With palms together,
Good Morning All,
It is the day after Christmas and as I read through the religion section of the Huffington Post I was struck by the number of posts addressing gun violence and war.. It is clear to me that we live in a violent world and, it would seem that religion is going through some soul searching, as well it should. But it is also clear to me that we live in a loving world, a world that cares that there is violence, cares for those who suffer, and cares that the suffering has not stopped. Stories of heroic teachers, firefighters willing to risk their lives for others, and so on, support this. One post written by a rabbi was particularly interesting in that it took to task those who would claim God was punishing humanity for its fall into moral neutrality if not downright moral fall. He argued we should question God and ourselves regards the continued suffering of humanity. I agree, not so much on the challenging of God, but more on our need to challenge ourselves, as it is we ourselves who bring suffering into the world.
Our world is not a moral agent. If our world were theatre, it would be the stage upon which we act out the play, be it tragedy or comedy. We make ourselves in this play, writing our own parts to play. How will we act today? Will we manifest our precepts and allow our six perfections to come forth? Through not killing, lying, harming each other with our bodies, stealing, intoxicating, gossiping, slandering, giving way to anger, not being greedy, and not denying our true nature, its teachings and our society our perfections of generosity, morality, patience, vigor, meditation, and wisdom arise. Years ago, in a textbook I co-edited, my Social Work mentor, Howard Goldstein, framed these as “the person of principle” and I saw them as manifestations of “the person of spirit.” Today I fail to discriminate between the two. Principle is the frame through which our spirit shows itself.
These are always in conflict as we cannot follow the precept against killing, for example, without the potential for the necessity of killing to arise. How do we support life in the face of those who would take life? Of course we should exhaust all possible and reasonable methods to stop others from killing, but in the event these fail we cannot put our heads in the sand hoping the killing will stop.
What we can do is manifest our willingness to reason, our willingness to care, and our willingness to understand and love those who would harm us and others. The true message of the darkest part of the year is in the fact that we can light a candle and bring light into the world. We can do this in spite of the fact that it is, indeed, dark outside. For Zen Buddhists this candle is our precepts and the light is our perfections. May we each offer the light of our candle today.
Good Morning All,
It is the day after Christmas and as I read through the religion section of the Huffington Post I was struck by the number of posts addressing gun violence and war.. It is clear to me that we live in a violent world and, it would seem that religion is going through some soul searching, as well it should. But it is also clear to me that we live in a loving world, a world that cares that there is violence, cares for those who suffer, and cares that the suffering has not stopped. Stories of heroic teachers, firefighters willing to risk their lives for others, and so on, support this. One post written by a rabbi was particularly interesting in that it took to task those who would claim God was punishing humanity for its fall into moral neutrality if not downright moral fall. He argued we should question God and ourselves regards the continued suffering of humanity. I agree, not so much on the challenging of God, but more on our need to challenge ourselves, as it is we ourselves who bring suffering into the world.
Our world is not a moral agent. If our world were theatre, it would be the stage upon which we act out the play, be it tragedy or comedy. We make ourselves in this play, writing our own parts to play. How will we act today? Will we manifest our precepts and allow our six perfections to come forth? Through not killing, lying, harming each other with our bodies, stealing, intoxicating, gossiping, slandering, giving way to anger, not being greedy, and not denying our true nature, its teachings and our society our perfections of generosity, morality, patience, vigor, meditation, and wisdom arise. Years ago, in a textbook I co-edited, my Social Work mentor, Howard Goldstein, framed these as “the person of principle” and I saw them as manifestations of “the person of spirit.” Today I fail to discriminate between the two. Principle is the frame through which our spirit shows itself.
These are always in conflict as we cannot follow the precept against killing, for example, without the potential for the necessity of killing to arise. How do we support life in the face of those who would take life? Of course we should exhaust all possible and reasonable methods to stop others from killing, but in the event these fail we cannot put our heads in the sand hoping the killing will stop.
What we can do is manifest our willingness to reason, our willingness to care, and our willingness to understand and love those who would harm us and others. The true message of the darkest part of the year is in the fact that we can light a candle and bring light into the world. We can do this in spite of the fact that it is, indeed, dark outside. For Zen Buddhists this candle is our precepts and the light is our perfections. May we each offer the light of our candle today.
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