“Desire: The Source of Our Suffering” Vance L. Toivonen
READING James 3:13 - 4:3, 7-8a
Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace. Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.
READING Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses
They call is dukkha, a Pali term in the language spoken by the Buddha, that is difficult to capture in one English word, but which is rendered variously by translators and scholars as suffering, anguish, stress, malaise, dis-ease, or unsatisfactoriness…All of Buddhism is oriented toward waking up from the delusions we spin for ourselves and the ones we are conditioned into through past experiences. In awakening, we free ourselves from the suffering and anguish that come from mis-taking the nature of reality through our limited self-oriented views and tendency to grasp and cling to what we desire and to push away what we fear.
SERMON
Some of you may know that I like to paste wisdom sayings on my wall. These are seminal pieces culled from my experience that speak the loudest to me, calling me to the newness that only change and transformation can bring in my life. I believe this is the whole reason for being…to experience change and transformation. Through consciousness and acquisition of self-knowledge I am moved from the place I have been to a new place. Each moment of my life is an explosion of a star within my personal universe, a supernova that results in the formation of many new worlds.
Brett Hanson reminded me of this last week in what was a transformational experience for me. People told me after the service that it went quite long. I do not wear a watch and I can honestly say that I had no idea how long the service was. I was lost in the moment, ensconced in the beauty and wonder of the prayerfulness, the humility, and the sheer awe of the personal journey that was evidenced by Brett. In the years that Brett has been here he has gone through much change and transformation. It was an honor for me to experience what Brett offered last week. (Thank you, Brett).
One of the prayers he taught us was Noverim Te, Noverim Me. Loosely translated this prayer calls us to a convergence of knowledge, knowledge of self and knowledge of God. The two are inexorably wedded together. Without the humility of knowing there is something greater than ourselves, which many, but not all, call God, there is no self-knowledge. Without knowledge of our selves, consciousness, self-examination, and so forth we cannot know something greater than ourselves. In fact, without self-knowledge we may be deceived into thinking that our egos are synonymous with God, that the “I” is the final arbiter, judge and jury for all of life.
Some of the old cathedrals, and yes, many Catholic churches, will etch some Latin phrase into it’s stone edifice at the entrance. I left last week thinking Noverim Te, Noverim Me would be a terrific statement of purpose, and the perfect thing to etch above the door through which we all enter this building. It is my firm hope, and desire, that we would all gather here for that purpose. Yet, at the same time that I share that desire, I am aware that we walk through those doors for myriad reasons. I am aware that my desire may not be a shared desire. And, in fact, I, and others in this community, are experiencing a certain degree of suffering and pain precisely because of our varied desires.
As we heard a few moments ago, the Buddhists call this dukkha. Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests various English readings of the word as suffering, anguish, stress, malaise, dis-ease, or unsatisfactoriness, all of which some of us are experiencing here at the moment. We may think that the resolution to this is to find a way to satiate all of our desires. Through compromise we may reason that we can ensure everyone’s satisfaction. We may believe that it is possible for everyone to get a little piece of what they want, and that then everyone will be happy and content.
Which brings me back to the sayings on my wall. I was painfully aware as I was writing this sermon that I do not always pay attention to the wisdom in those sayings. They tend to stay on my wall rather than penetrate the fortress of my heart and mind. One of those sayings is for me a more recent one, that saying we have heard here on some other Sunday morning from Epictetus. “Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish, but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil life.”
In his new book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle engages in a lengthy discussion about the ego. Our ego is the heart of our wanting, of our desire; and Tolle tells us that it is never satisfied. The path to true joy is the bridling of the ego. The ego marries our wanting, our desire, with our identity. If we cannot have what we want, then we take it as a personal affront, rationalizing that we cannot be, that we cannot even exist without the satiation of our wants and desires, the pleasuring of our egos.
Those words from Epictetus direct us away from the ego, and plant us firmly into reality, rooting us in what is; not in what was, or what might be, or what could be…but what is. This is the greatest challenge on my wall right now. In fact, this has been, and likely will continue to be my greatest challenge for the rest of my life. Tolle writes, “Unease, restlessness, boredom, anxiety, dissatisfaction, are the results of unfulfilled wanting.” I am experiencing these things here at Hope Church. I would tend to say that there is more than enough of all of that here right now. And I am aware that the only “unease, restlessness, boredom, anxiety, and dissatisfaction” I can own up to is my own. I have plenty of struggle with my own ego, and am consciously working to restrain it. I must ask that all of us please do our own work in this regard.
James asks rhetorically, “Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?” Perhaps the tensions we feel swirling around us here at Hope are nothing more than projections of our own inner cravings, temper tantrums of our egos kicking and screaming and whining and focusing myopically on our own self-interests. Is it possible to forge a community that nurtures not our egos, but rather awakening and consciousness which frees us from bondage to our egos? I ask this because I do not know. Churches have not typically been such places. Although they have been forums for discussion along these lines, all of the churches I have been in have been more geared toward feeding the ego than taming it, present institution included. Can we change this in ourselves, and in this place?
Jon Kabbat-Zinn writes,
Lying at the heart of…practices for the recognition of, liberation from, and cessation of dukkha is the cultivation of mindfulness…mindfulness can be thought of as an open-hearted, non-judgmental, present-moment awareness, the direct, non-conceptual knowing of experience as it unfolds, in its arising, in its momentary lingering, and in its passing way…the historical figure of the Buddha…gave the world a well-defined algorithm, a path of inquiry…the possibility of being fully conscious, fully awake, and free from the fetters of our own conditioning, including our unexamined habits of thought and perception and the afflictive emotions that so intimately and frequently accompany them unbidden. (Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses)
The only way for us to survive all of the malaise that haunts our doors here at Hope is for us to each devote ourselves to that prayer that Brett taught us last week. We don’t have to sing it or chant it. We don’t even have to speak it. All we need to do is plug into our hearts and minds, dedicate ourselves to it, and commit to gathering here for one primary purpose from which all other purposes will flow, to know God and to know ourselves; for we can do neither without the other.