If You Meet the Buddha...

"You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself..."
-- Dr. Seuss

Meditation:  a poem by Greg Kuzma

I begin my life

over.  It’s easy.

You take a deep breath,

close your eyes,

open them, and

there it is,

all the familiar things.

Nobody has to get up.

It’s drawing the chairs 

closer to the fire,

opening the window

louder on the sound

of people walking by 

outside, taking 

another sip of coffee.

It’s habit, too easily

broken by dreams

and regrets.  My 

mind’s a blank, my

heart stirs, my eyes

take on their gentle 

obligation.  My hand 

is steady as a baby’s sleep.

Reading: by the author and professor of English at Ohio University, Dinty Moore, from Between Panic and Desire, a piece entitled: The Koan. (p. 89)  

Two Buddhist monks from differing traditions agree to a meeting, planning to appraise the cultural disparity in their practice and see what can be learned from one another. A small audience waits expectantly to hear what the men will say.

One, a Tibetan lama, sits very quietly on his cushion, fingering his wooden beads while murmering, “Om mani padme om.” The second monk, of Korean descent, is well known for hurling rapid-fire questions at his students until they are forced to admit how little of the world they truly understand. At such moments he will often shout, “Yes! Yes! Keep that don’t know mind!”

At one point during the meeting with the Tibetan, the Zen monk reaches inside his robes and pulls out an orange. “What is this?”

The Zen monk stands ready to dispute whatever answer the Tibetan offers. In his tradition, every preconception is instantly challenged, and open-mindedness is the swiftest path to enlightenment.

The Tibetan just sits, however, quietly fingering his beads.

“What is this?” the Zen master insists, holding the orange up to the Tibetans nose, turning it over and over in his fingers. “Tell me, what is this?”

No answer.

The Tibetan finally leans over to the translator who is assisting in the encounter, and the two men whisper back and forth for several moments.

Eventually the translator addresses the room:

“Rinpoche asks, ‘What is the matter with him? Don’t they have oranges where he comes from?” 

Reading: by the Unitarian author, lecturer, and former Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay “Self-Reliance”

[We are] timid and apologetic… [we dare] not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but [quote] some saint or sage. … These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are… what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. 

Reading: by Sheldon Kopp from If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients (p. 3-4) 

In every age, men [and women] have set out on pilgrimages, on spiritual journeys, on personal quests. Driven by pain, drawn by longing, lifted by hope, singly and in groups, they come in search of relief, enlightenment, peace, power, joy or they know not what. Wishing to learn, and confusing being taught with learning, they often seek out helpers, healers and guides, spiritual teachers whose disciples they would become.

The emotionally troubled [person] of today, the contemporary pilgrim, wants to be the disciple of the psychotherapist… People seek the guidance of a [therapist] when their usual, self-limited, risk-avoiding ways of operating are not paying off…

…Though the patient enters therapy insisting that he wants to change, more often than not, what he really wants is to remain the same and to get the therapist to make him feel better. His goal is to become a more effective neurotic…. He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.

Given this all too human failing, the beginning pilgrim-patient may approach the therapist like a small child going to a good parent whom he insists must take care of him. It is as if he comes to the office saying, “My world is broken, and you have to fix it.”…

If You Meet the Buddha…

A Sermon Delivered on April 12, 2015

By

The Rev. Axel H. Gehrmann

This week the U.S. Postal service released a new commemorative stamp honoring the late poet Maya Angelou. Maybe you heard about it. The stamp has a picture of Angelou’s smiling face, and her famous quote: “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”

What a beautiful, fitting tribute to a great American author. Except, Maya Angelou isn’t the author of this particular quote. This quote is by the children’s book author Joan Walsh Anglund. The quote is reminiscent of lines from Angelou’s poem “Caged Bird”: 

The caged bird sings 

with a fearful trill   

of things unknown   

but longed for still   

and his tune is heard   

on the distant hill   

for the caged bird   

sings of freedom.

In a New York Times editorial this week Erin McKean writes about this unfortunate error, and how misattributing quotes to famous people is not at all uncommon. Citizens of Great Britain, for instance, “tend to attribute anything vaguely political to Churchill; Americans like to credit anything folksy to Mark Twain, and before Twain, Benjamin Franklin,” she writes. 

A metajoke about this kind of things has made the rounds on the world wide web in the shape of a MIME that shows the picture of Abraham Lincoln, next to a quote attributed to him that reads: “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it.” – Abraham Lincoln

This is exactly what Ralph Waldo Emerson was getting at, when he said, we are “timid.” We don’t dare say what we ourselves think, but instead quote “some saint or sage.”

I know exactly what Emerson is talking about. And I can’t help but ask myself why I feel compelled to quote our great Unitarian sage, about the folly of quoting great sages.

This is one of the great Catch-22s of the religious enterprise. And I was bumping up against it, again and again, last week as I was re-reading Emerson’s essay. Emerson’s language is a bit dated, and his writing style a bit stilted, but once I got beyond these distractions, and into the spirit of his writing, I couldn’t help but get excited about the ideas Emerson expresses so eloquently. “Trust thyself,” he says, “every heart vibrates to that iron string.” And I think, yes, of course. We must trust our own experience, or own thoughts, our own authority. We can’t live our lives by replicating what others have said and done. We shouldn’t settle for second-hand wisdom. We need to find our own path. We need to learn our own lessons. We need to discover our own truths. That's what I believe.

And yet there I was, re-reading the truths of someone who lived two hundred years ago.

* * *

Zen Buddhism is known for its attempts to help us break our habit of looking to ancient scriptures for clues on how to attain enlightenment. We rely far too much on hear-say. We are far too content to live within the confines of convention. We too easily settle for simply going through the motions of what society considers the hallmarks of a “good,” “respectable” and “successful” life. And so we spend our lives trying to conform to images and assumptions that, little by little, rob us of any sense of immediacy, authenticity and originality. Our thoughts grow shallow. Our senses are clouded. Our feelings are numbed. 

The two Buddhist monks, both in their own ways, try to help us snap out of it. The Zen Buddhist holds up an orange – not the idea of orange, not the memory orange, but a real orange – and asks “What is this?” hoping to touch on the truth of immediate, first-hand experience. 

I am not sure whether he is successful.

* * *

Buddhism has many helpful teachings. But rather than sharing the words of ancient saints and sages, let me offer you the story of a modern day American Buddhist named Brad Warner. 

Brad Warner was born in Hamilton, Ohio. As a teenager he got seriously involved in hardcore punk music, and played bass guitar in a punk band called Zero Defex. But he was always interested in Buddhism, and later became a Soto Zen priest. He shares some of his unique insights in a book entitled Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death & Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye.

As some of you may know, Dogen is the founder of the Soto school of Zen. Though he lived in 13^th century Japan long ago, Dogen’s life and teachings struck a chord for Brad Warner. He writes: 

“[Dogen] was born…to an aristocratic family back in the days when all Japan looked like the sets in The Last Samurai. His father died when he was just three years old, and his mother died five years later. Having lost the people children believe to be the most reliable, stable things in the world – parents – at such an early age, he started searching for something that was perfectly reliable. That’s what got him into Buddhism.” (p. 4)

Warner could relate this. Though his parents were still alive at the time, several of his close family members suffered from a congenital disease, and died young. He saw this as a child, and knew this particular disease runs in families. 

“So there was the chance,” he writes, 

“that I would suffer from the same illness and linger for years in a pretty miserable condition until the sickness did me in, as had happened to my grandmother and a couple of my aunts. So I started looking into religious and philosophical matters at a very early age. … The first religion I encountered was Christianity. And, although I was very intrigued with Christian ideas, they didn’t really address my concerns.”

When Dogen was a child, he had similar concerns. He was deeply troubled by his experiences of loneliness and loss, and also turned to mainline religion. In Japan at the time, that was Buddhism. But the Buddhist masters he met couldn’t adequately address his concerns. He needed to find his own approach, and ended up starting his own school.

Dogen was fascinated by koans. As Brad Warner explains, 

“the word koan [refers] to those weird unanswerable questions often associated with Zen, like “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” or “If a tree falls in a forest and hits a mime, would he make a noise?” The word koan means “public case.” So the koans are public records recounting encounters between famous Zen teachers and their students… 

For Dogen, the word koan was also a synonym for dharma, the profound truth of the universe in the sense that the universe is a mystery. And by that I mean that although the universe is all around us, proclaiming its truth so loudly you’d have to be deaf to miss it, most of us manage to miss it anyhow.” (p. 17)

* * *

Each of our lives is a journey. Like women and men throughout the ages, we are each on our own pilgrimage, our own personal quest, driven by pain, drawn by longing, lifted by hope. We each have our own moments of grief and struggle, of happiness and love. We try to make sense our experiences. We try to learn the lessons life is trying to teach us. 

And so we seek out helpers, healers and gurus, who can provide us guidance, and perhaps comfort, and perhaps clarity. Or we read ancient scriptures, hoping to find pearls of wisdom that will help us on our way.

These are the natural human instincts, that have led many a patient to office of the psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp. And yet religious writings, like the Bible or the I Ching, as well as therapists and other gurus are poor oracles, Kopp writes. Seekers come hoping to find “something definite, something permanent, something unchanging upon which to depend.” But rather than providing any simple solutions, the best teachers will instead draw from “wellsprings of wisdom about the ambiguity, the insolubility, and the inevitability of the human situation.” The best spiritual teachings offer the “reflection that life is just what it seems to be, a changing, ambiguous, ephemeral mixed bag. It may often be discouraging, but it is ultimately worth it, because that’s all there is.”

In the end, the fortunate among the seekers will learn that there is nothing anyone else can teach them. Once they are willing to give up being taught, and once they realize they already know how to live, Sheldon Kopp writes, they can discover the secret of life. The secret is that there is no secret.

“Everything is just what it seems to be. This is it! There are no hidden meanings. Before [we are] enlightened, [we] get up each morning to spend the day tending [the] fields, [return] home to eat [our] supper, [go] to bed…, and [fall] asleep. But once [we have] attained enlightenment, then [we get] up each morning to spend the day tending [the] fields, [return] home to eat [our] supper, [go] to bed…, and [fall] asleep.

The Zen way to see the truth is through your everyday eyes. …[We do] not need an answer in order to find peace. [We need] only to surrender [our] existence, to cease the needless, empty questioning. The secret of enlightenment is when you are hungry, eat; and when you are tired, sleep.” (p. 187)

This is the perplexing truth the Zen master is trying to convey with the koan “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” Rather than looking outside ourselves for enlightenment, we need to embrace the Buddha nature that is already within us.

As Kopp puts it: “Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside ourselves can be our master. No one is any bigger than anyone else. There are no mothers or fathers for grown-ups, only sisters and brothers.”

* * *

We are all seekers. We all hope to find meaning in our lives. We hope to learn. But sometimes we confuse learning with being taught. We turn to others hoping they will fix the broken parts of our lives. As if we were children and they could simply make us feel better. 

When we are young, we do need parents. And we need teachers. But in the end, we are the ones who need to do the difficult work of learning. Learning means changing. It means giving up old habits, and daring to enter the unknown. 

We are the ones who must live our own lives. We are the ones who must make our own choices. We are the ones who must figure out how to make a difference in the world. We are the ones who must speak our own truth. We are the ones who must act, and then be accountable for what we have done and what we have left undone. 

“Trust thyself,” I always say. Sing your own song. Sing with a fearful trill, of things unknown but longed for still. Sing of the freedom you long to find. The freedom to move beyond the confines of convention and conformity. The freedom to live your own life.

We can do this. We can move beyond our fears. We can learn and change. We can begin life over. It’s easy. All we need to do is take a deep breath, close our eyes, open them, and there it is, all the familiar things. 

The mystery of the universe is right here. The secret is that there is no secret. 

May we open our minds and hearts

To this mystery and this secret.

May we dare to trust ourselves, 

and be fearless masters 

of our own lives.

Amen. 

Rediscovered Truth

"Behold, my friends, the spring has come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love."
-- Sitting Bull

Opening Words

Let us gather for worship mindful of the timeless words of the 3^rd century Hindu poet Kalidasa, who wrote:

Look to this day, for it is life, the very life of life…

Yesterday is but a dream, and tomorrow only a vision

But today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness,

And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well, therefore, to this day.

Meditation: a poem by Lynn Ungar entitled “Breaking Ground”

Living in the violence of Spring

Living in a time

where shells are cracking

and shapes alter

Who can afford to risk

forgetting the danger

forgetting the moment

the crocus bulb breaks the ground

Never knowing whether

snow or sun or ice

awaits in warm or jagged welcome

There is no safety in

this restless season

Even the sheltering ground

rejects its own,

thrusting the life it held

into the untrustworthy

and insufficient care

of air and weather

There are no choices here

No careful path or

reasoned way

No holding in reserve for

some more settled,

more propitious time

But only the unconsidered

faith of the crocus

whose saffron petals echo

or demand the sun

Reading: by the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron from The Places That Scare You (p. 3)

… Bodhichitta is [an open attitude, and enlightened mind] capable of transforming the hardest hearts and the most prejudiced and fearful of minds… Sometimes the completely open heart and mind… is called the soft spot, a place vulnerable and tender as an open wound. It is equated, in part, with our ability to love. Even the cruelest people have this soft spot…

            Boddhichitta is also equated, in part, with compassion – our ability to feel the pain we share with others. Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. We put up protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and strategies, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt. These walls are further fortified by emotions of all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance and pride. But fortunately for us, the soft spot – our innate ability to love and to care about things – is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment – love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy – to awaken [compassion].

Reading: from the Jewish Hasidic tradition, words attributed to the maggid of Mezritch, an 18^th century rabbi who lived in what today is the Ukraine (from Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber, p. 104)

The Between-Stage

The maggid of Mezritch said:

Nothing in the world can change from one reality into another, unless it first turns into nothing, that is, into the reality of the between-stage. In that stage… no one can grasp it, for it has reached the rung of nothingness, just as before creation. And then it is made into a new creature, from the egg to the chick. The moment when the egg is no more and the chick is not yet, is nothingness… It is the same with the sprouting seed. It does not begin to sprout until the seed disintegrates in the earth and the quality of seed-dom is destroyed in order that it may attain to nothingness which is the rung before creation. And this rung is called wisdom, that is to say, a thought which cannot be made manifest. Then this thought gives rise to creation, as it is written: “In wisdom hast Thou made them all.”

Reading: by Clarence Day a poem entitled “The Egg” (from Scenes From the Mesozoic, 1935)

Oh who that ever lived and loved

Can look upon an egg unmoved?

The egg it is the source of all,

‘Tis everyone’s ancestral hall.

The bravest chief that ever fought,

The lowest thief that e’er was caught,

The harlot’s lip, the maiden’s leg,

They each and all come from an egg.

The rocks that once by ocean’s surge

Beheld the first of eggs emerge —

Obscure, defenseless, small and cold —

They little knew what egg could hold.

The gifts the reverent Magi gave,

Pandora’s box, Aladdin’s cave,

Wars, loves, and kingdoms, heaven and hell

All lay within that tiny shell.

Oh, join me gentlemen, I beg,

In honoring our friend, the egg.

Rediscovered Truth

A Sermon Delivered on April 5, 2015

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

Yesterday morning, with the moral support of my wife, Elaine, I engaged in a simple, timeless Easter ritual. I took a few eggs out of the fridge, boiled them for ten minutes, solid. And then – after carefully reading and rereading the instructions on several small boxes of food coloring – measured a few drops of yellow, green and red, into three cups, added two teaspoons of vinegar, and a bit of hot water to each. Then I carefully took an egg and dipped it into one color, and then the next. Creating my very own Easter Egg.

It’s been a long time since I spent my Easter Sunday searching for eggs and candy my mother or grandmother had hidden. And it has been several years since Elaine and I orchestrated Easter egg hunts for our children, who are now college-age.

But fond memories of childhood and parenthood come to mind, as I clumsily decorate my egg, and as I look out the kitchen window, at the bare trees and bushes behind our house, and also the green stalks of daffodils poking out of flower beds. I can’t see them grow. Nothing is happening. But I do see that every one of them is just a bit taller than yesterday.

* * *

The egg is a fitting symbol of spring; a symbol of new life and growth, of fecundity and abundance. And spring in the natural world is a striking symbol of how we humans since time immemorial have made sense of our inner spiritual world.

The hard shell of the egg, the husk of the seed, on the one hand meant to protect the potential for new life hidden within, on the other hand is also a kind of confinement. Life isn’t free to unfold, as long as it is trapped within this tiny enclosure, entombed, confined, imprisoned. Breaking free isn’t easy.

* * *

One of the great Easter stories is the one told in the Book of Exodus. Observant Jews celebrate a Passover Seder this week, with a special selection of foods reminding them of how the people of Israel long ago escaped slavery.

You remember the story: God told Moses to lead his people out of Egypt, into the wilderness, and finally to the Promised Land. But first of all Moses needed to convince Pharaoh to let his people go. Moses performed several miracles, and unleashed a series of plagues – frogs, gnats, locusts and more. Ten in all. But after each one, Pharaoh remained unconvinced. Again and again, Pharaoh’s heart was hardened.

When Pharaoh did finally relent, and after the people of Israel had fled, he soon changed his mind and sent his army to pursue them. And then Moses performed probably the most memorable of miracles. Just as the Egyptian army was about to catch them at the bank of the Red Sea, the waters parted, allowing the slaves to run to the far shore, with the Egyptian army in hot pursuit. Once Israel arrived safely at the far shore, the waters closed, drowning the entire army.

It’s quite a story. It’s been retold again and again. It was memorably portrayed by Cecil B. DeMille in his 1954 production of “The Ten Commandments,” starring Yul Brynner as Pharaoh, and Charlton Heston as Moses. At the time, with a cast of thousands, filmed on location in Egypt, it was the most expensive movie ever made.

And more recently, with a lot of computer generated special effects - and much less memorably - it was retold in the movie “Exodus,” starring Christian Bale in the lead role. The critic consensus on Rottentomtatoes.com is that “while sporadically stirring, and suitably epic in its ambitions, [it] can’t quite live up to its classic source material.” (The DVD was released just last month. Check it out, and decide for yourself whether it’s any good.)

* * *

It is easy to dismiss the Passover story as fodder for mass entertainment, or an outdated tale of unbelievable miracles and superstition. But if we did so, we would miss its more significant message.

The Easter story of Exodus is one of liberation. This theme is repeated in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and is found in other religious traditions as well. The key insight of all spring holidays, Rabbi Michael Lerner says, is “that rebirth, renewal, and transformation are possible, and that we are not stuck in the dark, cold, and deadly energies of winter.”

Judaism, he says, “builds on that universal experience of nature and adds another dimension: it suggests that the class structure (slavery, feudalism, capitalism, or neoliberal imperialism) can be overcome, and that we human beings… can create a world based on love, generosity, justice, and peace.”

The transformations taking place all around us in nature serve as reminder of a transformative force at work in the universe. Lerner calls it God: a force at the heart of justice and love. Or as he puts is, a force which “makes possible the transformation from that which is to that which should be.”

When we celebrate Easter or Passover, Lerner says, we shouldn’t just be thinking about ancient religious stories. We should each be asking ourselves: “What part of our society’s much-needed transformation can I participate in? – both in terms of personal and psychological transformation and in terms of social, political, and spiritual transformation.” (“The Tikkun Passover Seder Supplement,” April 1, 2015)

Whether in Israel or America today, there is much we could do to foster greater justice and peace.

* * *

The most powerful of religious stories don’t provide pat answers and simple solutions to the questions of life. The most valuable of religious teachings convey timeless truths that inspire and challenge us. We are challenged to rediscover how these truths can be applied in ever-new ways to the changing realities of our lives and the world. The best religious stories have manifold meanings and diverse dimensions that can inspire ever-new instances of compassionate and courageous action.

So, for instance, the Jewish psychiatrist Robert Rosenthal sees Pharaoh and Moses, not as historical figures engaged in an epic struggle, but rather as archetypes that represent “opposing aspects of the human mind.”

He says,

“Pharaoh represents the part of the mind that sees itself as separate from God and Spirit: the limited ego-mind [- short-sighted, small-minded and selfish]. Moses represents the part of the mind that is and has always been in full, direct connection with God and Spirit—what I call the Moses-mind. Both are present within us. The plagues brought on by Pharaoh’s stubborn resistance to freeing the Hebrews are our plagues. They afflict us whenever we bow to the Pharaoh-like ego… Likewise, the miracles performed by Moses are our miracles. They arrive the moment we make the decision, consciously or unconsciously, to be free from ego and follow instead the guidance of Spirit that comes to us through the Moses-mind.” (Tikkun, “Exodus: An Allegorical Portrait of the Human Mind in its Relationship to God,” July 25, 2012)

* * *

There is something within us that wants our hearts to be hardened. There is something within us that wants to build up walls between us.

We build walls because we are afraid, because we are vulnerable and we don’t want to get hurt. We build walls to protect the most sensitive aspects of who we are, especially our natural instinct to empathize with others, and to share their pain.

We harden our hearts, Pema Chodron writes, to shield ourselves from this pain, because it scares us. Our opinions and prejudices, our anger and arrogance, our envy and indifference are all barriers built up on a deep fear of being hurt.

And yet every person has a soft spot, a living spark, a seed of compassion that exists within even the hardest heart. And every one us can crack the hard heart’s shell, with our own innate capacity to love and care for others. Any vulnerable moment – whether a moment of gratitude or embarrassment, whether a moment of loneliness or love – can help us break free from the confinement of a hardened heart.

* * *

The arrival of spring in the outer natural world is inevitable. The arrival of spring in our inner spiritual world may require some effort. Breaking the protective shell in which we have learned to live requires courage.

As Rabbi Shraga Simmons points out:

“For the Jews in Egypt, life was comfortable. In slavery, the rations may be meager and the bed made of straw, but there's an up-side as well: all one's needs are provided, and there are no challenging decisions to be made. No laundry, no shopping, no deals, no deadlines. The Hebrew word for Egypt, "Mitzrayim," means a "place of confinement." Sometimes it's the smallest box which makes us feel the most secure.” (http://www.aish.com/tp/b/sw/Jump_Into_the_Sea.html)

The hard heart may be confining. It may imprison the free spirit. It may inhibit our innate compassion. But it feels familiar and safe. Allowing our shells to crack means daring to open our hearts and minds to the unknown.

Yielding to the spirit of spring means stepping out of our confinement, and into the between-stage. It means stepping into the nothingness before creation. The moment when the egg is no more and the chick is not yet. The moment when the seed disintegrates, disappears into nothingness, before new life is created. This experience of nothingness, the maggid of Mezritch says, this nothingness before creation is called wisdom.

The spirit of spring requires of us wisdom and courage, to leave behind the confines of the winter life we have known, and step into nothingness, so we might discover new and unimagined life. The spirit of spring asks us to leave the bondage of old habits behind, and journey into the wilderness, so we might reach the Promised Land.

This is the real spirit of spring, Bishop John Shelby Spong says, from a Christian perspective. In his book Resurrection: Myth or Reality, he writes, “What is real…, is that behind our religious systems, our holy words,… and even behind our fears lies an experience that transforms, deepens, and calls us into … “new being.”  It is that experience which demands of us an openness, a probing questioning mind, and most significant of all, a yearning to [find] what the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel called “the abundant life.”

…and what Kalidasa called, “today, well lived”: the very life of life.

* * *

Allowing the spirit of spring to take shape in our lives is not easy. As Lynn Unger says, living in a time where shells are cracking and shapes alter, we need to be mindful of risks and dangers involved. There is no safety in this restless season. If we dare to break free from the confines of our wintery self, like the crocus bulb breaking the ground – we don’t know what awaits us.

We need courage, we need wisdom, and we need the faith of the crocus, who – regardless of risk - opens her saffron petals echoing or demanding the sun.

* * *

The egg is a fitting symbol of spring. A symbol of new life and growth. Within its hard shell lies all of creation. “The egg it is the source of all / ‘Tis everyone’s ancestral hall… Wars, loves, kingdoms, heaven and hell / All lay within that tiny shell.”

May we have the courage, the wisdom, and the faith,

To break out of our shell

To crack open our hard heart

That we might discover a new life

With more love, more hope, more peace, and more joy.

In this spirit may we welcome

The eternal truth of spring.

Amen.