Sermon Archives : 2005/2006
Vietnam and Vipassana: Living Out the Third UU Principle
Benjamin Papa · September 25, 2005
When the last helicopter raced away from the American embassy in southern Vietnam on April 30, 1975 ending U.S. military involvement in that country, 58,202 American soldiers, 1 million Vietnamese soldiers, and 2 million Vietnamese civilians had died in a conflict that the United States called The Vietnam War, and the Vietnamese called The American War. This tiny country in Southeast Asia had lost in only a handful of years 140,000 more citizens than the entire present day population of Chicago, nearly an entire generation of young men.
Meanwhile, the United States was in the throes of political division and unrest unlike anything this nation had seen since the Civil War itself. College students lay dead on the campus of Kent State University, people from college students to lawyers to housewives had marched in protest against the war, and returning veterans wondered whether they had killed and whether their friends and comrades had been killed in vain.
On August 10, 2005, as I stood in the cold and massive stone mausoleum that houses the carefully preserved body of Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, I couldn’t help but wonder about the incredible games perception plays in the hearts and minds of human beings. Depending on one’s point of view, I was either standing face to face with the body of a great hero who spent his life struggling for autonomy for his tiny country from behemoths like China, France, and the United States. Or I was in the presence of a cold-hearted and conniving dictator who sacrificed his own people and the lives of tens of thousands of foreigners for his own political gain? Or was he both? In what ways when I stood in front of Ho Chi Minh this past summer was I staring in the mirror?
I refer, of course, to a trip that I was fortunate enough to be a part of this past summer to Vietnam, along with fourteen other Vanderbilt University Divinity School students and faculty. The purpose of the trip was to be immersed for two full weeks in the country of Vietnam – the tiny country that hugs the eastern side of the Indochina peninsula and that was the catalyst for one of the most important chapters in 20th century American history. While the experience was certainly a rich one, it was by no means a vacation – we earned every minute of academic credit that we received for going on the trip. Our schedules were packed everyday with meetings with governmental, social, and religious leaders who helped us understand the everyday lives of the Vietnamese people, including the roles that war, communism, and globalization have played in their country. We ate nothing but Vietnamese food, visited museums and historical sites where we learned about Vietnamese history, culture, and religion. And, of course, we sweated through two weeks of 95 to 100 degree temperatures and a humidity level that always hovered just below 100 percent. And I am someone who has always said that the greatest modern invention is the air conditioner. Fortunately, one of our trip’s leader was a menopausal woman who was very open about how hot she was all of the time. So whenever we arrived at a new place, she and I would scurry to find any fan or air conditioning vent in the room and then direct the other one to come over.
The vast majority of our time in Vietnam was spent in Hanoi, which was the capital of Communist North Vietnam before the country was reunited in 1975. We also took a two-day side trip to the town of Sapa and small ethnic villages located in the breathtakingly beautiful mountains near the Chinese border. We visited Ha Long Bay and Cat Ba Island, which is just off the coast of the mainland in the South China Sea, very near The Gulf of Tonkin, which most of you know is where the United States reported that it had been attacked by Communist Vietnamese military and was therefore entering the Vietnam War on behalf of the South Vietnamese who were attempting to resist a communist takeover.
The overall goal of our trip was to help us become stronger religious leaders, which includes broadening our own horizons so we can be in better touch with ourselves as well as the needs of the world. Considering the impact of the trip in this light, my time in Vietnam was largely about watching myself and how I responded to being in a strange and uncomfortable environment. The following is a brief excerpt of an entry from my travel journal that I wrote on August 13:
What I am coming to feel is that one of the benefits for me of this trip is watching myself when I have to operate outside of my comfort zone. I have been physically uncomfortable most of the time, I have felt dirty, I miss my family. However, I don’t feel particularly bad emotionally. Even though I keep getting covered in mud, sweat, and rain I still can be kind even when I am decidedly out of control in so many ways.
So what does my trip to Vietnam have to do with all of you? This morning I hope to use my trip to Vietnam as a sort of lens to open up a discussion of the third UU Principle. The third UU Principle states: We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. It seems to me there are two parts to this principle. The first is the part about accepting one another and the second is about spiritual growth. This morning I am going to focus on only the second aspect – encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.
Vipassana, the other word in my sermon title, is a Buddhist mediation practice that is central to the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, which is one of the three major Buddhist traditions practiced today. Vipassana, or insight meditation, is my own central spiritual practice and therefore one of the primary vehicles through which I seek to grow spiritually in my own life. The goal of vipassana meditation, as well as Buddhist practice in general, is to help practitioners live in the present moment and not in a haze of thoughts, plans, or commentaries about the present moment. When a person commits to vipassana practice, he or she is committing to do the tedious and often painful work of studying oneself intently, and thereby studying human nature more generally. The ultimate goal is to gain wisdom and compassion from the practice by learning to accept ourselves and the world as they actually are, without struggling against the reality of our lives.
Turning back to our third UU principle, how do we, as individuals in congregations, encourage one another to spiritual growth? It seems to me that we first need to define the phrase, “spiritual growth.” And doing so could easily comprise an entire sermon series unto itself. All of us could list at least a dozen traits that we associate with spiritual growth and depth. I want to discuss one spiritual trait that seems to me to be a good example of a characteristic that undergirds healthy spiritual growth no matter one’s religious or spiritual temperament. The trait is awareness.
By awareness I mean being present – truly present – for one’s life. Really seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting everything that happens to us, be it good, bad, or maybe especially indifferent. In Vietnam, I had to find a way to eat food that was put before me even though it was the forty-fifth time I had been served spring rolls, and the last thing I wanted as I sat in the sweltering heat was to ingest a plate full of steaming hot spring rolls. The true challenge was to really make myself experience the food. Not just to rush through it because it was unpleasant.
Unfortunately, in our culture we have been taught that life is experienced primarily in the big monumental events – the Hallmark moments – births, weddings, divorce, illness, and death. We learn that these are the events by which we should mark our lives. These are the experiences that, when they occur, we should really pay attention to them and be present for them.
How many of us can say exactly where we were and what we were doing on September 11, 2001? Who knows what the weather was like on the day you met the person you would fall in love with? What were the sights and sounds you experienced on the day your children were born? What was your immediate reaction when you first learned that your father had died? These moments and those like them are etched in our brains, carved into our souls. But I wonder what it would be like if we could live every minute of every day just as present as we are for the so-called big stuff. What if we could find a way to bring awareness to not only the dramatic, but also the mundane aspects of our lives?
One of the spiritual crises of our time is that we waste huge segments of our lives by simply not living them. Too much of the time we are unaware of our bodies, our physical surroundings, and even our emotions. Instead, we live in our thoughts, dwelling on the past, worrying about the future, or planning our to-do list for the week. When we have a free moment, rather than simply enjoy the quiet, we scurry to find a computer game to play, a television show to watch, a book to read, or a CD to turn on. Anything to fill the silence. It’s as if we are frightened to simply be – scared to live out our experience, whatever that experience may be. French Roman Catholic philosopher Blaise Pascal made this point well when he said, “I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.”
What would happen if when we had a free moment, we simply breathed and noticed our experience? How might our spiritual lives be richer if we actually carved out time from our schedules to pray, meditate, or engage in some other time-honored spiritual practice that is designed to help us slow down and be our best selves? A practice that grounds us in our bodies and souls and helps us be truly aware and present. Mahatma Ghandi reminds us, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
In addition to the somewhat more obvious benefits of trying to live one’s life as fully as possible, being aware also helps us be intentional about our actions. If we know what we are experiencing, then we can know how we want to respond to that experience. If we are not aware, we tend to fall into patterns of behavior that often serve to stunt rather than enhance our spiritual growth.
In my own life, when I am not aware of my thoughts and feelings, I have an inclination to try and control things. I want to control my schedule, my partner Brad’s schedule, my health, even my mother – something I’m sure no one else in the room has tried to do. I cease responding to what is actually happening to me and instead begin to follow a sort of script for how I think things ought to be.
For me, two things came into my life at about the same time to help me begin to let go of my need to control – the Buddhist practice of insight meditation, which I described earlier, and the birth of my twins. You can imagine what having two twenty-month-old twins does to one’s perception that he can control everything. What I am coming to understand is that my need to control, which has been a part of who I am since I was a boy, comes at least in part from my fear of experiencing my life as it actually happens. Do you see that connection? When we are out of touch – unaware of – our life experiences, we try to create an alternative life that is based on our own psychological needs and fantasies.
My tendency is to control. Yours may be to avoid your experience by always focusing on only the negative aspects of your experience, comparing what you have or don’t have to those around you. Or you may avoid your life by sticking your head in the sand and pretending that every day is a day at the beach when in fact you are feeling deep pain that you cannot address in a more healthy way. Or maybe you find yourself caught up in our culture’s bottomless quest for stuff – more computer gadgets, bigger houses, fatter bank accounts, designer clothes. These are all external things that, if we focus on them too much, divert us from feeling the wind on our face or sensing the desperation of a stranger in need. The Eastern sage, Nirmala, once said, “There is never enough of what does not satisfy.”
So what does this spiritual trait of awareness have to do with the third UU principle and its reminder that we need to encourage one another to spiritual growth? The challenge for all of us is to encourage one another to spiritual growth by being aware of our lives and by encouraging one another to do the same. If you don’t already have one, I encourage you to start a spiritual practice – yoga, meditation, prayer, or any number of other tried and true practices – and then tell two or three friends in this congregation to check in with you at least once a month to keep you accountable for actually doing the practice faithfully. Is that not encouraging one another to spiritual growth? Be bold enough to suggest to your friends and family that they start their own spiritual practice, and then consciously support them to persevere when it seems like the practice is doomed to be swallowed up by busy schedules or apathy. I also encourage you to join a covenant group if you are not already a member. Small group ministry has swept this denomination like wildfire the last few years, and even in this congregation people who are members of a covenant group have used that time and space to explore deep theological and spiritual questions. They also have supported one another through the death of a parent, the births of new babies, major job transitions, and the list goes on and on. People are creating intimate community with one another in covenant groups. Encourage one another to spiritual growth.
We must not become complacent in our lives as individuals or as a congregation. We much examine our lives to search for areas where there is room for spiritual growth and then intentionally work to improve them. We need to let go of our fear of offending one another or sounding corny is we talk about spiritual growth. Instead, our congregation should be a vibrant center of spiritual practice, reflection, and discussion. We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. I pray that it will be so here in this congregation. Amen.