8/31/14 Dharma Talk
Peg Syverson
And for some reason those old jokes came to mind:
A good friend is someone who will help you move; a great friend is someone who will help you move a body.
And
A good friend will come down to the jail and bail you out; a great friend looks at you and says “how did we get here?”
I thought, a spiritual friend helps you much farther upstream, so that you don’t end up with a dead body on your hands, or in a jail cell in the first place!
In any event...
There are deep longings in us that are not only unsatisfied, but actually exacerbated by our culture and its fixations. We long for human connection that is warmly supportive, creative, profound, and caring. The culture offers competition, distraction, craving, isolation, conflict, and social fragmentation. And there is also a longing to be part of a larger story, a positive story with meaning and creativity and purpose. The culture offers thin, artificial stories with little meaning or purpose, no personal engagement, and no sense of growth or development. The stories are frightening or horrifying or funny or ominous, but they do not satisfy our longing. So we drink, look for romantic partners, surf the net, buy things, watch TV in a kind of quiet desperation. Spiritual community, sangha, is one of the very best ways to meet and satisfy our deep human longings. That doesn’t mean that it is without its challenges, obstacles, and very human difficulties. It is a practice and a path that we walk together.
We long to have someone gaze deeply into our eyes, listening from the heart, perhaps reaching out and resting a hand on our arm. We long to share our excitement about some good news with someone who is not half-distracted by a screen nearby. We long to feel safe enough to risk our deepest fears, our sadness, and our anger with someone who can hold them. We long for an end to all the fighting, the cruelty, the grasping and striving, the judgments and criticisms that create such impenetrable barriers between us. We dissociate and distract ourselves with more and more devices so that we don’t have to feel the anguish of our deep loneliness and despair, so that we can have the illusion of connection without the trouble of genuine relating. When we really look at our lives, much of what we are doing seems utterly meaningless, short-term solutions to unnecessary problems, tiny plans for pointless activities, accomplishments that don’t really matter. Material things can never satisfy this hunger. Technologies only amplify it. Throwing our energies into causes can deplete us and overwhelm us. It’s not that these things are bad or wrong; simply that they do not address the fundamental longing that gnaws at us. It is a spiritual hunger, and there is no way to satisfy it alone.
Those who are searching for a spiritual path find an overwhelming array of offerings: megachurches, self-help books, gurus, sects, study groups, and traditional churches. They promise an end to spiritual loneliness and an opportunity for connection and care. But for those drawn to the teachings of Zen, none of those avenues seemed to fit. Often they begin with a personal meditation practice, alone, and they may continue that way for many years. I read books, sat in meditation, and tried to understand this practice all on my own for 23 years. It helped me in some indescribable way, but I still felt something was missing. Without spiritual friendship, this is a barren path.
Most people seem to come to a place like this seeking community. That’s what they often tell me. So I’ve spoken before about spiritual friendship and spiritual community. I’ve talked about the 1995 Robert Putnam book, published in 2001, Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community.
The Amazon description for this book notes that Putnam
“argued that civil society was breaking down as Americans became more disconnected from their families, neighbors, communities, and the republic itself. The organizations that gave life to democracy were fraying. Bowling became his driving metaphor. Years ago, he wrote, thousands of people belonged to bowling leagues. Today, however, they're more likely to bowl alone: Television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values--these and other changes in American society have meant that fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live. Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness.”
Even farther back, however, Aristotle wrote, "...how can prosperity be guarded and preserved without friends...And in poverty and in other misfortunes men think friends are the only refuge. It helps the young, too, to keep them from error; it aids older people by ministering to their needs and supplementing the activities that are failing from weakness; those in the prime of life it stimulates to noble action." [And,] "Friendship seems too to hold states together..." (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics).
The Putnam book has had its critics, I noted, primarily of the interpretations and conclusions Putnam makes, not of the accuracy of his observations and monumental data. Other similar books about the loss of a sense of community in America have been criticized for idealizing the past, and ignoring the dark side of community: the narrowmindedness, exclusiveness, lack of diversity and even hatred of others such groups can foster.
And of course I’ve often referred to the story of Ananda and the Buddha from In the Buddha’s Words:
Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was dwelling among the Sakyans where there was a town of the Sakyans named Nagaraka. Then the Venerable Ananda approached the Blessed One, paid homage to him, sat down to one side and said:
“Venerable sir, this is half of the spiritual life, that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship.”
“Not so, Ananda! Not so, Ananda! This is the entire spiritual life, Anada, that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship. When a monk has a good friend, a good companion, a good comrade, it is to be expected that he will develop and cultivate the Noble Eightfold Path.” (P.240)
This has certainly been my experience. My teachers have been profound spiritual friends; and my teaching partnership with Flint has been essential in my development and the development of this sangha. It is the very foundation of it. And in supporting you in this role deep friendships have developed that have taught me so much on this path. A teacher is a worthy adversary! But forming deep spiritual friendship requires time and a willingness to challenge ourselves and each other. And we have many reasons to avoid it, we feel: we are too busy, we are not “joiners,” we are still too new, we are still “deciding” whether we want to get serious about Zen, we are worried about what others think of us.
Nothing, however, so deepens our practice, our connection to life and our appreciation than a true and profound spiritual friendship.
But it’s way less important for me to talk about spiritual friendship than it is for us to discover what we can together, in it.
So I would like to explore a little of your own experiences with an experiment in belonging. Maybe there is someone you can try this experiment with:
In pairs, each partner takes turns speaking while the other partner listens. Becoming mindful, continue each of these sentence frames:
What I long for in spiritual friendship is…
What I am afraid of is that…
And so I…
Because I believe my only two choices are….
Still, another possibility might be…
Repeat:
What I long for in spiritual community is…
and then:
What I long for in a teacher is…
Discuss what you discovered together.
What kind of community is this one? It is unbound: what it becomes is up to us. In some ways it seems as casual as a coffee shop or a cafe: people come and go freely; they may or may not interact with anyone, as they choose, and they are not required to do anything at all. There is no obligation or responsibility except what is freely assumed by each of you. Unlike a coffee shop or cafe where regulars hang out, however, there is a shared intimacy and invitation here to deepen our understanding and awareness of life, to expand the possibilities for relating, and to support each other deeply on the path of compassion and wisdom. Like many church groups, it is intended to offer spiritual nourishment in connection with others. Unlike church groups, it is not structured around a specific set of beliefs, nor a demand for conformity to a spiritual ideal. We come together wholeheartedly, broken heartedly, half-heartedly, and as we witness and support the unfolding of our lives together, we learn something that cannot be learned in any other way except through human connection. Even though there have been hundreds of thousands of words written about Zen, whole libraries full of books, sutras, teachings, and commentary, this is still a tradition that is not dependent on words and letters, doctrine or creed, but is carried forward, as we say, “warm hand to warm hand.”
We come to a place like this with a question: “Is this what I need?” If we stick around, as our practice deepens and we connect with our vow, our heartfelt question changes, to something like “What is it that you need?” And ultimately, the question in true community becomes, “what is it that is needed?” In this way we heal ourselves, we heal each other, and we heal the world.