The Rev. Ann R. Lougee September 17, 2006 Wisdom of Solomon 7:26-8:1; Proverbs 1:20-33; James 3:1-12 Wisdom, Compassion and Peace In our Bible study group on Monday, someone mentioned that, on a recent Sunday when I was away, our guest worship leader used a reading which referred to Wisdom as feminine, and that they heard someone in the congregation whisper to a companion something about where did they get that "she" stuff. Well, it may come as big news to some, but since way before Bible times Wisdom was personified as a woman, and that tradition carried through into Hebrew culture. After worship last Sunday, George Cole told me that something I had said reminded him of a joke. In the joke, a couple of guys had rescued some creature who turned out to be magical and told them they could each be granted one wish. The first guy wished to be the smartest man in the world, and PRESTO! He was the smartest man in the world. The second guy said he wished to be even smarter than the smartest man in the world, and PRESTO! He was a woman. So, you see, the Wisdom tradition lives on! To be fair, I should point out that in the wisdom writings, Folly is also depicted as a woman. So today's lectionary gives us two Wisdom writings. And what does Wisdom mean, as used here? It means knowing how to live in ways that bring peace and justice and harmony to human relationships; it means going with the flow of God's tide, living in synch with God's ways, in ways that nurture life in every possible case. The New Testament Letter of James focuses on one particular aspect of Wisdom in what is a third reading from the lectionary for today. Here it is: James 3:1-12 Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord God, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh. Wow! When our mothers told us to watch our mouths, they were passing along real Wisdom! I know one public official in Redding who might be wishing he had heeded that Wisdom recently. I've been reading a little book by Pema Chodron, entitled Practicing Peace in Times of War, which is full of some very practical wisdom for our everyday living, and I want to pass along some of what she says. She reminds us that war and peace begin in the hearts of individuals. When we're upset or feeling stressed, what we really want is happiness and ease and peace, but what we do all too often is to start yelling at people, or making negative comments. So we get even more worked up and get everyone else worked up too. We all get hooked into anger. It can be as minor as when someone cuts in front of us as we're driving, and we don't like it so we roll down the window and scream at them. But it can be quite major, as in hatred and prejudice. War begins when we harden our hearts, and we harden them easily, when we feel uncomfortable. It's sad because our real motivation in hardening our hearts is to find release from the stress that we're feeling. We can talk about ending war, and we can march and have prayer vigils about ending war. But war is never going to end as long as our hearts are hardened against each other and our tongues lash out. I remember reading once about a peace march. When one group was coming back from the march, some pro-war people started blocking them, and everyone started screaming and hitting at each other. What's wrong with this picture? Clobbering someone with your peace sign? The trouble is that when we get angry, we fill up with righteous indignation and become totally intolerant. First the heart closes, then the mind hardens, and then we can justify hating another human being because of what they represent and what they say and do. If we look at history or at any other place in the world where religious or ethnic groups, or racial or political groups are killing each other, or at families who have been feuding for generations, we can see – because we ourselves are not involved in that particular argument – that there will never be peace until someone softens what is rigid in their heart. So it's essential to get a perspective on our own self-righteousness and rigidity when they begin to kick in and we are thinking that our own indignity and anger are reasonable. I try to practice what I preach. I'm not always that good at it, but I really do try. But the other day, I found myself being hard-hearted and closed-minded about someone else because he was holding such a rigid view. Then I realized I was being just as riled up and self-righteous and closed-minded as he was. And I saw that the more I held my point of view, the more polarized we'd be, and the more we'd be just mirror images of each other – two people with closed minds and hard hearts who both think they're right, screaming at each other. It changed for me when I was able to see my own rigidity. If we could have a bird's-eye perspective on the Earth, or perhaps a God's-eye view, looking down at all the conflicts, we'd see two sides of each story where both sides think they're right. So the solutions have to come from a change of heart, from softening what is rigid in our hearts and minds. Some, of course, will say, "OK, but nothing will ever change just by holding that all-inclusive, loving view." But I truly believe that when you take that view and begin really to live by it, at the level of your own heart in your own everyday life, something begins to shift very dramatically, and you begin to see things in a different way. You begin to have the clarity to see injustice happening, but you can also see that injustice, by its very definition, is harming everyone involved, the people who are oppressing and abusing as well as the people who are being oppressed or abused. There's nothing that causes more pain and suffering than being consumed by bigotry, cruelty and anger. So war starts in the human heart. Whether a heart is open or closed has global implications. If the patterns of aggression that come from hard-heartedness and self-righteousness still lodge in our hearts, how can joy and peace in this world ever be found? As long as we keep being hooked, justifying and strengthening our anger and self-righteousness with our words, we are planting the seeds of hatred, prejudice and war. So what Pema Chodron advocates is having the courage to have a change of heart. The reason this requires courage is that when we don't do the habitual thing, hardening our hearts and holding tightly to our views, we're left with the underlying uneasiness or pain that we were trying to get away from. When we don't harden, we're left with that feeling of threat, and that's when the real journey of courage begins. This is the real work of the peacemaker, to find the soft spot and the tenderness in that very uneasy place and stay with it. If we can stay with the soft spot, the tender heart, we can cultivate the seeds of peace. How do we do this when our old patterns are so ingrained? One way to develop our ability to deal with our uneasiness is in meditation. This is where we can train ourselves in how not to get swept away by our emotions, how to open and relax with what is happening, how to experience the uneasiness and the urge to lash out, how to interrupt that momentum that usually follows, carrying us along with it to our flash point where we say and do things in the heat of anger. So we can learn to acknowledge when we're tensing up, when we're hooked and getting all worked up. The earlier we catch it, the easier it is to work with our unease, but even if we catch it when we're already all worked up, that's good enough. Sometimes, we even have to go through the old cycle and make a mess of it because the old pattern is so entrenched. But what we can do after the fact is to reflect and re-run the story. We can start by remembering that all-worked-up feeling and get in touch with that, then experiment with not getting carried away. Gradually we learn to relax into that shaky moment, not following the habitual response. Then we resolve to keep practicing this way. It doesn't help to get down on ourselves. I'm reminded of the late Buddhist master in San Francisco, Suzuki Roshi, who looked out at his students and said, "All of you are perfect just as you are, and you could use a little improvement." We don't need to think, "Oh, I'm fundamentally messed up and bad," but simply we're basically good and healthy and noble, and there's work that we need to do to overcome ancient habits that we've been strengthening for a long time so it'll take a while to unwind them. This is a chance to cultivate unconditional friendliness toward yourself, your perfect and imperfect self. When we can do this, we can also look on others with more compassion and sensitivity. We can see, for example, in a conversation, when the other person's eyes get hard or their jaw tenses. When peace is your goal, this is an important observation. You can realize that whatever you're discussing, nothing is going to get through right now because this person has just been hooked by their unease. So you can nip your own aggression in the bud, which in intself has the power to stop the chain reaction. You might bring your awareness to your breathing, letting yourself be there openly and with curiosity. You might also change your way of talking at that point and ask, "How do you feel about what I just said?" The other person might say, curtly, "It's fine. No problem." But you know enough to be patient and maybe non-aggressively say something like, "Let's talk about this again later," understanding that even simple words like this can avert two people from going to war. Here, again, a practice of sitting meditation can help. We train ourselves in coming back to the present moment, regarding whatever thoughts arise in us with equanimity and letting them dissolve. We don't reject the thoughts and emotions that come up; rather, we begin to realize that our thoughts and emotions are not solid but transitory. This doesn't mean that then we live in everlasting happiness and comfort. We'll still experience pain. We may still get betrayed, may still find people who hate us. We may still feel confused and sad at times. What we won't do is get hooked into that cycle of aggression. The on-line Thought for the Day service to which I subscribe offers this thought for today: Mature believers should use their strength to undergird, not to undercut. We need to train ourselves at this very basic level because of the widespread suffering in the world. If we don't train ourselves to overcome our fear of pain and unease, we'll be very limited in how much we can help ourselves or anybody else. So let's start training ourselves just as we are, here and now, in this Wisdom. When we can open ourselves to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of our own beings and of reality, we increase our capacity to not be afraid, to keep our eyes, minds and hearts open. We notice when we get caught up by prejudice, bias, and aggression. We lose our enthusiasm for watering those negative seeds, and we begin to think of our life as offering endless opportunities to start doing things differently, endless opportunities to uproot the seeds of war where they originate – in the hearts and minds of people like you and me. Amen.