First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
25 March 2005
An End to Suffering
On Good Friday the teaching and tradition of the Church is to encourage us to put the brakes on our understandable desire to arrive at, and celebrate the empty tomb.
For just this little while, we are asked to allow ourselves to more fully experience and appreciate the enormous sadness that surrounds and defines the crucifixion and death that occurred over two thousand years ago.
Tonight I'd like to share with you a story of lamentation that I happened to read at the beginning of Lent. Its a story told by Pankaj Mishra in a book entitled An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World.
Originally from India, Mishra is the son of a Brahmin family that found itself displaced by the upheaval that took place in that country following its independence over fifty years ago.
Prior to independence, his father's family lived a relatively comfortable and stable life in the rural north of India, close to the Himalayan Mountains and India's border with Tibet.
Mishra notes that it was from this same part of India, in the 6th Century, that a young aristocrat, who became known as the Buddha, was born. This young aristocrat lived during a time of chaotic social, political and economic change. He lived during a time when traditional tribal ways were being uprooted and replaced by centralized kingdoms and empires.
During his life, the Buddha was greatly affected by the turmoil and suffering he observed
around him. His efforts to wrestle with, and find the source—and meaning—of that suffering—that turmoil—are what turned him into the respected teacher and thinker he became.
Mishra reminds us that the Buddha preached to thousands while he was alive. He walked many miles across northern India. He counseled kings and helped to found a civilization that would eclipse the great empires of his day. That empire, today, extends from Tibet to California.
Even though Mishra would appear to think of himself as a "lapsed" Hindu, he has no interest in converting to, or practicing Buddhism. He does however, report several, failed attempts to at least experiment with the techniques recommended by the Buddha for achieving enlightenment. (He confesses that they failed because he could not sit still long enough.)
Mishra's interest in Buddhism is, oddly enough, stimulated by its absence.
Mishra laments that, beginning around the year 700, the great cultural tradition inaugurated by the Buddha, and the teachings of compassion and peace at its center gradually disappeared from most of India. The clash of cultures and empire virtually wiped away its presence and its practice .
Mishra laments, also, that it took 19th Century Europeans, curious about the cultural oddities of their recently, acquired colony, to RE-discover and RE-introduce the teachings of the Buddha to his own homeland.
Mishra visits sites and shrines associated with the life and compassionate teachings of the Buddha. During these visits, he is stuck by the fact that—among those engaged in devotional activity—he could see nearly the entire, human community honoring the Buddha. North Americans, Europeans and Asians from Japan, China, Korea. People had come from every place but the Buddha's own homeland.
Mishra Laments this most of all, because, around the homeland he shared with the Buddha, he sees such great suffering, confusion and resentment. He describes violence, resentment and despair in places like Kashmir and others, were, literally, millions of men and women feel trapped, betrayed and without hope.
They feel this way because their was, and is, no place for them in the New India.
Mishra explains that, following independence, the nation of India embarked on a program of nationalism and rapid economic development. The push for a New India created an ideology that denigrated and dismissed the various rural traditions and practices across that enormous country known as India.
Traditional ways—like those of Mishra's family—were to be abandoned, and all of India was to adopt the ideology of development. Everyone was promised a place, a better place, in the "New India."
But as many of Mishra's generation came to learn, the new India could not deliver on its promise. Only a very small percentage of the population was able to become part of the prosperous, elite of the New India.
The rest only saw what had always been seen,: inequality and misery. One of Mishra's class mates at University told him that when he left school, to return to his village home he still saw half naked boys, and wretched huts crammed with children that no one knows what to do with. There is not enough to eat, so they die fast, but more are born each week.
Mishra's classmate didn't see anything different for him and others like him. He could not believe that there would ever be a New India for them.
All across Mishra's India, those who could not find their place in the New India—Sikhs, Muslims and lower Caste Hindus—defiled or destroyed each others sacred places. They fought and killed each other. They defiled, they fought and they killed and they died because they could not see any other way to secure themselves and their families .
So, Mishra laments . He laments what seems to be a forgotten tradition in his homeland. A tradition that could address and diminish the confusion, resentment, suffering and violence he sees swirling about him. He laments the amelioration that will not take place, the succor that will not be received because—the land that gave birth to the Buddha—cannot see or hear, cannot remember what he taught.
I share Mishra's story with you not because I want to promote the teachings of the Buddha. I share them because, like Mishara, I think there is much to lament here in our own homeland.
I'm sure each of us here brings our own confusion and suffering that we would desperately like to be delivered from.
Perhaps we are afflicted with an illness or anxiety that prevents us from fully engaging in life and sharing it with others.
Maybe its not knowing how a problem with a loved one is going to be resolved that troubles us. Or Maybe, you are some one who knows all to well the only way that problem can be resolved and you cannot accept it because it is not the outcome you wanted or hoped for?
Or perhaps , like me, you are confused and frustrated about the impossibly SAD situation in Florida. Maybe the spectacle of elected officials meddling in the affairs of the Schiavo family deeply disturbs you, as it does me.
Maybe, like me, you have friends, who are part of the disability community and they have shared with you their deep conviction that—absent any explicit instruction from the patient—allowing anyone to make life and death decisions, like this, is just too riddled with risks and problems.
Maybe you just want to know what is the right thing to be done? How can the the suffering of all members of the Shiavo family be, if not eliminated, at least minimized?
And Surely all of us are baffled and frightened by the violence we see taking place all around us. The violence that has erupted, and claimed victims, because, as in Mishra's India, people have come to think that their own well being can only come if someone else is deprived of their dignity; or someone else goes without necessities most of us take for granted.
We see it in Dafur and the West Bank. Lives degraded and extinguished because people don't see a different way, a way that allows them to survive and prosper, together.
So we lament and we pray. We wish things were different, and perhaps, like Mishra, we also think that it is all just so unnecessary.
Maybe, like me, you also think that there is another way, a different response to these situations. But we just can't seem to get our heads , or hands on, or around it?
A forgotten way, a lost tradition that we can't help but believe is available to us—all of us—if we could only adjust, or clear our thinking,—as individuals, communities and as a nation.
We know that Jesus spoke of a different world and a different way. He preached about the coming Kingdom of God and sacrificed his life to help bring it closer. We know that when people heard that word preached, and acknowledged the gift Jesus made of his own life, lives were changed. Hope was created or reignited.
We know about that different way, that different tradition, but it is not available tonight.
Tonight, that different way is lost to us.
Tonight we stay, for as long as we can in the moment of doubt and confusion. Tonight we stay this side of the Kingdom of God, and in the shadow of the dark and sealed tomb.
Tonight we acknowledge the pain and confusion, the degradation that seems to pollute our lives and the lives of all those, everywhere, that we care so much about
Tonight, like Pankaj Mishra, we think, dream and pray for an end to suffering and confusion in our lives and in the world. We dream and pray but we know, only to well that it has, clearly—so clearly—not yet arrived.
© 2005, Jim Stewart