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 preVatican 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 singthe 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.
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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 wrote about 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
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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.
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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 because she 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.
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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.
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