A student once told the Zen teacher,
Shunryu Suzuki,
About an experience in which he had dissolved into amazing spaciousness.
Yes,
You could call that enlightenment,
Suzuki responded,
But it's best to forget about it.
And how's your work coming along?
There is an ancient tale of a student asking the Zen master,
Joshu,
Please give me a practice.
Joshu replies,
Have you eaten your meal,
Which in Zen language means,
Have you tasted enlightenment?
The student says,
Yes,
I've eaten a meal.
Good,
Says Joshu.
Then go and do the washing up.
Some of you might remember me saying that when I was 19 and I went to live at Prunish Abbey,
I was very driven and idealistic and wanted to find enlightenment.
And how,
With great gentleness,
The monks encouraged me to stop looking for enlightenment,
The kingdom,
As if this were something separate from ordinary life,
Lived with a particular quality of open,
Receptive attention,
With awareness.
Whatever simple task I happened to be doing,
Which included a great deal of time working in the kitchen and the gardens,
Cleaning toilets and polishing wooden floors,
I was to practice being as wholeheartedly present as possible.
I was being encouraged to discover the sacred in everyday life.
There are strong parallels between how Benedictines approach the preparation and serving of food,
And what the great 13th century Zen master Dogen says in his manual,
Instructions for the Zen Cook.
The role of the cook,
In both the Benedictine and Zen monastery,
Is seen as extremely important.
Cooking is vital for nourishing the body,
The mind and the community.
It manifests a particular orientation to life.
In his book,
Looking at Dogen's Instructions for the Zen Cook,
Bernie Glassman,
The American Zen master who founded the Zen Peacemakers organisation,
Dedicated to contemptive social action,
Says that living our life well,
With wakefulness,
Is to realise the essential oneness of life in all its aspects.
In Christian terms,
To realise the sacred in every aspect of our life.
Not just in those aspects of our life that might look conventionally spiritual,
Like going to church,
Or turning up to meditation practice,
But also in those aspects of our life which may not look so spiritual at first glance,
Like sorting out the recycling,
Or doing the ironing.
It is high time for us to arise from sleep.
Let us open our eyes to the light,
Says Saint Benedict.
It's time for us to wake up.
When we are awake,
We awaken to life as a whole.
We can discover the sacred in every moment,
In every task.
There are many different metaphors for such a life,
Writes Glassman.
But the one that I have found the most useful,
And the most meaningful,
Comes from the kitchen.
Zen masters call a life that is lived fully and completely,
With nothing held back,
The supreme meal.
And a person who lives such a life,
A person who knows how to plan,
Cook,
Appreciate,
Serve,
And offer the supreme meal of life,
Is called a Zen cook.
Benedictine spirituality calls us to attend to every aspect of life.
It refuses to allow anything we do to be lost in the work of living a life which is whole.
It invites us to see that no moment is unimportant,
And that each moment holds an invitation.
It is a spirituality,
A way of seeing and being,
Which honours each moment,
Each task,
As God with us.
In the Gospel of Luke,
We find Jesus telling a parable about praying always and not losing heart.
Now,
Depending on what you think prayer is,
To be told to pray always might seem like a very tall order,
Something that might lead us to end up with a sore jaw,
A requirement almost impossible to keep,
A bit demanding,
Which might very well cause us to lose heart.
Well,
If we think of prayer,
Or prayerfulness,
More in terms of being an attitude,
An orientation to life,
To God,
Then we don't need to think any more about having the right words to hand,
Or not having any words at all.
We can bring this mind of attentive awareness to whatever we happen to be doing.
Prayer is now about how we live our life,
And how we live our life becomes our prayer.
And from the Christian perspective,
This must necessarily involve compassion,
Because God is love,
And God is the ground of our prayer,
Its beginning,
Its energy,
Its end.
Prayer can only be thought of as separate from compassion when we are mistaken about what prayer is.
This lovely story about the desert father,
Abba Piman,
Illustrates the point.
Some old men went to Abba Piman and asked,
If we see brothers sleeping during the common prayer,
Should we wake them?
Abba Piman answered,
If I see my brother sleeping,
I put his head on my knees and let him rest.
For Abba Piman,
Prayer and compassion could not be separated.
His compassion was prayer,
And his prayer was compassion.
God compassioning through him.
In meditation,
We practice being present.
We practice meeting every moment with open,
Receptive attention,
With awareness.
Saying our prayer word,
Following our breath,
We see how quickly and easily our attention is drawn away from our practice,
And so we return,
And return,
And return again,
Letting this gentle work of returning bring us home to the present,
Where our life is,
Where everyone else is.
After we get up from meditation,
We find we are more present,
More available for life,
For the next task,
For each other.
We cultivate what Benedictines call stability,
Stability of heart.
The whole point of meditation is the whole of our life.
