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Karen Armstrong: 2008 TED Prize wish: Charter for Compassion
I have posted a few quotes below from this lovely talk on belief and compassion. But the talk is worth watching for her telling on the Iliad story of the encounter between Priam and Achilles.
Armstrong on Belief
I found some astonishing things in the course of my study that had never occurred to me. Frankly, in the days that when I thought I’d had it with religion, I just found the whole thing absolutely incredible. These doctrines seemed unproven, abstract, and, to my astonishment, when I began seriously studying other traditions, I began to realize that belief, which we make such a fuss about today, is only a very recent religious enthusiasm. It surfaced only in the West, in about the 17th century. The word “belief” itself originally meant to love, to prize, to hold dear. In the 17th century it narrowed its focus, for reasons that I’m exploring in a book I’m writing at the moment, to include — to mean an intellectual ascent to a set of propositions — a credo. I believe did not mean “I accept certain creedal articles of faith.” It meant, “I commit myself. I engage myself.” Indeed, some of the world traditions think very little of religious orthodoxy. In the Qur’an, religious opinion — religious orthodoxy — is dismissed as zanna — self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of one way or the other but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian.
Armstrong on Compassion
So, if religion is not about believing things, what is it about? What I’ve found is that, across the board, religion is about behaving differently. Instead of deciding whether or not you believe in God, first you do something, you behave in a committed way, and then you begin to understand the truths of religion. And religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action: you only understand them when you put them into practice.
Now, pride of place in this practice is given to compassion. And it is an arresting fact that right across the board, in every single one of the major world faiths, compassion — the ability to feel with the other, and the way we’ve been thinking about this evening — is not only the test of any true religiosity, it is also what will bring us into the presence of what Jews, Christians and Muslims call “God” or the “Divine.” It is compassion, says the Buddha, which brings you to Nirvana. Why? Because in compassion, when we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. And once we get rid of ego, then we’re ready to see the Divine. And, in particular, every single one of the major traditions has highlighted — has said — has put at the core of their tradition — what’s become known as the Golden Rule. First propounded by Confucius five centuries before Christ, “Do not do unto others what you would not like them to do to you.” That, he said, was the central thread that ran through all his teaching and that his disciples should put into practice all day and every day. And it was the Golden Rule would bring them to the transcendent value that he called rén, human-heartedness, which was a transcendent experience in itself.
And this is absolutely crucial to the monotheisms, too. There’s a famous story about the great rabbi Hillel, the contemporary of Jesus. A pagan came to him and offered to convert to Judaism if the rabbi could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. Hillel stood on one leg and said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor — that is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and study it.”
And “Go and study it” is what he meant. He said, in your exegesis, you must make it clear that every single verse of the Torah is a commentary, a gloss upon the Golden Rule. The great Rabbi Meir said that any interpretation of scripture which led to hatred and disdain or contempt of other people — any people whatsoever — was illegitimate. Saint Augustine made exactly the same point. “Scripture,” he says, “teaches nothing but charity, and we must not leave an interpretation of scripture until we have found a compassionate interpretation of it.” And this struggle to find compassion in some of these rather rebarbative texts is a good dress rehearsal for doing the same in ordinary life.
Amida Buddhism is a religion of light and love. It is life affirming without being complacent about basic human nature; respectful of universal spirituality but not dependent upon ideas of divine creation or divine judgement. It honours and appreciates the bitter-sweetness of the spiritual struggles of ordinary folk who are attempting to be truly human. It allows for a life of full time devotion without setting up an over-privileged priestly class. It is an engaged spirituality, centred on the prospect of the Pure Land paradise. It is suitable for all people, having a basic practice that is accessible to anybody. It is a path of sudden awakening centred uncompromisingly upon faith. It derives from the very earliest Buddhism and from a direct encounter with the Buddha of all time. It is grounded in the doctrines common to all Buddhist schools, yet offers a unique perspective on them, and, furthermore, does not require the mastery of those doctrines as a condition of awakening. It emphatically asserts that the practice that matters is the utterance of nembutsu in simple faith and that alone. Understanding of the doctrinal framework and support may be satisfying, but it is ancillary to the main spiritual project, which is eminently simple. It does not stand in opposition to other faiths, but reveals the generic nature of faith itself as the wellspring of eternal life. It holds that no religion can be ultimate since even revelation must pass through the medium of human nature. We are foolish beings of blind passion, living, knowingly or unknowingly, in the presence of infinite light, that reflects in us as faith. That gift of faith we either squander or gather in. We express it through ceaseless nembutsu expressing a contrite heart and a mind that is sincere, deep and unconditional. Such is Pureland.
Who loves dies well - Dharmavidya
Ray writes -
Last night, rather than having a sangha evening at 118, we met at the Sheffield Faiths Forum/City of Sanctuary event Sanctuary, Hospitality & Refuge - Sharing our stories - an event for faith communities, held at the Methodist Victoria Hall in the city centre. It was a bitterly cold night but there were fifty plus people in attendance.
Bhaktika helped to facitate the evening which began with some personal reflections from two asylum seekers. Levan, from Chechnya (which he described as “the dark side of Russia”) said that he arrived in Barnsley about five years ago. He is a Christian who found support from a local church. He described how life was initially very difficult, feeling isolated, spending time between college and church. But eventually things began to improve, he began to ply the piano again, he made contacts in Sheffield and improved his English in the supportive environment of conversation clubs. He spoke warmly of the work of ASSIST who he said supported up to 800 destitute asylum seekers in the area. He closed by recounting how he’d attended a carol service recently at Christ Church were there were many faiths gathered together singing. “Many faiths, but One World”.
Ibtisam spoke of how she had grown up in Yemen, a muslim country and had never met people of other faiths whilst there. She spoke of the difficulties of being a young woman and a muslim, travelling alone and becoming a refugee.
She came to this country in 2004. She was fortunate in that she did not have some of the difficulties other people have experienced in obtaining refugee status. Her english was poor, and she initially lived in an arabic community in the Pitsmoor area. it was only when she began venturing further afield, eg attending Castle college did she begin to really meet other people of different faiths. She recounted how when she was initially doing some voluntary work for ASSIST she was reluctant and embarrassed to tell people where she was working, because it was situated in an office in an christian church! She is currently studying for a degree, and despite her protestations, her English is wonderful!
There were then several readings from various faith communities. Sundari spoke of the Second Mindfulness Training of the Community of Interbeing and then quoted Dharmakara’s fourth vow, from the Larger Pure Land Sutra.
There was a musical interlude from the Zeela Liberian Gospel Choir - which had everyone tapping and swaying!
Food was provided and people then gathered around tables to discuss a broad range of topics, including some questions identified by the organisers. There was then feedback to the larger group.
There were also contributions from Inderjit, Craig and Gordon concerning the roles of the Faith Forum, City of Sanctuary and Sheffield Interfaith, respectively.
The Menu of conversation provided is worth further reflection -
- What do sanctuary/hospitality/refuge mean to me/my faith?
- When have I felt welcome/unwelcome in community?
- What relationships do I and my faith community have with asylum seekers/refugees/migrants?
Sundari, Bhaktika and Ray were able to attend Gareth’s ordination during the Bodhi Retreat. Gareth received the Buddhist name - Kaspalita and becomes a novice amitarya. The picture above shows - Susthama, Prasada, Modgala, Dharmavidya & Kaspalita. It is lovely to be a part of these ceremonies that take place during this winter retreat. It is very moving to hear the vows taken by the amitaryas.
The winter Bodhi Retreat began last weekend at The Buddhist House, Narborough with a 24 hour nembutsu. Sundari and Bhaktika were in attendance. Prasada has put together this 3 minute clip to give a flavour of the event!
Ray writes:
Photo by Prasada
I spent the weekend at the Exile & Return retreat at The Buddhist House, Narborough and met the newest addition to the Household
An opportunity to hear about a socially engaged spirituality from two respected Pureland Buddhist teachers with the Amida Trust
Thursday 8th November, 6.30 – 9.00pm
at
The Quaker Meeting House,
10 St James Street, Sheffield, S1 2EW
Spirituality + Arts + Social Action + Buddhist Practice + Chaplaincy + Buddhist Psychology + Healing + Writing + Peacework + Interfaith + Writing + Aid + Research + Volunteering + Groupwork
This is a free event, all welcome!
Hosted by Amida Sheffield: Tel 0114 272 4290
Standing ovation for Burma refugee’s plea by Amy Burns
A MOVING speech by a Burmese refugee sparked a standing ovation during a meeting of Sheffield Council - and helped convince every councillor to vote in favour of the same motion.The woman, a representative from the Karen Community Association, addressed the full council after handing them a petition signed by 95 people.
The petition was signed in support of the people of Burma who have been subjected to violence following weeks of peaceful protest against military rule. Sheffield is one of two ‘host countries’ who welcomed Burmese refugees under the United Nations Gateway programme and as a result is home to one of the largest groups of Burmese exiles in the UK.
The spokesman for the Karen Community Association - Karen is an ethnic group - said the petition had been put together to highlight the problems in Burma and asked the council to show their support by recognising the atrocities.
“I came here as a refugee just over a year ago with my family. Over 120 of us Karen live in Sheffield,” she said. “I am grateful for your hospitality and will always remember how the good people of Sheffield took us in. But we Karen people of Sheffield feel we must do something for our friends who are still suffering all those miles away and we are asking you to help us. Monks are not violent people and they do not take to the streets without good cause. You brought hope to us when you welcomed us in but now we must bring hope to those who are still in Burma where hope is fast running out - they need to know not just that the World is watching and listening but that it is on their side.”
Her speech was greeted by a standing ovation from councillors and members of the public gallery.
Read the rest of The Star article here
In the last couple of weeks we have made some interesting visits. Sundari went accompanied Willemien to the Three Wheels temple in Acton, and from there, with Hiroko-san, wife of Rev Sato who is a patron of the Amida Trust, to Brookwood cemetery. In the summer of 2007, under the supervision of Masayuki Ogawa, a Stupa to contain the ashes of departed Buddhists was constructed iat the cemetery. The scheme originated in a bequest by Reverend Zenko, a Zen Priest who died on 19th February. Venerable Chimyo Takehara decided that, as the best way to use the bequest, it should go towards building a Stupa, and this idea was warmly welcomed by Reverend Zenko before he died.
We tended the stupa area, removing debris and cutting the grass, and discovered the versatility of chop sticks as cleaning tools! Brookwood, near Woking, is an amazing and huge cemetery - very beautiful - where there are areas designated for a range of faiths and peoples e.g. Serbian Orthodox, Ahmadiyya, Zoroastrian, and many more.
The short visit to Three Wheels was very delightful. It is truly a household life based on faith, and a religious community. The house looks like any other semi-detached house in North London, except there is some interesting stone in the front garden. But then inside, after the shoes and the children and the kitchen - all the features of ordinary domestic life - the huge carpeted lounge is a shrine room, and in the back there is a garden, which was designed by an Englishman, Professor John White, based upon his many admiring visits to the Zen gardens of Kyoto; and the construction work was supervised by a highly respected master gardener from Kyoto; Mr. Masayuki Ogawa. All the materials involved in constructing the garden originated in the UK.
Back in Sheffield, Bhaktika and Sundari visited the Jewish Orthodox Synagogue with members of the Faiths Forum and faith leaders. The importance of human connection was very evident, and of course the importance of scriptures.
A member of the Faiths Forum came to 118 for lunch, and found our lives and practice also very fascinating - so exchange is much in the air. This is being developed also now by Sally. A methodist minister had made it known that he would welcome the involvement of volunteers from other faiths in the city centre Sunday drop -in, and Sally has begun to volunteer there, giving time to people who probably don’t get listened to enough.
City of Sanctuary is going well. Today is the press launch of Sheffield City Council’s official endorsement of the idea, and we have been involved with Craig Barnett in getting support from Sheffield University for the consultation process that now needs to happen to make this a substantial change that affects people’s lives.
It’s not all sweetness and light here though. There have been some serious disturbances between ethnic groups in one part of Sheffield, and Bhaktika is very involved in supporting MESH to bring some dialogue and help ease the situation.
Amida Sheffield continues to meet on a Monday, and there have been quite a few new people coming to the lunchtime meditation at the Cathedral recently.
There is now a second book out on Pureland Buddhism as practised by Amida-shu. Dharmavidya has written an excellent introduction to the Amidist faith and has done so with reference to a highly personal and moving account of the last few weeks of his mother’s life. It is a beautiful book that I shall treasure.
Here is a short exerpt:-
I knew she was at peace with the ending of her life. My own sense of the time scale had transformed completely. I was now not sure that she would even be with us more than a day more. I knew she would now “get on with it.” Mother was like that. Once she was clear what was to be done she would get on with it. Dying would be no different. I returned her smile. It was yet another moment of mutual recognition, of which there had been so many in those few days. And with each such moment there was not just the knowledge that we understood each other, there was a deepening self-reflection on my side - perhaps also on hers, who can say? - that was sobering.
Buddhism is a matter of becoming sober. The Buddha saw that we are as if drunk. We are drunk on self-conceit. This conceit is, in large part, a psychological defence against knowledge of death and the anguish of alienation. Perhaps this would not matter so much if it were not for the fact that the anaesthetising habits with which we fill our lives are non-discriminating. Just as they dull our awareness of our finitude, so they dull awareness of the infinite glory of our world as well. In smothering our alienation they also smother our love. What does it take to sober us up? Encounter with somebody who is not as intoxicated as ourselves. Who would that be? It would be somebody who is closer to death, in the true spiritual sense of the word close.
Somebody close to death does not necessarily mean somebody who is actually dying, though it might and in this case did. However, a spiritually advanced person is somebody who is closer to death even in their physical prime. Enlightenment is an encounter with spiritual death. It is not something we achieve, however. It is a gift. It is transmitted to us.
The idea of transmission does not just apply to a mystical validation procedure whereby a Buddhist master passes his authority to an anointed successor. We receive the Dharma by transmission. The knowledge of spiritual death and its consequences is not something that an individual can attain unaided. There has to be contact.
Throughout life we are learning about death. Mostly, however, the learning opportunities pass us by. Sometimes I have sat in a group of people talking about death or talking about a person who is dying or has died. By looking around the circle you can easily see that some people are tuned in and others are tuned out. With the ones who are tuned out there is little one can do. They will remain in that mental set until something happens in their life that jolts or seduces them out of it, and generally speaking, such transitions cannot be contrived.
This is one of the difficulties of what is called Buddhist training. On the one hand, it is possible for people to follow a course of education and to participate in ceremonies and a way of life and as this rubs off on them they learn something. They may become more considerate of others, more tender and kind, less compulsive or bad tempered and so on. This is to the good. It inevitably remains fragile, however, until it is grounded in a real awakening experience of some degree. This latter cannot be planned or achieved. It is incidental or even accidental.
The most important spiritual lessons that I have learnt from others have not come so much from what people have taught me, but from how they are. People sometimes say that all true knowledge comes from within ourselves. It is true that when one receives some true transmission it feels as though something inside oneself has been awoken and one might like to say that it was there all along, just waiting, like Sleeping Beauty waiting for the Prince. Sleeping Beauty, however, does not wake without the Prince.
Rev. Dharmavidya David Brazier
We have been discussing what “sangha” means to each of us within our Amida Sheffield congregation. I am interested in what we can learn from other spiritual or faith communities. Faithworks’ Steve Chalke has written a book called Intelligent Church in which he argues that the task of the Church is to be the irrefutable demonstration and proof of the fact that God is love. An intelligent church connects the Bible and its twenty-first-century culture, is authentic and, most importantly, has thought through its practice. In other words, the way it does Church is a reflection of its understanding of who God is.
I wonder what an Intelligent Sangha looks like?
Chalke argues that an Intelligent Church is an inclusive church, it involves itself in the life of the surrounding community, working with and involving others. He then goes on to suggest that an intelligent church is a messy church. Why? Because messiness is the consequence of being inclusive. Whenever a local church chooses to be outward-looking and welcoming of all, it will automatically become messier than it was before - it’s inevitable.
In many senses the church is a hospital - it is a place of spiritual, social, emotional, moral and psychological healing. And just as in a hospital the patients suffer from different conditions, are at different levels of health and are at different stages of the healing process, so it is with the church. Sometimes healing takes weeks or months - sometimes it takes a lifetime. Simply visiting a hospital doesn’t automatically make a sick person well. Some need intensive care, others less intensive but no less important ongoing treatment or rehabilitation. No hospital is a centre of physical perfection, and neither is a church one of spiritual perfection - rather, both are messy environments full of messed-up people striving to be less so.
Intelligent Church - Steve Chalke
Messy Church. I like that. I wonder whether we aspire to have Messy Sangha too? How messy is your spiritual community?
Ray writes -
The monday lunchtime meditations at the Anglican Cathedral continue, taking place in St Katherine’s Chapel. You can get a 360 view of the chapel here. It is a glorious space.
I once, a little tongue-in-cheek, described myself as more of a “secular meditator” in that I first came to meditation through exploring the clinical applications of mindfulness and the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn. Later I would experience Buddhist meditation (Mindfulness of Breathing; Metta Bhavana) at the local FWBO centre, but meditation has never been central to my spirituality. Latterly I have been reading more about christian meditation and contemplative prayer and have loved some of the poetic imagery. I love the following passage from James Finley. He has been talking about the Parable of the Prodigal Son (these biblical stories are so much part of my culture!) and the joy of the father when his son returns home. It is a lovely illustration of the spiritual path and a description of quiet sitting or prayer that resonates with me.
When we practice meditation we are like the repentant son returning to his father’s house. By the time we begin to meditate, we have probably come to realise how foolish we have been in the past. We are sorry about the suffering our foolish ways have caused ourselves and others. We are sincerely intent on not being so foolish in the future. But like the repentant son heading home to beg for his father’s forgiveness, we are still labouring under the illusion that our wayward ways make us unworthy in the eyes of God.
We do not want to give up the illusion that our weaknesses are obstacles to God’s love for us. The perception that our weaknesses are real in God’s eyes is bound up with our egocentric perception of ourselves as outside God’s sustaining love. Entrenched in the ignorance of our imagined otherness from God, we set out to meditate as a way of overcoming one obstacle after another so that we might succeed in reaching God. It is in being subject to this ignorance that we become discouraged about our real and imagined slow progress in meditation and in the spiritual life in general.
As the parable begins, the father saw that his son could not be talked out of his foolish insistence on making himself miserable. And so the father, as an act of love, lets the son go off so that he can discover, in the process of exhausting his own resources, the loving home he was so determined to leave. The same is true of us. Seeing how we cannot be talked out of our ignorance, love sets up a kind of obstacle course that provides the ego with spiritual goals it can attempt to achieve. “Here, try this,” love says. “See if you can sit present, open and awake as a way of being open to my presence in your life.” The sincere ego self struggles in its efforts until it exhausts completely all its own means of overcoming its inability to realise oneness with God it desires. Then, just as all seems lost, we look up to see God running towards us with open arms. Suddenly we realise there is no place within us that is not encountered, embraced, and made whole in a love that does not even care to hear our litany of short comings and regrets.
Here is yet another way of putting it: Our egocentric sef sets out with an egocentric understanding of the spiritual path. This egocentric understanding is that of having to jump over a bar that is set so high that only the most finely tuned spiritual athlete could ever hope to clear it. Our struggles with distractions, sleepiness, and indifference brings us to a point of near despair. We begin to fear that our doubts were true concerning our inability to master such a seemingly insurmountable challenge.
Then, just as we have become exhausted and spent in our futile efforts to rise above our own limitations, the saving event happens. Compassion steps out and places the bar flat on the ground! Approaching the bar, bewildered by the unthinkable simplicity of the task, we trip over it and fall headlong into God, waiting to reveal to us that we are precious in our frailty and strangely whole in our fragmentation.
Some of the mystics speak of what is called the gift of tears. Sometimes, tears may literally start streaming down our face. Most often, the tears are interior tears of realising that we so profoundly loved by God. We are loved without any foundations for being loved, except divine love itself. The tears stream all the more as we realise that everything in us that could be offered as a reason for our not being worthy to be loved results only in deepened and intensified experiences of love.
All this occurs in the ways in which you simply open yourself to God in meditation. As you keep sitting in your “Here I am, Lord” stance of openess to God, your precious, wayward heart is laid bare. As you continue breathing God’s love into each new distraction and diversion, the imagined power and relevance of distractions and diversions dissolves in the silent love in which you now sit.
Christian meditation - Experiencing the Presence of God by James Finley
Many people of faith would hear these words and smile, it would strike a chord… though we may use different language. I love the image of the bar being placed on the ground before me… and still I trip over it, falling headlong into Amida, in my foolishness, accepted just as I am. Namo Amida Bu
I am really enjoying reading Susthama’s blog Beyond the Clouds. Susthama has been writing about the retreat that is taking place at Amida France and the preparations for Joy’s ordination.
Namo Amida Bu
When I first interviewed people across the Christian world, I began to imagine religious truth as something splintered and far-flung for good reason, too vast for one tradition to encompass. I saw reformers, across time, as people who noticed a scattered piece of the Christian truth that the Church itself was neglecting. They picked it up, and loved its beauty, and saw it as a necessary, and embodied its virtues. The Anglicans saw common prayer. Lutherans saw the Bible. Mennonite saw pacifism. Calvinists saw intellectual rigor, and the Quakers saw silence. This analogy holds as I now explore the splinters of all the world’s traditions. The gentle singlemindedness of Zen complements the searching discipline of Theravada Buddhism. The exuberant spirituality of Sufism rises to meet the daily-lived piety of Sunni and Shiite Islam.
But truth and beauty interact with human frailty. The shadow side of my tale of a world of scattered truth is that as soon as human beings pick up a piece of the truth, they make their mark on it. They codify and literalize. They distort the rest of the picture to fit their chosen center. This happens with every kind of truth, surely, in politics, as well. But religious truth flattened out, becomes an especially blunt instrument when it enters the political theater of debates and power plays — a weapon with the same transcendent power religion has to inflame hearts, to infuse life and death with meaning.
There is a difference, of course, between religion and spirituality, and some say that religion alone is what complicates our political life. Religions would be the containers of faith, containers malleable and corruptible in the hands of the people who fashion and control them. Spirituality would be faith’s original impulse and essence. I appreciate this distinction and, at the same time, I’m wary of drawing it too starkly.
A rabbi, Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, gave me the best illustration I know of the difference between spirituality and religion. ‘On Mount Sinai,’ she says, ’something extraordinary happened to Moses. He had a direct encounter with God. This was a spiritual experience. The Ten Commandments were the container for that experience. They are religion.’ I find this example wonderful because it gets precisely at the wrong way religion is often taught, and the way it enters politics through words and positions.
We proclaim and pass on the rules. We divorce them from the sweep of the spiritual history by which they were discerned, a history that tells of an incomplete and ever-evolving human capacity to comprehend the nature of God and the ultimate meaning of religion.”
I like the analysis of a Croatian-American theologian, Miroslav Volf, whom I’ve interviewed, who has formed and tested his theology in a place in the world where people have many times waged war in the name of faith. And he describes religion that justifies violence as ‘thin religion,’ religion reduced to a formula. Thin religion also becomes manipulable. It comes to look like ideology. Traditional journalism, the stuff that fills our news, is good at covering thin religion, which lends itself to crisis and violence. The gentleness of thick, lived religion can elude the calculus of politics and journalism. But I’m out to investigate thick religion. I’m out to expose virtue, and still, that is not quite as straightforward as it might sound.
“As a journalist, I’m deeply aware of how strangely tricky it is to make goodness seem relevant or, at least, as perversely thrilling as evil. As perpetually horrified as we are of terror and brutality and war, we are riveted by them, and we let them define our take on reality. The communications miracles of the 21st century make wondrous connections possible, and yet, they also bring us images of horror with an immediacy and vividness that are debilitating. Violent images seem altogether more solid and substantial, more decisive and telling, somehow, than kindness, goodness, and lived peace. It is easy to bow down before these images and give in to the despair they preach. But if I’ve learned anything, it is that goodness prevails, not in the absence of reasons to despair, but in spite of them.If we wait for clean heroes and clear choices and evidence on our side to act, we will wait forever, and my radio conversations teach me that people who bring light into the world wrench it out of darkness, and contend openly with darkness all of their days. For me, their goodness is more interesting, more genuinely inspiring because of that reality. The spiritual geniuses of the ages and of the everyday simply don’t let despair have the last word, nor do they close their eyes to its pictures or deny the enormity of its facts. They say, ‘Yes, and …,’ and they wake up the next day, and the day after that, to live accordingly.
Speaking of Faith - Krista Tippett
With a few days off I have had plenty of time to read and have thoroughly enjoyed reading Krista Tippett’s Speaking of Faith - part gentle memoir and reflection on her own journey of faith; part the story of the development of her wonderful radio show.
You can hear and see Krista reading from her book, Speaking of Faith before a live audience at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota. She traces the intersection of human experience and religious ideas in her own life, just as she asks her guests to do each week. Krista reflects on her adventure of conversation across the world’s traditions — and on the whole story of religion in human life, beyond the headlines of violence.
The phrase remembering forward is inspired by a line in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
We remember our stories, the raw materials of the lives we’ve been given, in order to know who we are — and to tell something of the larger story of our time. I believe that we are all theologians in some sense, and our memories and experiences also contain pointers of the best we can discern of ultimate truth, the nature of God, and the sacred.
Ray writes -
Monday had been wet and miserable. I’d nipped out to the Moor for a sandwich for lunch and the heavens had opened some more. I was well pleased to pick up a sturdy golf umbrella from Millets, using a gift token from my birthday last year that has been stuck at the bottom of my wallet for an age. Dancing in the rain? No. But I did break out into a smile on the way back to the office.
We met for a sangha evening at 118. Food, conversation, nembutsu and bailing out the cellar. Sue and Sundari planned a route home to avoid possible flooded areas after hearing the latest reports. We got home safely but it was only when we began to listen to the news reports on Five Live radio that I began to realise how serious it was.
I travelled in to work the next day. The road leading to Rotherham was a car park. The tram, slowly but surely, made its way into the city centre which was eerily quiet.
In the office, people were telling their stories. An admin worker had had to walk home, through thigh high water, bursting into tears with relief when arriving home at almost 10 p.m. Another social worker had been rescued by a fork lift truck, having had to abandon the car as the water rose. He had told his story on 5 live radio later that night, but this morning he appeared to be reflecting just how fortunate he’d been.
Three people lost their lives. a 14 year old boy washed away when a river bank broke; a 68 year old man losing his footing in the rising water on the Wicker (pictured above); a man in twenties perished whilst trying to help unblock his grandad’s drain. Tragic.
It was pictures of cars floating down Brightside (pictured below) that brought it home to me. This is a road I have often bussed along to visit people at home.
People turned up for their appointments at the centre and the Care Trust made contingency plans in case we lost the electricity supply. The alcohol relapse group finished with fewer people than expected. Some people had experienced flooding whilst others due to attend had been called on to help out, work extra shifts etc… So it goes.
Friday came and the mountain of paper work just did not seem to be diminishing. I abandoned it at 6.30 p.m. - caught the tram home in the sunshine and looked forward to a week off and seeing family in Wigan tomorrow.
More photos at BBC South Yorkshire
Bhaktika writes:
Last night was our sangha evening with service and meal, this time with the added attraction of forming a chain gang to bale water out of the sump in the cellar before and after the service - it adds that little extra something, recognition of the forces of nature that we can only accept for what they are, though that doesn’t mean being quietist. Indeed by our engaged practice we managed to keep the flooding out of the shrine room until the rain abated and the pump in the sump was able to manage unaided again. At the end of the evening Sundari gave Ray and Sue a lift home to the other side of the city without mishap, having carefully scutinised on the BBC website where the two main rivers in Sheffield had burst their banks, and then finding a route that avoided these areas.
Sundari added that -
As we have only just finished drying out after the flood of ten days ago, it was with a heavy heart that I stacked our meditation stools and zafus above water level yesterday, in preparation for the next ingress of water. You’re right - it’s just stuff, and we really know how lucky we are when we see what has happened to others, especially that three people have died. The other part of it, that feeling of heavy heart, seems to tap into something else. The collective low level trauma is palpable. The conversation club today felt ‘damp’ - in the words of a friend - even though most people present had not been directly affected. Another aspect of the collective though is that it makes a huge difference being in it with others. Ten days ago we were much buoyed up by Shad and her boyfriend helping us to bale out. With five of us in a chain we were pretty cheerful. A memory that will stay with me is of a quiet slooshing in the first few hours as we paddled around, and sotto voce chanting of Namo Amida Bu, as Sally and I mopped and wet vacced in the sodden shrine room and storage cellar. Sally’s journey home yesterday was quite an adventure, and she was lucky to make it back. 1,500 people in Sheffield were stranded over night.
Namo Amida Bu
South Yorkshire was badly affected by the weather this week, with many areas flooded.
Last saturday there was an afternoon meditation workshop held at the cathedral. This was in response to an event earlier in the year when regular attenders to the monday guided meditations met to explore their practice in a little more detail than was possible in a lunch break. It had been a positive experience that people felt they would like to become a regular event.
The focus for the saturday was “meditation for other people”. 10 people gathered in the Chapter Room at the side of the cathedral. We began with a short guided meditation which focussed on posture and body awareness. Mary then introduced christian meditation practice from The Fellowship of Meditation group to which she belongs. This group was founded by Marian Dunlop. After a tea break, Sundari guided a Metta Bhavana, a lovingkindness meditation. There was then an opportunity to discuss and compare our experiences of both practices. The event was a success and the next is planned for september with a number of possible themes beng considered.
Best laid plans… a flooded cellar at 118 meant that Bhaktika was unable to attend the Engaging with Faith event being held at the Maitri Project. This was planned as a Buddhist-Christian Exploration and was being led by Elizabeth Harris, Methodist Secretary for Inter-Faith Relations, and Dharmavidya David Brazier.
Shad, who had turned up for the Friday morning meditation and found the shrine room ankle-deep in water, had been considering attending the event and so the next day we both travelled down to Leicester, fortunately dodging the worst of the bad weather. It was a good event, with two dozen people attending. The format was built around two sessions in which Dharmavidya and Elizabeth took turns to interview each other about their respective faiths. There was also plenty of time for more informal discussions. I intend to write up some of my notes and I’ll add a link to the Amida Sheffield site when I have done this.
Monday night we met as a sangha and repeated the Quan Shi Yin liturgy in a makeshift shrine space in 118’s front room. Sally has now moved in to 118 andmonday was her first day working within the care trust as an occupational therapist.
On tuesday night, four of us met for a Vow 22 meeting. We have previously met as a sangha to listen to some of the Vow 22 talks, notably the “Characteristics of the Amida School” series, but this occasion was an opportunity to have a more informal discussion about some of the course work. We chose to focus on the assignment asking what the nembutsu means to each of us. It was a productive discussion and we hope to meet more regularly after Bhaktika ans Sundari return from Croatia next month. I arrived a little earlier to discuss the coming cathedral meditation event for the following saturday. 118 is also being re-decorated to add to the general chaos and we ended up planning the workshop whilst Sundari stood ankle-deep in water, resealing the bath whilst I read aloud a passage on the transference of merit. Surreal!
Wednesday was Sue’s birthday but unfortunately I was unable to take time off as I was co-running the relapse prevention group. We have reached week seven, the penultimate session, which focuses on how to deal with a lapse. This can sometimes feel uncomfortable for people in that it can feel contradictory to be a part of a group in which the intention is to remain abstinent, whilst atthe same time discussing what to do if one has a drink. We usually use the analogy of a fire drill. One practises a fire drill so that one knows what to do in case of a fire. practising a fire drill itself does not mean one is more likely to have a fire, it just means you are better prepared. Similarly, planning for a lapse does not necessarily mean that one is more likely to happen, but if it does, one is better prepared to “nip it in the bud” and prevent moving on to a full relapse.
That evening, Sue and I were both exhausted so we opted for a nice take away meal from Ka-China’s rather than a meal out in the city.
Thursday was a study day for me. I attended a mindfulness training day arranged for my colleagues working in the SAAS alcohol service. This was held at the Buddhist Centre in Walkley, home of the Sheffield FWBO. The day was facilitated by Kuladitya. There were about ten of us and it was lovely to spend time with people with enthusiasm for introducing mindfulness practices to help people in recovery from alcohol. I knew several people through lengthy phone conversations so it was great to meet people in person. Kuladitya was able to bring a lot of his experience from previous work within drug and alcohol services in London and his 20+ years meditation practice.
Much of the day was experiential though I particularly liked one of the discussions around the buddhist derivation of mindfulness practice. Kuladitya noted that mindfulness, or sati is often seen as “keen attention to one’s present experience” but that it is also includes awareness of past and future, and that in many ways this aspect is equally important though when we are first working to develop mindfulness the pure awareness of the present experience is perhaps most useful. He made the link to developing an awareness of past and future events with relapse work such as awareness of SIDs, “seemingly irrelevant decisions”, patterns of behaviour that can lead us unwittingly to a relapse.
He defined practising mindfulness as “cultivating our ability to pay attention in the present moment” - It is really a particular way of paying attention; being deeply present to one’s experience, now, in the present moment, with the spirit of self-enquiry and self-acceptance.
He also spoke of Sampajanna - an aspect of mindfulness that is usually translated as “mindfulness of purpose”, “Recollection of purpose” or “clear comprehension”; an awareness of our direction - and he then discussed how this related to the buddhist idea of karma.
In an accompanying handout he wrote -
Despite their differing emphases, mindfulness and clear comprehension of purpose often appear as a compound word in Pali - Sati-sampajjana and the two words are considered to be so close in meaning as to be virtually interchangeable. It is difficult to come up with a definition that evokes the spirit of this compound word - we could say that it is “going about one’s daily life without ever forgetting one’s (higher) purpose” - you know what you are doing and why you are doing it, and you are aware of where you are and where you are going (which means not forgetting where you have come from!)
Very apt for relapse prevention work. I’ve not heard this empasis on past and future actions, and on purpose emphasised in this way before, with reference to clinical applications of mindfulness. It is consistent with the values-based work within Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, whilst the emphasis on mindfulness of purpose strikes a personal chord with saying the nembutsu, i.e. mindfulness or remembrance of the Buddha.
This is a very nice passage about self power and other power approaches within the Buddhist traditions -
Buddhism itself is a religiously pluralistic world. These many schools are variously classified in terms of their cultural roots, their spiritual goals, and their doctrinal emphases. The remarkable thing really is that despite the huge number of schools, sects, teachers, and interpretations, there is still a substantial degree of agreement across the whole tradition about the general tenor of the religion. Differences between schools are those of emphasis and perspective. Each school has its own perspective upon the whole Buddhist corpus and each has its preferred modes of practice. There is much overlap, but some points do stand out with a degree of clarity.
One important distinction is that between what are called self-power approaches and other-power approaches. The latter are also commonly, but not everywhere, called Pureland. In some Buddhist countries there are actual Pureland denominations. In Japan there are several, Jodo-shu and Jodoshin-shu being the best known, and these collectively constitute the greater part of Japanese Buddhism. Westerners are generally unfamiliar with these schools and are more likely to be aware, for instance, of the Zen denominations that are numerically much smaller. In other countries, like Tibet, there are no Pureland denominations, but Pureland teachings constitute a substantial tendency within the national religion. Again, in Theravada Buddhist countries such as Thailand or Sri Lanka, there are no Pureland denominations, but recognisably Pureland attitudes make up a large part of the popular practice of the religion, especially amongst the laity.
amida buddha
amid blue flowers -
forget me not
Ray writes -
Sundari and Bhaktika arrived at 7.45 a.m. It was already a bright sunny morning and soon we were on the motorway on our way to The Buddhist House in Narborough. I was sat in the back of the car, watching the countryside outside heading North.
This visit had not really been planned. A few days earlier, Sue’s operation in her painful shoulder had been cancelled literally at the last moment. Gowned-up, felt-tipped arrow marking the correct shoulder, the operation was canceled due to a concern over her history with anaesthesia… that and a staffing issue. Disappointment is an inadequate word to describe this, the second time it has been put off in the past month.
The plus was that we were able to visit Narborough today. All four Sheffield School members were to be in attendance for the first time since Sue and I joined in october 2005.
There was an Easter retreat taking place. This itseld had had to be switched from Amida France to Narborough as Modgala had been experiencing her own bout of ill-health. Namo Amida Bu. It says a lot about the nature of Amida retreats that we could arrange to attend for a few hours over this weekend without, we hoped, causing too much disruption to the proceedings.
We arrived a little before nine, parking at the Desford Road premises and making the short walk up through the village. it really was quite a beautiful sunny morning, with just a hint of crispness in the air. We entered the house via the back garden, resplendent with Spring. The corridor is lined with shoes and sandals. There’s a morning service still in progress. we could hear the chanting from the main hall.
Namo tassa Bhagavato arahato sammasambuddhassa
Namo tassa Bhagavato arahato sammasambuddhassa
Namo tassa Bhagavato arahato sammasambuddhassa
Bhaktika led a short guided mindfulness of breathing exercise and there was a chance to discuss the practice. Mary, with an array of thoughtful quotes and poems (from William Blake to Master Eckhart) spoke of meditation and contemplative prayer within a spiritual or religious practice. Sundari introduced two practices used within Amida-shu, Nei Quan and Chi Quan. there was much open sharing, and a real appetite to discuss how our practice related to each of our differing religious/spiritual backgrounds. It felt quite an honour to be a part of this group and there was plenty of enthusiasm to meet again on a more regular basis, may be every three months.
Sadly, partly due to this prior arrangement and to other circumstances, the Amida Sheffield sangha were not able to get to the wedding celebrations that were, by then, in full swing at the Buddhist house.
Sundari and Bhaktika did manage to get to the registry office wedding earlier that morning, but the buddhist ceremony took place at midday and then the fun really started! Dharmavidya has written a lovely account here
Wednesday 5.30 pm. I am hovering outside the Town Hall. This is a beautiful building to be found next to the Peace Gardens in the heart of the city. Some days I get off the tram a few stops early so that I can walk through the city, past this glorious building. I have never been inside it before though… until this evening.
Just before Christmas Mike had told us about the development of the Sheffield Faiths Forum and that he had intended to apply to be the Buddhist representative. His application proved successful, and tonight was the big launch in the grand setting of the Town Hall.
I enter the Town Hall feeling decidedly scruffy. However, I am greeted warmly and directed to the main hall. I get my name badge and enter the room. I can see Mike seated on a table near the front and Gina further away by the windows. Both are wearing their bright red wagesas. I sit on a half empty table nearer the back and away from the video camera’s gaze. A gentleman is holding forth about his many years of interfaith work in Pakistan. A lady approaches and sits next to me. Her name is familiar but I can’t quite place her until she asks me which tradition I belong and we find that we are both Buddhist! Suzanne works at the University of Sheffield as is an advisor within the Chaplaincy and is member of the local Sokka Gakai group. Indeed there are a number of local Buddhists in attendance including people from FWBO and several Zen groups.
Bhaktika Mike Fitter chose the following passage to read at the launch of the Sheffield Faiths Forum held yesterday at the Sheffield Town Hall. All the Faith Forum members were asked to read a piece of scripture or religious text that reflected their hopes for becoming part of this inter-Faith venture. Mike explained that he felt that the metta sutta would be familiar to all the Buddhist traditions established in Sheffield. A full report on the event will follow shortly.
METTA SUTTA
Lovingkindness, or metta meditation, is a traditional Buddhist practice that helps us to move from a sense of dislocation and isolation into more of a connection with ourselves and, ultimately, with all beings everywhere.
The literal translation of the word metta is “friendship.” So metta means being a friend to ourselves and a friend to all of life. Its foundation is connection.
Every action that anyone commits – even the most misguided and evil action – is an attempt to escape suffering. So we can wish that all beings, including ourselves, find the wisdom to see that true happiness is supported by love and awareness, and not by hatred and violence.
May all being be happy and secure.
May all beings become happy in their heart of hearts!And think of every being without exception: the weak and the strong, from the smallest to the largest, whether you can see them or not, living nearby or far away, beings living now or yet to arise – may all beings become happy in their heart of hearts!
May no one deceive or look down on anyone anywhere, for any reason. Whether through feeling angry or through reacting to someone else, may no one want another to suffer.
As strongly as a mother, perhaps risking her life, cherishes her child, develop an unlimited heart for all beings.
Develop an unlimited heart of friendliness for the entire universe, sending metta above, below, and all around, beyond all narrowness, beyond all rivalry, beyond all hatred.
Whether you are staying in one place or travelling, sitting down or in bed, in all your waking hours rest in this mindfulness, which is known as like living in heaven right here and now!
To help others carry their pathologies and to have them help me carry mine
Anthropologists tell us that one of the primary functions of any family is to carry the pathologies of its members. In past times, when families were stronger, there was a lot less need for private therapy. The therapy of public life helped provide what today individuals must seek elsewhere. To go to church is to seek the therapy of a public life and to be part of that therapy for others. Simply put, I go to church so that other people might help me carry what is unhealthy inside of me and that I might help them carry what is unhealthy inside of them. If this is true, and it is, then we should not be surprised that we find every kind of sickness within our churches. But the presence of those pathologies should then not deflect us from going to church but, instead, positively beckon us there.
The Holy Longing - Ronald Rolheiser
To dispel my fantasies about myself
Away from actual, historical church community, whatever its faults, we have an open field to live the unconfronted life, to make religion a private fantasy that we can selectively share with a few like-minded individuals who will never confront us where we most need to challenge. The churches are compromised, dirty, and sinful but, just like our blood families, they are also real. In the presence of people who share life with us regularly, we cannot lie, especially to ourselves, and delude ourselves into thinking we are generous and noble. In community the truth emerges and fantasies are dispelled. Not being involved with the church because of the Church’s faults is often a great rationalisation. What is too painful to deal with is not the Church’s imperfection but my own fantasies about my own goodness which, in the grind of real community, will become painfully obvious. Nobody deflates us more than our own family. The same is true of the Church. Not all of this is bad.
The Holy Longing - Ronald Rolheiser
In my last post I made reference to discussions we had had during several of our sangha nights regarding faith and the religious life. I quoted Dharmavidya as saying that religion is a communal and shared practice and this would reflect his vision that Amida-shu embraces the religious and spiritual dimension of Buddhism.
Amida Buddhism, therefore, is a religious path. Its particular approach is to take refuge, as a deluded and vulnerable being, in the Unborn - in Amida Buddha - through a simple act of prayer called nembutsu. We can say, therefore, that there are three elements to Amida Buddhist belief and practice: the ordinary nature of the devotee, Amida Buddha as the object of devotion, and the nembutsu prayer as the primary form of practice. Amida Buddhism partakes of the Pureland tradition of Buddhism deriving from the Buddha in India via a transmission through China and Japan. It is not a self-improvement technique nor an exotic pastime - it is a deeply personal, yet wholly transcendent, inquiry into the meaning of one’s life.
This post is entitled “So why go to church?” but I could just as well have added “… and/or participate in a spiritual community?” It comes from an enquiry by Ronald Rolheiser in his book “Seeking Spirituality”
So what can be a vision, a reason for going to church and committing ourselves in an irrevocable covenant to a group of very flawed men and women and agreeing to journey with them for the rest of our lives? What are the reasons to go to church?
Some of the reasons he gives could equally apply to why one should join in any faith or spirituality group. I’m going to focus on just four, over a series of posts, and will relate them, in particular, to my experience of the Amida School. I would invite people to comment with reference to their own communities. Does this strike a chord?
To take my rightful place humbly within the family of humanity
There are three major stages to life. Different ages have had different ways of teaching this. Contemporary psychology speaks of the process of individuation and what lies before and beyond that. The ancient biblical sage, Job, spoke of two kinds of nakedness (Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return again Job 1:21) and what lies between them. Essentially what both, new and old, teach is the following:
The first stage of life is birth. We emerge from our mothers, from nature, naked and helpless, more of an acorn than a tree, not very actuated in terms of self and not very differentiated in terms of others. At this stage, smelling of the earth and of the womb, we are primordially linked to the family of humanity. we are humble.
But almost immediately, we begin the second stage - washing the smell of the earth off ourselves, clothing, accumulation, distinction, separation, and actualisation. We spend our early years - and, if we never really grow up, the rest of our lives - trying to distinguish ourselves, to set ourselves apart from others, to accumulate things, to have successes, to create some privacy for ourselves. This stage is characterised by the urge to separate and clothe ourselves (in Job’s terms). For the first half of our lives this is a healthy thing.
But at the point that adulthood is reached, something else is asked of us, not just by God but also by nature. Our task now is no longer to try to emerge, but to merge - to go back into community, to lose our seperateness, to not stand out, to become naked again. This is the real meaning of humility and it describes perfectly what is contained in the great imperative that asks us to take our place within the family of humanity. To be human is, ultimately, to be part of the group, naked and unmarked. But how to achieve this? What concrete community can offer us that place to merge? Our blood families can help, but they are too narrow and exclusive fully to identify us with all of humanity. Humanity as a family is inclusive enough, but is too abstract. The Church gives us the place to die to elitism. To join a church is to give up elitism. That is both perhaps the greatest obstacle to church participation and the greatest benefit of it.
In our recent Amida Sheffield weekly meetings we have spent a little time discussing the opening line of Summary of Faith and Practice
For those having a karmic affinity with Amitabha Buddha wishing to practise a religious life in truly simple faith…
Actually, that’s just half of the first line and we could happily spend another month exploring what we mean by “karmic affinity”, “faith” and ”religious life”. Sundari and Bhaktika talked about some of the conversations they had had at a recent event at Narborough at which Dharmavidya had spoken of his latest pastoral letter entitled Madness of Faith
In it he stated that-
The popular thing nowadays is to be pro-spirituality and anti-religion. Well, I have no objection to using the word spirituality, but it has the downside of speaking about something privatised and individual whereas religion is about something communal and shared. We do not have to buy into the individuated approach.
This comment echoed the opening passage of Ronald Rolheiser’s excellent book “Seeking Spirituality” in which he cautions about our contemporary, and in his view, misguided understanding of what spirituality is about.
It is no easy task to walk this earth and find peace. Inside of us, it would seem, something is at odds with the very rhythm of things and we are forever restless, dissatisfied, frustrated, and aching. We are so overcharged with desire that it is hard to come to a rest. Desire is always stronger than satisfaction.
Put more simply, there is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to peace. This desire lies at the centre of our lives, in the marrow of our bones and in the deep recesses of the soul. We are not easeful human beings who occasionally get restless, serene persons who once in a while are obsessed by desire. The reverse is true. We are driven persons, forever obsessed, congenitally dis-eased, living lives of quiet desperation, only occasionally experiencing peace. Desire is the straw that stirs the drink.
At the heart of all great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion lies the naming and analysing of desire. Thus, the diary of Anne Frank haunts us, as do the journals of therese of Lisieux and Etty Hillesum. Desire intrigues us, stirs the soul. We love stories about desire - tales of love, sex and wanderlust, haunting nostalgia, boundless ambition, and tragic loss. Many of the great secular thinkers of our time have made this fire, this force that haunts us, the centrepiece of their thinking.
Sigmund Freud, for example, talks about a fire without a focus that burns at the centre of our lives and pushes us out in a relentless and unquenchable pursuit of pleasure… Karl Jung talks about a deep, unalterable, archetypal energies which structure our very souls and imperialistically demand our every attention… Doris Lessing speaks of a certain voltage within us… James Hillman of a blue fire within us and of being so haunted and obsessed that neither nature or nurture, but daimons, restless demanding spirits from beyond, are really the determinative factors in our behaviour.
Whatever the expression, everyone is ultimately talking about the same thing - an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, an appetitiveness, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a congenital all-embracing ache that lies at the centre of the human experience and is the ultimate force that drives everything else. This dis-ease is universal. Desire gives no exemptions.
It does, however, admit of different moods and faces. Sometimes it hits us as pain - dissatisfaction, frustration, and aching. At other times its grip is not felt as painful at all, but as a deep energy, as something beautiful, as an inexorable pull, more important than anything else inside us, towards love, beauty, creativity, and a future beyond our limited present. Desire can show itself as aching pain or delicious hope.
What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, is our spirituality.
Today there are books on spirituality everywhere. However, despite the virtual explosion of literature in the area, in the Western world today, especially in the secular world, there are still some major misunderstandings about the concept. Chief among these is the idea that spirituality is, somehow, exotic, esoteric, and not something that issues forth from the bread and butter of ordinary life. Thus, for many people, the term spirituality conjures up images of something paranormal, mystical, churchy, holy, pious, other-worldly, New Age, something on the fringes and something optional. Rarely is spirituality understood as referring to something vital and non-negotiable lying at the heart of our lives.
This is a tragic misunderstanding. Spirituality is not something on the fringes, an option for those with a particular bent. None of us has a choice. Everyone has to have a spirituality and everyone does have one, either a life-giving one or a destructive one. No one has the luxury of choosing here because all of us are precisely fired into life with a certain madness that comes from the gods and we have to do something with that. We do not wake up in this world calm and serene, having the luxury of choosing whether to act or not act. We wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness. What we do with our madness is our spirituality.
Hence, spirituality is not about serenely picking or rationally choosing certain spiritual activities like going to church, praying or meditating, reading spiritual books, or setting off on some explicit spiritual quest. It is far more basic than that. Long before we do anything explicitly religious at all, we have to do something about the fire that burns within us. What we do with that fire, how we channel it is our spirituality.
I’m fond of this passage. It helps provide a way of explaining to others why spirituality is an essential in good mental health care, not just an optional extra. Rolheiser’s book, subtitled “Guidelines for a Christian Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century” would resonate with Buddhists of any tradition. The Four Noble Truths shine out in the passage above. Indeed, in a commentary on the Third Noble Truth, Nirodha, in a chapter from The Feeling Buddha entitled Taming the Fire, Dharmavidya David Brazier writes-
There is a close association between fire and emotion or passion. Spirituality is the art of mastering our fire.
The chapter talks of how we can be encouraged to be “riders of great dragons” - to be discussed in a following post.
Amida Sheffield – Reflections on the past year
In February 2006, after some initial discussions in the previous Amida Trust (Sheffield) monthly meeting, we took the decision to dissolve the group in its current format. The group had begun some nine years ago as a local network group of the Amida Trust. The group had been valued; a place were “Buddhists of all religions and none” were welcome. The decision to wind up was thought to be the right one because the Amida School and Order had come into being in recent years, some ATS members had aligned with this, and were looking to deepen their practice in this direction. Others had formed the Gaia House sitting group and were active in developing that group. The original idea of an eclectic group of ‘Buddhist sympathisers’ did not have the motivation and drive it originally had for many of us.
It was recognised that a friendship network had grown up among a dozen or more active members. It was hoped that this would now be strong enough to continue informally and through other activities. It is pleasing to report that this has been the case.
Activities
2006 has seen Amida Sheffield take time to reflect on its form and engagement with the local community. Three core activities continue -
• We have endeavoured to hold a weekly Pureland service on Monday evenings at 6.30 pm followed by a shared meal, discussions and much laughter. The core of the group has been the four local Amida School members – Sundari and Bhaktika (Order members) and Sue and I. In July we were recognised as a congregation under the terms of the Amida-shu constitution.
We have occasionally been joined by other local Buddhists, both familiar and new faces. These evenings have been the bedrock on which we have been able to support one another, share ideas, gain inspiration and then “go forth” in various engaged activities, both shared and individual. We have also used these Monday evenings to occasionally listen to dharma talks together.
• The Monday lunchtime guided meditations at Sheffield Anglican Cathedral have continued. There were a few concerns with the departure of Canon Nick Howe, who took up an exciting new post in Stockholm. Nick had been our main link with the cathedral and had led guided meditations himself. However, as it has turned out, relations with the cathedral have strengthened and Sundari and Bhaktika were thrilled to welcome Mary Dight to the team. Mary has many years experience of contemplative prayer.
• The Friday morning silent meditations at Bhaktika and Sundari’s house continue and there are thoughts about re-launching this activity in the New year with a publicity campaign
Sue and I attended the Honen Shonin Memorial Retreat at The Buddhist House last weekend. It was a lovely time and I was left to ponder some of the themes raised. We met for our Sheffield sangha night the following tuesday. I had been reading an article from Living in Amida’s Universal Vow and tried to present some of the ideas in an article by Kaneko Daiei, not wholly successfully. I had read this chapter before, when I first bought the book, and there was something about the weekend that had made me look it up again. It was concerned with a discussion about what was meant by “salvation” in Pure Land Buddhism. it was only on this second reading did I notice that it was originally written in the sixties. I love some of the poetic passages in it, which is a compliment to the translator, Sakamoto Hiroshi.
Semantically, the term ’salvation’ means the liberation or emancipation from a predicament into which one has fallen. In other words, ’salvation’ presupposes some kind of predicament, whatever it may be. What, then, is the human situation which Buddhism envisages as the predicament from which man should be liberated?
The New Year: We Begin Again by Gregg Krech
We tend to enter a new year with hope. Hope that things will get better. That our health will improve. That our suffering will diminish and that life won’t be such a struggle. It seems reasonable to enter a new year with hope, but I wonder if such hope serves as a distraction from appreciating the life we already have. The monk Ho Sen wrote the following New Year’s haiku:
Another year passed –
Empty rice sacks remind me
how lucky I am
We would expect that if Ho Sen’s rice sacks were overflowing he would feel very fortunate. If you have excellent health, or great wealth, or a wonderful home . . . it’s not really that hard to be grateful. And yet even with such obvious blessings, we easily turn our attention to other areas of life where we struggle and hope things will improve. But Ho Sen is reminded of his good fortune by empty rice sacks. Would we be able to look at an empty bank account, or an empty refrigerator and be reminded of our good fortune?
As we begin the New Year it is easy to forget how lucky we are to be alive. It is easy to take our life for granted — to feel entitled to another year as if another year of life was nothing very special. It is easy to get caught up in our own suffering and express hope that things will somehow change. But can we rise up to the challenge of relaxing into our life just as it is? Can we discover gratitude for our life just as it is — for the struggle as well as for the joy? Our life is an adventure. This year is a new chapter in a mystery where we never know what’s going to happen. New opportunities. New challenges.
A new year. We go forward. We fall.
We get up. We begin again.
Ten Changes That Will Start You Off on the Right Track for the New Year
Dusted with frost, the
child’s abandoned toy, transformed -
a jewelled carriage!
XXX
There is something about a heavy frost on a winter’s morning that transforms everything it touches.
All four of us met at 118 for a monday sangha evening for the first time since Sue had her operation. We reflected on the past year, and looked forward to 2007. I made some notes for a Running Tide article we are writing, as we chatted over tea and cake. A service and a shared meal completed the evening. It felt good to be together again.
As for the New Year being happy,
Let it be swathed in mystery!
That’s my wish for the New year.
- Issa
Ray writes -
It is dark. Already awake, I hear the morning gong as it progresses up the stairway, gently if somewhat insistently, reminding the retreatants that -
“time has passed with the swiftness of light; it is already morning - Impermanence rushes upon us every moment”
The weather has been raging through the night and I’d had a little difficulty settling the previous evening. I am sleeping on a mattress at the top of the house, in Prasada’s office, sharing the room with Richard. It is very comfortable. But that weather…. awakened at five, I have lay there, pondering the previous day’s activities - several meetings and a lotus sutra study class.
The sounding gong drifts away and eventually I get up and make my way down to the main hall, first stopping off at the kitchen to share a pot of tea. It tastes like only tea can on a cold morning.
The service begins with chanting from the Larger Pureland Sutra, in English. Amida-shu liturgy
“incorporates several important principles: It dramatizes the expression of faith; it incorporates time honoured elements; it is flexible to adapt to context; it is a sacred art form; it enables us to express the nembutsu with body, speech and heart; and it sustains community life”.
The chanting of the Larger Pureland Sutra is led by Susthama, Lisa and Sally. The rest of us keep us as best we can. The rhythms and repetions are unexpectedly beautiful. English is not always condusive to chanting. This seems to work well.
The Morning Service follows. More of the community join the room. There are periods of walking nembutsu that involve circumambulating the Buddha, pictured above. This is thought to be one of the earliest buddhist devotional practices.
We chant a chinese form of the nembutsu, NAMO-AMITO-FO, to a lovely tune. Of all the communal pureland practices that take place at the Buddhist House, this is the one that I love best. There is something about the gentle walking; the chanting; the shrines and the other people present that brings a real sense of being held. Walking past individuals, each with their own phrasing of the nembutsu on their lips. It can been seen as a form of samatha practice, the single minded focus on Amida, on grace. Modgala often describes it in a form that sounds like a metta bhavana - an outpouring of love, a receiving of grace. I prefer to describe it as prayer.
Of course, we have a tendency to idealise how a spiritual practice should feel like, but it does not always manifest that way. Today it is hellish, a great big mirror reminding me that along with the red shirts, notepad, toiletries and change of underwear I packed in my ruck-sack, I seemed to have found room to bring along some irritations, frustrations and resentments. There they are, and there is no place to hide in walking nembutsu. We have three periods during the day, and each is just not how I want it to be. Namo Amida Bu. A lesson, if one I am reluctant to face.
There is, however, the ceremonies to be enjoyed. This morning service concludes with a refuge ceremony for Robert, and in subsequent days there were ceremonies in which Angela, Judy and Ngi Yi became members of Amida-shu; Lisa, Sudana and Tony were admitted to the Order of Amida Buddha ; and Sally was admitted as an aspirant. and Gareth was admitted as a postulant. This means that they will both live and train at The Buddhist House, Sally toward ordination as a chaplain/minister and Gareth toward ordination as an amitarya.
On friday, Lisa was ordained as a chaplain in the Order of Amida Buddha and received the Dharma name Amita Mudita and Venerable Susthama Kim, a novice in the Amida Order, having completed her novitiate of three years, was ordained as an amitarya.
There is a delightful mixture of formality and informality during these proceedings. Formality, in that people are making serious aspirations; informality, in that recognition of our bombu-nature entails that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. All ceremonies conclude in hugs and smiles all round. Nice.
I leave the following day after the midday service and within three hours I am home in Sheffield. I maintain a sort of semi-retreat for the rest of the week, mindful of the activities in Narborough. A morning service is assisted by the recording I have made from the web site; and I am able to listen to some excellent talks from the Amida France summer retreat available on CD. I spend a relaxed few days at home with Sue.
There is no place the moon does not shine,
But it only illuminates in the heart of those who gaze at it.
Honen
Today is Enlightenment Day. Namo Amida Bu!
Ray writes -
The Bodhi Retreat has been taking place this week at The Buddhist House in Narborough. This is probably the most important event in the Amida annual calendar. It is traditional to hold a retreat at this time of year in memory of the enlightenment of Shakyamuni Buddha celebrated on the 8th December. Last year saw the introduction of 24 hours of continuous nembutsu chanting on the first Saturday-Sunday: an event which had a wonderful effect upon participants and which it was planned to repeat this year. The retreat includes teachings, seminars, silent periods, nembutsu practice, Amidist ceremonial, and opportunities for personal sharing.
Ill-health conspired against the Sheffield sangha. Sue was still recovering from her operation and Sundari was troubled by a chest infection, which meant that we all missed the 24 hour nembutsu. Still, resting up for the weekend probably did us all some good and on monday morning, three of us, Bhaktika, Sundari and myself were able to journey down to Narborough.
We arrived in time for a sharing session on how people had found the 24 hour chanting. It brought back a lot of memories from last year. Back then, I had been rather skeptical about the value of chanting nembutsu in alternating sitting and walking periods for 24 hours. The experience itself th