Finding Space

Sermon preached at the Alumni Weekend Memorial Service
June 13, 2004
Thompson Memorial Chapel, Williams College

Kathleen Brownback ‘74

A reunion such as this one, and the memorial service that must accompany it, is a time to remember what has changed and what does not change.

I remember a game that children like to play, finding pictures of things hidden within pictures. You remember the drawings that if you studied them you’d find a football in the fireplace or a magnifying glass masquerading as a keyhole, or a fox disguised among the folds of an open clothes closet. I remember them as a child, but by the time my son was young, there were whole books of these, varieties among varieties. One that I especially remember had an African landscape section that secretly harbored oryxes, dorcas gazelles, Barbary sheep, and lanner falcons about 100 other animals, and maybe 20 other sections like this—the rainforest, the Arctic, and so on. They wisely included a picture of each animal for baffled parents whose memories had never once logged the greater portion of these species. But the puzzles I used to do as a child were far simpler, just line drawings really. I associate them with my dentist’s office, although relatively little detective work was ever needed on his part to determine how many pieces of 1-cent bubble gum I had managed to sneak past my parents in the 6 months since my last visit. There weren’t too many places to hide on the days that I showed up in the office, but nevertheless I enjoyed myself in the waiting room until my arrival in the chair, whereupon he would utter a sadistic laugh and before I even opened my mouth ask me if I had any plans for the rest of the day.

But I more or less forgot about those hidden pictures, until much later when I visited a Buddhist retreat center, and heard enlightenment described as the ability to see what is always already here. Although at the time I could only vaguely imagine what that meant in the context of enlightenment, I knew the feeling that we all sometimes have of suddenly seeing something that has been there all along. It is familiar in the solving of a math problem, or the way on the third or fourth read a poem suddenly changes in its entire meaning, or when you learn something about yourself or another person that makes some previously mysterious aspect of your or their character more comprehensible. Something that was there all along becomes evident—some pattern emerges. The Buddhist idea of awareness has no pattern, really, but whatever it is that we are being directed to is already here—it is not a state we need to seek, or even can seek, in some other place or time. The variable is within us, our ability to be conscious of it, our ability to see, our ability to wake up, in the present. And the present is always here.

The school where I have taught for 17 years is a boarding and day school in the seacoast New Hampshire town of Exeter, a school that has been around for more than 200 years and co-ed for almost 30. You may be wondering what strange impulse leads people to think that a community of 1000 very bright and talented students charging through adolescence together in a residential school is a particularly good idea, and I can only hasten to assure you that about this time of year the faculty tends to ask itself the same thing. However, most of the time it is a very good idea.

This winter a colleague of mine, Jamie Hamilton, went to Egypt to attend the wedding of a former Exeter student, and on a side trip while there she visited the Greek Orthodox St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula. She discovered soon after leaving that by mistake she had left her camera behind, and she returned for it although the monastery had closed to visitors for the day. At that time she met a resident monk and priest who spoke English and assisted her in her search. She soon learned that he was an American, a Texan no less, who had grown up in a devout Baptist family. Some 20 years ago he had learned of this remote place and had come to seek its life of silence and devotional prayer.

A few months after Jamie’s visit, the monk, Father Justin Sinaites, came to New York to accompany ancient manuscripts from the St. Catherine’s monastery that were to be on display this spring at the Byzantium exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jamie read of Father Justin’s visit to the Met in the New York Times, which included a photograph of him, and asked our department what we thought of the idea of asking Father Justin to visit and lecture at Exeter while he was in the country. You can perhaps imagine that this was not an obvious slam-dunk. Father Justin has a long beard that extends to his waist and dresses in the long black robes of the Greek Orthodox priesthood. He had not spent much time around teenagers since his own youth, and he knew very little about teen culture generally and even less of New England boarding schools. Our students are not by and large a church-going crowd—many are not even nominally Christian, and quite a few of those who are give the definition of nominal a run for its money. We pondered around the small round table in the department room what sort of visit this might be. But before too long we invited him and he was glad to come up, understanding that he might be speaking to a fairly intimate group.

It came as a considerable surprise to us when the church, which seats almost 300 people, rapidly filled for the Friday night lecture. Many of those in attendance were students. Though some had been required to come for a class, others had come along with friends or on their own out of curiosity. The lecture was to include slides of the wild beauty of the Sinai Peninsula, the strikingly secluded monastery built by the Emperor Justinian in the 6 th century, and some of the manuscripts that Father Justin had brought to New York. As he began the lecture, the PowerPoint presentation did what many PowerPoint presentations do somewhere along the line—it developed technical difficulties and stopped. A student named Wei-li in one of my classes wrote about this in this way:

“The first thing that struck me about Father Justin was the sense of calm he emanated. His eyes didn’t dart around like ours often do and his movements were more deliberate. Many adults are able to keep their eyes steady and seemingly focused, but Father Justin carried about him an aura that stemmed from something deeper. It seemed that his mind was calm, not just his eyes or hands or any other external feature of his person. When his computer froze at the beginning of his PowerPoint presentation, he seemed completely unfazed. He restarted the computer and waited very patiently for the program to work. Most other people would have been at least a little bit worried. Even if they did not start panicking, we would be able to detect a hint of nervousness, perhaps a tapping foot or drumming fingers, or a tightening of the jaw. Father Justin did none of these things.” (As an aside to anyone who works with teenagers—if we think we are not under close observation, think again.)

That night I stood with a colleague in the History department, watching students walk up to Father Justin afterwards and ask him questions. There, and in an earlier classroom discussion with students, he had an air of such kindness, and such wry and open sense of humor, that the students warmed to him immediately. My history colleague, who is not at all a religious person but had come because he was interested in the Justinian era in which the St. Catherine’s monastery had been built, said, “I’m a bit surprised that students gravitate so much to him. On the other hand, when you think of the schlock that they are exposed to for so much of their lives, it must be a relief for them to meet someone like him.”

Perhaps it has to do with 9/11, perhaps because of the wrenching consequences of the war, perhaps because many people are uneasy about problems like energy and water (and from which it is easy and perhaps convenient to become distracted), or because they feel the hollowness that often comes with our lives (the schlock factor)—for whatever reason, I find more and more students are asking questions about the “something deeper” that Wei-li saw in Father Justin. They are curious about equanimity, feeling so little of it themselves, and they wonder where real compassion comes from. They are aware, somehow, that conventional religious directives such as “Love thy neighbor as thyself” or, even more outrageously, “Love your enemy” are just impossible to follow without a deeper spiritual grounding. Without that such ideas simply turn into lofty standards next to which we all fall far short. Even those who understand forgiveness for that falling short wonder if there really is a way to become more loving, or is it just ok that we are not. Those who try to fake this love, which would be most of us at one time or another, are well aware at some level that they are doing so, and they hate themselves for it, and they hate the people they cannot bring themselves to love, and the disaster deepens. Religion seems only to offer advice that no one can follow.

Partly out of these questions, we began an experimental class this term, one that a group of students asked to have, one that focused on what it is that all religions share, not so much at the level of doctrine but at some other level. Many of the students had taken philosophy earlier in the year, and they had begun to recognize that there are many questions that skeptics have always known we could not answer rationally, but they were unsatisfied leaving it at that. They wondered if there were other ways to know that something was true, or is it entirely subjective, or does the word truth just have no real meaning. They were also aware that the conviction of truth, in one form or another, leads more often to barriers between people than it does to any kind of peace, as we battle out the divides of Christian vs. Muslim, unbridled capitalism vs. state socialism, milking the rich vs. cheating the poor, our land vs. your land, our blood line vs. your blood line, or any other of the countless variations we could name. The division is fun, as in athletics, when it is understood as a game, and it is deadly when it is not. “Love your enemy” is a fantasy in those contexts. Truth is for us; it’s not for them.

The class that gathered was a remarkable group of students, mostly spring term seniors, on what was clearly a spiritual search although I am not sure we ever called it by that name. They had glimpsed, somewhere, that there is deeper kind of certainty than the certainty of ideas and opinions, what the poet Rumi called a field, in which all our ideas of right and wrong rise and fall. And they began to understand that the path to it is not by thinking about it, but by quieting their minds enough to begin to glimpse another kind of awareness, an ability to be in the present, whatever it brings, without self-deception or pretension or the desire to make it conform to some other standard, without an endless judgment about what does and does not belong. Once we make room for what is here, we begin to realize how little we usually do see of what is here; so busy are we with ruminations about the past and plans for the future. Only then do we have the capacity for what the Buddhists call “right action”. This is, I think, what Wei-Li glimpsed in Father Justin. And to see it in someone else, you must have begun to find that place within yourself. This is really the only spiritual practice, to clearly see what endlessly distracts you from this, to see what you really call sacred, to see your heart as it really is.

This is what true spiritual leaders are and have always been about—it is what Jesus was about, and what the Buddha was about—when they are free of uses and abuses and misunderstood translations. The Buddha’s first noble truth is often translated as “All is suffering”, which taken by itself makes you wonder if you really want to hear the second, but it really about becoming free in the only way that we really can become free in this world. Jesus in the New Testament sometimes sounds like all the sinners are headed for hell in whatever conveyance can be summoned most quickly, but he is talking about a hell we so often create for ourselves and carry with us wherever we go. One could speak similarly of the words of Muhammad and Moses and many others. But the garbling of all this goes with the territory. The love is there, it’s natural, but like a mirror that has gotten fogged over we no longer see it, or ourselves in it. So the place to start is within, with quiet, without too many lofty ideas, finding space to notice what is always, already here.

For many of the students in the class this spring, nature is a place where their minds could grow quiet and they could begin to find this space. The same could be said for many of us here today. It was Thomas Berry who said, “Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of the clouds by day and the stars by night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human. ” I think it was at Williams that I began to discover this for myself, hiking in the Hopkins Forest or somewhere else in the mountains around us. Even death, in nature, is not such a great divide. It’s all around, and it gives rise to such beauty that we somehow sit with it more easily. The power of a waterfall or a gathering storm or a rising sea reminds us of something both within and greater than ourselves. We are drawn to the calm of a lake or the ocean at sunset because we feel it within ourselves then. We are not separate, either from each other or from nature, and we forget this to our great suffering and eventually to the loss of our humanity. This peace belongs to us, but taking the time to see it is up to us. We can only know that it is here.