Emptiness and Love

Rev. Linda Simmons

March 8, 2015

Gary and I stayed at a Trappist monastery for 2 weeks in February. Thank you for this time away to pray, contemplate, reconnect and wonder.

The monks wake at 3 am each morning for vigils and meditation. We woke with them and enter their holy space and chanted with them, so much of what they do is in song. I found myself singing praise to Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and God. I found myself bowing in reverence as I entered their simple, modern chapel. I found myself transported by the incense and guitar and organ but mostly by the sound of the brothers’ voices.

We would join them again in the afternoon and evening for prayer and song.We ate our 3 small meals in silence.

The abbot at Mepkin Abbey is 76 years old. He came to live there when we was 17, right after high school. Being a Trappist of Strict Obedience used to be different pre-Vatican II. Monks could not speak at all then, except to the Abbot and as part of worship. Women were not allowed on the premises. Visitors were highly restricted. Retreatants were unheard of. So much of that has changed now.

What has not changed is that when a monk enters a Trappist Monastery, he promises to remain from that moment until death in that one place.

He gives up all his possessions. He lets go of family and career. He makes vows of silence, now for half the day instead of the whole day, vows of contemplation, service to the abbey through work and obedience to the Abbot. A Trappist Monk’s sole goal is to learn to love God and let God’s love find him. The path to this is mighty and steep. The self wants constant attention. The monks must learn what is the voice of this small self and how to let it go, over and over again as they seek a larger self, the Self that is not separate from what they call God.

To be in prayer with such men who had lived on these grounds for so many years, who practiced every day a contemplation very similar to that of the Buddhists, was heart opening.

At first, I was surprised to find myself soothed, comforted, held, nourished by the chanting of their devotional services. The first time I saw the texts we were to sing- the psalms and gospels- I recoiled. This is not my theology, I prickled. I can sit here and be in this milieu of devotion but I cannot say these words. I will shut my eyes and let is wash over me. Well, the shutting of eyes did not work as I would open them to find everyone standing or sitting when I was doing the opposite.

The spell of chanting became the vehicle beyond the words for me. And so the words of worship started melodically rising from my throat: praise to you our lord, and to your son risen to erase our sin, come to save us, through the holy spirit, amen.

I know right? Was I being disingenuous? Was I mocking my faith, my station as a minister, or their faith?

Mepkin Abbey has a fine library of theological and philosophical books. The abbot gave me the key. I was in heaven, so to speak, in that library! Just the smell of the books, the feel of book jackets, worn by so much reading, dating back hundreds of years. I spend many afternoons there.

The first book to leap off the shelves and into my hands was, The Way of Chuang (Shoe ang) Tzu (ze), by Thomas Merton, a famous Trappist Monk and author. The classic period of Chinese philosophy was from 550-250 BC and Chuang Tzu, the greatest of the Taoist writers, lived at the end of this period.

Merton highlights in Chuang Tzu’s philosophy the difference between personalism and individualism. Personalism gives priority to the person, different from the individual self. A person lives in connection to all that is, an individual seeks separation to know him or herself.

Chuang Tzu wrote that freedom cannot be found in the separation that individualism calls us to-freedom only exists in relationship.

As Thomas Merton wrote, “The ascent of the individual soul to personal mystical union with God is made to depend, in our life, upon our ability to love one another.”

Though the monks might seem to live separate from society, they create their own society within their Abbeys that is rife with all the same conflicts and tensions and demands of any community. It is their lives in community with each other that shapes them, offers them the tools to give away the demands of their egos which allows them to keep them making room for the love of God they so cherish.

One of the monks told me that over a lifetime of contemplation, one comes to a place of nothingness, a place where who we are and what we want no longer has a stranglehold on us and in this place, eternity comes to fill the emptiness, the opening. This eternity and love and teaches us that we are all, everything: the trees, the plants, the animals, that we are all connected. There is no separation. If we could live knowing this, then we would not fear death which he described as the ultimate expression of life, the flowering of life into relationship with all that is, the removal of the final separation from the ground of our being: eternal, interconnected love. Happiness is not outside of us he told me. It is always right here.

Chuang Tzu wroteabout the way of the Tao. He explained that the more one seeks happiness and the good outside of oneself, as something to be acquired, the more

this happiness becomes an object to be sought after, to be attained, to be achieved and the more happiness then alludes us as the pursuit becomes the goal, the pulse of our lives.

Thomas Merton calls this “organized despair.” The monks find that happiness can only be found by first learning what it is to love and to be present beyond the constant needs of the self to be affirmed and then to give one’s life over to loving, each other and what they know as God, which they call love.

The monks arrive here through the constant discipline of contemplation and prayer. The only other way I know to get to a place outside of the needing self is through an experience of transcendent beauty, compassion or tragedy. Our little island has had its share of tragedy this winter hasn’t it? This brings great despair and also great connection as we gather round to comfort each other and grieve together. We have all been touched by the outpouring of compassion, discussion, advocacy, and caring of this community but we are growing weary, aren’t we? And yet it is often in this weariness that the greatest love can be found.

Several years ago, I received a call that I needed unforeseen, serious surgery. There were two weeks between this call and the time of surgery so I did what I do when I feel lost, I started walking. It was summer, and so I walked especially in the Boston Public Gardens and Common. I love the beauty there. I love the throngs of people. I needed their breath and desire. I needed to be surrounded by those that existed as if time mattered, always racing somewhere, longing for something, putting on lipstick, lit up with the dance of needing more for tomorrow.

As some of you know, Macy’s is not far from the Boston Common. I found myself wandering there over and over in those two weeks. I must have gone 4 or 5 times. Macy’s has a 75% off rack and I ended up there each time, buying heavy pants, sweaters, scarfs. It was 90 degrees out then. I realize now that I was dressing myself for another season, wanting to see myself caring about clothes in another season, thriving into another season.

The only way to leave this particular Macy’s is to walk through the bottom floor that is the domain of the cosmetic counters. Women all dressed and made up walk around here smiling and soliciting. The smell of perfume is dizzying. Making my usual dash for the door one day, a woman from one of these stands stopped me and asked, “Would you like a facial?” “No,” I said, “I need to get outside.” “You look so tired. Please, sit down.” Too tired to resist, I shrugged and sat down. And this lovely woman, Nashima as I came to learn, massaged my calves and back and made up my face with subtle colors and tones. As she did, she asked me why I looked so tired. I told her of my coming surgery and that I was afraid. She then told me story after story of the courage of one family member after another who lived longer than anyone predicted, who survived the difficult, overcoming all the odds and finding peace.

I saw Nashima every time I went to Macy’s. Each time she massaged me and made me up. I hardly knew myself when she was finished. Each time, she comforted me, offering me her wisdom and kind touch. She told me that I had to love life, that it was through loving life that I would find the strength and courage to heal. Nashima held me to life, reminded me of goodness, gave me hope. In Thomas Merton’s words, she brought me back to the Tao, that simple piece of knowing there is nothing to do but be present and respond to what is open hearted and let love do the rest.

The night I woke up from surgery in the ICU a nurse came in and apparently asked me how I was doing. I don’t remember any of this. The next day she asked me, “Do you remember what you said last night when I asked you how you were?”

“No, I don’t remember even seeing you,” I replied.

She went on, you said, “I’m fine; I’m shopping at Macy’s at the 75% off rack.”

Apparently my idea of heaven!

Nashima brought me back to this life becauseshe risked loving me, a stranger, a passerby. She was able to put her personhood before her individuality in Chuang Tzu’s words. She never asked me to buy anything from her cosmetic counter. Nashima knew the Tao though she was Muslim and had not read or practiced the Tao by name, she knew that happiness comes through seeing another, loving another, connecting with another beyond one’s own needs.

The reason I could chant those words with the brothers in the Trappist Monastery in South Carolina was because the words did not matter. What mattered was the love these brothers created as they sang, the hope that swept through my chest as I opened to belt out another praise of god and a Mary I imagine was not a virgin and yet whose name I sang wide open as Virgin Mary. What mattered was the possibility of facing oneself in the silence and all the fear and loneliness of not knowing and yet doing this as one chorus, one voice, one song. What mattered was feeling the heartbreakingly, impossibly fragile lives we all live and opening self, the rock of self the monks implored in their chanting we allow to weep, to the goodness that resides in all of us and to the connection this goodness creates. What mattered was for just so brief a moment being able to still the chatter and desire long enough to hear the voice of love.

What mattered was letting the music and the words, even if from another theology, transport beyond the needs of the individual self to be affirmed and reflected into another kind of love, a love that has room to be surprised, haunted, renewed, and grown beyond the limits of what we imagine brings happiness, a kind of love that can see from a new perspective, allowing our lives to change us, to unhinge us from our usual paths we are so hell-bent on, and be in the personhood of love and so touch true freedom when it is not attached to an outcome or product or place.

I know that in this act of love, from this simple love that flows through like breath, that the Tao smiles. If Nashima got hold of this Tao, that smile would be shine in all the latest colors!

Dear friends, may we continue to comfort each other, see each other, truly see each other as we find our way past our grief of so much winter and so much loss and into the understanding that love is stronger than death, that compassion brings happiness to the giver and the receiver, that this day is precious and the love we risk giving is our sacred connection to that which is eternal in us all.

Amen.