I'd like to begin my talk with a koan.
And you'll recognize why I've chosen this koan.
A monk asked Master Zhao Zhou,
When times of great difficulty visit us,
How should we meet them?
Zhao Zhou replied,
Welcome.
When times of great difficulty visit us,
How should we meet them?
Welcome.
This koan has been rattling around in my head for days.
As I sit with a broken heart,
Thinking that perhaps the world can't burn any more harshly than it burns right now.
Some of you may be sitting with this heartbreak as well.
I mean,
What arises for me is despair about how cruel we can be to each other.
And then the despair will ebb,
And then I will start to get enraged.
And then it will become too much,
And in the next moment,
I give up.
Too big,
Too much,
Can't do anything about it.
And I find myself turning away.
Climate change,
The pandemic,
Racial injustice,
And now a new war.
This resonates for me particularly because my grandparents came from Ukraine.
Their parents were doctors who spent their whole lives relieving suffering.
But because they were Jewish,
They realized they were in grave danger,
And my grandparents were whisked away out of danger.
And so I'm aware that I have a particular resonance with that country that's now under attack.
But I'm also aware that these kinds of tragedies are happening everywhere.
They're happening in places that I'm barely aware of all the time.
So many wrongs done to our ancestors,
And so many wrongs that our ancestors have done to others.
And we seem to keep repeating the past,
Sometimes deliberately,
Most of the time,
Because of ignorance and forgetting.
So what did Zhao Zhou mean when he said that we should meet difficult times with welcome?
Well,
We know what he meant.
We know that this practice is about welcoming life as it is,
Because there is no other life.
And so as we sit with this and our hearts break,
We also do the work of knowing what is in our own hearts.
When we point fingers at others,
And I've been doing a lot of finger pointing recently,
As the African proverb says,
When you point a finger at others,
Three fingers are pointing back at you.
So what do I find?
What's pointing back at me?
Well,
I know what it's like to want to have my way.
I know what it's like to hold on to a fixed view,
Even when it makes other people suffer.
I know what it's like to want to take what isn't freely given.
All that,
All that resides in each of us,
Each of us.
And so when we welcome,
We welcome all of it.
We recognize all of it as the heart and minds that we all have,
And this world that we live in.
But as our reading said tonight,
This could risk our doing a spiritual bypass to say,
Yes,
Humans are like this.
We all do this,
Nothing to be done.
And that is not where this practice is meant to take us.
So how do we practice with it all?
Well,
First we glimpse the absolute.
We glimpse our complete connection with everything we despise,
With everything we push away.
My connection with the bullies of the world who trample on others.
Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a poem about all that he was,
Including the refugee girl who was raped and the pirate who raped her.
Such harsh words,
But when we really know our own hearts,
We see that all of this is there to be known,
To be glimpsed,
To be worked with.
And then we sit like Guan Yin,
Hearing the cries of the world.
That's one of the hardest places to be,
Where we really hear the cries.
Yesterday,
I spoke to one of our Sangha mates,
And she and I were sharing this swirl of feelings that comes up.
And we both realized how much less alone we feel for sharing it.
That one of the elixirs of Sangha is to allow us to share this pain with each other and to draw strength from each other as we feel less alone with it.
Not to rest in practice,
But to grab those moments when we are inspired to take action.
And then what?
If all of us live with this swirl of emotions,
And all of the bad out there in the world lives in me,
Then I am not in the world,
I am what the world is doing right now.
What then?
This is where our bodhisattva vows are what we can hold on to.
We say them at the end of each sitting,
Bowing to save all beings.
And if you remember,
The bodhisattva is able to go to Nirvana,
To go to the place where there's no more suffering,
But the bodhisattva says,
I will not go until everybody is there.
Everybody is free of suffering.
An impossible vow,
But a vow that says we are always all in this together.
Not feeling virtuous about that vow,
But simply knowing our oneness with everyone means that we have to do what we can to ease suffering when we can.
When big world events are happening,
It's very easy to believe that we are too small to do anything.
And when I feel that way,
I'm reminded of the Dalai Lama's quip.
He said,
If you think you are too small to make a difference,
Try sleeping with a mosquito.
But in a less facetious way,
He's telling us that everything we do,
Each little action we take to relieve suffering,
Has power,
Reverberates through the world in ways that we can't possibly foresee.
And so it may not be that I can stop the fighting somewhere else in the world,
But I can ease the suffering of a homeless person today by making a donation.
I can ease the suffering of someone who's frightened by the desperate state of the world.
Each of us,
When those moments arise,
Can look around us and see,
Where can I ease suffering?
Where can I enact my bodhisattva vow in this moment?
Of course,
We rest in knowing that we don't know how any of this will play out.
And we don't have to know.
All we can do and all we need to do is set an intention to relieve what suffering we can,
When we can,
Including taking care of ourselves,
But to know that the reverberations of whatever we do will be powerful.
Thinking again about the reading tonight,
The Way of Tenderness.
The way of tenderness does not equal quiescence.
It does not mean that fiery emotions disappear.
It does not render acceptable that anyone can hurt or abuse life.
Tenderness doesn't erase the inequities we face in the relative world.
And it doesn't encourage a spiritual bypass of the feelings we experience.
The way of tenderness is an elixir for the clogged arteries in the heart of our world.
We can practice in this way with fluidity,
Allowing the ebb and flow of all the feelings,
The ebb and flow of the heartbreak,
But also the ebb and flow of energy.
Energy to enact those bounds that keep us anchored and keep us from despair.
I'm going to close with a piece of writing from John Tarrant,
Our,
My Dharma great grandfather,
Actually.
He wrote a piece on the end of the world.
And he says,
What if it really were the end of the world?
I'd be full of wonder and possibly laughter.
I'd think the end of the world is always happening while hummingbirds zoom past my nose and the plain brown birds scratch in the leaf litter and cars go by much faster than the posted speed limit.
So this is what the end of the world is like,
I'd think,
Feeling awe and probably happiness.
I could stop bargaining.
I could just say welcome and listen to the vast pulse of the changes.
Our welcome is not a passive welcome.
It's not a spiritual bypass.
It's a welcome where we muster energy whenever we can to be like that mosquito and make a difference in the world,
But unlike the mosquito to act toward relieving suffering.
A monk asked Jao Jao,
When times of great difficulty visit us,
How should we meet them?
Jao Jao replied,
Welcome.
Thank you.
