Jul 28th: Presence, Mystery & Wonder, with Becca Ellis.
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Presence, Mystery & Wonder with Becca Ellis. Series: Beguiled By Beauty: Cultivating a Life of Contemplation and Compassion A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Matthew 6:25-34.
Join us this Sunday at First Presbyterian for a message on the importance of wonder, presence, and cultivating tenderness in response to the world’s pain. Experience the transformative power of living in the present moment. All are welcome.
Transcript:
Becca Ellis: When my son, Soren, was 18 months old, I would take him with me every day when his two older siblings got on and off the school bus as we stood at the bus stop, you could see his face full of excitement and anticipation as he waited for the big yellow bus to come into sight as it came around the corner, his face would light up, his eyes bright and wide, and as he pointed his finger wildly in the air, his whole body animated, he would start to call out one of the few words he knew, bus, bus, bus. And he wouldn’t stop until you at least acknowledged that you had in fact seen the bus too, as if he needed all of us to share in this thrill he was feeling. The joy was infectious. And anyone who has experienced that pure and unbridled, primal joy and sense of wonder expressed by a child knows it’s something special to behold. I think part of this is that it invites us into the present, even if just for a moment, it allows the autopilot of our minds to be interrupted. It might also cause us to look back with nostalgia at that childlike innocence. We might notice how we’ve lost our own sense of wonder throughout the years. We might hope that our children, or children in general, can hold onto it a little longer than we did, but life can be relentless. It has a way of over time, stripping that sense of wonder from us, and for some of us, that begins far too soon. You learn from an early age not to get your hopes up too much. You experience betrayal. You learn there are some people you just can’t trust. You invest in something, pour significant resources into it, only to have it be a complete waste, and you’re back to square one. Or maybe even worse, you lose something, or maybe you lose someone, and you become hard, maybe not all at once, but each painful rub from the world creates this thin layer around your heart that gets a little more calloused. Bit by bit, you might find yourself becoming a little more distanced, a little more guarded, until you find yourself at arm’s length, disillusioned and spectating from the side. I mean, why put yourself out there only to get burned again? But I don’t think this is what God meant for any of us. And the practice of wonder and presence are essential to finding our spiritual center and purpose. We need this practice more than ever, especially now, when the world around us seems to be an utter chaos, to the point where nothing seems to really shock us anymore, and the only certainty in life seems to be the uncertainty looming in the air. In his book, Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish thinker, scholar and mystic, wrote, the beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe, but a will to wonder. He also wrote, Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. Get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal. Everything is incredible. Never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed. I love that description, this idea of radical amazement being core to our very sense of spirituality. Because when I experience those moments of full presence where time seems to vanish, and all I can do is wonder at the very experience of life and existence, of what is the world around me. It is such a profoundly spiritual experience, I can’t even find words to describe it. And for many of us, this is part of why we even live in this region of the world, right? We can just look out the window or go for a short drive and see the landscape around us, the mountains, the blue skies, the rivers and lakes. It catches our breath, interrupts our thoughts for a moment as we experience this feeling of awe, it’s hard to express fully in words. But what about in the moments when that isn’t enough, when our immediate life feels like it’s falling apart. What about when we look out at the landscape of our world and everything feels futile? You might be familiar with the work of Eckhart Tolle in his book The Power of Now, where he points out the ways as humans, we are usually stuck in and operating out of our ideas of the future or the past instead of the present moment, our minds run in circles telling stories about the way things are when really we’re missing the only thing that is ever guaranteed to us, this moment, right here, right now, right in front of us. It’s actually. Really pretty eye opening once you stop and notice how often you are thinking about what is ahead and imagining an outcome or considering something in the past in a way that keeps you stuck, you might be surprised at how often you are truly living outside of the present. Being present is a much more intentional practice than we might realize, something we must work at. Otherwise our minds can get away from us. It becomes easy to operate from a place of fear and anxiety, almost on autopilot, as we imagine a future that hasn’t happened or repeat the past, perhaps wishing things would have been different, but none of that is reality. Toli writes about how spiritual masters of all traditions have pointed to the present moment as the key to the spiritual dimension. It reminds me of the psalmist who writes poetically about the awe and wonder of God. And in the gospels we read Jesus’ words and how we emphasize this often, and yet we downplay the actual practice of presence in our own life. I think about the Sermon on the Mount when he says, So, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today. Or when he speaks to His disciples, saying, Nobody puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God, and then he says another unexpected thing that you must become like a child in order to enter the kingdom of God, that is to say, in order to experience the full presence and mystery of love in our lives. Now, this kingdom that Jesus spoke about was something radically different from any Kingdom his followers could have experienced or imagined. It was a way to live that changed the rules, where instead of greed and hierarchy and control, everything was flipped upside down, and a world was imagined where all could flourish and thrive, regardless of who they were. And this idea of wonder, of presence, this is what I think, in part, Jesus meant when he said, to become like a child. Now I want to make one important distinction between becoming childlike and being childish. Theologian and author Rob Bell describes it this way, as being a posture of the heart. Being childish is a hardness, a resistance to what is it is the folding of arms across the chest and stomping your feet. We all know someone in our life who has acted childish, or, if we’re being really honest moments we have reacted in childish ways ourselves. Childlike rather is a posture of openness, open to the wonder and awe of the everyday. It’s my son seeing the bus come around the corner every morning as if for the first time, it’s stopping and literally smelling the roses. It’s being startled by the beauty around us we are always given the opportunity to behold. It’s inviting these deep, even if small, moments of reflection that point to the mystery of existence. It’s becoming aware of the presence of God in our lives, realizing it was always there in the first place. But it is our awareness of that presence that is so often absent. It’s when you can stop in your tracks at the beauty and pure amazement of life, when you are struck with the possibility in every breath, turn, movement, when you aren’t caught up in some sort of rigid way of being or trying to prove something about yourself, but like a child, simply see things as they are, and like a child, there is space for imagination again, because I don’t know about you, but when I look out at the landscape of the world right now, at the times we are living in, it feels hard to muster up imagination around how things could actually be different. It’s much easier to let anxiety, fear and worry creep in and overwhelm, and the overwhelm can then lead to a paralysis, because what can we really do about it anyway? And then that often leads to finding ways to sedate ourselves, whether conscious or not, we might seek out substances, chronically, check out on our phones, chase that next thrill or high, or fix anything that will let us get a break from reality and try to cope. But maybe there is another way, and at least one part of it is this practice of presence, of bringing our awareness to the moment in front of us, interrupting the relentless cycles of fearful narratives that loop in our minds, which then cause us to live out of a place based in fear instead of love, and when we are living from that place, we miss out on The truest purpose any of us hold when Jesus said, do not worry about tomorrow to his followers, I think about how they might have received those words, considering they had plenty to worry about. They were first century Jews living in Roman occupied land, often unliked for their very different religious practices, their 10. Had been torn down and rebuilt multiple times throughout history. Their freedom to worship, which was central to their way of life, left up to fate and the whim of current authorities being told not to worry itself, might feel a bit childish and unaware, but this isn’t a practice that pretends all is right and well in the world, rather, it brings us into a place where we can look out at the world and our own life with a wider lens. We need this more than ever, a broader perspective and understanding in this time when people are so divided, our world so fractured, true presence is what brings healing to ourselves and those around us. I recently heard about a study on therapy and how the healing client’s experience has less to do with the therapist’s technique or formal academic training, and everything to do with the quality of their relationship between themselves and the client, the heart emits electrical waves radiation, as does the brain, and when the waves are in sync between the heart and the mind, you’re in a state of calmness and presence. In the study, they looked at people in therapy, and they measured these waves from the heart and the brain of both the therapist and client, what they found was that the most effective moments of treatment happened when the radiation of both therapist and client were in sync with each other. This happened more often when the therapist was listening than speaking. So the healing that took place had less to do with the therapist sharing their insights and everything to do with their capacity to actually listen and be present to the client. Imagine a world where more of us were engaged this way, present, listening our hearts in sync. Wonder begins to soften us toward imagining something different again, it wakes us up from simply sleepwalking through life and instead asking questions about why things are the way they are, and what we have the influence to change. It happens in the midst of the unexpected and heartbreaking and terrifying moments when we allow ourselves to be interrupted, stopping the spiral in our minds, getting back in sync with ourselves in the present moment. It’s taking a step back and not trying to solve all the big, huge problems at once, but taking it one step at a time. I think of what author Glennon Doyle, when she shares about her journey into sobriety, writes, just do the next right thing, one thing at a time that’ll take you all the way home. There is a mystery to all of this. I find that words can’t fully explain it, and that feeling of being fully here transcends thought and connects us to something much greater than ourselves. It brings us into awareness of the presence of God in our lives, presence points us to a purpose and begs the question, what is the work of love? The next right thing for you to do in this moment when you can tap into that, you tap into a heart centered space where you can operate from love, where your heart and mind are in sync with each other, and we enter into the mystery and wonder available to each of us. We are no longer operating out of the cycles of fear of just our mind. Rather, we become rooted again in the love that dwells within each of [Becca Ellis]: us. This past week, I read Becca Ellis: a story shared by journalist and author Krista Tippett after she attended a retreat there, a monk invited participants into a practice where you take one hand and clench it into a fist. First, he instructed his listeners to try to take their other hand and force the fist open with it. If you do this, what you’ll notice is that the fist only clenches titer a natural reaction to force. But if instead you cradle the fist with your other hand, which might seem counterintuitive, there’s a very different and yet still natural response, [Becca Ellis]: the fist softens and releases.
Becca Ellis: Krista used this as symbolism for our time writing a sea of clenched fists is a metaphor for our world right now, this exercise brings me back to a conviction I’ve long held but can find hard to sustain. One of the most powerful ways we can be present to our world’s pain is with a counter cultural tenderness. I think many of us are asking what we can do, how we can be a healing and loving force in this world. And it’s easy to glamorize and get caught up in the promise of big moments of action in response to the pain we see in the world, but there is also a less obvious and quieter response we can each take. Ache, which, as Krista Tippett puts it so simply, is to be a calmer of fear, to soften the fist that so many of our bodies and hearts have clenched into. You can’t access that kind of tenderness without practice. There is plenty to worry about. There always has been. There always will be but here is an invitation not to just pretend that all is well in the world, but to be brought back to the only thing you are actually guaranteed in this life, this moment right in front of you right now, [Becca Ellis]: the first step just Becca Ellis: paying attention, being interrupted by Wonder, bringing your awareness to this moment then asking yourself, what is the next right thing, the work of love you are called to do. Start [Becca Ellis]: there. You.
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