Awake, Alert, Alive
By Charles Rush
November 15, 1998
Mark 14: 37-41
live in a world of distraction. One commuter was telling me that
every day she has to run the gauntlet through Penn Station. She has
been dieting and the gauntlet requires her to hold her breath past the
Krispy Kreme donut stand and past the Dunkin Donuts until she gets up
the escalator where, in her words, 'I can breath deeply of the smog of
our cities Taxi's, the best appetite suppressant in New York.'
I love watching first time tourists
in New York. There are so many sights and smells, so many neon signs
jumping out for your attention and guys yelling at you on the corner
hawking their wares, that these tourists get a kind of glazed look on
their face, like deer staring in your headlights.
The office is certainly
distracting. You might have an action agenda at the beginning of the
day, but increasingly there are e-mails growing in number every week,
and the funny thing about e-mail is that people expect an immediate
response. Or the phone, you want to just dial almost anywhere these
days, and you hear 'Welcome to the CBS automated menu list If you are
calling about local programming please press one.' Literally 6 minutes
later, you might actually get to a human being and by then you are
trying to remember why you were calling in the first place because
another e-mail message has just come in.
TV monitors follow us even in to
many lunch areas, with silent news reporters, and the latest numbers
from the New York Stock Exchange rolling by.
Back in the safety of suburbia,
there is television. Talking about cable TV, Bruce Springsteen has a
song that says '700 channels and nothing on.' We got Direct TV and for
a month they gave you every movie channel, every sports channel,
literally several hundred different programs. I would come downstairs
and my kids would be surfing click, click, click through dozens of
channels, seemingly infinite variety of action movies, B movies, more
action movies, just plain dumb movies, 12 year old movies you walked
out of the first time you saw them. My kids can surf from channel to
channel for an hour and they get this open mouthed gape like they're
about to drool or they are trying out for a bit part in 'Deliverance'.
This distraction is increasing down the generations. Watch MTV for a
while or VH1. It is a series of rapid cut images, incredibly sexy and
beguiling, one after another. Perhaps there is a theme that pulls them
together or perhaps the sheer titillation of the images is enough to
make it. Go buy a video camera. They come with an automatic feature
nowadays that limits a given shot to just a few seconds. Watch the
opening shots of NYPD Blue, the camera moves almost in a blur boomboom
boom to give you that juiced confusion of Manhattan in rush hour.
What parent doesn't have a headache after going to a video game center
with their kids so many rapid images requiring little Johnny to blast
apart 47 Ninja's to get to the next level. And when they graduate from
the arcade, they can go to Atlantic City and get the same hyper effect
from a room of two thousands slot machines all making noise like they
are about to cash out any minute.
You ever have an exacting day, working late, when you get off the
train, walk home in the darkness and the silence of a side street is
just deafening?
I started noticing a few years ago the way that all of this
distraction, all of these choices is shaping our consciousness. 10
years ago, I had just begun teaching at Rutgers University. I was
teaching ethics, which is generally a pretty interesting class. But I
began to notice that regardless of how engaging the subject might be,
if I asked the students to think on a concentrated level for more than
a certain period of time, their eyes glazed over. I realized that what
was happening is that a they needed to go to commercial break, so about
every 6 minutes of serious material, I would stop and tell a joke or a
historical anecdote Even Terry Gross on 'All Things Considered', which
has no commercials, will say 'We'll talk some more after this short
break'.
During this same period, we had a professor who came to Princeton
Seminary from the University of Hiedelberg. He was a world-famous
scholar and he gave a typical German lecture on Kant's Metaphysic's of
Morals: no jokes, just non-stop didactic for 1 hour and 20 minutes.
After it was over, the faculty members were pronouncing it
magnificent. One of them turned to me and said 'Charles, wasn't
Professor Pannenberg wonderful?' I said 'he'd never make it in
America.'
It is true that our attention span is shrinking. Our consciousness is
being shaped by the structure of commercial television. You probably
notice this if you are of a certain age. Remember twenty years ago,
you thought nothing of becoming completely absorbed by a fascinating
sixteen-page article in Atlantic Monthly or the New Yorker. Nowadays,
you are lucky to scan all of the headlines in the Times. In terms of
format, the Post will do just fine. Give it to me in a photo with a
paragraph of succinct description.
This is happening all around us and we don't get it because we are in
the midst of it. You know some archeologists believe that one of the
principal reasons for the downfall of the Roman empire had to do with
the fact that a high percentage of the people drank water that ran
through lead pipes. They were getting dumber and dumber, prone to
eccentric behavior, sometimes psychosis and no one really noticed
because they were all in it together. No one ever figured out the root
cause.
So why do I mention this? Jesus tells us to Watch. The word in the
Greek has a connotation that doesn't quite come through in
translation. It means 'be alert, pay attention, guard over, care for.'
And Jesus' parting words to the disciples are 'Wake up'. What great
parting words in the gospel of Mark.
There is a word in Japanese I am told that refers to a similar state of
spiritual being. The word is Zanchon. It is a state of knowing what
is going on in the world all around you. Supposedly Zanchon is
referred to in those martial arts films of B quality at best. The
protagonist enters a dark alley, is surrounded by bad guys on all sides
who attack him at once. He begins kicking in five different directions
simultaneously with these stunning direct hits, sometimes at people he
can't even see, and each of the bad guys goes flying. We all need a
little bit of that. I used to say to my boys, when they were young, 'I
think you should know that these hands have been registered with the
United States Government. I am licensed to kill.'
In reality, Zanchon is a spiritual state of being completely attuned
with your surroundings. It comes from meditation, and apparently with
real Zanchon there is no butt kicking involved. It is a focused
consciousness that is awake, alert, in touch.
The Buddha supposedly attained these higher qualities of alertness.
When you see the Buddha depicted, he is usually shown in the midst of a
meditation. He has attained a dispassionate serenity, equanimity, and
mindfulness. In the path to Enlightenment, he divested himself of
desire and thus overcame the suffering that attends most of human
existence. So the depictions of the Buddha radiate this calm and
self-possession.
In the eightfold path to Enlightenment, the last two steps are right
mindfulness and right meditation. Right mindfulness is made possible
by the well-disciplined thought habits during long hours spent on
edifying subjects.
Right meditation is ultimately the attainment of a trance like state of
equanimity and peace. The Buddha taught that there are three
overlapping approaches to spiritual wholeness: understanding, morals,
and concentration.
You may be wondering, about now, why the Protestant Minister is way off
on the Buddha. No, I am not pulling an Allen Tinker. I merely want to
lift up the contrast between the spiritual approach to reality that is
taken by the Buddhist monks and our own life of distraction. We have
the same concepts in our Christian tradition and there have been lots
of people like Thomas Merton that have exemplified them. But, on the
whole, I think the Buddhists are farther down the road than we are.
Concentration, focus, meditation, awareness of the world around you,
centerdness, being awake Have you ever been in the forest just before
dawn, walking as quietly as you could, feeling all the sensations of
life awakening around you, hearing a cacophony of noises around you?
Sometimes you almost feel merged with the world in a mystical, tingling
way. Unfortunately as a child, us boys were taught to interrupt this
spiritual moment with a dramatic blast from a shotgun whenever Bambi
got near.
We can have that kind of focus in prayer. We ought to have that same
kind of focus in prayer. Get up at the beach before dawn and go to a
part of the shore that is empty, sit and breath deeply, filling
yourself with peace as the sun breaks over the horizon. You have to
work up to it. Jesus said to his disciples 'can you not sit one hour?'
But this peace will not only transform you; it will transform the world
around you. We read a dramatic story about this in our prayer group
last year. There was a woman who had a farm, I believe in Vermont.
She had lot of animals but two of them were these exotic Japanese geese
that had been given to her by someone. These two geese were just down
right ornery. They were always biting anyone that got near to them,
flapping their wings and running at visitors and children in this
bellicose, aggressive manner. Despite the fact that this woman fed
these birds, they would still bite her so she kept her distance.
One day she is out meditating by her pond. It is a beautiful day,
quiet, and she is at calm in front of her placid pond. She is
meditating for maybe half and hour, with her eyes pretty much closed
with only the sound of the wind. She becomes aware of a presence near
her but she doesn't want to break her meditation so she opens her eyes
ever so little. Both of these geese are standing with their beaks just
a couple of inches from her cheekbones. Gently she just closed her
eyes again and continued to breathe in peace, to breathe out anxiety.
After a bit she could feel the necks of the geese rubbing against her.
She would experience for a minute and then just let it go, returning to
her breathing and meditation. A few minutes later, she felt both of
the geese lay their heads in her lap as she continued to meditate. And
the three of them just shared a moment together in peace and
tranquility.
It doesn't surprise me that animals would have such a response to a
human in meditation. They are probably so relieved to see us in such a
non-threatening posture, such a vulnerable and participating demeanor.
Perhaps it is a concrete metaphor of what Isaiah envisioned when he
looked forward to a day when 'the Lion shall lie down with the lamb.'
Now, I have no illusions that anyone here is going to trade in their
seat at the exchange for a farm in Vermont, nor am I suggesting that
you don a saffron robe and throw out the Donna Kaaren power suit. But,
it is reasonable for us to understand that our path to redemption
requires us to step back, to get refocused on what is important. I
think it is reasonable to begin to incorporate meditation or prayer in
our lives. For most of us, it will probably be like working out
physically. Some of will only do it sporadically, others of us will
keep doing it and find it takes us to a different level to the point
that we do it almost every day, not out of a sense of duty but because
we really feel better. It can become the place where you get back into
the zone. And it will change us too, and make us see the world around
us differently.
On a sweltering day, an old man went down into a cool cellar for some
relief. The moment he entered, he was blinded by the darkness. 'Don't
worry,' said another man in the cellar, 'it is natural that when you go
from light to darkness, you're unable to see. But soon enough, your
eyes will grow accustomed to it, and you will hardly notice that it is
dark.'
'My dear friend' replied the old man, turning to leave, 'that is
exactly what I am afraid of. Darkness is darkness, the danger is
convincing yourself that it is light.'
We must understand that, although they are not fatal, the distractions
around us keep us from developing spiritual unity and concentration in
our lives. The distractions of our world obscure our search for
meaning. It encourages a listless and aimless life that is not
centered. It increases our doubts and fears.
The reality is that God created each of us with a divine spark that
illuminates our way in the midst of the darkness. Meditation
cultivates this spark, like oxygen giving full flame to a fire. It
opens us to the transcendent force of God that shoots through the
universe. It gives us the resources by which we can begin to instill
every one of our acts with virtue and infinite meaning. It moves us
away from confusion towards harmony. And each of these acts fill us
with hope that goodness is more real and overcomes the randomness and
evil that also dominates our world.
And so my brothers and sisters 'be in the world but not of the world'.
Make yourselves places of refuge where you can go alone, sometimes with
your spouse, sometimes with your families, and begin to develop
meditative peace in your lives. Let tranquility flourish. Be centered
in your purpose. Be unified in your focus.
Amen
