The Shattered Tea Cup

I’ve been working on a series of stories for liberal religious kids, and have already posted two on this blog here and here. Yet another story from this work-in-progress:

The Shattered Tea Cup

Copyright (c) 2005 Dan Harper

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a land called Japan, there lived a Zen Master. This Zen Master was very, very wise. People said that perhaps he was the wisest person in all of Japan.

The Zen Master was small and quiet, with gray hair and many lines on his face. He often smiled. He lived in a monastery that stood near the banks of a rushing river. There, he watched over all the monks who lived at the monastery, teaching them how to be good Zen Buddhist monks.

The monks chopped wood for the fireplace. They hauled buckets of water from the well to use in the kitchen. They listened to the teaching of the Zen Master, sitting in the great hall while the Zen Master gave Dharma Talks. Sometimes the best monks would challenge the teaching of the Zen Master in a tradition called Dharma Combat. Only monks who were truly enlightened could match the wit and wisdom of the Zen Master in Dharma Combat. And if one of the monks ever got the better of him in Dharma Combat, the Zen Master laughed out loud in pleasure.

But the most important thing that the monks did was to meditate. Every day, they sat on the floor of the great hall of the monastery, meditating in silence. No one said a word all day long. All you could hear in the great meditation hall was the sound of the rushing river, and the wind in the trees.

It was hard for the young monks to sit in silence for such long periods of time, but the Zen Master could sit for days on end, meditating in silence.

One of the younger monks asked him, “How can you sit for so long in silence?”

The Zen Master replied, “Stop worrying so much. Just sit.”

*****

At that time in Japan, a very wise scholar lived far, far away from the monastery at a great University. This wise Scholar had written many books about Zen Buddhism, and in fact he had even lived as a Zen monk for a number of years. But while he was a monk he had never achieved enlightenment, and at last he had left the monastery to become a scholar. In fact, for all his wisdom and learning he had to admit to himself that, having never experienced enlightenment, he had never quite understood what enlightenment was.

One day, the Scholar heard about the wise Zen Master, who was perhaps the wisest person in all of Japan. “Ah!” said the Scholar to himself. “Someone who is as wise as that might be able to tell me what enlightenment is. I will go and visit this Zen Master.”

He called to his servants, “Get my donkey! I will ride to meet this wise man.”

His servants brought his little donkey, and off they trotted. After days and days and days and days of traveling, the Scholar got to the monastery. He and his servants were welcomed in silence by some monks. The Scholar stated his business, and he was led in alone to see the Zen Master.

While the Zen Master prepared tea, the Scholar said, “Zen Master, I have been trying to determine what Enlightenment is.”

“Do you think I can tell you?” said the Zen Master.

“They do say you are the wisest person in all of Japan,” said the Scholar. “Now, I have not myself reached the state of enlightenment, but I do know something about it. When I was a Zen monk, I sat and meditated for many hours. I have read the poems of the monk Ryokan, I have read what Boddhidharma said, I have read what Master Sheng-yen says, and many other writers and scholars. It seems that enlightenment is not a state where you know the oneness of the universe, but rather a state of empty mind. On the other hand….”

The Scholar talked on and on and on and on. He told the Zen Master what he, the Scholar, thought enlightenment might be. The Zen Master finished preparing tea. The Scholar kept on talking. The Zen Master handed the Scholar a delicate porcelain cup. The Scholar took the cup, paused to mention how beautiful the cup was, held it in both his hands — but he kept on talking.

The Zen Master began to pour the hot tea. The Scholar kept talking. The Zen Master kept pouring. The Scholar kept talking. The Zen Master kept on pouring, and the delicate cup grew uncomfortably hot. Then the cup overflowed, and some scalding water flowed onto the Scholar’s hands.

The Scholar started in surprise, the delicate cup flew out of his hands, and shattered on the floor beside him.

Upon hearing the cup shatter, the Scholar experienced enlightenment.

The Zen Master took all this calmly. “Here’s another cup,” he said. “Let’s have some tea.”

*****

Notes on the story: In the book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (compiled by Paul Reps), you can find a story where a scholar visits the Japanese Zen master Nan-in (1868-1912). The Scholar talks too much, and Nan-in pours hot tea over the Scholar’s hands as a vivid demonstration of the necessity of keeping your mind open to new ideas. This story has taken on the status of a folk tale in contemporary American culture, and it is often used to tell people that they should shut up and listen to what the speaker has to say.

I have told variations of the Nan-in story a number of times in worship services, but I became uncomfortable with the way adults interpreted the story. Adults wanted the story to mean that children should be quiet and listen to authority figures. I tried to frame the story so that it became clear that it applied to adults as well: I would make the Scholar be the same age as I, and at the end of the story I would say that I felt more like the Scholar than the Zen Master. I began to tell the story as way to demonstrate the importance of meditation and of emptying one’s mind. But no matter how I told the story, the Scholar always came off looking like an idiot, and adults kept interpreting it as a story that was meant to tell children to be quiet and listen.

Then I read a dharma talk by Master Sheng-yen (1931- ), who tells the story of how one of his Zen masters, Xu Yun, acheived enlightenment. Xu Yun was holding a cup into which someone else was pouring tea. By mistake, the other person spilled some tea onto Xu Yun’s hand, he dropped the cup, and upon hearing it shatter he acheived enlightenment. Master Sheng-yen says that just as the cup shatters, the mind must shatter to become no-mind. By the way, Master Sheng-yen is a university professor and scholar as well as a Zen master, demonstrating that enlightenment and learning are not mutually exclusive.

Having the cup shatter seemed a much better ending to the story, so I retold the Nan-in story with this new ending. Of course, now it is no longer a Zen story, it is my story with Zen trappings.

Housekeeping

I have just completed transferring all posts from this blog’s old site, at American OnLine, to this new site. A few glitches intervened:

  1. A big apology to the people who get notified of new posts to this blog via email. They found themselves with over a hundred email notifications in their in-box in the last 24 hours. Please accept my apologies — and sorry you have to delete all those email messages.
  2. No word yet on how this affected those who have an RSS feed. I had understood that backdating posts means no RSS feed — if I’m mistaken, my apologies to you as well.
  3. One or two posts got away from me, and appeared momentarily on the main blog before I corrected their dates. Sorry for any confusion.

But now the transfer is over — it’s been a mess for some of my readers — and a mess for me as I transferred the old posts one by one, by hand, from AOL’s kludgey blog system. Thank you for your patience.

One last thing — the old AOL site will stay up for a few more months, and then it will disappear.

Instant communication and religion

Back on Sunday, February 5, I mentioned the anti-gay hate crime in New Bedford during the worship service in the prayer. I wasn’t impressed with that prayer, so I tossed it into the file and forgot about it. Then excerpts from that prayer appeared on the Boston Globe Web site (thanks for the tip, Stoney). I’m grateful the reporter did some heavy edits to the prayer, because it reads much better now, but I have no idea where he got the text of that prayer.

All of which raises the issue about how religion is being changed by the communication revolution. What a minister says in a worship service today could wind up on a Web site tomorrow, and from there who knows where those words will spread. I have to admit, I’m slightly unsettled by this phenomenon. At the same time, it’s good to be aware of this phenomenon, and to start thinking of it as a fundamental part of the religious landscape.

Update: Turns out I did give the text to a reporter who called — I just misunderstood which newspaper he was calling from. Mystery solved: it was just my own lousy memory. Sigh.

Blizzard conditions

Ten people showed up at church this morning. One of them was a reporter from the New Bedford Standard-Times, reporting on Mayor Scott Lang’s call to religious organizations for a day of reflection and prayer this weekend, following the hate crime at Puzzles Lounge last week, and its aftermath; the reporter visited us because apparently First Unitarian was just about the only downtown church that held worship services this morning. The wind-blown snow made driving very difficult. I’d say we’ve had close to blizzard conditions all day: high winds and heavy snow.

Carol and I went home after church, had lunch, and sat around updating our respective Web sites. By four o’clock, I was getting a little stir crazy. “Let’s go for a walk,” I said. We could see blowing snow outside our windows, so we bundled up.

We walked down to the end of State Pier. Blowing snow kept visibility very low.Looking across the harbor, we could see some lights on the Fairhaven side, and I just barely made out the ghostly profile of the Unitarian Universalist church’s spire.

We didn’t walk around much; the wind was too fierce, driving the snow right into our faces, blowing cold air into our heavy coats. We mostly looked at all the fishing boats tied up, an unusually large number of them in port, riding out the storm.

I noticed something out in the water. “Look!” I said, “a seal.” Carol spotted two more, and then we saw another two right up next to the pier, and another two; maybe eight all told. The two up close to the pier poked their heads up, looking around, looking at each other nose to nose (it almost looked like they were kissing). Another one rolled in the water close by, and when I took a step forward to get a better look, it slapped its tail on the water and dove down out of sight. I’ve never seen so many seals in one small area in New Bedford harbor; perhpas they, too, are riding out the storm in a safe port.

Meditation, ukulele-style

After a month or more of unseasonably warm weather, temperatures have dropped back below freezing. Ordinarily at this time of year, 29 degrees would feel mild, warm even; but on Friday it felt bitter cold. The strong westerly breeze, damp and raw, didn’t help matters.

I walked across the harbor bridges to Fairhaven, all bundled up; and, if truth be told, feeling a little sorry for myself. It had been a week filled with too many little things to do, I had lost sight of the big picture, lost in the trivia of church work. And now it was cold, and it was supposed to snow. I walked along with my head down, brooding.

As I got to the gas station on Fish Island, for no reason at all I started to sing ‘ukulele songs. I’ve never been to Hawai’i — the closest I’ve come is reading the old James Michener novel, which isn’t very close — so I really don’t know what Hawai’i is like, except that it must be warm and friendly:

I wanna go back to my little grass shack in Kealakekua, Hawai’i,
I wanna be with all the kanes and wahines
That I used to know, long ago….

A truck pulled up beside me into the gas station and a man got out. The noise from four lanes of traffic running right next to me meant I could sing at the top of my lungs and he could barely hear me:

I can hear the old guitars playing
On the beach at Honaunau
I can hear the old Hawai’ians saying:
Komo mai no kaua i ka hale welakahao….

(Years ago, my ‘ukulele teacher told me that last line doesn’t mean anything at all, it’s just there to confuse the haoles.) Further along, a man stood on top of an old semi-trailer amidst all the junk and old machinery on Fish Island; a bulldozer rolled up to him, raised its bucket up, he stepped in and was lowered down. I kept singing:

When you love, ‘ukulele style,
With every note your heart will float
Far away to a tropic isle,
Where a ‘ukulele tune is softly played….

I kept walking along past the parking lot for Pope’s Island marina. The bright February sun crisply lit up every little piece of trash and broken shell along the highway. Ordinarily the trash would bother me, but I just kept singing.

Davidson Loehr’s angry letter

Davidson Loehr, senior minister at First Church Unitarian Universalist of Austin, Texas, wrote a letter to the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) back on November 30, 2005. In that letter, he lambasted the Pathways Church project, a Unitarian Universalist start-up church sponsored by denominational headquarters, for its complete failure to meet any of the initial goals of the project. Loehr said he believes that failure is tied to another problem with contemporary Unitarian Universalism, “the lack of a serious religious center.”

Now that’s a sweeping generalization, but Loehr does have a point about the wider denomination. My partner, Carol — who is unchurched — once pointed out that many Unitarian Universalist sermons sound like commentary on National Public Radio, which is to say, while hip and fun they are not particularly religious. At denominational headquarters, I am not aware of serious theological thinking affecting policy since Hugo Holleroth (who grounded religious education in existential theology) left there in the 1970s. Loehr elaborates on this problem later in his letter:

The center [of Unitarian Universalism] is political rather than religious, as it has been for decades. I’m not saying this as a crank; I’m saying it as someone who earned a Ph.D. in theology, with a good understanding of what religion is, and what it isn’t.

Rev. Peter Richardson has been instructive for me in this area, in pointing out that there actually once was a vision of a religion for the future that would still work, but that the UUA actively sabotaged it from the beginning. This was the vision of a religion grounded in the deep ontological commonalities of the great world religions — the “wisdom traditions” of the great religions — with its symbol of the circle of logos from eight or so of the world’s religions. While this seems the logical — even obvious — path toward a pluralistic future for any liberal religion, it simply can’t be done now, and may not be possible for a decade or more, unless there is a conversion of consciousness.

Actually, Ph.D. or no, Loehr is a little behind the times, intellectually speaking. That old idea of thinking that Unitarian Universalism could be a “a religion grounded in the deep ontological commonalities of the great world religions” has been seriously challenged in recent years. If you subject that idea to some simple deconstruction, you uncover tendencies towards an unfounded sense of superiority, reductionism, and imperialism. The unfounded sense of superiority comes into play in the assumption that we’re so much better than anyone else that we can find those “deep ontological commonalities” that somehow managed to elude the greatest religious thinkers up until now — it’s possible, but no one else in the world seems to recognize this superiority of ours. The reductionism comes into play in the assumption that religions can be reduced to relatively simple ontological “commonalities” that can be divorced from a lived religion, including liturgical practice and day-to-day embodied living of one’s religion — that’s a little too Cartesian and Western to be considered universally true. The imperialism comes into play when the previous two assumptions remain unexamined; and the imperialism can manifest itself as cultural misappropriation or worse.

A number of us who are a bit younger than Loehr are heading in a different religious direction. Some of us are looking within our own tradition for a religious center — and we’re finding it. I don’t want to speak for others who are doing this work, but I know I’ve been drawing on Universalist and Transcendentalist religious thought, filtered through American pragmatism (which has roots in Emerson) and ecological theology and ecojustice (with roots in Thoreau and Emerson) — and uncovering a deeply religious center for my religious praxis. This is in distinct contrast to Loehr’s stated aim to incorporate “eight or so of the world’s religions.”

I have a suspicion that what I’m seeing, in my differences with Davidson Loehr, is that he is very much within the modernist tradition of creating grand meta-narratives that attempt to encompass and explain everything. Those of us who find themselves immersed in post-modernism are far more wary of making grand claims about religion — for instance, we’re wary of saying that we can incorporate other religious traditions into our own. Instead, from a postmodernist perspective, I might say that I am a post-Christian: acknowledging that I am very much in the Christian tradition, but recognizing that in a postmodern globalized world we have to accept that we are influenced by other world religions; the difference being that we aren’t trying to co-opt those other religions, but rather to understand what impact they have on us.

So where does this leave us? I think we do have a religious center, which I’d call post-Christian. Other Christians might not accept us, but we know that we are in, and came out of, the Christian tradition. Looking back to our past, I think we started becoming post-Christian as early as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Hosea Ballou, diverging from the Christian mainstream, rejected by them, and growing into something new. By claiming our place on the margins as our religious center, by engaging in “theological archaeology” to find out who we were and who we are, by avoiding the construction of grand metanarratives about who we might be — I think we could become a far more viable postmodern religious tradition.

What do you think?

Original post revised in light of Scott Wells’s comment.

Web site revision, blog comments

Just finished revising the main Web site. The new, simpler design, should make it easier to navigate. You will find some new content has also been added, more to follow. Your comments and critiques are always welcome; please use the email address listed in the menu at left.

Web site stats for January show an uptick in viewed (i.e., non-robot) traffic: 757 “unique visitors” for the month of December, 883 January. It’s very nice to have more readers — thank you all! — but there’s been an associated increase in comment spam. I’ve been so vigorous about deleting comment spam, I may have deleted legitimate comments in error. If that happens to you, please accept my apologies and send the comment in question to me via email.

“Lovemarks,” conclusion

This is the final installment on Kevin Roberts’ marketing book Lovemarks: The Future beyond Brands.

One key point that Roberts makes over and over again throughout the book is the importance of getting out of the office and out into the field, coming into actual people who are (or aren’t) using your products…..

I discovered this first-hand when I was working in the Middle East for Procter & Gamble. Like other companies at the time, P&G’s research was done by the numbers. Sometimes it seemed to me that we did little other than to verify what we already knew. We were tied to benchmarks and followed norms. I found it tough to see the value of all this, so I spent as much time as I could out of the office, three weeks out of four.

My passion was store checks and home visits. After going through all the numbers, I’d head into Dubai and visit a hundred little shops in the Soukh and get myself invited into consumers’ homes. I talked wtih retailers, consumers, people just walking by. Irrespective of what the nubmers said, I got my insights from these connections….

How does this insight apply to churches?

Let’s first explore the ongoing complaints about denominational headquarters. In the Unitarian Universalist blogosphere, it’s hard to find anyone who actually likes denominational headquarters. And if you talk with actual church-goers, you’ll often hear things like, “They seem so distant from what actually goes on in our church,” and “The denominational magazine just has nothing to say to me,” and “The Sunday school curriculums just don’t apply to our church.” The sad reality is that many UUA staffers do not get out into ordinary congregational life; a goodly percentage of them don’t even attend church regularly; and when they do church visits, UUA staffers are far more likely to have lunch with the senior minister than to get themselves invited into an ordinary Unitarian Universalist household.

There are exceptions to this trend. The director of electronic communications at our denominational headquarters, a woman named Deb Weiner, is an active member of a local church (serving on the Board, sending her kids to Sunday school and youth group, deeply involved in the social life of the congregation). To my mind, her involvement shows in the high quality of the denominational Web site; no doubt there are problems with the Web site, but on the whole it appears to be responsive to the needs of actual Unitarian Universalists. (My only denominational involvement right now is volunteering for that Web site, because when I volunteer for Deb I find I learn about real live Unitarian Universalism.)

Another exception is the newsletter for lay leaders, “Interconnections.” The editor of that newsletter, Don Skinner, is a former journalist who knows how to listen to people and report what they have to say. His ability to listen well shows up in “Interconnections” — lay leaders consistently report to me that “Interconnections” is by far the denominational “product” they love best.

What applies to the denomination applies equally to local churches. I’ve done a lot of work as a religious educator, and I discovered that lots of people — ministers, lay leaders, directors of religious education, parents — think they know what kids get out of church, and think they know what kids need from church. But when I sat down and actually listened to kids, I found what they were getting from church was different than what adults thought they were getting. Adults think kids get lots of intellectual understanding at church. Kids report that Unitarian Universalist churches change their hearts; they may not know much about their faith, but they feel it, and love it, far more deeply than adults who didn’t grow up as Unitarian Universalists.

Remember, Roberts says that a “lovemark” is owned by the passionate consumer, not by the big corporation. In denominational terms, the lovermark of Unitarian Universalism is owned by the passionate Unitarian Universalist, not by denominational headquarters.

Therefore, any lay leader or denominational staffer or minister or whomever, has to get out and talk with passionate Unitarian Universalists one-on-one. I suspect that if all the top staffers at denominational headquarters made it a point to be active members in local congregations, and to get out in the field and listen hard to real live Unitarian Universalists, and let it affect them in their hearts — I suspect we’d see big drop in complaints about denominational headquarters. Same principle is true in local churches, where lay leaders and ministers have to make it a point to listen deeply and listen well to persons who are in the church. This doesn’t mean that you kowtow to every passing whim — but you do have to listen hard, and listen well.

Kevin Roberts has a cutesy name for this — “Xploring” — and he tells us how to do it:

Simply put, the Xplorer puts on a pair of comfortable shoes, grabs a backpack, and heads off. There are no one-way viewing mirrors. No projective techniques. Just interaction, observation, and lots of conversation.

Roberts would predict that such interaction would lead to increased respect and increased love for our denomination. I think Roberts is right. And I think this is a kind of marketing I can actually use.

Lovemarks follow-up: Link

Rainbow connection?

With the anti-gay assaults at Puzzles Lounge, it seemed like a good time for First Unitarian in New Bedford to fly a rainbow flag, as a sign of solidarity with the gay and lesbian community in New Bedford. So today, Carol and I walked down to Brewer’s Flag on 77 Forest Street.

We rounded the corner from County St. onto Forest St. “I wonder which building it is?” I said. I’m always worried we’re going to miss whatever building we’re looking for.

“I’ll bet it’s the one with all the flags,” said Carol, and sure enough, I could see a number of brightly colored flags just down the street. We got closer, and Carol added, “What a cute little building!”

Brewer’s Flag is in a lovely, friendly little brick industrial building tucked into a residential neighborhood. The building is right on the sidewalk, and you walk up five steep granite steps to get to the door. Once inside, we found ourselves in a high, bright little anteroom, from which you could see the back room where they sew the custom flags.

The owner, Penny Brewer, said she had three sizes of rainbow flags in stock: 2 x 3 ft., 3 x 5 ft., and 4 x 6 ft. I asked if she didn’t have anything larger. She might have a 6 x 10 ft. one in stock, but she doubted it. While she looked in her stock, Carol and I looked at all the flag paraphanelia — flagpoles, flagpole brackets, flagpole ornaments — and the flag decals, flag posters, sample flags of every sort, wind socks (Carol has been looking for a nice fish wind sock), holiday flags, Azorean flags, everything to do with flags.

The biggest rainbow flag in stock was 4 x 6 ft. Penny Brewer unfolded it for us to look at. Carol thought it looked big enough. “It looks bigger in the store,” Penny Brewer warned. The flag will probably be dwarfed by our huge granite church building, but we’ll figure something out. At the moment, the most important thing is to just get the rainbow flag flying.

On our way out, Carol looked back up at the building housing Brewer Flag. “What other city could you find a neat little flag store in a great little brick industrial building within walking distance of where we live?” she said. “I like New Bedford.”

So do I.