October 15, 2006
Myron Andes
Wisdom in the Dessert

Hello, my name is Myron and I’ll be your preacher today.

May I start you off with something? An appetizer perhaps?

We have specials today on some delicious questions.

We have a robust, “What is the meaning and purpose of life?” that comes with a side of, “How should I live?” We also have a nice fresh catch of the day, “How can I be happy?” served atop a bed of piquant, “Why are we born only to suffer and die?”

In case you hadn’t noticed, the menu today is all “questionitarian.”

First, let me bring you an appetizer:

Sometimes understanding comes in the strangest of ways, if we can open ourselves to receive it. Things emerge from the sea of life, and how we respond to them can reveal who we are, and who we might become. If we are smart cookies.

Ready for the main course?

Alan Watts was an important interpreter of Zen Buddhist thought to American culture. In the early 1970s he published a book with an unusual title. It was called: The Book. Now, The Book had a subtitle: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Really Are. In it he writes:

“You did not come into this world, you came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.”

The “taboo against knowing who you really are” refers to the persistent human idea that each individual person, each object is separate from the great ocean, somehow a permanent, independent, relatively unchanging thing.

Well, Alan Watts would rather have us consider how a wave is not a permanent, separate thing, but a phenomenon of the greater ocean. It is much like another image, taken from our Unitarian Universalist movement’s Principles and Purposes. In the seventh principle we “covenant to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.”

A wave arises, persists for a time, and perishes. Like us, each wave has a beginning, a middle and an end. As the good sisters ask in The Sound of Music, “How do you hold a wave upon the sand?” The answer of course is that you don’t. If you could do that, it would no longer be a wave.

This way of thinking is like what your English composition instructor taught you: everything has a beginning, a middle and an end. This applies to everything from itches to empires, to you and me. If we just wait long enough, all come to an end.

Our human attempts to latch on to some thing, some person, some idea, some answer fail to take into account this fundamental aspect of existence. Everything changes. Nothing is permanent. It takes a lot of energy to pretend that things won’t change, a lot of effort to hang on to something that is struggling escape our grasp and move along. When we try that, our attention turns to the past, or the future. We get caught up in the fantasy of our desires and aversions, trying to lock the one in and the other out. Then we fail to fully experience the ever-changing present. And the present moment is the only thing we really have.

In THIS present moment, I’d like to invite you to come along with me to a time long, long ago and a galaxy far, far away; to a magical, mystical land called “Minnesota.” In this almost impossible to imagine era, I was not yet even a seminary student. The pertinent fact about that is: I could afford to go out to dinner more frequently!

One evening I was having dinner with friends at a favorite Chinese restaurant. At the end of a wonderful meal, it was time to open our fortune cookies.

The first one read, “You will begin a long journey.”

Next came, “You will meet a mysterious stranger.”

Then, “Your lucky numbers are 8, 17, 23 and 54.”

I opened mine last, and read:

Suffering is caused by attachment to impermanent things.

Suffering is caused by attachment to impermanent things?

I was astounded!

Amid the clichés that inhabit cookies of fortune, I had received the Second Noble Truth of the Buddha!

Suffering is caused by attachment to impermanent things.

How, I wondered, had such a thing gotten into that cookie? Was there a secret sage working in the cookie factory, who just had to insert some actual wisdom? Or was it taken without thought from a book of quotations, or maybe off of somebody’s web site?

And however it got there, how had it come to me? Was this some special message from the cosmos? I tend not to think in those terms, but it seemed remarkable, I thought, that it happened to come to someone who could appreciate it for what it was.

And then I wondered, “What should I do with it now?”

So what I did then was, I stared at it.

Suffering is caused by attachment to impermanent things.

It just seemed that I should do something to honor this great occasion, the finding of great wisdom on a little slip of paper in my food, in a small restaurant in a strip mall beside a highway near the Minneapolis airport on a normal Friday night. I felt that I should share this wisdom for the benefit of humankind. So I pondered for days what to do.

Then it came to me.

What if this tiny piece of wrinkled up paper, bearing such great wisdom, was housed in an ornate frame? What if I had it mounted on a simple but dramatic black mat, in the middle of a very large, heavy frame with fake gold leaf over red enamel? And what if the frame was covered with cornucopia, and cherubs, and floral decorations of all kinds? And when anyone got close enough to read the message, they would see:

Suffering is caused by attachment to impermanent things.

I thought the irony of this simple statement in such a pretentious context was wonderful! Surely it would drive home the point to everyone who saw it.

But that was another problem. I asked myself, “Who would see it?”

Where would it hang? After considering this a bit, I realized that in my heart I knew the best place. I knew the solution. All I needed to do was this:

I would, first off, go back to graduate school and finish my long abandoned master’s degree. Then I would polish off a doctorate in nothing flat, get a faculty position somewhere, maybe a small liberal arts college, teaching philosophy and religious studies. And there it would hang on my office wall. The ostentatious frame with the simple message:

Suffering is caused by attachment to impermanent things.

I imagined colleagues seeing it and chuckling. Students would see it and have this great wisdom brought home to them for the very first time, perhaps changing their lives forever. And they would remember me as the teacher who had so profoundly influenced them.

Yes, I decided, I would do it! I would haunt garage sales and antique shops until I found the perfect, gaudy frame! A friend agreed to do the matting and framing. I strode to my den to retrieve the prized slip of paper and…I couldn’t find it.

I looked everywhere in the pile of clutter I called a desk. I looked on the floor and in my pockets. I looked in the pockets of all my dirty clothes. But it was nowhere to be found. I agonized over my brilliant plan that would never be realized. I was heartbroken! Miserable! I had completely lost the message of that fortune cookie:

Suffering is caused by attachment to impermanent things.

Sometimes understanding comes in the strangest of ways, if we can open ourselves to receive it. Things emerge from the sea of life, and how we respond to them can reveal who we are, and who we might become. If we are smart cookies.

Zen is not the only system that focuses on the “present moment.” Alfred North Whitehead’s “process philosophy” sees reality as a series of moments, each coming into being and perishing continuously. Even a pop song a few years ago said, “Every new beginning is some other beginning’s end.”

That is one of those inconvenient truths that can be difficult to live with. We human earthlings like to make our plans, pour our foundations and build to last. If everything would just stand still for a while it would be so much easier!

But things don’t stand still. Even “eternal truths,” be they of religion, science mathematics or whatever field. “Eternal truths” are constantly reinterpreted, adapted, added to, or thrown out and replaced. It is this thread of continuing change that is our reality, our life. Our bodies are changing. Hopefully, our minds are changing. So are our environment, our society, our government, and this congregation.

I’ve had a lot of changes in my life recently that make the reality of impermanence very obvious. So has this church. But it is true all the time, even when it is not so obvious. So I believe with all my heart that great truth I received in the fortune cookie: Suffering is caused by attachment to impermanent things. As we grow up, we “put away childish things.” We leave behind clothes and other things we outgrow, and embrace new ones that fit us better. Attempting to make things stay the same does cause frustration and suffering. It is in jumping into the ever-changing flow of the stream of life that we can know joy and fulfillment.

So, every so often, I need to ask myself, “What things do I need to let go of?” You might want to ask yourself, too, “What do you need to let go of?” What is it that this church needs to let go of? What fears? What attachments? What hopes clung to beyond their usefulness? What self-images? What prejudices and presumptions we didn’t even know we had? What expectations? What illusions?

Imagine how much energy this will free up for us to use in the new, clearer reality we enter. What new horizons will we find? In what ways will we be able to change the world? Who in the world will we become? What will we do that we’ve never, ever done before?

Where do we go from here?

(I told you this was a “questionatarian” menu!)

Here is one closing bit of flotsam. These words from Zen liturgy have floated from Japan to the San Francisco Zen Center, from there to the Minnesota Zen Center in Minneapolis and on to Clouds in Water Zen Center in St. Paul, where I sometimes used to study and practice. I share this with you today in Evansville with the permission of the Guiding Teacher of that Zen Center. These words are used to close sessions of meditation and instruction, as people are about to return to their usual lives. So I leave you with them:

I urge you everyone-

“Life-and-death” is a Great Matter.

All things pass quickly away.

Awaken! Awaken! Take heed:

Make use of this precious life.