Psalm 65; Philippians 4:4-9
“Remember,” the gentle, soft-spoken Buddhist monk began, “last time I asked you to practice focusing your awareness on your lustful thoughts. Did you notice your lustful thoughts this week?”
I looked across the half-circle of meditation students and saw the startled faces of two newcomers. I imagined what they might have been thinking: “we come to a church hall where we do a beautiful loving kindness meditation followed by a peaceful breathing meditation, then we chant something in a strange language that the kind monk says means ‘fully enlightened.’ And then he asks us about our lustful thoughts?”
I leapt in. “Bhante [which means Reverend], remember last time we realized that what your book translates as lustful thoughts has a very different meaning than the way Americans understand those words. For us, lust means sexually objectifying another person.”
Bhante Pannasiri’s eyes grew wide for a moment, and then he laughed. Relieved, we all laughed. He proceeded to explain what he means by lustful thoughts. He described lust as what happens when we go to the mall. We see things, they attract us, and before long our shopping cart is overflowing.
“Like greed?” someone asked. “Kind of,” he replied.
“Like grasping?” I asked. “Kind of,” he replied again.
Bhante Pannasiri explained that lustful thoughts aren’t always about objects. They can be about memories or ideas or dreams. And they are not necessarily about things we want. Sometimes our lustful thoughts are about our worries and fears. Lust in the Buddhist context, we began to understand, is about holding on to something, maybe trying to control it. It’s about attachment.
One of the newcomers spoke up. She talked about how hard she tries to practice mindfulness when she is caught in a downward spiral of worries. “I try to notice the worries and then let them go,” she said. “But they keep coming back.”
Bhante responded by reminding us that mindfulness is a practice. It takes practice–a lot. Start, he said, by noticing. Don’t try to push the thoughts away. Just notice. Keep practicing. Eventually, the worries will float away.
The woman’s question prompted me to ask mine. “Over the last few weeks,” I began, “there has been a lot of awful things on the news. If we try to be compassionate people, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. We don’t want to shut it out, though, because people are suffering. How can mindfulness help?”
I asked the question because I was still reeling from two mass shootings and the horrifying California fires, and I had just learned about a hate incident at Hemenway school. I was sitting beside people I know are deeply compassionate–and I guessed they were reeling too.
Bhante reiterated the importance of practicing mindfulness–noticing our response to the world around us. With practice, he suggested, we will not be so disturbed. We can be happy, and we can sleep.
“But…” I stumbled to ask my question. “But compassion is at the heart of Buddhism, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “You should be compassionate. You do your duty. If there is a way you can help, you should help. You should do kind acts. Then you go to sleep. Otherwise, what good will it do? You will just cry all the time.”
His words were wise. If we absorb the pain around us until it immobilizes us, we’re no good to anyone. Still, I wasn’t satisfied. How do compassion and non-attachment fit together? They seem like opposites. I suspect that is a paradox of Buddhism, which can’t be explained any better than I can explain the paradoxes of Christianity.
I asked the question because I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be a Christian–or a person of any faith or simply a person who is compassionate–in our world today. We are bombarded with so much bad news–about our planet, about mass shootings and suicide epidemics, hate, the opioid epidemic, threats to civil rights for transgender people, refugees and asylum seekers desperate for safety. There is so much pain and we hear about it non-stop.
Sometimes we blame the 24-hour news cycle. Why, we ask, does the media focus only on the bad things? They are simply responding to consumer demand; if they focused on happy stories we wouldn’t watch. Research points to a deep-rooted human tendency to pay much more attention to bad news. It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint: bad news may mean danger, and so we focus on it to keep ourselves alive. That instinct, of course, evolved in a time when the news we heard was limited to a narrow sphere–family, clan, tribe.
Every world religion, each in its unique way, calls human beings to a broader perspective, to expand our compassion beyond our family or tribe to include strangers and even enemies. The Torah commanded the Israelites to welcome the stranger and the sojourner; Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan; Bodhisattvas delay their own enlightenment to help awaken others.
In Moses’ and Jesus’ and the Buddha’s times, this call was a deep challenge to the human impulse to focus on one’s own people. The challenge today is intensified by the communications break-throughs of recent decades. Now we hear about each tragedy, each act of hate, as soon as it happens. Before we can figure out how to respond to one, another piles on top of it. No wonder we are overwhelmed.
It is tempting to respond by narrowing our circle of concern, restricting our compassion to people who look and think like us. That temptation runs counter to our faith. I don’t know what Jesus would say if he lived today; I am quite sure he would not counsel us to ignore the pain of people we do not know.
On Tuesday night, Bhante Pannasiri described the Buddhist practice of mindfulness that enables him to live with compassion and sleep well at night. What Christian practices might help us respond with passion and compassion without collapsing under the weight of the world’s pain?
Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi lifts up one central Christian practice. “Rejoice in our God always,” he wrote. “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God….Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
Paul called the Philippians to a conscious practice of gratitude–giving thanks. Paul called them to purposefully, intentionally, bring their awareness to the true, honorable, pleasing and praiseworthy things they might not otherwise have been noticing. Pay attention, he said, to the good things as well as the painful ones.
Whenever we talk about gratitude, I am aware of how quickly we can twist it into permission to ignore the suffering around us or deny the pain within us. “Quit complaining; be grateful for what you have,” we say. Or “Look on the bright side of life.” Or the song my elementary school music teacher taught us, “You’ve got to accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative; latch on to the affirmative; don’t mess with Mr. In-between.”
That’s not what Paul meant; and that’s not how our faith calls us to live. Giving thanks does not mean denying pain and suffering. A choice to live with gratitude is a choice to see the world for what it is: a place where suffering and joy co-exist, where human beings perpetrate horrifying act of hate and risk their lives to help others, where there is ugliness and beauty, death and life. Given our human instinct to focus on the negative, gratitude challenges us to see the whole of the world around us. Gratitude restores a balanced perspective on the world. That balance gives us the solid ground we need to use our creativity and our gifts to respond to the very real pain around us.
Bhante Pannasiri’s words come back to me: practice, practice, practice. What is true for mindfulness in Buddhism is true for gratitude in Christianity. When we practice it regularly, gratitude–giving thanks–can transform our lives and can free us to be part of healing our world.
A practice of gratitude can take many forms. Saying grace before meals is a simple and powerful practice–a reminder that we didn’t create the food sitting in front of us, an invitation to open our eyes to the gifts we receive in between our meals.
Some people keep a gratitude journal–a daily listing of things for which we are thankful. When I have tried it, I found it sometimes hard to come up with the first thing on the list; once I get a few words written down, though, I feel my perspective begin to shift. I start with obvious things–food, shelter, the tree outside my window. Once I get warmed up, I awaken to beauty beyond what I could see before: a friend’s forgiveness, a mentor’s words from a decade ago, a disagreement that has challenged me to grow, the satisfaction of giving a gift.
There are many ways to practice gratitude: A morning Tai Chi series to awaken gratitude for healing energy, an evening prayer of thanksgiving, a daily walk, writing a thank you note every Saturday. What is your gratitude practice? What might it be?
An individual gratitude practice can be life-changing; the power of giving thanks is multiplied in community. Every Sunday morning our worship begins with a communal gratitude practice: our hymn of praise, sentences of praise, the gloria. We sing whether or not we come to church feeling grateful. Sometimes, the act of singing reminds us of things for which we are thankful, and our perception shifts. Other times, when we are mired in grief or depression, the words sound hollow, and all we can do is trust the congregation to sing them on our behalf until we can claim them again as our own.
As we practice gratitude together, week after week, we counter-balance our deep-rooted instinct to focus on fear and pain. We help each other awaken to beauty beyond what we see. We realize we are not alone, and we find creative new ways to work together–to work with the wider church and the interfaith community and people of good will everywhere–to be a source of healing and hope.
The news is overwhelming. Hatred, tragedy, suffering are all too real. As we reclaim the Christian practice of gratitude, we awaken to the truth that they are not the only reality. As we together give thanks, we regain our balance. We are energized to use our compassion and our gifts to bring love and comfort and justice to our world.
Let us practice gratitude together. Amen.