Liturgies

One of the greatest Mathematicians who has ever lived was a man by the name of Archimedes of Syracuse (c287BC-212BC) of Greek origin. (not that mathematics was a great love of mine).

He is remembered fondly for the expression Eureka! (I have found it or I have got it!)

It is what he exclaimed as he ran naked from his bath and his home when he realized that by measuring the displacement of water an object produced, compared to its weight, he could measure its density . (Don’t try this at home, that is running naked from the bath. )

The other expression he is famous for is “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the Earth.”

His theory went on to revolutionize systems of moving heavy objects. In psychological and spiritual terms, a place to stand is essential.

For many of us who have called ourselves Christian we have found that place in our relationship with God, through the teachings of Jesus, prayer, meditation, stillness and sharing that with others in a church community.

For Dundalli, the great Aboriginal lawman and warrior, who was executed here in Brisbane in 1855 outside the GPO in Queen Street, his place to stand was his trust in his Ancestral Laws and customs, his connections to country and his people.

For the Dalai Lama who was in Brisbane recently, his place to stand is his practice of mindfulness and loving-kindness, the Sangha (the practicing community), the Buddha (the person and life inspiration of Buddhism) and the Dharma (the teachings).

Finding a place to stand is essential to our overall well-being, our connection to the physical world we inhabit with all its relationships and our place within that world.

But as we move into an increasingly more complex world where cultural norms and practices are broken down, challenged and changed.

The establishing of the place to stand has become increasingly difficult and complex. Anxiety, depression, panic attacks, mental illness is on the increase. We see an increase in suicide and addiction of various forms. There are many and varied reasons for this but one must wonder at what cost the rapid changes in society and culture has had on these increases.

People can feel that the ground beneath them is no longer stable- the things that could be relied upon for stability are no longer firm. For some it means a retreat back into what they see as the fundamentals of their faith and hence we witness a rise of fundamentalism within the various religions. Often these are outward expressions of religion (creeds, dogma, religious garments, etc). It is never about inner transformation and the radical return to the essence of many of the religions.

For those of the Catholic Faith, we have seen this with the return to traditional masses like what is happening at the old St Mary’s up the road with the pews returned to the train carriage style, the return of the old confessionals, vestments and words of the Mass. For those of the Muslim faith we see it in the rise of extremism, forced adherence to very strict laws, the Taliban, the forcing of women back into traditional subservient ways, a return to the old,it seems the thinking here is that in going backwards we are meant to solve the ways of going forward.

All of this is an attempt to find solid ground in a world where the ground is always shifting.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus, the one who says to the rich man, go sell everything and give the money to the poor, is the same Jesus who says to his disciples, take nothing for the journey – no bread, no haversack, no coppers for their purses, not even spare clothes. Your security, your life is not found in material things, there is something much more solid on which to base your life, to take a stand. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all will be given to you. This Kingdom, this Presence of God is always available to you – this is what you truly seek and on this you can base your life.

The Buddhists remind us of the universal dimension of impermanence, that all things on earth are transitory, tentative, appearing out of emptiness and then disappearing. The invitation of Jesus and the Buddha in this ever changing world is to rest in consciousness itself, and for Christians we say to rest in the Presence of God.

Jack Kornfield, a Buddhist psychologist and author tells this story to emphasize that when we rest in consciousness we become unafraid of the changing conditions of life.

Jack writes, in the monastery Ajahn Chah (Jack’s teacher and mentor) would often notice when we were caught up in a state of worry, anger, doubt or sorrow. He would smile with amusement and urge us to inquire ‘Who is doubting? Who is angry? Can you rest in the consciousness that is aware of these states?’ Sometimes he would instruct us to sit at the side of a person who was dying, to be particularly aware of the mysterious moment when consciousness leaves and a person full of life turns into a lifeless corpse. Sometimes he would say, ‘If you are lost in the forest, that is not really being lost. You are really lost if you forget who you are.’

This knowing of pure consciousness is called by many names, all of which point to our timeless essence. Ajahn Chah and the forest monks of Thailand speak of it as the ‘Original Mind’ or the ‘One Who Knows’. In Tibetan Buddhism it is referred to as ‘rigpa’, silent and intelligent. In Zen it is called the ‘mind ground’ or ‘mind essence’. Hindu yogis speak of ‘timeless witness’.

Aboriginal people sometimes refer to this consciousness as BIAME. For Christians we call this God. For Jews, Ya-Weh – more a breath than a word (the one who cannot be named).

In a world which seeks  empirical, tangible, concrete data to maintain if something is real, these teachings may sound abstract, but in reality are quite practical. To understand them we can simply notice the two distinct dimensions to our life: the ever-changing flow of experiences, and that which knows the experiences.

Perhaps we can better understand this through a story of a Palestinian named Salam, one of Jack Kornfield’s good friends. He met Salam when he was doing some teaching for the hospices of the Bay Area. Salam was able to sit with the dying because he had no fear of death. In the late 1960s and 1970s Salam lived in Jerusalem as an activist and a journalist. Because he was writing about creating a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem and the establishment of a Palestinian state, he was regularly arrested. He spent nearly six years in Israeli prisons. He was frequently interrogated and periodically beaten and tortured.

One afternoon after he had been badly beaten, his body was lying on the floor of the prison and he was being kicked by a particularly cruel guard. Blood poured out of his mouth, and as the police report later stated, the authorities believed he had died.

He remembers the pain of being beaten. Then, as is often reported by accident and torture victims, he felt his consciousness leave his body and float up to the ceiling. At first it was peaceful and still, like in a movie, as he watched his own body lying below being kicked. It was so peaceful  he didn’t know what all the fuss was about. And then Salam described how, in a remarkable way, his consciousness expanded further. He knew it was his body lying below, but now he felt he was also the boot kicking the body. He was also the peeling green paint on the prison walls, the goat whose bleat could be heard outside, the dirt under the guard’s fingernails – he was life, all of it and the eternal consciousness of it all, with no separation. Being everything, he could never die. All his fears vanished. He realized that death was an illusion. A well-being and joy beyond description opened in him. And then a spontaneous compassion arose for the astonishing folly of humans, believing we are separate, clinging to nations and making war.

Two days later, as Salam describes it, he came back to consciousness in a bruised and beaten body on the floor of a cells, without fear or remorse, just amazement. His experience changed his whole sense of life and death. He refused to continue to participate in any form of conflict. When he was released, he married a Jewish woman and had Palestinian-Jewish children. That, he said, was his answer to the misguided madness of the world.

Salam had learnt from this very painful and near death encounter that there is something beyond this physical realm and that this is our true nature – it is the timeless one and realm we never leave. We are immersed in it like a wave in an ocean, we appear as a wave but we are really the ocean. This is the place we can stand. It is solid and never changing.

When we truly stand here and with the appropriate levers as Archimedes discovered, we can change our world.

Homily 11^th and 12^th July 2015