Wake
Up
Reverend Ted Tollefson
© 2006
Awakening:
A realization
born of crisis
into a hidden truth
that trans-forms self,
world values, vocation.
"Awakenings" have a common structure. They are part
of our birth-rite as members of Humankind.
Awakenings can
be spiritual, ethical, aesthetic, political,
social.
They are one way to realize our True Nature. Today I will
remind you
of three great Awakening: Old Buddha, Henry David Thoreau and
Mary Oliver. Near the end, I will share a mantra which
connects "waking up" with two ways to realize our True Nature.
Prologue: What to
Remember When Waking
(c) 1990 David Whyte
...You
are not a
troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident
amidst other accidents.
You were invited from
another and greater night
than the one from which
you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the
slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain
presence of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you
to your one love?
What shape waits in the
seed of you to grow
and spread its
branches against a future sky?...
1. Old Buddha's Awakening
(500 bce??)
"Buddha" is not the last name of Siddhartha Gotamma. It's an
honorific title which means "the one who is awake", the "one who is
enlightened". Siddhartha Gotamma was born into a privileged family in
north India about 540 bce. His father tried to protect
Siddhartha from all the unhappy facts of life. He grew up in an elite
gated community; perhaps like "Dellwood" or "North Oaks". As a young
man he persuaded his chauffer to drive him outside the gates.
There he saw disease, old age and death for the first time.
His first awakening was to recognize that no amount of power and
privilege could protect from the sorrows of embodied life.
His heart was moved by the suffering he witnessed.
Within a few month, Siddhartha left his palatial home, cut his hair,
left behind his fine clothes and walked out into the forest.
There he met his first spiritual teacher and, within a few years,
learned the disciplines of Yoga to discipline his senses and desires,
calm his heart and mind. He was so thorough in his ascetism
he almost killed himself. A poor milk-maid took pity upon the
bag of bones she saw and pushed a little rice porridge into his mouth
and left more in his begging bowl. Siddhartha's body came
back to life. He had his second Awakening: there was no life
and no
liberation outside the 'fathom length' of body and mind. Punishing his
body was no more useful than indulging it. He vowed to follow
a "Middle Path".
When body and mind were mended, he sought a place to deepen his
meditation. He found a good place in the shade of a large fig
tree, near a river. There he took up his place in an "unmovable
spot". This is not any place in the physical world, but an
invisible Center formed by his undivided and unwavering
attention. He vowed to stay put until he realized the true
cause and cure of human suffering.
After several hours or days of meditation, he opened his eyes to see
the Morning Star (Venus) and entered into his Great Awakening. His
awakening began by realizing that he had no separate, privileged self.
His thoughts came and went like clouds covering the
Sun. His feelings ebbed and flowed like river
currents. But nowhere could he find a substantial, separate
self. There was no island self to worry, fear,
hate, suffer or die. All around there was an open "Field"
constantly in motion, deeply
interconnected. By seeing through the fiction of a separate
self, Old Buddha realized there was no one left to suffer.
After several more layers of Awakening, Old Buddha took his teaching on
the road. For 40 years, he taught the causes of suffering and
their cure. The Buddha Dharma (later "Buddhism") shook the
foundations of India's caste system and the priestly caste that
sanctioned it. Nobility was now based on conduct not an
accident of birth. Liberation came from direct experience,
not correct faith or magical rites. The Buddha
Dharma radiated outward from India to China, Japan, Korean and now
America and Europe. Because of Old Buddha's ministry,
millions have awakened to their True Nature: boundless and free from
sorrow, imbued with compassion, deeply connected to the common life of
all beings.
***bell-sound***
2. Henry David Thoreau's
Awakening (1817-1862)
Thoreau was born as "David Henry Thoreau" in the small village of
Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. Thoreau's family teetered on the edge
of poverty. His mother ran a boarding house. His family made
pencils. Young Thoreau was a bright young man who went off to
Harvard College at the age of 16. At Harvard he joined the
"Transcendental Club" where he imbibed the "New Ideas" brought forth by
his Concord neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher Henry Hedge
and others.
Thoreau returned to his native Concord at age 20 and entered into a
period of "lateral drift". Like many in their twenties he
sought his calling by eliminating possibilities that didn't fit. Within
a few years he failed at love, failed at teaching, failed at work and
failed to live up to his families hopes for him. He suffered
the death of his beloved elder brother. Like many in his
family, Thoreau struggled with narcolepsy. For Thoreau
staying awake was both a literal and metaphoric quest.
Thoreau's "First Awakening" came in October 1837. He attended
a dinner party and afterwards joined in conversation with his neighbor
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson had a keen eye for young
people with talent. Near the end of the evening, he
turned to young Thoreau and said: "Do you keep a
journal?"
A seed was planted. The next day Thoreau bought a journal and
began a life-long habit of recording his life and thoughts.
Thoreau
used his journal as a cocoon in which to grow a new identity.
Within two years, he moved out of his family home and became an adopted
brother and uncle at the Emerson household. He renamed
himself "Henry David Thoreau" and with the help of his
Transcendental buddies, built a small cabin on Emerson's woodlot.
Thoreau moved into his cabin on Walden pond July 4, 1845.
Thoreau's second Awakening came during his two-year residence on Walden
Pond. He walked and surveyed his surroundings by day and came
home to write at night. He checked out new translations of
oriental scriptures from the Harvard Library. Within the safe
enclave
of his cabin and journals, Thoreau began to "see through" the polite
pretensions of his Yankee neighbors. He realized that a
"majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation". He
recognized that many were "possessed by their possession" not liberated
by them. He realized that the path to happiness and the free
time to enjoy it came, not by working more to accumulate more, but by
decreasing insatiable want to actual need. By communing with
his wild neighbors and conversing with his fellow 'Transcendentalists',
Thoreau began to write a new chapter in American literature.
When
Walden or Life in the
Woods was finally published in 1854, Thoreau had
combined creative non-fiction, pithy proverbs, and occasional rants
with seeds of Hindu texts to form the poetic roots of American
Naturalism. Thoreau lived and evoked a life that Emerson
could
only imagine.
To understand Thoreau's Third Awakening, we must enter into the text of
Walden. I want to know what Thoreau saw when he was
Awake!, or more precisely how he saw. Listen to Thoreau's
benediction to chapter two of Walden:
Time is but the stream I go afishing in.
I drink at it, but while I drink
I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.
Its thin current slides away, but Eternity remains.
I would drink deeper, fish in the sky
whose bottom is pebbly with stars.
I cannot count one.
I know not the first letter of the alphabet.
I have always been regretting
that I am not now as wise
as the day I was born.
Like the perennial philosophers and mystics of all ages. Thoreau sees
through the details of "Walden Pond" to a deeper dimension, which he
calls "Eternity":
beyond the compass of rational
thought
beyond the habits of counting or lettering
there is a place where all things sing together----
a "poem of the Whole", a "Wise
Silence"---
where river bottom and night sky
inside and outside
infant and sage
fold into a timeless Unity.
The living waters of the Ganges empty into Walden Pond and Thoreau,
our first Yankee Yogi & backwoods Buddha WAKES
UP Like
the bantam rooster he celebrates in Walden,
he proclaims his Good News:
I desire to speak
somewhere without bounds;
like
someone in a waking moment,
to others in their
waking moments...
Only that
day dawns to which we are awake.
There is
more day to dawn.
The sun
is but a morning star. (Conclusion, Walden)
***bell-sound***
3. Mary Oliver's
Awakening (1935-): "Wild Geese"
Mary Oliver is thankfully still living on Cape Cod with her partner
Molly Benson. Beacon Press publishes most of her
books. Perhaps someday soon she will become the poet laureate
of the UUA. I'm going to focus on a single well-known poem,
"Wild Geese". Because this is a sermon, I'm going to inflict
some commentary upon the text. Preaching aspires to
the condition of poetry; worship aspires to the condition of
Jazz. Just because we fall short every week, doesn't mean we
should stop trying.
You do
not have to be good.
You do
not have to walk on your knees
for a
hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only
have to let the soft animal of your body
love what
it loves.
Tell me
about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
As I read this opening, there are two no's, one maybe and one radiant
Yes. The no's are to habits that we might well
leave behind. We could try to "fix" someone else or punish
ourselves,
but we don't have to. We could invite someone to join us in a
communion of despair, but we don't have to. There is another
option, similar to Old Buddha's rescue by the milk-maid:
You only
have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
If we follow the tendril of our "soft animal...body", we may find that
it connects us to something older, wilder and lovelier:
Meanwhile
the world goes on.
Meanwhile
the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are
moving across the landscapes,
over the
prairies and the deep trees,
the
mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile
the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are
heading home again.
All around us is an interactive field of events that is lovely, that is
us: for we are Nature looking at Nature, Nature
laughing,
Nature loving, Nature following its own Way.
The poem's conclusion sounds an invitation which Thoreau spent much of
his life answering:
Whoever
you are, no matter how lonely,
the world
offers itself to your imagination,
calls to
you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting----
over and
over announcing your place
in the
family of things.
What Buddha saw by the light of the Morning Star and Thoreau glimpsed
in Walden Pond, Mary Oliver over-hears in the call of Wild
Geese. When we awaken to our True Nature,
we find our place in the "family of things". This world becomes
"Mitakuye
Oyasin", as our Lakota elders say, "All our relations!"
The world comes alive; we are part of this life; and we come home.
***bell-sound***
4. Concluding Invitation:
3 Steps become a Dance
I have talked about three great Awakenings: Old
Buddha!
Thoreau! Mary Oliver! Waking up is a good way to
begin, but
our way of being religious must not end there. If Old Buddha had been
content with solitary enlightenment, if Thoreau had remained a cranky
hermit, if Mary Oliver hadn't give voice to her vision our lives would
be immeasurably diminished.
Waking Up! is just the beginning. It needs two
others steps
in order to become a dance that can change world as well as self,
social vocation as well as personal values:
Wake
up!
Stand up!
Shake up!
Wake up to what's True!
Stand up for what's Right!
Shake up the powers that be!
That's just some of the Good News from Unitarian Universalism
where all the women are wise & compassionate
all the men
are gentle & agile
and all the
children are full of bodhichitta:
the seeds of
Awakening.