LIVING AUTHENTICALLY

A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford

3 December 2000

The other day I was standing on line at the Star Market in Newtonville. In addition to picking up some necessities and the makings for that evening’s dinner, I was purchasing some beer. While I don’t drink Jan does and I take considerable pleasure in shopping around to find designer beers for her to sample. On this trip to the Star Market I saw I could select from among the micro and slightly-less-than-macro brewing company offerings while still getting a single six pack price. A mix and match deal. I thought it was great.

However, the person checking the groceries hadn’t encountered this possibility before. She held up one of the six bottles I’d gathered. I forget which exactly, a bottle of Three Stooges Beer or some such, and asked, "How much?" I replied, "I don’t exactly remember, but a sign said the assortment comes at a six pack price."

This led to calling over a manager, a brief discussion and then a trip for an ill-clad pimply-faced youth to the beer department. Did I mention this is the Newtonville Star Market? The lines are very long and the people behind me were quickly beginning to twitch. Soon everything else was rung up, and we waited for what seemed to be an eternity.

At last the guy standing directly behind me, a fellow in a suit with his tie loosened and a selection of Stouffer boiling bags, products with which I am myself fairly familiar, spoke up. "Hey, this seems like a fifty cent deal. I’ll pay the damn fifty cents! Let’s get going."

I flushed with embarrassment. I turned to him and said, indignantly, "We’re just trying to find the right price." He snorted derisively. I flushed and turned back to the checker. Standing there I found myself running through all sorts of scenarios, none of which seemed appropriate to either a minister or a thirty-year Zen practitioner.

The wait seemed like forever, but finally, excruciatingly, it all came to an end. I did, indeed, find myself paying an extra fifty cents. I left the store feeling red as the proverbial beet, from my hairline right down to my collar.

At last sitting in my car, I wondered what it had been all about? Why had I felt so defensive? Indeed, it seemed in a moment everything I’d striven for in all my years walking the spiritual path washed out of me. My goals and my spiritual practices, my striving for decency and perspective, lost. I felt exhausted and ashamed. And even seeing it all happen, I still wanted to bash that guy on his head with my Curly Joe beer bottle.

So what happened? Where was the failure? What would be success? Indeed, this is the question for today. What does it mean to live authentically? And, it is necessary to add what does this have to do with our lives as parents, as friends and lovers, as engaged human beings? What, I want to ask, is an authentic life?

Right at the start can’t we ask ourselves how is it possible to not be authentic? I mean here we are. What is going to be inauthentic? I particularly think of that advice good and kind people give to those of us in the midst of judging someone. "She is doing the best she can." "He really is doing the best he can." I suspect in the moment of hesitation which might follow such a caution, something important is revealed.

We are what we are. We are who we are. The bed, in which we lie, was made long before we were. How goes that harsh question from God when Job squeaks his objections to the horror of his life? Dryly, horrifyingly, devastatingly, the voice out of the whirlwind asks. "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the cosmos?"

We are by any objective consideration essentially the products of our genes and our conditioning. The foundations of our being, that is your being and mine, were laid long before we were born. So, of course, even within this vast universe of possibilities we in fact find ourselves astonishingly constrained, narrow and driven by necessity. Every day, it seems, in the great arguments between freedom and necessity, freedom seems to wane and necessity wax. My fingering, if only mentally, that Curly Joe bottle thinking murderous thoughts is ancient and animal. We are, no doubt, driven.

However, while the good and kind remind us to not judge so quickly, to remember the constraints on the human spirit that can so often contribute to our being mean and narrow and selfish, there is something more. I suggest we can choose our responses to the conditions of life. We can choose our response. This choice of response is the subject of spirituality, of the quest in all religions. Here, we encounter a perspective beyond necessity. In our choices we find the possibility of the authentic.

In fact the very word authentic in some sense guides us toward our possibility. It is one of those ancient words, where the actual etymology is shrouded in an antiquity so vast it joins our forgetting as well as our remembering. "Authentic" is a root word of our humanity. We find it shares kinship with the Greek anyein, "to accomplish," and the Sanskrit sanoti, "he gains." To accomplish. She gains. Here, reflecting on the authentic, I believe we stand before some mysterious divinity, the divinity we name freedom.

Here in fact authentic and freedom reveal each other. Freedom speaks to the state of being free. Free. Our English word "free" has multiple origins. On the one hand it derives from the Germanic "Friede" or "Frith" meaning peace. Here the use seems to derive from the time following a blood feud, when the goddess Freda or Frita reigns. There is a Sanskrit source for free as well. "Prija" means beloved or dear.

I suggest we can take these sources for free to show us the deep intuition that there is a moment beyond constraint, beyond necessity. Here a goddess of peace reigns; here we find that which is beloved to us, that which truly is dear. This is what we gain, what we accomplish by not turning away from the investigation. Here we discover freedom and authenticity are what separate us out from the rest of the animals.

Now I still believe we are constrained by necessity, by our biology and our environment. I believe any honest examination shows how true this is. It is extremely hard to choose a surprising, a different response to conditions. But, there is something miraculous in our human existence. We can in some real way choose our responses. Maybe only a little. Maybe our freedom is little more than our ability to say yes or no. But, I suggest this is enough.

I think this is the meaning of that story our ancestors gave to us. Where "Jacob was left alone; and a being wrestled with him until daybreak." The story tells us "when (the being) saw that he could not defeat (Jacob), he (pushed) the hollow of his thigh; (throwing) Jacob’s (leg)… out of joint..." This was terribly painful. But still Jacob held on. Finally after hours of struggle the being said, "‘Let me go, for daybreak has come.’

"And Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go until you bless me.’ (And the being replied) ‘Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel: for you have wrestled with God, and have won…’ And he blessed him there. (Later) Jacob called the place Peniel: ‘for I have seen God face to face, and my life has been saved.’"

Maybe when we don’t turn away, even when we are wounded, after all don’t forget, Jacob, now Israel would limp for the rest of his days from that encounter: if we don’t turn away, then we can be blessed. In those small matches and in the great ones: where we are bruised and hurt, when we don’t let go of learning too easily, as we seek the blessing we earn some wondrous reward.

In that choosing to stay engaged, we gain something. We find the source for a peace that passes all understanding. We glimpse the beloved, we find that which is dearest to us. And, truly, we are blessed. It happens in the great moments and it happens in the smallest moments. And, of course, sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. But I suggest those moments when we fail, as well, can teach us. The way of the authentic is remembering the limp and its blessing.

I reflect on my experience with the man offering fifty cents for the beer to get me moving, and my embarrassment right then, and then my further embarrassment in thinking of all those years in spiritual training to just come up short, all teach me. I felt the ache of Jacob’s ancient limp.

In this context I remembered another story, a story that one of my old Zen teachers liked to tell. A monk had lived in the monastery for a full decade. He’d advanced prodigiously along the way, meditating clear as glass, answering koan one after another. His community and his teacher acknowledged his insight.

And then the first time in years out of the monastery, he found himself confronted by a woman who felt he slipped into a line ahead of her. He was angered, actually he was enraged. Then he was embarrassed. And then he returned to the temple to sit another decade. Thus gifted he found his learning ever truer, ever deeper, ever more authentic. All from that small wound, from the limp he continued to experience.

And there I was. Here I am. Failed again. Of course I can’t go back to the temple for another decade. I’ve got responsibilities right here. I am the minister here in this place. I am married to Jan. I have auntie to care for. Necessity has overtaken me. The conditions of my life bind me to this spot. And so embarrassed, foolish, caught up short, I must deal with it here.

Perhaps like the rest of us? Who among us, after all, is going to a monastery for a decade? In this ordinary lived life, do you ever feel caught up short? Have you found your way less than you hoped? Do you feel the weight of necessity and at the same time long for something better? Perhaps? Does the prayer of our teacher T. S. Eliot echo for you some sense of recognition?

"Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain,/spirit of the garden,/Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood/Teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still/Even among these rocks./Our peace in his will/And even among these rocks/Sister, mother,/And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea./Suffer me not to be separated/And let my cry come unto Thee."

Who among us seeks healing from the tears of life? Who in this room feels they’ve fallen short? Who? If it is you, then what can you do? What can we do, who know the words, "He’s doing the best he can. She’s doing the best she can?" If still we feel that’s not enough for us, then what? Perhaps we need to pull up our socks, and try again? Maybe?

If we cannot retreat to find our way, if the monastery is not an option, if we don’t have that second decade, or maybe even not the first, then what can we do? How do we live here, as the Buddha said, like a lotus in the fire? How do we make this place our sacred learning ground? How do we caught up in the play of necessity still accomplish, still gain, still discover peace, the beloved, the dear?

I see my binding to necessity in my reaction trying to purchase some beer. Such a small event, and yet, here, like for Jacob of old, we can meet the dark mystery and we wrestle it into the morning. In all our small failings and insults and missing of the point, we can hold on, even wounded, even caught up short, we can look.

Now, I suggest, should we be willing to do this, then something wonderful reveals itself, a magnificent blessing awaits. It awaits any of us who will engage the whole mess. That is the promise. We will fall short. And so we need to forgive others and ourselves. Still, we need to attend. We need to let the whole glorious mess be what it is. And then we need to get up, to shake ourselves off, and to try again.

Thomas Merton, in his splendid little book The Wisdom of the Desert: Some Sayings of the Desert Fathers, shows how we can cultivate this perspective, and where it can lead. He recounts how "Once there was a disciple of a Greek philosopher who was commanded by his Master for three years to give money to everyone who insulted him. When this period of trial was over, the Master said to him: Now you can go to Athens and learn wisdom.

"When the disciple was entering Athens he met a certain wise (woman) who sat at the gate insulting everybody who came and went. (She) also insulted the disciple who immediately burst out laughing. Why do you laugh when I insult you? Said the wise (woman).

"Because, said the disciple, for three years I have been paying for this kind of thing and now you give it to me for nothing.

"Enter the city, said the wise (woman), it is all yours."

Merton, one of the wise people of twentieth century America, certainly one of those teachers who has been signal in my life, tells how one of his teachers the mid-fourth century African abbot John "used to tell (that) story, saying: This is the door of God by which our fathers (and mothers) rejoicing in many tribulations enter into the City of Heaven."

"Hey, fifty cents! I’ll pay it if it’ll get us going!" A flush of red in the ears. Anger, embarrassment. What is the difference between the man with the loose tie, the woman accusing the monk of cutting in line, and the wise woman at the gate throwing insults at all who pass? Ah, the door of God, and a genuine lesson if we’re willing to hear it.

Have your children caught you up short? Have you made a fool of yourself lately? Well, here we find the lotus being cultivated in the midst of a lake of fire. Here the temple is constructed for us to train, to find our way. Right here we find our possibility for authenticity, for freedom.

I hope we all will take a chance, notice and learn a little. Who knows what we may accomplish in this exercise? Here, right here, we engage; we make our mistakes, one right after another, following our noses down. But each time, I hope, picking our selves up, dusting ourselves off, and trying again. Then trying again, and again.

In those small actions, truly the mystery of heaven will be revealed. Indeed, here we may find our authentic way. Here we discover what our freedom can be. Here, in finding our voice and saying at the right time yes or no, we gain God, we find peace, we gaze upon the face of the beloved, we find all that will make our lives dear. And that, my friends, I suggest, is enough to justify our birth and to pay for our bread.

Amen.