cross, pie-in-the-sky religion died. And on the cross, the God of faith came alive.

         

Faith looks at reality with clear eyes, respects it for what  it is, and chooses to live hopefully and compassionately anyway. Faith bases itself on facts, and then works  hard to change them, even if the odds are against success. Faith doesn’t expect miracles. But it gives us energy and perseverance to do  the miraculous.

         

Faith can happen when we stop pretending that we are  entitled to exceptions from the laws of nature. Faith doesn’t exempt us from the pain of this world, but it does give us an experience that transcends it and gives it meaning. Faith is the paradox of knowing  our mortality and our immortality at the same time. Faith embraces the contradiction that we are  separate, limited creatures and we are also one with God.

SANCTUARY

It's an old idea whose time has come, once again.

"Sanctuary" is the principle that there ought to be places in the world that protect people and other beings from threatening forces.  On the island of Hawaii, there was an isolated peninsula called the "City of Refuge" where people could go if they were accused of a crime, and live in peace and with protection.  It was guarded by tiki gods that made it "kapu" or ritually forbidden to enter with the intention of doing harm to the refugees living within.  The early Hawaiians understood that mercy was a law that trumped ordinary justice.  Just over the hill from here in Sausalito, the Marin Headlands form the northern boundary of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary which protects sea life all the way past Big Sur.  Our society recognizes that the economic laws of supply and demand should be trumped by principle of the sacredness of delicate life-forms and ecosystems.  In the 1980's, Presbyterian churches were in the forefront of the Sanctuary Movement, which protected Central American civil war refugees whom the US government aimed to deport back to death or imprisonment.  At first, churches offered sanctuary in their physical sanctuaries - rolling out sleeping bags on pews where Guatemalan and Salvadoran families could sleep.  The guiding concept of the Sanctuary Movement wasn't "civil disobedience" to an unjust administrative interpretation of US asylum laws.  Rather, the movement was based on obedience to the deeper source of law, the law of love itself.  The Sanctuary Movement's people called it "civil initiative", because instead of breaking the law, they aimed to follow it from its roots.

The prophet Jeremiah declared, "This is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law ("torah") within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people."  (Jeremiah 31:33)  To this day, the centerpiece of a Jewish synagogue is the Torah scroll in its ornate cabinet.  It is a reminder of the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, which contained the tablets of the Ten Commandments.  In the Holy of Holies within each of us, the law of compassion is engraved upon our hearts.

Lent is a time to visit holy, set-apart places in the spiritual as well as physical dimension.  It's a time to renew our commitment to make the church a place of safe, warm inclusion for every kind and condition of person.  And it's a time to go deep within ourselves and rediscover the law of love from which all right action and thought follows.  If we enter that inner sanctuary, we'll find that there is room for all beings, even our enemies, even those we reject or neglect.  Within us is a safe and protected sanctuary where the fragile, lost, and lonely aspects of ourselves can roll out their sleeping bags and find rest and loving company.  A place where the Border Patrol, the enforcers of religious dogma, Adam Smith's invisible hand, and even our own self-critical judgments lack jurisdiction.  The buck stops at divine mercy in the sanctuary of our hearts.

The Meeting of Rumi and Shams

(I wrote this play, with inspiration from my friend Tom Devine, and we performed it in worship this past Sunday at Sausalito Presbyterian, with Julie Carlson of our church as narrator.)

Narrator: The year was 1244. The place was Konya, in what is now Turkey. Jelaluddin Rumi was a theologian and teacher, an intellectual in a long family line of clerics and jurists. He had many devoted students. Shams of Tabriz was a wild, wandering mystic of the Sufi mystical order of Islam. After their meeting, Rumi was transformed from a conventional scholar into an ecstatic poet. After Shams’ mysterious disappearance, Rumi never signed his own name to his poetry.  Rumi entitled the collection of his poems as “The Works of Shams of Tabriz”. The poetry you will hear in this play is Rumi's.

(Rumi sits at his desk, reading and writing)

Shams (muttering behind the curtain): Who is greater?

Rumi: What was that? (turns head and then goes back to his books)

Shams: Who is greater?

(Rumi lifts his head, looks around, then goes back to studying)

Shams (leaping out from behind the curtain): WHO IS GREATER?

Rumi (shocked – stands up): Who are you? A madman?

Shams: You are so smart. Such a scholar. Surely you know!

Rumi (offended): Know what?

Shams: Who is greater? The one who exults in his knowledge, or the one who admits his ignorance?

Rumi (stunned): Allahu akbar! (passes out on the floor)

Shams (joyful): Allahu akbar! God is great! For such a friendship I would happily lose my head!

Narrator (poem by Rumi):

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let's buy it.

(Rumi wakes up and lifts his head)

Rumi: How could I have missed it? All these years in my father’s library! How have I missed the question? The answer – so simple. The greatest is the one who admits his ignorance. For the one who admits his ignorance, the way is always unfolding. I am ignorant! I am ignorant! Allahu akbar!

(laughing, Shams lifts up Rumi to whirl)

(Shams and Rumi sit on pillows on floor)

Shams: You are the notes
Rumi: And we are the flute.
Shams: We are the mountain,
Rumi: You are the sounds coming down.
Shams: We are the pawns and kings and rooks you set out on the board.
Rumi: We win or we lose.
Shams:  We are lions rolling and unrolling on flags.
Rumi: Your invisible wind carries us through the world.
You are in my eyes. How else could I see light?
Shams: You are in my mind, this wild joy!
Rumi: How can so great a love be inside me? I am too small.
Shams (laughing): Your eyes are small and they see enormous things!
Rumi: Something opens our wings
Shams: Something makes hurt and boredom disappear
Rumi: Someone fills the cup before us
Shams: And all we taste is sacredness.
(they drink from jug)
Rumi: When grapes turn to wine, they long for our ability to change.
Shams: When stars wheel around the North Pole, they are longing for our growing consciousness.
Rumi (laughing): Wine got drunk with us, not the other way. The body developed out of us, not we from it.
Shams (laughing): We are bees, and our body is a honeycomb. We made the body, cell by cell, we made it.
Rumi: I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door.
Shams (laughing): It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside!
Rumi: Those who don’t feel this Love pulling them like a river
Shams: Those who don’t drink dawn like a cup of spring water
Rumi: Or take in a sunset like supper
Shams: Those who don’t want to change, let them sleep.
Rumi: This Love is beyond the study of theology, that old trickery and hypocrisy.
Shams: If you want to improve your mind that way, sleep on.
Rumi: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
Shams (dropping cup and falling back on the floor): When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
Rumi (falling back on the floor): Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.

(They stand and walk away, stumbling, dancing, laughing, behind the curtain)

Narrator: Rumi and Shams went wandering together, laughing and singing, drunk with love for Allah within them.

(Rumi enters and sits at desk, studying)

Rumi’s students became intensely jealous of the time that he spent with his new friend. But he knew he would never be the same after meeting Shams.

(slamming a book shut) Rumi reads:

Rumi: Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours,
but I couldn't.

I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?

Shams: A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.

Rumi: That's how I hold your voice.
I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.
I saw you and became empty.

Shams: This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence!

Rumi: To praise is to praisehow one surrenders
to the emptiness.

Shams: To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.

Rumi: So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where!
Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck
we could have. It's a total waking up!

Shams: Why should we grieve that we've been sleeping?

Rumi: It doesn't matter how long we've been unconscious.

Shams: We're groggy.

Rumi: But let the guilt go.

Shams: Feel the motions of tenderness around you,

Rumi: The buoyancy.
(Rumi stands and goes behind the curtain.)

(Shams and Rumi emerge, dancing)

(Shams bows to Rumi and takes his leave, going behind the curtain)

(Rumi goes back to books)

Narrator:

No one knows for sure what happened to Shams, but it appears that he fell victim to the enraged jealousy of Rumi’s students... literally losing his head for his friend.

(From behind curtain:)

Allahu Akbar! (loud thump)

Rumi: Shams! Shams! (jumping up and darting back and forth in a panic, then going behind curtain) 

Narrator: Rumi feared the worst for his friend, but he heard a rumor that Shams had been seen in

Damascus

, so he went south to

Syria

to look for him.

(Rumi wanders through the congregation)

Rumi: Have you seen Shams of Tabriz? A strange fellow, roughly dressed, his turban always askew? Singing and dancing for no apparent reason? Blathering in iambic pentameter? Seemingly drunk out of his mind, but without the slightest whiff of liquor on his breath?

Narrator: But Shams was nowhere to be found.

Rumi:
(laughing) I am so ignorant! How could I miss him? Why should I seek? I am the same as he. His essence speaks though me. I have been looking for myself! (falls to the floor on the altar and rolls around – then rises and eagerly returns to his desk to write)

 
Narrator:

They’re lovers again: sugar dissolving in milk.
Day and night, no difference. The sun is the moon:
An amalgam. Their gold and silver melt together.
This is the season when the dead branch and the green branch are the same branch.
Men and angels speak one language. The elusive ones finally meet.
The essence and evolving forms run to meet each other like children to their father and mother.
Good and evil, dead and alive, everything blooms from one natural stem.
You know this already, I’ll stop.
Any direction you turn, it’s one vision.
Shams, my body is a candle touched with fire.

(Rumi lights candle on desk and then exits, dancing)

Narrator:

One went to the door of the Beloved and knocked.
A voice asked, ‘Who is there”
He answered, ‘It is I’.
The voice said, ‘There is no room for Me and Thee.’
The door was shut.
After a year of solitude and deprivation he returned and knocked.
A voice from within asked, ‘Who is there?’
The man said, ‘It is Thee.’
The door was opened for him.