“The Still Small Voice Within”
Rev. Peg Boyle Morgan
February 26, 2006
West Seattle UU Fellowship
I have just spent two weeks in Costa Rica. This is a trip that I never will forget, for I was privileged to visit a land rich with a multitude of the earth’s most inviting and friendly people and most beautiful and diverse living species. Moving intimately through teeming, living forests, I quickly forgot all my lists of to-do’s at home on my desk, and felt instead to be a part of the lush green jungle.
It all began as we landed in San Juan, Costa Rica, greeted by our darling Costa Rican naturalist guide named Oliver, our stealth pothole dodger bus driver named Pecky, and our University of Washington professor, James Karr; after a restful night we drove eastward. We moved up small mountains, and beginning at 3000 feet we found ourselves looking out the windows at hills filled with coffee bushes, and as we descended down the eastern side we were surrounded by fields of bananas. Soon we were down in the flat land villages of the Black Costa Ricans, descendents of the Jamaicans who had come a century ago to help build the railroads, for they alone could stand to work in the heat.
Reaching the eastern Atlantic coast, we boarded a small boat and began a 2 ½ hour trip gliding north on a river in the Torteguero Rain Forest, experiencing up close and personal the stillness of a sly crocodile and the camouflage of a green iguana. It was thrilling to see in the branches above me the cute white faced capuchin monkeys, the abundant and territorial howler monkeys, and their elusive cousins the spider monkeys; I was in awe of the smooth glide of the great blue heron, the clear flight path of the toucan, and the mating ritual of the bare-throated tiger heron.
I delighted in the little brown Jacana bird with his yellow wings as he perched himself on floating vegetation, and I was taken in by the stately posing of the anhinga birds holding their oil free wings out to dry. We arrived at the village of Torteguero, with a population of only 700; and found our rooms in an eco-sensitive lodge. On later walks my eyes focused on a praying mantis eating his moth prey, and on an army of leaf cutting ants marching dutifully down a tree carrying their green bounties to their nests. I patiently watched sleepy sloths high in the trees, and on a colony of tiny bats sleeping on a large shaded riverside rock.
The next morning, I faced my fears of height and vulnerability by swinging high through trees on a canopy cables, and allowing me my only encounter with a high perched red headed lineated woodpecker. Later in the week back in the middle of the country my heart was stolen while holding hands and singing with children of a small indigent village in a cloud forest. And in our last location in the town of Tamarinda, the stinging of jelly fish was of small matter as I snorkeled among brilliant blue and yellow fish, eels and sharks –all in reefs of the Pacific Ocean.
These were just some of the highlights of my adventure in this part of the living earth. Many times, I found myself looking into the eyes of another creature, feeling a soulful connection of life with life. The living creatures of the jungle were at home there, taking only what they needed, and often showing their playful side. We have much to learn from those creatures with whom we share this earth. Our own survival and theirs depends upon it.
Before I knew it, we reached the end of our 12th day, and we reluctantly left for the airport in San Juan, only to discover that our flight was delayed for three hours. They booked us on new connecting flights out of Dallas, but in Dallas our plane was required to wait for a gate, causing uncertainty about making our new connecting flight. Wayne and I determined that we would walk as briskly as we could to the flight, but we would not run, and we would not be attached to the outcome. It helps to live with a Buddhist. In other words, we would not get upset or uptight, and if we didn’t make it, then we’d just figure out another plan. We still had immigration and customs to get through, making matters worse. We didn’t make it, far from it. We ended up being on a standby list for two later flights, clearly missing the first of the two. But we were happy. The trip was peaceful and invigorating. We kept reliving the memories and talking to members of our group who waited with us.
As we watched our first standby plane fill up and the staff close the gate, I sensed that a drama was about to take place. I knew the airline employees were doing their best to accommodate as many displaced passengers as possible, while juggling the possibility of late confirmed seat arrivals. All eyes were on the agents. The flight was scheduled to leave. The gate was closed with the last possible people, a mixture of standby and barely connecting passengers. Just then a man with his wife and son came running up shouting “We’re here, open the gate!” The airline personnel informed him that the flight was already closed, and that their seats were already taken by a standby passenger. “No!” he shouted, “We are here! I demand that you open the door” as he slammed his hand on the glass door. He was agitated and pacing, and continued yelling and pointing his finger at the staff. “We have confirmed seats, you have to let us on, if you hadn’t kept our plane waiting for the gate, we would have made it” he yelled, as he advanced toward staff, invading their space, pacing behind the counter. He was providing quite a show for all of us, a show that made me feel sad that he reacted so quickly and so negatively; and I wondered how his family was affected by his rage.
Part of the tension and sadness of watching him is seeing myself in him, taping into memories of my own past rage, times when I have lost my cool suddenly and without thinking. Particularly there was a time in my life in the mid 90’s when I had let the conditions of my personal life get out of control; I had tried too long to make my marriage work; my needs were grossly under-met, and I wasn’t taking responsibility to change my situation. Instead I found myself funneling my anger to situations at work.
Any progress I have made in staying calm and not being attached to outcomes has come only after conscious personal/spiritual work with counselors, with a spiritual director, and in my own private meditation. Spiritual growth work is part of an imperative we all have, an imperative of evolution that is moving in us to change our consciousness, a still small voice calling us to realize that we are essentially spiritual in nature. Our spirituality is intimately connected to the web of all life of which we are a part—reflected in our seventh principle; and as I have said in previous sermons, I define spirituality as our relationship to all that is, experienced and expressed through our minds, our hearts, our intuitions and our bodies. Given that definition, we all have spirituality, whether humanist, theist, mystic or …another persuasion. The extent to which we can quiet ourselves to listen to the still small voice inside us—determines how aware we can be of the eternal wisdom within –a wisdom that calls us to love, and compassion and justice and calm.
Just as our physical bodies require food for nourishment, so our spiritual selves require nourishment. Our minds are essential to our spiritual growth. Emerson said that “the ancestor of every action is thought” and so he placed great emphasis on how we might choose our thinking wisely. The Buddha said it differently: he said that we become what we take into our mind. Listen to the Buddha’s words:
Our life is shaped by our mind: we become what we think. Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it. Our life is shaped by our mind: we become what we think. Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves.
The Buddha goes on…
“He was angry with me, he attacked me, he defeated me, he robbed me”—those who dwell on such thoughts will never be free from hatred. “He was angry with me, he attacked me, he defeated me, he robbed me”—those who do not dwell on such thoughts will surely become free from hatred.
The Buddha continues:
For hatred can never put an end to hatred; love alone can. This is an unalterable law.
People forget that their lives will end soon. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.”
Much of our spiritual health is related to what we let ourselves take into our minds, what thoughts we think, values, meanings and assumptions. Our work to change our consciousness is to consider what messages we took in as children and as young adults or from other significant relationships. We become like the people we grew up with and hung out with. Haven’t we told our teenagers that? Choose your friends carefully, we say. For we absorb messages and ways of thinking. That’s why I love hanging out with open minded, spiritually searching Unitarian Universalists.
If in our past we ingested or were exposed to angry or controlling or selfish thoughts over and over, then anger and controlling and selfish behavior can easily become a reflex. I often was around the thought that people or life wasn’t fair, and therefore I had to protest to defend myself, sometimes losing control of myself. I wondered about the man in the airport. He was so out of control. He had lost freedom, for he was controlled by his rage. What were the not so still and not so small voices going on in his mind? What experiences had he absorbed over and over to cause his angry reflex? He had no idea that all of us who were watching him, we who were waiting for our names to be called, we who talked to the anxious ticket agents about what a difficult job they had, --he had no idea that we all had sat in planes on the tarmac, waiting for a gate on this busy end of a holiday weekend, and that the airline human beings were doing what they could under difficult weather and safety conditions. His mind was clouded, so he couldn’t know that. I’ve been there, judging, not understanding.
Eknath Easwaran has a lot to say about how we can take the negative voices in our mind and transform them so that we can teach our minds how to be calm, kind and creative with our problems. Easwaran was born in India, and he considered the most profound spiritual teacher in his life to have been his grandmother.
After being invited to come to the United States as a scholar, he began teaching his meditation ideas at Berkeley, and then founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in California. His 24 books have sold over 2 million copies in twenty-two languages. And it is his passage meditation work that I taught in a class here a couple months ago.
He tells of a time when he and his wife were looking at some old houses. They came across a once-gracious garden with an ancient marble fountain so clogged with rubbish that not a drop of water could get through. “You don’t just give up such a fountain for lost. With a lot of cleaning, you can get the water to start playing again. Then grass and flowers will grow around it, and birds will come there to have their bath; it will grace the garden with its beauty. It is the same with personality. To remake ourselves, we don’t have to bring goodness, love, fearlessness, and the like and stuff them all in somehow. They are already present in us, deep in our consciousness.” p. 109 Conquest of Mind
I believe that the still, small voice of love and kindness and calm within all of us is always there, though at times that voice gets clouded with strong feelings from hard times. The innocence of our birth gets banged around a bunch by life, but there is that evolutionary imperative moving in us to find our original expression of love and compassion which Easwaran called “original goodness.” This is the same concept that our Universalist ancestors talked about when they rejected the concept of original sin, believing that all humans are born good.
Easwaran goes further, saying that we have work to do to free up that goodness from all the rubbish that has smothered it. We need “to remove the impediments that have built up over many years of biological conditioning, to dislodge all the old resentments and fears and selfish desires—and when we do, love will flow from us like a fountain, and those we live and work with will come to us to be refreshed.” p. 109 Conquest of Mind
How do we do that? First of all, by staying primarily in the present. We live where our attention is. Our minds are like little time machines. We zip back to old resentments, attending to them, going over and over them, getting stuck there in negativity. Something happened to us, and we never are able to forgive. That builds up rubbish. Or we live only for the future. In the future we will be happy we say to ourselves. Well, you know, there will never be a future. There will only be a now. So no matter what stage of life we are in, we need to experience joy and calm now. And we can do that by taking little micro vacations, moments during our day to quiet our minds and to listen within—as this Gaelic prayer (p. 58 Strength in the Storm) suggests:
I weave a silence onto my lips.
I weave a silence into my mind.
I weave a silence within my heart.
I close my ears to distractions.
I close my eyes to attractions.
I close my heart to temptations.
Calm me, oh great love of the universe, as you still the storm,
Still me, Oh Love; keep me from harm,
Let all tumult within me cease.
Enfold me, Oh Love, in your peace.
So staying in the present finding calm. Secondly, as the Buddha says, we suffer not because of others, but because of ourselves. We get upset and react angrily because we are upsettable. That’s not the other person’s problem, it’s ours. So Easwaran suggests that we work to be aware of old negative conditioning, and replace those thoughts with the conditioning of just the opposite. He believed strongly that choosing a verse of a poem or a short spiritual passage that conveys a perspective of love, and calm and compassion, and repeating it over and over in your mind will in time make love and calm and compassion our knee jerk reaction to stress. He thought that most of our problems come from negative conditioning that creates big egos, and just like going to the gym does wonders for us to develop a flatter tummy, so meditation on a specially chosen passage will flatten out our sharply jutting out egos. And….Just like going to the gym once doesn’t do it, so consistency with meditation is required to really develop a healthy and resilient spirit.
And what passage does he recommend that we all could start with? The Prayer of St. Francis. Let’s listen to the words, slightly adapted:
Love, Make me an instrument of thy peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.O Divine One, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as understand,
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.
Setting our mind on such thoughts begins our day with a perspective that we can take into our day like a thread that weaves through whatever comes our way. It reduces the power of past negative conditioning, allowing us to live in more freedom. It becomes a conditioning exercise to strengthen the core of our spirit, making it more likely that we will be able to respond to what comes at us during the day with calm. A calm mind can handle any kind of storm.
Easwaran also tells of his first passage from India across the ocean to the United States. It was on an ancient ocean liner. The ship was crossing during the monsoon season, and was tossed violently by winds and rain. The second time he sailed across the ocean, he traveled on the old HMS Queen Mary—and had “an utterly different experience.” Hitting rough seas, the ship did not lose its steady calm movement. Why he asked. What makes the difference? The answer came from a ship officer who said, “It’s the stabilizers. We installed them a couple years ago. Now rough waters don’t bother her at all.” P. 18 Strength in the Storm: Creating Calm in Difficult Times.
There are stabilizers we too can install which keep us calm even in rough waters. Being a part of a religious community, so that you have a place and a people you can join with for caring, for growing and for working for justice is one stabilizer.
The repeating of a spiritual passage that particularly speaks to how you want to respond to a difficulty is another good stabilizer. Short ones can be used as mantras to calm you periodically throughout the day. Longer ones can be read as you begin your day, or even memorized for your walk. Eventually you can memorize several alternate passages that speak to you and which address whatever yearning your spiritual center is calling for.
My personal spiritual passage is from a Hindu vega:
God makes the rivers to flow. They tire not, nor do they cease from flowing. May the river of my life flow into the sea of love.
No matter on what river my life journey takes me, whether in Torteguero or here at home, my goal is to move through life in loving, generous ways, taking what I need, and playing joyfully along the way. This passage reminds me of that.
Which brings me to one last thought. What life goals do you have? How do you wish to be remembered? What spiritual legacy do you wish to leave for your loved ones? We all have wills through which we leave our property, but what example of relating to all that is—of spirituality will you leave for others? And what stabilizers will you utilize to assure your spiritual example is the legacy you wish to contribute?
I have offer these ponderings of my spiritual journey to you, in hopes that there is a nugget in here somewhere that will make a difference for you.
May it be so, Amen.