vomit

As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly. Proverbs 26:11

Now I know this is not the most appetizing text to bring to your attention on a Sunday morning just before you sink in up to your elbows in your plate of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, butter beans, sliced tomatoes, and hot buttered biscuits, chased down by gallons of sweet iced tea. But it's the truth and it needs to be talked about.

I've seen it happen. It's a typical dog action. And lest you cat lovers get too comfortable in your smugness, cats do it too.

We humans are also very good at it. Each of us has some aspect of ourselves that we know is poison to us. Our bodies and our souls are self-purgative. So every once in a while we will live in purge-atory. Whatever that poison is, and you full well know what I'm talking about, whatever that personal poison is within your heart, your soul, your mind, your body, every once in a while, you will throw it up. You will do all in your power to rid yourself of it and it will do all in its power to come out of you. It seems as if you are not its most comfortable host.

After we eject this vomitous poison, we feel much better. Relieved. It is usually at this point that we swear we will never go back to it again. We swear it to ourselves. We swear it to others.

What is this poison? Greed, Anger, Desire, Stupor, in all their forms. They all amount to giving ourselves pleasure, even though it is momentary, at the expense of any and all around us. At those moments, everyone and everything else can go to hell. We come first.

And don't go pointing your finger at Brother or Sister Whoever. I'm talking about YOU, darling, and I include myself in that YOU. "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God."

Brother James, I saw you nudge Sister Mabel, winning your bet that I couldn't go for a month of Sundays without bringing up sin at least once. A pretty safe bet I would say. After all, this is a Baptist church. Zen Baptist.

Zen is a Japanese word derived from the Chinese chan, which was derived from the Sanskrit dhyana, which means meditation. Meditation means to be mindfully present and aware and to act upon that awareness.

When we return to our folly which we have vomited up at least once, swearing to ourselves never to go there again, we are meditating on our vomit. Sin, in this sense, is keeping your vomitous poisonous folly before your eyes and convincing yourself that it is not so bad, and so you start licking around its corners, its edges. As soon as that happens, you are a goner.

As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool returns to his folly. We fool ourselves, make fools of ourselves.

An old Zen story has it that a student asked a Zen master (Ichu) to write something of wisdom for him. Ichu wrote: Attention. The student said: Is that all? Ichu wrote: Attention! Attention! The student said: That doesn't seem very profound. So Ichu wrote: Attention! Attention! Attention!

I see I just woke up the back row.

The student, all frustrated now, no doubt expecting some long self-help book s/he could read, feel better, and toss away, said: What does attention mean?

Ichu said: Attention means attention!

The poison is called the dote. The cure is called the antidote. The antidote for our particular individual self-chosen poison is our attention.

As we meditate, keep our mind on, our awareness on our spiritual teachers, our spiritual teachings, and ask for the aid of our spiritual community (embodying and not), we will not be returning to our vomit.

Wherever our attention goes, we go.

Let's stand and sing "Revive Us Again!"

budo

This morning I was thinking of budo -- the way or path of the warrior. The essence of the warrior path is spirit. As Jesus said, have little or no concern for those who can kill the body, but look out for that which can kill your soul. He is speaking budo speak -- the path and code of warrior training.

As a Zen Baptist, I find this training reflected in Jesus' character and in all of Jesus' teachings. Jesus was and is one of the mightiest warriors who ever lived.

Please open your Bibles to Matthew 22. Find verses 36-40.

Lou Ellen, will you read that aloud?

"Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

Thank you. One of the lawyers hanging around Jesus asked him this question, hoping to trap him in his answer. As usual, Jesus nailed him.

But look at this. Look at the question first. Apply it to yourself. You have a relatively short life to live. How should you live it? The question is of great importance, of much more importance than should you have the double-flapped frapping frappe' as your coffee of choice for the morning, or even which human, if any, you should choose to bunker with for life duration.

This is a budo question, a warrior question. And asked of a great warrior, one who could slice right through b.s. to bedrock.

The question had already been answered, in what the Christians call the Old Testament.

And that answer gives us the budo way, the path of warrior training. Love the Source that is birthing you right now with your whole being. With all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. Nothing held back. Nothing in reserve.

This is both the warrior's training goal and the warrior's training practice.

And this means to love all around you as yourself. So it means you have to love yourself too. And even first of all. Now you know that doesn't mean you are kissing yourself all over. Or constantly staring with moonstruck eyes into a mirror. An essential part of the practice is to know what love is.

Try this on for size. Love consists of unwavering awareness. Zanshin. Bare ass naked awareness with no thought of and no clinging to the one who is aware.

Then Jesus threw in the clincher.

He said that on these two principles (which are really one) and their practices "hang all the law and the prophets."

Humankind's entire system of jurisprudence, what is right according to law, and the teachings of the entire body of human visionary and intuitive awareness rest upon this budo code: the giving of our lives with love, nothing held back, nothing in reserve.

Let us sit for a moment in silent contemplation.

deem

"See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time . . . " --Ephesians 5: 15,16

To deem means to mark something out, to make it out standing, to especially note it, to emphasize its characteristics.

In energetic language, which all spiritual language is, to deem means to claim a particular realm of energetic territory as one's own and as of importance. We can and do deem our prides, our irritations and hostilities, our lusts and desires, our jealousies, as rightful realms in which we have planted our flag of ownership and domination, a flag which impales our loving heart.

We deem it necessary to protect our little selves, to mark us out as special, to make us an exclamation point in a flatland horizon.

Our energetic or spiritual practice is to re-deem ourselves. To un-deem our demption traps and to allow the freedom and creativity of new deeming.

How do we do that? First of all, we have to decide to do it. If you love your stupor, your irritations, your greediness, you can just keep right on deeming them, creating yourself in their image. No one will stop you. Many will encourage you.

After deciding to deem differently, at least two steps are important for demption transformation. One is to turn completely away from the old deemings as soon as they arise. In many of the old re-demption practices, this is done by uttering a sharp emphatic sound.
Some Tibetans use Phat! Some of my Navajo friends use Pah! One of my sisters uses Pffftt! I used to use the F word (it was a holy F), but have since graduated from that.

Whatever sound you use to expel your negative deeming, it is best if it is short and exclamatory. I find now that a simple brief exhalation of air will do.

The important second step is to turn your awareness immediately to what you now deem -- to lovingkindness, to good humor, to joy, to generosity, to live awareness of now. Your new deeming will be reinforced every time you do this.

Soon you will be singing the song I invite us to stand and sing now. Page 182 in your hymnals: "I Have Been Redeemed."

Come on now! Belt it out! Singing is another way of demption.

spirit

Please turn in your Bibles to John 4:24. Let's read it aloud.

"God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."

Any notions we have of God are off the mark. They may help us aim in God's direction, but fall far short of encompassing God.

Father, Mother, Source, Creator, Maker, Origin, Friend and so on, are helpful as re-presentations of God, but what we are aiming at with these words is not contained within these words, not even and perhaps especially, since it contains so much baggage, the word God.

However, each of us planetary beings speaks a language and we must use what we have. If one wishes to measure the ocean and only has a teaspoon, that is what one uses.

"God is a Spirit." Spirit is life-force, is the energy that brings all into being and sustains it all. The life-force sustains us, is our sustenance. "God is my help in every need. God does my every hunger feed." The life-force (spirit) flows through us, keeps us, opens our awareness. When not enthralled by ourselves, we are pure life-force.

God is a spirit, is the life-force, and those "who worship him must worship him in spirit." Worship means to move in the same realm as. The life-force that we are is the life-force of God.

With our own self-will, we tend to bend and shape our life-force into peculiar forms. This is done out of fear and irritation and habit and is based on an adversarial approach to life.

In musical scale terms, I want the dough and the rays to fall on me, so I may go far in my lah-ti-dah ways.

When we open instead to the spirit of God, to the life-force of our Source, when we flow with the flow of the Flow, this is worship. No separate creature on knees, but a partner in the making.

Now we are worshiping in truth, in reality. We open in lovingkindness, freely giving and freely receiving the life-force energy that we are.

As a friend reminded me the other day, all language is metaphor. Then he left me with these words which sums it up quite well -- May the MetaPhorce be with you!

soul

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? -- Mark 8: 36-37

And, to keep the gender balance: For what shall it profit a woman, if she shall gain the whole world, and lose her own soul? Or what shall a woman give in exchange for her soul?

We live in the temporal world, the world of time, the temporary world, the world in which we are temps, and we live as souls, as microcosms of the macrocosm, as embodyings of our Source.

In this temporal world, we tend to drift and to trade away parts of our essence for things we want. We look for security. We look for peace. We look for happiness. If we can just get this kind of job. If we can just get this type of position. If we can just get this particular retirement plan. If we can just get that person to tie their lives in with ours. If we just had enough money. If we just lived somewhere else. We begin to live the life of the "just."

Meanwhile, almost entirely out of our notice, the soul of us slips away. Weakened, undernourished, neglected, the essence of us sends out alarm signals. We take that alarm as the need for more world sustenance and we begin to consume more of that which does not sustain us, does not feed our soul. We trade our birthright for a bowl of sugared corn.

What shall we give in exchange for our soul? A strangely worded question. Not what shall we get, but what shall we give. "I will give time to you and whatever you want me to do in exchange for my soul." In addition to being soul-numbing, this is a false bargaining position. Our soul is not our own. It is a gift to us from our Source. We are trying to barter something that is not ours.

The question also implies that when engaged in such transactions, we become brokers for our souls, pimps of our own prostitution. We become a third party, even more alienated.

No one can determine when one is exchanging soul for the temporary except oneself.

If I were going to get a tattoo, This Soul Not For Sale might be a good one.

Well, okey-dokey. I hope everyone has recovered from their Easter Resurrection hangover. That Monday after Easter Sunday can be tough. You are joyously resurrected and then find out that you are still here!

Let's stand and sing "Where The Soul Of Man Never Dies!"

gone

Gate gate paragate parasamgate!

Gone, gone beyond, totally gone beyond!

This is the essence of the Heart Sutra and of the Easter message.

When the women went out of loving compassion to the tomb in which Jesus's body lay, they found it empty. Jesus was gone, gone beyond, totally gone beyond!

I have often wondered why the Christian emblem was not the empty tomb instead of, or in addition to, the cross. Christian theology and preachings would move from suffering on the cross of existence (really, that gets so old after a while) to letting go, releasing, emptying ourselves of ourselves.

People would wear circles on their lapels as reminders of the practice of emptying. Rather than making the sign of the cross, one would make the sign of the circle. The empty circle.

No more wallowing in the agony of existence. The tomb, the old way we were, is empty. No clinging to that corpse, painting its face, and dressing it in finery. No matter how much we perfume it, it still stinks.

Nope. We follow the example of Jesus. We transcend, trance end. "He is not here. He is risen." Gone, gone beyond, totally gone beyond.

And we do not come back or maintain residuals. It's like Mr. Buddha said, when you get to the other shore, you don't hoist your boat up on your shoulders and carry it with you. It served its purpose. Leave it, let it go.

One old Zen dude said it this way: "The bee does not return to its abandoned hive." Nor did Jesus, our example in this matter, return to the tomb.

Gone! Gone beyond! Totally gone beyond!

in the midst of pain is birth

"Now at that feast he released unto them one prisoner, whomsoever they desired. And there was one named Barabbas, which lay bound with them that had made insurrection with him, who had committed murder in the insurrection. And the multitude crying aloud began to desire him to do as he had ever done unto them. But Pilate answered them, saying, Will ye that I release unto you the King of the Jews? For he knew that the chief priests had delivered him for envy. But the chief priests moved the people, that he should rather release Barabbas unto them. And Pilate answered and said again unto them, What will ye then that I shall do unto him whom ye call the King of the Jews? And they cried out again, Crucify him. Then Pilate said unto them, Why, what evil hath he done? And they cried out the more exceedingly, Crucify him." -- Mark 15: 6-14

This is the time of year when we recognize that we have a habit of killing the best in ourselves and setting free the criminal we are.

Every morning upon awakening and every moment of the day each of us decides what aspect of ourselves we shall release into the world at large.

And sometimes we release a monster.

We may paint the monster with a pretty face, but we know and all around us know what lurks beneath.

We refuse to crucify the monster. Nor can we. S/he won't go up on that cross. But the best of us is crucified all the time. What sense does this make? Are we so perverted?

Nope. The monster runs loose because it has not learned lovingkindness. Lovingkindness is a sacrifice, an outbreathing, a giving of all one is and has. "No attachment," say the Zen dudes and dudesses. "Detachment," say the Christian mystic monks.

The monster in us is attached to everything, Velcroed and SuperGlued to our pet grievances, our old wounds, our accustomed ways of self-serving being in the world. We can't peel that sucker off long enough to nail him.

The best in us dies every day for the monster's sake. Look carefully at that sentence. It is a two-edged sword.

The best in us is the best in us because it gives freely of itself. Only when the seed falls into the ground and dies does it bear fruit.

"Be dead. Be thoroughly dead." says the Zen monk Bunan. "Die before you die," say the Sufi. John of the Cross calls it the dark night of the soul.

This is a hard teaching. If you do not understand it, let it go. But rest assured, the path of one who follows spirit, the life force, is to die many times and to be resurrected each and every time.

And there is a good old Baptist song to sing with all of this. Turn in your hymnal to page 292 and let's stand and sing: Revive Us Again!