Text Box: Interfaith Celebration Gathering Sunday, December 1, 2002 Interfaith Celebration Gathering Service Service agenda: Opening Prayer Readings Message OPENING PRAYER: Dear Creator God, Mother and Father of us all, Please help me learn to love myself. I ask all this knowing in my heart of hearts that it is already granted. Amen READINGS: Buddha said: “There are five meditations. “The first meditation is the meditation of love in which you must so adjust your heart that you long for the weal and welfare of all beings, including the happiness of your enemies.” “The second meditation is the meditation of pity, in which you think of all beings in distress, vividly representing in your imagination their sorrows and anxieties so as to arouse a deep compassion for them in your soul.” “The third meditation is the meditation of joy in which you think of the prosperity of others and rejoice with their rejoicings.” “The fourth meditation is the meditation on impurity, in which you consider the evil consequences of corruption, the effects of sin and diseases. How trivial often the pleasure of the moment and how fatal its consequences!” “The fifth meditation is the meditation on serenity in which you rise above love and hate, tyranny and oppression, wealth and want, and regard your own fate with impartial calmness and perfect tranquility. Gospel of Buddha, Chapter LX. Amitâbha, verses 19—24, Dr. Paul Carus MESSAGE: Conversation with Buddha Okay, Buddha, the deep caring and compassion for others you mentioned in your second meditation is not really hard to do, most of the time, that is. Once we realize that others are merely an extension of ourselves and that we are as interconnected as two limbs on the same tree on which God is the trunk, caring about what happens to our sisters and brothers becomes easier. There are a few thought patterns that get in the way of our compassion, though. One of them is when we mistakenly think that others deserve the bad things that happen to them. Another comes about when we are so needy or self-absorbed that we cannot even pay attention to the pain of others. As to feeling joy for others as you suggest in your third meditation, Buddha, if we work really hard at it, we can be happy for others and rejoice in their good fortune. That is, we can rejoice in the good fortune of others as long as our own needs are met. But, when we are needy or in want, we have a harder time rejoicing when others get the things and experiences we feel we lack. As to your fourth meditation, Buddha, we have learned that doing bad things sets up a ripple effect that eventually comes back to hurt us. It is only when we feel needy that we do bad things to others in the false hope that we can bring them down to our level so we will not feel so needy. With respect to your fifth meditation, rising above love and hate, tyranny and oppression, wealth and want sounds like a good thing to do, Buddha, but the individual aspects of the first part of this meditation are really tough. We can rise above valuing wealth or being needy by healing our inner child. When we give our inner child the loving and attention we missed as children, we will no longer seek material things or attention and love from all around us to fill up the holes in our souls caused by our inner child’s neediness. Loving ourselves and changing our inner child’s neediness to fulfillment also helps us to comply with the second, third and fourth meditations. As to rising above tyranny and oppression, we need to learn that no tyrant or oppressor can tyrannize or oppress us if we understand that we are free. Our souls will forever remain unfettered regardless of what happens to us. This means that we can make a conscious choice to be free regardless of the external circumstances in which we find ourselves. We can make a conscious choice to see external circumstances such as chronic illness, imprisonment, and tyranny as gifts that help us learn our life lessons. These external circumstances only define and control our reality if we allow them to do so. Rising above love and hate means that we rise above the need for loving and hating; it does not mean that we have to give up loving others or being loved by them. What it means is that we need to rise above needing to be loved. We do this by loving ourselves enough to fill up the holes in our souls that drive our desperate need to be loved. When we love ourselves, feel compassion for others, and allow no one to oppress us in our minds, we also rise above the need to hate. When we turn our lives over to God, we can then complete the second part of your fifth meditation, Buddha, the part that tells us to regard our own fate with impartial calmness and perfect tranquility. In order to turn our lives over to God, we first need to trust God with all our hearts and all our minds. When we allow God to be in charge of our lives, we no longer have a need to control what happens to us and can regard our fate with perfect calmness and tranquility. At this point, Buddha, I am sure you have noticed that we skipped over your first meditation. Well, there was a reason for this lapse. We first needed to understand all of the rest of them in order to come back and understand how to adjust our hearts so that we long for the happiness of all beings, including our enemies and those who do harm to us. We needed to learn to feel compassion for others, to rejoice in their joy, knowing that we are interconnected with them. We needed to be able to see our enemies as other branches on the tree whose trunk is God. We can no more hate them than we can hate our own nose or one of our arms. And we needed to see that the basis for all of our healing is healing the wounds of childhood that we carried with us as we grew, wounds that directed our actions as adults. We needed to recognize that our neediness springs from the attention, loving, and guidance we missed as children that created holes in our souls that we try to fill (to no avail) with relationships and material things. No matter how wonderful our parents were, they were not perfect, so all of us have holes in our souls, holes that we need to fill with our own love. For it is only in learning to love ourselves that we can learn to love God and others. May the God of love add a blessing to these humble words. AMEN © 2002 Rev. S. Suzanne Fisher