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"The Holy Way" |
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Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin |
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In my yoga practice there are 26 postures. One of the most challenging is called the standing head to knee. It’s taken me 2 ½ years of hot yoga (Bikrams) to be able to lock out my knee in preparation for my head to knee posture. This posture involves standing on one leg, with knee locked “lamp post straight”, while kicking the other leg out in front of one’s body, waist high, and locking it out as well. The outstretched leg is saddled in one’s interlocked fingers. When you first start doing this posture, the standing knee wants to buckle and bend and there is a tendency to lose the grip in one’s hands. The issue is strength – it takes a long time to build up enough strength in the standing leg to keep the knees from wobbling around, and to build up the strength to keep one’s grip. As our instructors like to bark out: “Bengal Tiger strength, Bulldog determination!”
“Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble
knees”, cries Isaiah the prophet in today’s reading (Isaiah 35:3). “Say to
those of fearful heart: Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come
and save you (35:4). I love this passage from Isaiah until we get to the bit
about God coming to rescue the faithful. You see, this is where my yoga
instructors beg to differ with the prophet. What they teach, in fact, seems like
the opposite of what Isaiah is saying. Here’s what I mean. We’re standing there,
dripping sweat and muscles quivering with tension and all we hear is: “Why are you looking at me? I can’t help you. Nobody can help you. Look inside. All the strength you need is within. You are much stronger than you think you are.”
They have a point. I know, for example, that whenever I set my yoga mat up beside one of the two pillars in the room, I will invariably use it to help me during my balance postures. That’s why I set up away from the pillars. When I’m not near one, I don’t need it to balance. I’ve learned many important lessons in my yoga practice. One is that I am stronger than I think I am. Another is that, if there’s an easy way out, part of me always wants to take it. I have far more inner strength than I typically draw upon.
So is it God’s grace or our own strength that is going to save us? I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a false dichotomy that stems from two fundamental sources. First of all, in a pre-modern worldview (from which Isaiah wrote), there was a strong belief in fate. The world, its institutions, and the place and role of humans were pretty much fixed and unchanging. If anything were going to change, it would have to be through an act of God. It wasn’t until the modern period, and in particular within last 300 years that humans realized that we were creative agents. We were capable of changing our circumstance and influencing the future. This was a revolutionary insight that eventually would result in widespread atheism. Who needed God, when we could do it ourselves?
A recent Environics analysis of the people living within a 15-minute drive to Canadian Memorial Church shows that 40% of this demographic have no religious identity. We have the dubious distinction of living in the most secular area in all of North America. This relatively recent insight that we could do for ourselves what only God was believed to be able to do in pre-modern times has led to widespread atheism. Who needs God? We can strengthen our own hands and feeble knees, thank you very much. Given that we were all educated from within this modernist paradigm, even those who attend church are functionally biased toward self-reliance, relative to the say, Isaiah.
The second source that leads to this false dichotomy is a
theistic belief system. Theism is the belief that God lives outside of us and
outside of space and time, and makes occasional forays into our world and our
lives to straighten things out. After this visit, God returns home, wherever
“home” might be. In this belief system, we must wait for God to enter our lives
so that He may accomplish things for us that we cannot do for ourselves. From
the perspective of this belief system, Advent is the season when we wait in
eager anticipation for God to come from the Great Beyond and help us. To return
to my question, is it God’s grace or our own inner strength that lifts us up out
of our mess? I think there is middle way between absolute self-reliance on the one hand, and waiting on God to intervene and do for us what we cannot do ourselves, on the other. What if all of us are expressions of God, and that we can function in the world from this awareness or contrary to this awareness. Genpo Roshi is a Buddhist monk who talks about Big Mind and Big Heart. What if we have a Big Mind – a conscious awareness that we live and move and have our being in God, and a little mind – that function as though we are isolated and separate from everything and everybody? What if we have a Big Heart – a conscious awareness that love is the ultimate reality – and a little heart, one that lives from a place of fear? When we are living from Big Mind and Big Heart, we are more fully manifesting God than when we are in living from little mind and little heart.
One of the insights of modern science is that we live in an
evolutionary universe. There is a power surging through creation that wants all
things, all bodies, and all realms to become more conscious, more elegant, and
more compassionate. In humans it is biased toward the conscious
realization of Big Mind and Big Heart – the One we call in the Christian
tradition “God”. The reason we know this is this is where our most evolved souls
in every faith tradition have arrived at. When I am able, after three years, to
attain greater elegance in a yoga posture, is it “me” that has achieved this? Or
is it this Spirit-infused evolutionary Power? Well, it’s this Power that has
been granted access to influence my body and mind through an act of willingness.
And what is this willingness? Another word for willingness is “practice”. I have
a physical practice, a mental practice, a spiritual practice, and a practice of
social engagement. But even my willingness is a response to an intuition that
comes through Big Mind and Big Heart, telling me that there is more power, more
elegance, more love than I ever imagined. There is, in St.Paul’s words, “no
reason to boast”, for all is a “gift of God” – even my willingness. This willingness to practice one’s faith is what the
prophet Isaiah calls “the Holy Way” – a pathway built through the desert (35:8)
leading to the very heart of God. I am convinced that the future of the mainline
church depends upon the recovery of spiritual practice – prayer, meditation,
hospitality, justice and peace-making (social engagement), the recovery of the
joy of an authentic Sabbath practice, biblical literacy, and theological
reflection to name just a few practices. Spiritual practice is how we harness
the willfulness of our small mind and small heart, and transform it into
willingness to allow us to be informed by Big Mind and Big Heart. One of the most powerful lines in Scripture for me comes up
in every Advent. An angel visits Mary telling her that the Holy Spirit has
overshadowed her. She is going to give birth to the Christ. Her response is to
say: “Let it be to me according to your word”. Willfulness gave way to
willingness, fear to love, victim-hood to power. Our souls want to be involved
with something worthy of their grandness. We want a divine project of this kind
of scope and significance. Our Big Mind and Heart love the idea of being part of
a divine scheme to birth the holy into the world. It’s what we’re for. Our
little mind and heart are scared to death, because this part of ourselves tells
us that we’re not up to the challenge, it’s beyond us. Well, it is beyond this
part of us that is self-reliant and self-determined and knows only how to live
through willpower. It should be frightened. But with spiritual practice, we grow
in the awareness that it’s not about “us”. I call this piddly power. It’s not
about the piddly power of my piddly self. It’s about the power of the
Spirit-infused evolutionary universe moving through us. It’s about living out of
the depths of who we’re called to be. This is what makes flowers bloom in the desert of our
souls, and streams flow in the desert of our hearts. This is what, in Isaiah’s
words, causes “sorrow and fear take flight” and “everlasting joy” to be “upon
our heads”. And as we learn to live more fully out of our Big Mind and Big Heart
we make the world a more beautiful place. We don’t do spiritual practice so that
we can feel better, although this is a pleasant byproduct. We walk the Holy Way
of spiritual practice because we want the whole world to be a radiant reflection
of God’s heart. We want the earth to be full of God’s glory. We want the lame to
walk, and the blind to see, and the hungry to be fed, and the captive to be
liberated. We want this because we are the heart of God in human form. We are fortunate that there are so many ways to walk this Holy Way at Canadian Memorial. We hold meditation classes, Centering Prayer, and offer opportunities to serve the homeless, and support youth at risk. In the New Year, we’re introducing a Be the Change symposium and small group circles to support you to lighten your ecological footprint. We offer Bible studies, and workshops on how to write sacred poetry. Singing in our choir is a spiritual practice for those with ears to hear. Showing up for worship is a spiritual practice. We’re planning to launch groups called Pathways to God in February – based on the 12 Steps of AA, only now available to those of us who don’t think we’re in need of recovery. (We are, even if we don’t know it!) I haven’t even mentioned all the programs that are offered at the Center for Peace by visiting groups. What’s your practice? Are you walking the Holy Way – this highway to the heart of God? Are you willing to cooperate in strengthening those weak hands, and making firm those feeble knees?
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