Compassion Meditation

Last week, Richard Rohr quoted the following passage on “Compassionate Meditation.”  A practice I was not aware of but which engaged me:

Thich Nhat Hanh and other Buddhist practitioners recommend that we regularly engage in a Compassion Meditation that is also known as metta or loving-kindness.…

May you be happy.

May you be blessed.

May you be free and peaceful.

May you be ever loved.

May you be always loving.

Now repeat the exercise, this time picturing someone you hardly know. Wish them the same loving desires. You may choose someone you saw on the bus, someone in the supermarket or a church group, or perhaps someone you’ve read about in the news. Make the image clear and pray for them as sincerely as you can. Your goal is to open to them/give them their humanity. 

I can see how this would be a powerful practice for being compassionate and helping someone to be more compassionate.  To riff on Burt Bacharach, what the world needs now is love, sweet love. Compassion is one of the expressions of love.   

I can also see how it would be a is a means in which Christians can practice the great commandment of Jesus Crist to love one another as he loves us – and that includes our enemies as Jesus so inconveniently declares.  Yes, that is not a typo – inconveniently for Christians – as it is, at least for me – as Jesus is commanding me to do what seems to be impossible. 

To do this as a part of compassionate meditation, what I suggest is a third step which would be for someone who is, or seems to you to be your enemy:

Now repeat the exercise, this time picturing someone you consider your enemy. Wish them the same loving desires. You may choose someone who is currently in your life, someone who is no longer physically a part of your life, but who has injured you deeply in the past, or someone in the news who is not directly in your life. Make the image clear and pray for them as sincerely as you can. Your goal is to open to them/give them their humanity. 

I hope that you will try this several times as see what happens.  I am going to do this as part of my daily practice this week.  Also, do not forget to do this for yourself.  It is important that you show yourself compassion.  

May you be blessed to give and receive compassion on your journey. 

Advent 3 What the World Needs Now is Love

 Yesterday we celebrated the third Sunday of Advent in our church by lighting the candle for love.  Some churches were lighting the candle for joy but we will do joy on the 4^th Sunday.  There is much that can be said about love as Jesus made it very clear the importance of love in God’s Kingdom, “You must love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with your whole mind.  If that was not enough he commanded that we must love our neighbours as ourselves. 

This priority of the place of love was not original with Jesus.  Some six hundred years previously Ezekiel declared that hearts of stone will be converted into hearts of flesh, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36:26)   That passage resonated with me when I listened to a webinar by Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Banks of Canada and England and now the UN Special Envoy on Climate and Action and Finance.  This was a presentation by St. Basil's Church in Ottawa.  It was a very thoughtful and inspiring talk which addressed the issues of the economy and climate change today and shared his vision of building a better world for all.

Mr. Carney covered a great deal of territory in a relatively short time but what particularly resonated with me can be summed up with his quote of Oscar Wilde, “The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”  To my mind this is what the market driven economy is based on.  It is very good at putting a price on things but very poor at knowing the true value of things.  I believe this started, or at least, came to preeminence with the Enlightenment which led to everything having to be measured, weighed and put under the microscope to be considered valuable.  The Enlightenment brought much to be thankful for but this is what might be considered its dark side.

So, you might ask, what has this to do with love?  Well, the problem is that love cannot be measured and weighed or seen under a microscope.  Therefore, the value of love, despite all the songs and poems to the contrary, does not have a place of prominence in our market driven economy.  As was noted in the Webinar, Amazon the company has a valuation of worth billions of dollars on the stock market, but The Amazon is only given a value when it is deforested and used for farm land. 

The result of this is the ecological crisis that the world is facing today.  What the world needs now, as Burt Bacharach wrote, “is love sweet love.  It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.”  If we love something we put a value on that person or thing which cannot be measured or weighted or put under the microscope.  We need to love God, love ourselves and love our neighbours – love the world that God created.  I do believe that love is what binds the universe together and will not be defeated by those forces that threaten to pull us and the world apart. 

Blessings, and let the light of the love of Christ shine through you on your journey.  

Are You a crucifier or the crucified?

On Easter Sunday I made my usual appeal for people to volunteer to be crucifers.  However, what I said was, “please consider being a crucifier”; which might have been more appropriate for Good Friday.  There was a lot of laughter and I immediately corrected myself.  However, on reflection I wonder if there is more to this than a slip of the tongue.

On reflection what comes to mind is the old Burt Bacharach song “What the Word Needs Now is Love Sweet Love”.  Well I never thought I would be quoting a Burt Bacharach song as he is not one of my favourite songwriters to it mildly and that song is sentimental schmaltz.   However, to paraphrase Burt, we don’t need any more crucifiers.  The world seems to have plenty of them.  The question this morning after the Second Sunday in Easter is, when are we crucifiers and when are we crucified.  Put it another way, when do we look for a scapegoat to take all the blame for what is going on in our lives and when do we acknowledge that much of what we put on others is so that we don’t have to acknowledge it in ourselves?

It is human nature to not want to “see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye”?  Carl Jung named this phenomenon the shadow which can appear I our dreams often as a person of the same sex as the dreamer who carries all the unacknowledged parts of ourselves.   These are often negative qualities—or qualities we see as negative.  However, they can be positive and be carried by what is the bright shadow.  In any case as Jesus says we need to be able to acknowledge that log in our own eye if we are not to be crucifiers of others in this life. 

Blessings