Sermon

This sermon is prompted by a recently published book called What Really Matters; Searching for Wisdom in America. It is the chronicle of a man named Tony Schwartz, co-author, with Donald Trump, of The Art of the Deal. It tells of his dissatisfaction with the success and prominence that book brought him and follows his search for deeper values.

The first section focuses on his exploration of meditation. He wound up with no doubts whatever about the authenticity of the higher consciousness that could be gained, but with troubling questions about its adequacy. ¡°In 1985,¡± he writes, ¡°a survey of gurus and spiritual teachers in America found that thirty-four of thirty-nine who were not celibate admitted to at least occasional sexual relationships with one or more students. . . . Serious allegations of abuse of power--nearly all sexual or financial--have been lodged against the leaders of more than a dozen of the largest spiritual communities in America during the past decade¡± (p. 136). As another individual put it, ¡°There is no absolute assurance that enlightenment necessitates the moral virtue of a person. . . . The enlightened are on an equal footing with the ignorant in the struggle against their own evil--the only difference being that the enlightened person knows the truth, and has no excuse for betraying it¡± (Stan Trout, p. 137).

This brings to mind two quotations, one from Scripture and one from Swedenborg. The Scriptural one, our text, is from the end of the ninth chapter of John. Jesus has given sight to a man who had been blind since birth. The Pharisees have questioned this man, who has testified that he does not know whether Jesus is a sinner or not, he only knows that whereas he was blind, now he can see. The whole episode ends with Jesus saying the some of the Pharisees, ¡°If you were blind, you would have no sin, but now you claim to see. Therefore your sin remains.¡± ¡°The enlightened person knows the truth, and has no excuse for betraying it.¡±

The Lord is not saying that enlightenment is a bad thing. He says in fact that he has come to give sight to the blind. The opening chapter of John describes him as the ¡°true light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world.¡± He is saying that the price of enlightenment is responsibility. To put it another way, enlightenment is not an end in itself. To quote another of the people Tony Schwartz talked with, ¡°A lot of people have confused . . . the powers to control body, emotions and mind . . . with spirituality. But [these powers] can be an ego trap. A saint is a person who does what he says¡± (Elmer Green, p. 137).

The doctrinal quotation is one I have been particularly fond of for a long time, but had never connected with the particular issue of the practice of meditation. It is from Divine Love and Wisdom 258, and reads as follows:

By birth, we are all gifted with the ability to discern what is true even to that deepest level where angels of the third heaven are. . . . So we can become rational as our minds are raised up. . . . If the love of our volition is not raised at the same time, then no matter how high the wisdom of our minds may rise, it eventually falls back to the level of its love.

Or as one of Tony Schwartz¡¯s sources put it, ¡°You can¡¯t take an end run around the foibles and flaws of personality merely by transcending¡± (Elmer Green, p. 154).

The fundamental question is the one posed by Mr. Schwartz¡¯s title. ¡°What really matters?¡± One of last month¡¯s sermons had a couple of paragraphs that bear on this, and I should like to quote them here. The subject was Swedenborg¡¯s move away from the concept of a ¡°theocentric heaven.¡±

What is this all about? The ¡°theocentric heaven¡± is the concept of heaven as the ¡°beatific vision¡±--the image of the individual caught up in bliss in contemplation of the glory of the divine. It points a path away from the world we live in, away from consciousness of our relationships with each other. It assumes that when we love the Lord our God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, there is no room left for loving the neighbor as ourselves.

Swedenborg¡¯s lively, interactive heaven, full of people in communities bound together by ties of mutual affection and understanding, is radically different. We may not realize that for many people, the word ¡°spiritual¡± simply does not have this kind of substantial, almost earthy content. It still suggests the visionary, a kind of other-worldly escape from the cares (and perhaps the responsibilities) of this world.

In a sense, it is easy to say ¡°what really matters,¡± or ¡°what matters most.¡±¡± This was the heart of the question of the scribe who came to Jesus and asked him which was the greatest commandment of all. The answer was clear and definite, that there were two commandments on which everything else depended, love of God and love of the neighbor. The only problem is that there seems to be a wide range of opinion as to what kinds of behavior actually constitute those loves.

What the commandments do, though, is draw the boundaries within which we should look, so to speak. They tell us that what really matters is how we treat each other--each other and ourselves, since these two are inseparable. They tells us that the principles that should govern our treatment of each other and ourselves come from beyond ourselves, that it is the Lord and not we who actually defines what ¡°love¡± is.

It is no accident that our Adoramus, our declaration of faith, ends with the words, ¡°This is his commandment, that we love one another as he hath loved us.¡± The two great commandments are together in this one sentence. It starts with the second, that we are to love each other, and then identifies the model of that love as the incarnate Lord, Immanuel, God with us. The source of this wording is the Lord¡¯s discourse at the Last Supper as presented in the Gospel of John (15:12) where a major theme is the nature of Jesus as a manifestation of the Father¡¯s love.

It is in this same discourse that we find the most striking statements about oneness, which often seems to be the primary goal of meditative practice. Time and time again, the highest states of consciousness are described as experiences of the total oneness of all that is, and of total oneness with all that is. No mystic, no one whose meditative practice has touched on the higher levels of consciousness, would have any problem with Jesus¡¯s radical statements that his goal is that we all should be one, even as he and the Father are one (John 17:22).

Perhaps the critical question is how we are to get there. It would seem clear that meditative practice can do no more than give us an experiential picture of the goal. In Swedenborg¡¯s image, we can visit heaven with our minds without taking our hearts with us, but no matter where our minds may travel, as the Lord made very clear, our treasure will be where our hearts are.

The path laid out for us in Scripture seems quite clear. We start by tending to the way we treat each other and ourselves. We make a lifelong commitment to do to others as we would have them do to us. We seek understanding or enlightenment not for its own sake, not for the gratification of the experience, but for the tasks at hand. The task immediately at hand may from time to time be self-understanding, but again self-understanding is not an end in itself. If I discover why I react negatively in some situations, why I shirk some responsibilities, but do nothing about that behavior, I am one of those who claims to see, and whose sin therefore remains. ¡°The enlightened person knows the truth, and has no excuse for betraying it.¡±

To put it bluntly, I had better not seek enlightenment unless or until I am prepared to accept the responsibilities it may disclose. It is very likely that the upper reaches of the spiritual path call for a daunting measure of selflessness, and that to press beyond our immediate needs may get us in over our heads. Ram Dass, who has a nice gift for the memorable phrase, recognized that people did sometimes get truly helpful illumination from psychedelics, but came to grief when this induced them to keep using the drugs. His advice was, ¡°When you get the message, hang up.¡±

We open our Sunday School devotions with words from the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm, ¡°Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.¡± The Word is not given just for our intellectual delight, simply for our heads, but for our feet, for our path.

What is that path? In the Gospels, the Lord presents himself as the good shepherd. This is a rich image of the divine providence that is over all our moments. We have the assurance that if we respond faithfully to the circumstances we encounter, our path will lead out of the darkness and into the light. Life itself will raise the critical questions. Of course there can be delight in learning, and if we wait to learn something until the need actually arises, we will find ourselves perpetually unprepared. But as we ¡°overlearn,¡± as we look ahead, so to speak, we can always be asking the good Swedenborgian question, ¡°What is the use of this? What is it saying to my feet?¡± ¡°A saint is a person who does what he says.¡±

Amen.