This Very Moment

Rev. Peter Friedrichs

December 30, 2007

Well, the waiting is finally over. After weeks of anticipation, Christmas has come and gone for another year. Since Thanksgiving, at least, we looked forward to it, counting off the days on the calendar, comparing the winnowing hours to the chores on our "to-do" list and, if you're like me, getting squeezed in between that rock and that particular hard place. Some of us look forward to Christmas with the wide-eyed innocence and anticipation of a child, delighting in the magic of the season. Some approach the time with fear and trepidation. Others still, with a sense of benign resignation, once again, that we won't get done what we wanted to do, and that we won't get the Christmas cards out until after New Year's, if at all. Regardless of whether you believe in the miraculous birth of the Christ child, the entire season of Advent, the four weeks preceding Christmas, is a time of waiting, of preparation, of expectancy and looking forward. If, for nothing else, looking forward to the expression of joy on the face of someone special, whom you've surprised with a particularly thoughtful present, or looking forward to receiving a heartfelt gift from a loved one.

I got just what I wanted for Christmas this year. I began taking guitar lessons nearly a year ago, and Irene wanted me to have just the right guitar for the style of music I've been playing. So we talked about it and we ordered it online. It wasn't expensive; it's an import, but of good quality. And it arrived at our house nearly a month ago. But since it was a Christmas present, the deal was that I had to wait until Christmas to play it. For nearly four weeks this beautiful guitar sat in its case in my study, where I could see it every day. Every day I longed to pick it up and play it, but I was good, and resisted the temptation. And, oh, did I look forward to Christmas! I couldn't wait to get my hands on that guitar. Day after day I dreamed about the beautiful sounds that would emanate from its body. Sounds that, in my dreams, were far more beautiful than the ones I could actually make at this stage of my music-making career. I could hear the strings ringing out, the bass line thumping beneath a great blues riff. Every time I walked by that case, my eyes were drawn to it, and I looked at it longingly, like a sumptuous meal viewed through the window of a restaurant I couldn't afford to enter.

So, when Christmas finally arrived, I was like the proverbial kid in the candy store. I pulled the guitar from its case and began to tune it up. And then the unthinkable happened. With a loud twang and a bang, I broke a string. There I sat, with this beautiful instrument in my lap, and still I couldn't play it. After all this waiting, I had to wait one day more, until the music store opened and I could buy a new string. But now, it's got all six strings attached and it's ready to go. And for the past few days I've been having a ball with it. Granted, it doesn't make the sounds that I dreamed of for these past weeks, but that's not the guitar's fault.

It occurs to me that we do a lot of looking forward, and not just around Christmas time. As we stand on the cusp of a new year, I'm already busy making plans for next summer, looking forward to visiting my daughter in Africa. I'm looking forward to our "Soul Storming Summit" that's going to be happening here at church at the end of January. I'm looking forward to countless other events that loom on the horizon in 2008, many of which are already scheduled on my calendar. As human beings who have a consciousness about the future, it's natural for us to plan what we'll be doing in the next hour, or day, or month, or year. We look at the trajectory of time and see our lives laid out before us, and by making plans we attempt to gain some degree of control over the future. As a result of all our planning, we expend much of our psychic energy on that which may, or may not, come to pass. On the "not yets" and the "maybes" and the "hope so's." We plot and plan the paths of our careers and our relationships, we picture our prospects and our potentials, making the adjustments necessary as we experience the realities of every day living.

At the same time, many of us spend an equal or even greater time reliving the past. It's not just on New Year's Eve that many of us raise our metaphoric toasts to Auld Lang Syne, or days gone by. Just as our human brain enables us to consider the future, so does it empower us to bring to mind the past. Since we learn from our experiences, or at least we like to think that we do, reliving our past serves a useful purpose. As they say, experience is the thing that enables us to recognize a mistake when we make it again. And yet, for all the value and insights that we gain from our experiences, we are often inclined to relive or remain in the past, and not always to our benefit. We harbor long-held grudges like half-healed wounds that we can't help but pick at. We resent the families we were born into or the jobs we ended up with. We live in a place of regret over choices we've made, wondering what might have been, if only things had been different. Or, we compare our ordinary, mundane lives to that one sparkling moment in the sun that we experienced long ago. When we made the game-winning catch in the big football game or we got the lead part in our high school musical. We're still sure that we could have played in the Big Leagues or sung on the Broadway stage, if only we had gotten the break we deserved. For some of us, as Bruce Springsteen says, "time slips away and leaves us with nothing but boring stories of glory days…"

There is, as the Buddhists like to remind us, a middle path. The danger of living in the past or constantly hoping for the future is that we miss out on the present, the things that are right in front of us. The title of this sermon, "This Very Moment," is borrowed from a book of the same name that was written by James Ishmael Ford, minister of the First Unitarian Society of Newton, Massachusetts. In this work, Ford introduces UUs to the spiritual practices of Zen Buddhism, and discusses how to integrate that practice with the principles of Unitarian Universalism. Ford writes that "The bottom line is that we need to attend…When we genuinely attend to the moment we discover that our hopes for the future and memories of the past are reconciled in the fully lived moment. Here-and-now is the place where all things come together. Here, in this very moment, we find who and what we are."^[1] Ford offers us some basic instruction on the Zen practice of sitting meditation. This practice, which I suspect many of us have tried and a few may follow, is Ford's way of preparing to encounter the vagaries of our day-to-day lives and of integrating the inner world with the outer. Sitting, he says, prepares him to attend and be present to the experiences that life has to offer. Through meditation we come to know ourselves more completely, and to appreciate our unity with all that is. And with that knowledge, we are better able to live in sympathy and compassion with all living things and to realize the fullness of our humanity.

This idea that sitting quietly leads us to clarity of thought and spirit is well illustrated by a story told by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, in his book The Sun My Heart. He tells of caring for a young Vietnamese refugee girl who was playing outdoors with some friends. The children came inside, asking Nhat Hanh for something cool to drink. He poured the three of them some home-made apple cider, the girl receiving the last glass. The girl's juice was mixed with the pulp from the bottom of the bottle, and she refused to drink it. She went back to playing with her friends, and a short time later returned, asking for some water. Thich Nhat Hanh reminded her of the glass of juice sitting on the table. Looking at it, the girl was surprised to see that the juice was no longer cloudy. She asked, "Is this a different glass?", to which Nhat Hanh replied, "No, it's the same one as before. It sat quietly for a while and now it's clear and delicious." The bright young girl asked Nhat Hanh if the cider was meditating like she had seen him meditate, to which the monk replied, "Let's say that I imitate the apple juice when I meditate. That's closer to the truth."

In his book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh offers another form of meditation that is more active than sitting Zen. The Sutra of Mindfulness, as he calls it, requires us simply to be present to the activity that we're engaged in at any particular moment. When we are washing the dishes, for example, we should not be thinking about the meal we've just enjoyed or the tasks that we need to accomplish after the dishes are done. Instead, the Sutra calls us to focus our mind on the fact that we're washing the dishes; feel the warmth of the water, the slippery quality of the soap. When we peel an orange to eat it, he says, we should experience peeling and eating the orange, calling to mind the combination of sun and rain and human labor that brought the orange into being, rather than simply stuffing section after section into our mouths. The Sutra of Mindfulness requires us to always be conscious of what our body is doing at any particular time, calling ourselves to experience the present moment with the fullness of our consciousness.

I long to find a way to be consistently present to what James Ford calls "the beauty and grace of this moment," to experience the reality that "this very moment is both the doorway to heaven and heaven itself."^[2] I am attracted to the Buddhist spiritual practices advocated by Ford, Thich Nhat Hanh and others. But I find them exceedingly difficult to sustain. I have sat in silence, listening to my breath, until all the chatter in my head subsided, at least for a few seconds. And I have washed the dishes while washing the dishes. But more often than not, when I do actually sit quietly for a time, I find my mind more often behaving like the "monkey mind" that Elizabeth Gilbert talked about in today's reading. Even though I have experienced some new awareness and insight from my sporadic encounters with these practices, I am challenged to carve out the time in my busy day to meditate or to take fifteen minutes to eat an orange. I wonder if any of you feel the same way?

The present sits squarely between the past and the future, and I think the reality is that we're never going to be able to be fully aware of the here-and-now and simultaneously successfully negotiate our daily lives. I think it's important to admit that we live in a tension between the weight of yesterday and the pull of tomorrow, and I wonder whether our goal should be simply to strike a balance somewhere in the middle, which draws us closer to the present. Does anyone here know what a bongo board is? It's a small plank that sits on top of a cylindrical piece of wood, kind of like a miniature see-saw. The object of a bongo board is to learn to balance with your feet spread out on the board while it's sitting on the cylinder. I used to think that the way to stay on a bongo board was to find the center, and learn to stay there. To find that perfect balance point between my feet where the two halves of the board are perfectly aligned on each side of the cylinder, and to hold onto that position for as long as I could. But unless you're a member of the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe, that's an impossible feat. It's like trying to stay upright on a bicycle that's standing still. The trick to staying on the board is not to stay in one place, but to move intentionally. You need to shift your weight from side to side, raising one end while lowering the other, never straying to either extreme or staying in one place too long. It's all about staying in constant, conscious motion. Here, balance is not a static thing to be achieved and maintained. It is, instead, dynamic.

I think that life is a lot like this. We are constantly balancing ourselves between the past and the future, always moving between the two. It's a delicate dance that requires us to pay attention to where we are at any particular moment, including this very moment, and to monitor that we don't tip too far toward one side or the other. This picture of a life in dynamic balance gives me permission to move freely from the past to the present and on into the future, then back again. It relieves me of the pressure to seek that perfect point of the present and to hold onto it, sometimes desperately, when I find it. While I yearn to discover a spiritual practice that moves me closer to a perfectly centered life, and I encourage all of you to seek out your particular path toward enlightenment, perhaps a life held in dynamic balance is enough for now.

May it be so.

^[1] James Ishmael Ford, This Very Moment (Skinner House Boston 1996) 2.
^[2] This Very Moment, 97.

Closing Words:

Our closing words are taken from an ancient Sanskrit text and can be found in the back of our hymnal:

Look to this day
for it is life
the very life of life.

In its brief course lie all
the realities and truths of existence
the joy of growth
the splendor of action
the glory of power.

For yesterday is but a memorty
And tomorrow is only a vision.
But today well lived
makes every yesterday a memory
of happiness
and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day....

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