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New Testament Reading—Matthew 13: 44-46
On a radio program, I recently heard a student at Stanford talk about her first experience traveling abroad. She was in England with her high school English class as they went on a bus tour to the homes of famous dead authors such as Jane Austin, Robert Burns, and Shakespeare. She described the students on the bus as stewing in an atmosphere charged with sexual tension. She herself was consumed with thoughts and longings for one of her classmates in particular. In the midst of the trip, the students went on an excursion to the Hadrian Wall in Northern England. For those not familiar with it, the Hadrian Wall was built by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago to protect them from Scottish barbarians. The bus stopped near a part of the wall on a tall hill overlooking a cliff on the other side.
As the student sat by herself on the cold stone of the wall, she could see for miles over the landscape. She could see grass three times greener than anything she had ever seen before. She could see sheep huddled in stone paddocks that were hundreds of years old. She could see tiny cottages that dotted the countryside. In taking it all in, she suddenly forgot about the other students. She even stopped thinking about the object of her desperate romantic yearnings. An incredible wave of feeling passed over her as she suddenly felt at one with a world full of beauty. She became taken over by a spiritual experience of inner peace and bliss. This one experience put her on a quest for more experiences of this kind, and over her college career she would make significant decisions about her life accordingly. Her story is perhaps a familiar one. Often our spiritual pursuits are fueled by the desire to have a different experience of life than what has been the norm. Once we get a taste of that different experience we want more and more of it. It could be an outdoor experience such as hiking or skiing. It could be the first time you did a creative or artistic activity you particularly enjoyed. It could be when you joined your first choir. You might think back over your own life to see whether your own spiritual passions and pursuits arose in a similar manner.
On a couple of different levels, I could identify with the story of the student. When I was a student in college, my inner psychological world was in constant turmoil over my continued experience of unrequited love and all the fears of rejection that spurred. No matter how much I wished otherwise my mind would get stuck in the rut of romantic agony. My mind would spin its wheels over the same muddy ground again and again. In my junior year, I traveled abroad to South Africa with the promising balm of no longer being in close proximity to my romantic interest at the time. Of course, in South Africa, I quickly developed another romantic interest which led to more unrequited love.
I can’t say that my trip abroad led to any spiritual experiences that put me on a quest for more of the same, but I did seek spiritual experiences of a different kind during those years. For a period, I read a lot of Buddhist meditation books. At the same time, I was attending the Cross Street African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, so I hadn’t converted to a different religion, but I was attracted to Buddhist meditation because of the idea that it could bring me inner peace. Amid my ceaseless ruminations over romantic rejection, this seemed like an offer of salvation.
As a seminary student, my attempt at formal meditation petered away, perhaps because I felt like what I was doing wasn’t having the desired outcome, but I have nevertheless maintained an interest in meditation and I make an informal practice of trying to observe my own thoughts in a nonjudgmental way. I have learned that I get out of mental ruts quicker by simply noticing that I am in them with a sense of self-compassion. Of course, it also helps that I no longer experience unrequited love.
Occasionally, I read articles about meditation and in the past year I have read a few books about the neuroscience of its benefits on our well-being, happiness, and compassion toward others. I sometimes like to think about what a compelling version of Christian meditation might look like. On a certain level, I don’t think I have ever dropped the desire to find spiritual practices that give me a transcendent sense of inner calmness and peace. It has become part of my spiritual quest, and it is part of what draws me to activities like hiking and jogging.
For this reason, I was excited this past week when I caught a glimpse of what a compelling form of Christian meditation might look like. I came across one of the most interesting essays I have read recently by a poet and author named Diane Ackerman. The essay caught me at a time when I thought the mundane stresses of life might have caused a dip in personal feelings of gratitude just as Thanksgiving approached, but fortunately, the essay helped change all of that, because it is about a people who managed to find gratitude during the worst of circumstances. It’s about a community within Judaism that almost got entirely wiped out during the holocaust. It’s a community that Ackerman describes as having “a dancing religion that teaches love, joy, and celebration.” It’s a community that has “kept alive an ancient tradition of meditation and mysticism.” We refer to this community today as Hasidic Judaism.
In the Warsaw ghetto of Poland, there was a Hasidic Rabbi named Kalonymous Kalman Shapira who chose to stay there in the face of Nazism rather than flee abroad. Shapira taught a form of meditation that included witnessing one’s own thoughts. He believed that dispassionately observing a negative thought could weaken that thought. The analogy he used was that of standing on a river bank as one watched the thoughts flow by without letting oneself get swept up by them. Another meditation technique he taught was that of the mindful enjoyment of everyday experiences such as eating and drinking. The goal of this technique was to sensitize one to the holiness of life—both “within oneself and [in] the natural world.” Shapira believed that throughout the world one could hear “the voice of God” speaking. His theology was actually very similar to what we Christians call incarnational theology. God is not above and beyond. God is within and among.
Shapira believed that not just rabbis and the most devout could practice meditation in the ghetto. He believed everyone could practice meditation and thereby manage to cope better with the immense suffering they were experiencing. Ackerman finds it especially poignant that Shapira would focus on the beauty of nature in meditating because this was something that only existed in memory for those who lived in the ghetto. There were “no parks, birds, or greenery” to appreciate in the world around them. One mother who lived in the ghetto had to “explain to her child the concept of distance” because her child couldn’t imagine a physical landscape that extended beyond the street on which they lived. The mother had to paint a picture of what an open field is like, what the ocean is like, and what a forest of trees is like.
It was amid this situation that Shapira maintained the practice of meditation. He sought a practice that would create an experience of wonder and transcendence in the hope of warding off “the psychic disintegration of everyday life.” In his journal writings during this period, Shapira did not focus at all on the horrors being experienced. Even the words “Nazi” and “German” are absent, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the denial of reality that we might associate with contemporary forms of positive thinking. I think Shapira was instead using writing as a meditative practice for focusing his mind. His writings focused on his pursuit of compassion. As he puts it, he sought “to project the supernatural powers of kindness into the realm of speech, so that they might take concrete, specific form.”
Another spiritual leader in the Warsaw ghetto that Ackerman writes about is Janusz Korcsak who was trained as a pediatrician and who wrote books like “How to Love a Child” and “The Child’s Right to Respect.” In 1912, Korcsak left his medical practice and gave up his literary career to start an orphanage for a hundred children in Warsaw. In the orphanage, he created what he called “a children’s republic” whereby the children ran their “own parliament, newspaper, and court system.” Instead of fighting each other in disputes, the children sued each other and went to a court of law over which they themselves presided. The first hundred laws in Korcsak’s code of conduct all pertained to forgiveness. Like Shapira, Korcsak chose to not leave Poland. He choose to stay with the orphan children. At night, he would write imaginative science fiction in which he would “escape to his own private planet.” On this planet, he would plead with a friend not to destroy the war-infested planet Earth out of a sense of compassion for the planet’s innocent youth.
Like Shapira, he also kept a journal that focused his mind away from the horrors of life. On his sixty-fourth birthday, the deportations to death camps began, but his journal entry on that day doesn’t make any mention of this. Instead, it mentions “a marvelous big moon” shining above in the night sky. Elsewhere in his journal, we find Korcsak encouraging prayers of thanksgiving among the orphans as they coped with starvation and suffering. One such prayer reads, “Thank you, Merciful Lord, for having arranged to provide flowers with fragrance, glow worms with their glow, and make the stars in the sky sparkle.” I love the image of children finding glow worms to brighten up their day. To put it in the words of our scripture, the glow worms were the hidden treasure that they had unearthed.
As I think about our own congregation in relation to our scripture, I have this image of all of us being on a quest together, and we finally get to our destination. It’s not far from here. I like to imagine we are on a beach along the Oregon coast. All of us get out of our bus and head to the sand. Some of us start wandering about with metal detectors in our hands and our eyes focused on the ground. Some of us join with the kids as they dig up the sand and search for seashells. All of us are looking for buried treasures, and when any of us find what we are looking for, we yell, “I found something.” We then bend down and pick it up for all to see. In a sense, this is a metaphor for what we do as a community of faith. We come here to get away from our regular lives and whatever might be consuming our thoughts during the week. We come here and we can focus our attention on finding spiritual gems and treasures. Each of these gems and treasures opens our senses to the divine. It gives us a glimpse of the Kingdom of God, the beloved community.
Like the man in the parable, the treasures that we find here are what feed our joy. They are what lead us to a deeper and fuller commitment to the Christian life. For the man in the parable, this means selling everything he has to buy the field in which the treasure lays. What a convenient message for the Sunday on which pledges are due! But I think what the passage is meant to convey is the power and the significance of the buried treasure. It is a treasure that brings meaning and purpose into our lives. It is a treasure that helps us maintain a bit of sanity in a world that often seems insane. It is a treasure that brings with it the gifts of hope, love, and peace. For the man in the parable, one can see how this treasure could be so valuable that he would give anything for it. I know there have definitely been times in my life when I would have given almost anything for what this treasure represents. It’s value and worth are certainly cause for thanksgiving and celebration. Amen.