[Our service usually has a portion devoted to meditation, in words, silence and song, before the sermon.]

A Meditation on the Body

This is the time in our service when we typically allow a short time for meditation. Since meditation practice is the focus of my talk today, I would like to take a little more time than usual for this.

I view meditation more as a physical than a mental practice. Actually, I think our bodies tend to appreciate time for focused, alert relaxation, times of stillness and quiet. When we try to meditate, often it is our minds that complain and give us trouble long before our bodies feel discomfort. I believe that if we can train the body to be still, gradually over time, the mind will grudgingly come along.

In the few minutes of silence we will have together, I suggest you might try sitting in an upright but not rigid posture, both feet firmly on the floor, hands mindfully placed in a position you find comfortable. Feel you body in the chair, the pressure of your own weight against the seat. Notice the sensations of the air and your clothing against your skin. Your body is the one constant companion who will be with you until the day you die. Our bodies deserve more love and care than most of us take time for. During this quiet time you can, of course, do as you wish with your mind, but if you would like to give it a little job to keep it out of mischief, I will suggest three possible activities from which you might choose.

First, mindful attention to the breath is a mainstay of meditation practice in most traditions. Much can be said about breath practice or mindfulness of breathing. For now, you might just try maintaining a steady awareness of your natural breathing in and breathing out, without trying to control or alter it in any way. This type of practice can be pursued for decades without exhausting its richness. You might wish to do this now.

Alternatively, our hands and our feet are parts of our bodies which often have deep emotional connections and rich associations. If you have two hands and two feet which have worked for you as intended, consider your good fortune. If you do not, the practice I'm suggesting may be problematic or elicit feelings of loss. Either way, you may wish to meditate on your hands or your feet.

For you feet, consider how they have served you during your life and remember the many interesting and challenging places they have taken you. Perhaps your feet have carried you into danger and delivered you back to safety. Perhaps they have taken you to places of great beauty. To walk on the earth as a human being is a gift of your feet. Where have your feet been? What do your feet know that your mind can never grasp?

For you hands, consider all the work they have done during your life. We have busy hands. Consider how you have expressed love for yourself and for others with your hands. Where have your hands been? What and whom have they touched? What do your hands know that your mind can never grasp?

Opening Words

Our opening reading is from "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self- contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.

I wonder where they got those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?

Sermon - Zen, UU and Me

Most mornings, as the sun is coming up, I can be found silently sitting crossed-legged on the floor, meditating. I do this almost every day, for maybe an hour, sometimes more, sometimes less. I have been doing this for most of the last forty years. I also like to go on meditation retreats which last several days, alone or with other like-minded folk, where sitting like this is the main thing one does for eight or more hours during each day. I wish I could do this more often, but twice a year is usually all I can manage with my busy little life.

Now most people don't do this kind of thing. Although worldwide there are probably several million people with some kind of regular meditation practice similar to mine, there are, of course, several billion who can't imagine why anyone would want to spend time this way. After all, life is short, and I think most folks want to get as much done as possible in the time they have. Sitting silently on the floor, just sitting up straight and breathing, doesn't count as doing anything, and it certainly doesn't put food on the table or pay the rent. It doesn't look like there's much going on. Would Hollywood make a movie about daily life in the meditation hall? Can you imagine? "Hey kids! Let's go watch Daddy while he meditates."

My meditation practice is definitely one of the most important things in my life. If other things start to get in the way, they tend to get tossed overboard. The reasons for this devotion to meditation are very personal and, truthfully, I rarely like to talk about it. Somehow I got sucked into thinking I should do a sermon about meditation, maybe even proselytize a little. Now I'm kind of sorry, but a promise is a promise, so here I am.

I started out thinking I could explain a lot of the religious background and some of the most important aspects of meditation, including the Buddhist traditions from which I draw my practice. I could explain a little about how I came to this practice years ago and try to bring it to life a little. After throwing most of this out because it was way too ambitious, I had a philosophical lecture which was still much too long for a UU worship service. So let's just say that meditation, as I practice it, has a rich spiritual and philosophical context, a very long history, and I have my own story about how I discovered it. Maybe another day we can talk about some of that stuff. I will just point out that Zen Buddhism is the practice tradition where I have had most of my training. Beyond that I'm just going to focus on how meditation works for me on a personal level.

I meditate because I feel that I must. Maybe it's just compulsive behavior, maybe it's my calling in life. If I skip a day - no big problem. Skipping a week is out of the question. I could weave all kinds of personal stories around this, and most of them would have some truth. Here's the story I'll give you today. Meditation helps me remember who and where I really am. When I forget, and forgetting is pretty easy, I tend to feel lost and strung out. Sometimes life really hurts. Have you noticed? When it does, one might ask, "what's the point in being alive anyway?" Sounds like depression? Maybe. It also looks rather like the first of the Buddha's four noble truths - that one of life's important characteristics is the reality of suffering. If you're doing just fine, don't worry, you'll get over it soon enough. And if you don't feel like waiting, you don't have to look far to find someone who is not doing just fine. Sometimes this reality just grabs me and won't let go. Meditating helps me with this.

Although we are privileged to see great beauty in our experience of life, these glimpses of beauty are actually pretty brief. Suppose we go with today's conventional wisdom that the universe we know is about 15 billion years old, give or take a few billion. In less than a hundred years (less than a nanosecond in the cosmic scheme of things), just about everyone here today will already be dead and gone, and most of us have a lot less time than that to smell the roses. And of course, life is not just a rose garden, and even if it were, we would still need to deal with the thorns. You know that if you're feeling overly cheerful, all you have to do is read the front page of any newspaper or the website of any news service and you have the perfect antidote!

Some people seem to be able to focus on the sunny side of life, adopt the power of positive thinking. You know: "Don't worry, be happy!" This just doesn't work for me. Extremely cheerful people are mostly good company, but when they get carried away, it can really bring a guy down! I'm more like Eeyore than Piglet, so I meditate to help me get through the day. Why does this help? It helps because it reminds me that I can choose to see life, my experience of reality, just as it is, as sacred. This is the only way I have figured out how to make my life work.

For my purposes today, let's say the opposite of "sacred" is "mundane". Mundane is what we see on the front page of that newspaper. It's current events. It's the history of our planet. It's all of the beauty and the ugliness which surrounds us. We try to do good. We try to make the world a better place. We try to create beauty. We try to be loving. These are things we must do. But is it really working? Is there any real basis for the implicit faith in progress that seems so deeply rooted in our culture? Is there any empirical evidence to suggest that the arc of the universe, long though it may be, really bends toward justice.at least in any practical sense? We don't always have the best of intentions, and even when we do, the results of our efforts have a way of creating disasters, large and small. There are some mundane facts that I find pretty discouraging - global warming, out of control human population growth, resource depletion, environmental degradation, social degeneracy, political corruption - all of which are minor issues if you are struggling with more immediate threats such as war, famine, genocide, or torture.

Sitting silently, cross-legged on the floor taking all of this in, I am reminded that the sacred character of my own experience of the universe does not depend on the fate of our species or our planet. It depends on being right where I am right now. Is this magic or some kind of hocus-pocus? Maybe. But if it's magical or miraculous it's the kind of ordinary down to earth miracle we see every day in the rising of the sun or the blooming of a flower. These kinds of things have a mundane aspect in the way they occur, day in and day out, but we understand that they also have a different dimension which I'm calling "sacred". And I'm not just talking about the pretty things we like to dream about. I'm also thinking, for example, about the silence and finality that fills the room where someone you deeply love has just died - after the crying has run its course and it sinks in that one life has ended and yours has irrevocably changed. I'm thinking about the ashes flowing downstream or vanishing in the surf. All of the fleeting events and mundane facts of our existence have, I believe, a connection not only to each other but to something immense, something bigger than our own life and death.and so it can appear to us as sacred.

What is this immensity? I think it's pretty hard to talk about and impossible to really explain. Some might call it "god", but attempting to name it opens up a lot of opportunities for misunderstanding and miscommunication. The Zen school of Buddhism is largely founded on the recognition that what we are really after, our true and ultimate heart's desire, is beyond the reach of words. One way of honoring this fact is to practice silence. In Zen practice centers, besides the daily meditation, they study scriptures, conduct rituals and chanting, and hear the words of their teachers, but at the end of the day, it is not forgotten that all of the words are, as the old saying goes, only a finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. And how do you explain or define the beauty of a bright full moon on a warm summer night - the whole world seeming to come alive with its soft and subtle radiance? The sacred quality of our awareness calls to our hearts even more than to our minds.

It was discovering my capacity to experience life as fundamentally sacred that brought me to meditation and keeps me coming back, over and over again. It seems to me that acknowledging the sacred character of our experience is a choice that we can make. But it's hard to make such a choice with conviction, absent the actual direct experience which meditation can help to cultivate. This practice helps me to touch the sacred aspect of life more clearly and deeply. Maybe I just do it because it feels good. But it also feels like more than that. It feels like finding myself, moment by moment, in the reality of my own awareness, and I doubt there is any limit to how deep our awareness can go or how far it can extend. It transcends our conventional notions of space and time. Meditating in silence - entering the presence of the sacred - it feels to me like worship.

I'm not delivering a lecture today on Buddhism, or the countless techniques for practicing meditation in the Buddhist tradition or in any other tradition. Those are all very big subjects. I'm just saying that my practice of meditation, mostly based on ideas and techniques found in Soto Zen, is where I've made my spiritual home. We say the practice is simple, but not always easy. It's based on settling into the body, focusing on erect posture, regular and natural breathing, persistence, and very little else. Thoughts come and go like clouds floating through empty sky. Some days are quite cloudy, even stormy, some days are crystal clear. It doesn't matter much about the thoughts because this style of meditation has very little to do with thinking or ideas.

We make up a lot of stories about ourselves and our place in the world. Most of the time we even think the stories are true. This is a time to let those stories go, if they are willing, and I find that usually they are, at least after a few polite goodbyes. For me, this is a centered peaceful place of refuge in a troubled world. It doesn't feel much like an escape from reality. It feels more like sitting calmly in the middle of it all, accepting the world exactly as it is, stripped of my human judgments and agendas.

So I say this is my spiritual home, but I'm also a card-carrying Unitarian Universalist. How does that fit in? Being a UU is a much newer thing for me. I've only been at it for about ten years, and this place, this congregation, has been almost the sum total of my experience. It's been working for me because the UU tent seems so expansive, you can bring almost anything into it. That is to say, almost anything good and worthwhile. Some things are clearly not at home here - narrow mindedness, hatred, greed, prejudice - not that these undesirables don't creep in from time to time. We are only human.

I think it's fine to be a Buddhist Unitarian Universalist. That's quite a mouthful so sometimes I just say "Buddhitarian". (Maybe "Buddhaversalist" would be better.) After all, my late wife who first brought me here a decade ago was a goddess-worshipping feminist Pagan witch who found great encouragement and comfort here, so I guess we can deal with a Buddhist meditator. This Fellowship is good for me because it brings me into a community of good people whose values I share and who are just fun to be around. Although my meditation practice nourishes me very deeply, it may also feed into some of my most problematic personality traits - shyness, introversion, passivity. These are tough traits to maintain at this place on a Sunday morning, and that's a good thing. I don't always feel like coming to church on Sunday, especially since it's a long drive, but I'm invariably glad when I do. All of the gregarious jostling is good for me, but it's no wonder I feel like a little nap when I gets home. This is one busy place, and there is a definite limit to the amount of busy-ness I can tolerate.

Another reason for sticking around this church is the depth of feeling that you and I bring with us when we come together here. This is where we celebrate and mourn together and honor the transitions in our lives as we careen from cradle to grave. After a while it starts to feel like family and home. I've been married here. I've participated in memorial services here. I've agonized over the twisted bookkeeping. Eventually it all adds up. I've always fancied myself to be a bit to the left of Liberal in my politics and social views, so I like the way we proudly reclaim the "L" word, even through a time when it seems to have become unfashionable in our popular culture. The UU "principles and purposes" mostly make sense to me. I appreciate the humanist perspective, although I don't see myself as a humanist. Putting our values into action in the world seems like a lot of what being a UU is all about. This is more than a little challenging for me, but I try.

Having said all that, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for enlightened activism to transform human nature and call heaven down to earth. I need a plan that will work for me here and now in this world as it actually is. So I tend to think my UU identity is maybe not much more than skin deep. Underneath that skin there is a Buddhist, and underneath the Buddhist there is something deeper that I touch in my meditation practice and try to carry with me as I live out each day. I can't easily put into words what that "something" really is. In a sense, it's just who I am and my connection to the universe, which I try to open every morning as I sit cross legged on the floor. That's about all it is, but at least on good days, it feels like an immense treasure that we can all find if we just take the time to slow down and really look.

[Delivered 15 April 2007. Jim Robison was a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County.]