The Still Small Voice, or Buddha on the Ballfield
	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield 
	May 21, 2000

Reading:  Mindfulness In Plain English by Venerable Henepola
Gunaratana (Boston:  Wisdom Publications 1992) pp.  7-8.

This sermon is the confluence of three very separate and disparate
tasks:  In this intergenerational service, I wanted to say something
to our young athletes about the values they take with them onto the
fields of their various sports.  I want to talk about one of the roots
of my own spirituality, the Buddhist tradition.  And Jeff had several
musical pieces he wanted to use with the theme of the still small
voice.  Whether I have successfully woven these three strands together
will be for you to judge when I have finished.

The phrase, "the still small voice," comes from a hymn inspired by a
famous passage in the Hebrew Bible, a rattlin' good story which deals
with the prophet Elijah.  You see, Ahab, the king of Israel, had taken
a wife named Jezebel who did not worship Yahweh, the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob, but instead worshiped Baal, the Canaanite god.
Elijah arranged a kind of contest between Yahweh and Baal, where the
priests of each side prepared a sacrifice, and Elijah called down the
fires of heaven, and to everyone's amazement, the fires descended on
the altar and consumed the sacrifice.  The poor the priests of Baal
had no such luck, their sacrifices remained untouched.  So Elijah, not
content to expose them as idolaters, promptly set on the priests of
Ball and slaughtered them.  This didn't set too well with Queen
Jezebel, and she let it be known that if she caught him she would kill
him.

So Elijah got up and went into the desert and traveled forty days and
forty nights, until he came to Mount Horeb, where legend has it that
God had given Moses the 10 Commandments.  Elijah holed up in a cave on
Mt.  Horeb waiting for a word from God.  A voice came to him that said
he was to go to the mouth of the cave, for the Lord was about to pass
by.  And the Bible says

"Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains
and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in
the wind.  And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in
the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not
in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence."  I kings
19:11-12.

It was out of that silence that God spoke to him in what the hymn
writer, following tradition but not the text of the Bible, called "a
still small voice," and told him what he had to do.  Elijah goes back
and under God's authority, changes the political course of history and
chooses Elisha as his successor prophet.  He must have done a good job
because Elijah ends up getting carried up to heaven in a flaming
chariot.

Now this is the kind of story we like in America, a story with winners
and losers.  The prophets of Baal lost, and they got their
comeuppance.  Elijah, who looked like the underdog going up against
the queen and her priests, comes out a winner with the help of the
Lord.  His being carried up to heaven in a chariot might be seen as
the ancient equivalent of a victory parade for the Super Bowl winners.

Winners and losers.  These are key terms in American thought today.
They come from the sports world and they are strongest there, but they
aren't confined to sports.  They're everywhere.  We think of winning
and losing at love, in finances, in what colleges we get admitted to,
in what clothes we buy.  In my other occupation, the legal profession,
winning and losing is so deeply ingrained in the culture that lawyers
tout their won-lost records in order to attract and keep clients.

Let's say I'm admiring your new outfit.  Instead of just taking in
your beauty and applauding your good taste, I might ask something
like, where did you buy it?  If you bought it at the "right" store,
then you've won.  Or I might ask how much you paid for it.  If you got
a great deal on it, you've won.  So winning and losing seem to enter
into a lot of our transactions.

One of the real downsides of this is that the word "loser" has become
about the most vicious label we can hang on a person in America today.
What could be lower, more worthy of our contempt, than a loser?  We
should all shun such a person, pass her by on the other side of the
street.  We certainly wouldn't want to be caught dead talking to a
loser, let alone out on a date with one.  For if our friends saw us
hanging out with a loser, they might start to think we were a loser
ourselves.

What I want to say to you today is that, as powerful as the
winner/loser mentality is in America, it is not the only way to look
at things, or even the best way.  And one other way we can look at it
was thought up by a guy who wasn't even an American, and who lived in
India about 2,500 years ago.  His name was Siddhartha Sakyamuni
Gautama, but we know him by his title, the Buddha, or "the enlightened
one."

I don't call myself a Buddhist, but I've been a fan of the Buddha
since my college days, which were a long time ago.  You may be
surprised to know that there is an active Buddhist temple here in
Wakefield - I visited it on one of my Sundays off in January.  They
have a large rectangular worship room whose ceiling was hung with rows
of paper lanterns shaped like lotus-blossoms, with a huge gold-plated
statue of the Buddha at one end, and no chairs, just mats, where the
faithful sit, lie, stand and kneel.  The service is entirely in
Korean, for these are Korean Buddhists of the type of Buddhism known
as Pure Land.  Although I didn't understand a word of the service, a
young woman very kindly told me what was going on at each stage, and I
found the chanting very powerful and peace-inducing.

Now the Buddha didn't talk about winning and losing, but he talked
about the same thing in broader terms:  pleasure and pain.  He said
that there are three kinds of things in our lives:  those that we
want, that give us pleasure, those that we try to avoid, that give us
pain, and those that are neutral, that neither give pleasure or pain.
Though this third category actually constitutes most of the things in
the world, we don't pay much attention to it - it's boring.  We spend
most of our time and energy pursuing the pleasant things and trying to
avoid the unpleasant things.

Now another tenet of the Buddha's teaching is that reality in fact is
ever-changing.  Nothing is permanent, and nothing ever stays the same.
But we have a hard time accepting this.  Let me come back to the words
of the Buddhist Monk I read from earlier, Venerable Gunaratana:

"No matter how hard you pursue pleasure and success, there are times
when you fail.  No matter how fast you flee, there are times when pain
catches up to you.  And in between those times, life is so boring you
could scream.  Our minds are full of opinions and criticisms.  We have
built walls around ourselves and are trapped in the prison of our own
likes and dislikes.  We suffer."

Suffering is at the root of Buddhist doctrine.  The first of the Four
Noble Truths is this:  everything is suffering.  Actually, that's a
little misleading.  What is actually written is that everything is
dukkha.  Buddhism's sacred texts are written in a language called
Pali, which is a close cousin to Sanskrit.  Dukkha is a Pali word
whose most exact English equivalent might be "unsatisfactoriness."
One of my teachers said that the root of the word suggested a bent
wheel.  Have you ever tried to ride a bicycle whose wheel was bent,
out of true?  You know that it never quite rides right.  That is the
mildest sense of dukkha.

Now the point of the First Noble Truth, that everything is dukkha is
that it is true whether we are winning or losing.  Anyone can see that
when something bad happens to you, or many things bad happen to you,
you might be tempted to say that everything is suffering.  As you
know, I had a bad thing happen to me earlier this month when half of
my face was paralyzed, and there has been a lot about my life that has
been unsatisfactory ever since, like I can't really smile.

But it might not occur to you that even when things are going well,
when you're winning at the game of life, there is still this subtle
undercurrent of unsatisfactoriness, of suffering.  Life is never all
it's cracked up to be, we are never quite as happy when we've achieved
a great victory as we thought we would be.  I may have scored the
wining goal, I might be carried out of the stadium on the shoulders of
my teammates, yet in all the roar of the crowd, amid the tumult and
the glee, under the earthquake, wind and fire, there is this still,
small voice saying, "Not good enough yet, Got to have more, got to
make it better, got to be better."

Here's how Venerable Gunaratana describes it - see if this rings true
for you:

"Go to a party.  Listen to the laughter, that brittle-tongued voice
that says fun on the surface and fear underneath.  Feel the tension,
feel the pressure.  Nobody really relaxes.  They are faking it.  Go to
a ball game.  Watch the fans in the stands.  Watch the irrational fit
of anger.  Watch the uncontrolled frustration bubbling forth from
people that masquerades under the guise of enthusiasm, or team spirit.
Booing, cat-calls and unbridled egotism in the name of team loyalty.
Drunkenness, fights in the stands.  These are people desperately
trying to release tension from within.  These are not people at peace
with themselves....

"Life seems to be a perpetual struggle, some enormous effort against
staggering odds.  And what is our solution to all this
dissatisfaction?  We get stuck in the 'if only' syndrome.  If only I
had more money, then I would be happy.  If only I could find somebody
who would really love me, if only I could lose 20 pounds, if only I
had a color TV, a Jacuzzi and curly hair and so on and on forever.
Where does this junk come from, and more important, what can we do
about it?  It comes from the conditions of our own minds.  It comes
from a deep, subtle and pervasive set of mental habits, a Gordian knot
which we have built up bit by bit and we can unravel just that same
way, one piece at a time.  We can tune up our awareness, dredge up
each separate piece, and bring it out into the light.  We can make the
unconscious conscious, slowly, one piece at a time."

Here you have the key to escaping this round of delusion and seeing
things as they really are.  Mindfulness; awareness.  It is a
discipline that Buddhists practice the world over.  It starts with
learning to pay attention.  When you meditate, you see immediately how
hard it is to pay attention.  You see that the mind, which seems like
a well-oiled thought machine, progressing logically from this thought
to the next, from major premise to minor premise to conclusion, is
actually a boiling cauldron of thoughtlets, miscellaneous words and
images, feelings, fears and illusions with no rhyme or reason.  We
spend most of our conscious lives either replaying and fretting about
the past or worrying about the future.  We are almost never completely
in the present.  We are almost never paying full attention to the here
and now.

Buddha would not tell you not to play soccer or softball.  If Buddha
were beside you on the ball field, he'd probably be telling you
something akin to what your coach is telling you:  pay attention.  Be
here and now.  Keep your eye on the ball.

Skill is an important concept in Buddhism, for it takes skill and
discipline to be able to see things as they really are, to discard the
illusions that we foster on ourselves.  In Buddhist practice, the
skill is exercised and developed in meditation and in debating and
discussing points of doctrine.

But skill can be used in any context, so Buddha on the ballfield will
be urging you to play with all the skill you can muster, but not to
let your happiness get held hostage to whether your team wins or
loses.  The old adage, "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you
play the game," might be acceptable to our ballfield Buddha.

Buddhism, like Taoism, is based on a healthy respect for the fact that
most things are beyond our control; most outcomes are not going to be
determined by what efforts we make.  You know that no matter how well
you play, your teammate might make that crucial error in the bottom of
the sixth that lets the other side go ahead with two runs.

The mainstream American ethic is that we go all-out and we try as hard
as we can every time, and we don't let ourselves get away with
slacking off.  For Buddhism, this philosophy is not wrong, just
unenlightened.  For when we understand how things really are, we can
appreciate the Buddha's second and third Noble Truths.  Remember that
the first Noble Truth is that everything is suffering.  The second
Noble Truth is that the cause of suffering is our own grasping, our
own craving.

Think about that for a moment.  The reason there is suffering in the
world is not that the devil is aboard, sowing evil everywhere.  It is
not that the fates are especially cruel.  The cause of our suffering,
of our unhappiness is entirely within ourselves.  It is caused by our
desire.

The American Declaration of Independence says that it is a
"self-evident" truth that individuals are endowed with certain basic
natural rights, and one of those rights is the "pursuit of happiness."
But Mr.  Jefferson, for all his learning, was not much of a Buddhist,
for if he were he might have known that the pursuit of happiness is
itself the cause of unhappiness.

And this Second Noble Truth leads to the Third:  that the key to
stopping suffering is to stop the craving, to stop the pursuit.  To
stop caring about winning.  To stop chasing the bright elusive rainbow
of happiness.

Now, I don't pretend that I understand this completely in my mind.
Still less do I think I have grasped it in my heart.  But I can see
how it does make sense.  If you have eliminated desire and craving in
your life, your attitude is one of complete equanimity and acceptance
of whatever comes.  In today's jargon, you're cool with what's going
down.

But it definitely goes against the American grain.  Isn't happiness
what it's all about?  Listen to Venerable Gunaratana:

"So what is this happiness?  For most of us, the perfect happiness
would mean getting everything we wanted, being in control of
everything, playing Caesar, making the whole world dance a jig
according to our every whim.  Once again, it does not work that way.
Take a look at the people in history who have actually held this type
of power.  They were not happy people.  Most assuredly they were not
at peace with themselves.  Why?  Because they were driven to control
the world totally and absolutely and they could not.  They wanted to
control all men, and yet there remained men who refused to be
controlled.  They could not control the stars.  They still got sick.
They still had to die."

In other words, to paraphrase Mick Jagger, "you can't get everything
you want.  It is impossible.  Gunaratana continues,

"Luckily there is another option.  You can learn to control your mind,
to step outside of this endless cycle of desire and aversion.  You can
learn not to want what you want, to recognize desires but not be
controlled by them."

Let me repeat that last sentence:  to recognize desires but not be
controlled by them.  That is an enlightened definition of freedom.
Freedom is not winning, it is not gathering all the money and all the
power and the right house and the right mate and going to the right
schools.  In fact the desire for those things, the rearranging of our
lives so that we maximize the chances of getting those things, that is
slavery.  We are enslaved to our desires.  We become free, from an
enlightened perspective, when we realize that it is our desires that
have enslaved us, and attempt to overcome them.

Let's go back to the still small voice.  In the Elijah story, the
still small voice talking after the earthquake wind and fire was God
telling the prophet what to do.  Let's contrast that with two other
small voices.  The small voice of the reading we did earlier, is the
voice telling you you've got to have more, got to do better, got to
pursue winning above ll else.  That voice gets so much reinforcement
in our culture that it might not be a small voice after all.  It might
really be the roar of the crowd.

What I want to urge is that if you put those voices aside, if you can
be focused on the present and really pay attention to what's going on
in your mind and in your life, you can hear another small voice that
says that winning isn't everything, and that your desire for winning
is the root of unhappiness.  Let us try to listen to this small voice,
to keep ourselves mindful and focused on the real things on the
playing fields of life.

Amen.