"On Life's Stumbling Blocks"

 

Some time ago I went to dinner at the home of a friend who had invited a number of people from different walks of her life, who didn't know each other. The food was delicious, the house was a showcase, and the company good.  We spent a lot of time that night talking about various favorite vacations we had taken. The talk moved from cruise ships to car rentals.  We discussed strategies for how to cope when you don't speak the language and how to avoid having your wallet stolen.  In those simpler days safety measures for travelers amounted to using travelers checks and knowing when to forgo the drinking water. Everyone agreed that a good trip was a safe trip - no one wanted any surprises, thank you very much.

Then a rather quiet man named Joe from Cohasset said that the best trip he had ever taken was full of surprises, full of trouble in the usual sense - and he proceeded to describe it as a great vacation.  He said he'd do it again in a heartbeat.

He had a couple of weeks off and his son, Adam, was out of school.  So he agreed to do his brother a favor and drive his 56 Chevy down to the Texas panhandle. (He was now in a position to restore it if he could only get it to Texas)  Joe's eleven year old Adam was eager to go along - this could provide them with some quality time together and he'd see some of the U.S..  He'd estimated the trip would take six days on the back roads - they were in no hurry; they'd visit for a day or two and fly home.  (He allowed as how his wife disagreed with him on the wisdom of this trip….)

"A 1956 car - Didn't you break down?" he was asked. 

"Four times," he replied.  A couple of the problems were fairly major, and required waiting overnight for parts to arrive. So what possibly was good about it, we wondered…

Probably because his son was with him, at the start he was determined not to overreact when the car broke down. It helped that his brother was paying for the repairs.  At first his equanimity was playacting - but eventually, it became real. The breakdowns were not a problem, they simply dictated where and when they'd be stopping. The fact that the trip took nine days instead of six became part of the adventure. 

He and Adam learned a lot about small town America; they played catch; they window shopped; Joe learned about slowing down.  they passed the time of day with gas station attendants who told stories about where they lived, helping while away the time.  They chewed up time eating in diners that were the local pride and joy - every town seemed to have one.  They had good, personal conversations with waitresses and mechanics -   One gas station owner, who also had an eleven year old boy, took them home and even put them up for a night. 

 

Adam, at an impressionable age, experienced a kind and considerate America that father Joe had never imagined was there. This had become a trip neither would ever forget - an adventure. Joe was no reckless parent. Had he anticipated the breakdowns he never would have made the trip.  The irony is, had he played it safe, they would have missed the best vacation of their lives.

And we all want to travel as safely as we can.  But we should be careful - our desire for comfort can become a stumbling block to growth. The sermon title I had selected today was ""On Life's Stumbling Blocks." The stumbling block I've focused on this morning is our natural tendency to seek comfort. Comfort is the opposite of adventure, and sometimes, tit is the opposite of being awake..

Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron teaches says there's a common misunderstanding among the human species that the best way to live life is to try and be comfortable.  We see this even among the animals and the birds, she says. 

I myself love comfort - and everything that is usually associated with it - the idea of being cozy, full, warm, at home, rested, worry and stress free.  Many positive attributes go with the word comfortable. But comfort is a kind of protection from life's edges. It is good to have available, but not a good permanent condition.

 One non-productive characteristic we all share, to our detriment, according to Chodron, is the that we spend too much of our energy trying to control life for the sake of comfort.  Chodron says we can lead a much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful life, if we would develop our curiosity more and, at the same time, strive less for personal comfort.  Because personal comfort requires so much personal control over one's environment, it stifles growth.

To quote Chodron: "To lead a more passionate, full and delightful life, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is, how we tick and how our world ticks, how the whole thing just is."

I think just maybe Joe from Cohasset has learned how to vacation with a Buddhist outlook and he was grateful for the rewards it brought him.

Think about when you are most comfortable. You need to feel safe, that's a given.  If you are like me you are most comfortable when you are in the company of friends you've known for a long time - those you know well.  Most people find their old sweaters and old slippers the coziest. Here's nothing really wrong with this as long as you can override these preferences when you need to. Believe me, you don't want me showing up here in some of the clothing I'm apt to wear at home. Comfort, for different people is, of course somewhat different in its attributes, but it rarely is a growth attribute.

In his book Being Peace, the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of an unhappy man who came to enter the religious community which he oversaw. I quote Thich Nhat Hanh:

When someone is suffering so much, when he or she comes to a meditation center, the first thing is to give some kind of comfort. The people in the Temple were compassionate enough to let him come and have a place to cry. How long, how many days, how many years did he need to cry? We don’t know. But finally he took up refuge in the meditation center and did not want to go back to society. He had had enough of it. He thought that he had found some peace, but one day I myself came and burned his meditation center, which was only a small hut: his last shelter!

The visitor was settling for comfort above all else. Spiritually speaking, this is a mistake. Certainly, change can be profoundly painful.  Sometimes we avoid change as just too hard.  I am told that some prisoners, having spent many years in jail are overwhelmed by society and prefer prison, and commit new crimes in order to be able to return to the comfort of the familiar, even if it is a jail cell.  We can do the equivalent of this in our own lives - become our own jailers and cease to grow.

          Comfort and familiarity and become a trap to the degree that it is accompanied by fear of the unknown. This is true for us if one is single and uncomfortable with meeting others in new situations now that one is available. This is true for you if you have a talent that is begging for growth and you are too timid to exercise it or take lessons. Each of us has ways in which we would like to avoid the new and unfamiliar. All growth is a struggle.

          The trick is to commit to a first step into something new that beckons us. That may be to admit to yourself that you may want to grow or change. To pick up that phone to admit that you want something different or something more.

Years ago there was a suburban homeowner who loved gardening and landscaping. He was frustrated - he couldn't beautify his front yard because it was dominated by an enormous  rock, some eight feet across. It was too low to attract the eyes as a focus and looked like a bare spot from the street. The effect was lousy. One day, after he had mowed around it for more than ten years, and damaged his lawnmower blade umpteen times he finally decided to do something about it. He figured he's need to hire someone to dynamite it out, but he'd find some way to blast that rock out of there.

So he began digging against one side of the rock to see how many feet down this enormous rock actually went. Imagine his surprise when two minutes of work revealed it was essentially flat at the top and the bottom, a slab only about six inches thick. Sheepishly, he broke it up with a sledgehammer that afternoon. As he was carting the pieces away he had to smile, remembering all the trouble that the rock had caused him over the years and how easy it would have been to get rid of it sooner. When we want to change, very often our challenge is just like this rock - the hardest part of the process is committing to it in the first place and taking that first step. 

          Churches can struggle with comfort issues too. Growth in numbers is uncomfortable.. Growing biger means structural change, and that is hard with many people having to learn to ways of communicating, working together and responding to each other. Staying the same size, on the other hand,  is in many ways comfortable - Everyone knows the ropes, most people know everyone and things are done pretty much the way they've always been done.  For that reason, most churches tend to stay the same size over the decades.

But there is one condition that creates a certain amount of discomfort - and forces a certain kind of growth. Lack of money forces churches to grow in connectivity and creativity. Some churches - ours is one - are sort of like a '56 Chevy.  Their fiscal health needs to be attended to from time to time. This work, in the form of fundraisers that involve most of the community becomes an unexpected source of deepening relationships and vitality. Instead of the comfort and security of financial abundance, churches without endowments have the fun and friendship and feisty community that results from the year 'round purchasing of each other's goods and services at service auctions, bake sales and flea markets and putting on dinner theaters together. Growth, to some degree, has to be forced.

Think about yourself for a moment. Have you grown in recent years or have you pulled back from adventure in favor of comfort?  Have you learned anything new recently? Do you accept the discomfort of challenge?  Are you complacent, or are you still growing? 

How about the people around you. Are they growing?  Thich Nhat Hanh burned down the cottage of his fellow traveler.  He also wrote this poem which, I think, captures so much: bold spiritual confrontation, the shared pain of grief, and the hope of new life rising:

One night, I will come
and set fire to his shelter,
the small cottage on the hill
My fire will destroy everything
and remove his only life raft after a shipwreck.

In the utmost anguish of his soul,
the shell will break.

The light of the burning hut will witness
his glorious deliverance.
I will wait for him

beside the burning cottage.
Tears will run down my cheeks.
I will be there to contemplate his new being
. . . as I hold his hands in mine

 

. I don't think you and I should go about the business of dismantling each other's places of safety, but we should use this opportunity to consider whether we might use his inspiration to burn down one of our own comfort zones that is being overused.