Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

The Cross Is Empty and Always Has Been

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cross of matchesEvery summer growing up I attended Vacation Bible School at our Presbyterian church in downtown Denver. We would do crafts, sing songs, memorize scripture verses about God’s love, and try to cream each other in games of dodge ball in the church basement.

One summer one of our craft projects was to make a cross out of matches. We took partially burned matches and pasted them onto a cross-shaped piece of cardboard. Then our teacher had us glue the cardboard cross to a piece of contact-paper-covered plywood and told us to find an appropriate scripture passage to write on it.

I loved doing crafts, and this project was right up my alley. Painstakingly, I pasted my matches onto the cardboard, lining them up neatly, then glued the cross onto the backing. Then I thumbed through my Bible to find just the right scripture verse.

I was excited when I landed on the perfect verse. I carefully wrote it out, and proudly took my project to my teacher to show her.

As soon as she looked at it I could tell by her expression that I had done something wrong. She didn’t say what it was, but there seemed to be a problem with the verse I had chosen: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”Continue Reading

Scandalous Halos and the Incarnation

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Nativity icon
What a difference it would make if we asserted the sacredness of the entire cosmos.

A couple of years ago, while sitting in the balcony of a church waiting for a concert to begin, I was pondering a mural of the Nativity that was painted on the back wall of the chancel.

In the painting Joseph and Mary were kneeling beside the infant Jesus who was lying in the manger. Nearby were a donkey and a cow, and off to the right the magi. But more than the figures themselves, it was the halos that caught my attention, halos that only appeared around the heads of Mary, Joseph and Jesus.

“That’s exactly the problem,” I thought to myself. The mural, placed in the position of the holy of holies, was inadvertently broadcasting the very belief that has led to so much devastation and suffering on our planet: the belief that humans alone carry the divine light, and not just that, but only certain humans.

Christmas is the season in which Christians celebrate the Incarnation, the Divine breaking into our earthly existence, taking on human form and the fullness of human experience. Yet over the course of my life, as a result of my own spiritual explorations and experiences, I have come to believe that traditional Christian understandings of the Incarnation obscure its radical implications.

Continue Reading

Of Crosses and Crocuses

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of crosses and crocuses
There are two realities available to us: imperial reality and divine reality.

Last week on March 21st Kip and I celebrated our 21st anniversary. These last couple of weeks I’ve been recalling our wedding, which was a small, intimate gathering of immediate family and close friends. The ceremony was nontraditional. We wrote our own vows, friends and family members sang and played music, read poems, did liturgical dance and at the end of the ceremony each person came forward and gave us a blessing as they placed ribbons across our shoulders.

It was a wonderful gift to be showered with the well-wishes of our loved ones, and later Kip wove the ribbons of blessing into a wall hanging that hangs in our home to this day.

Of the many blessings we received that day, two stand out clearly in my mind. The first was, “May you have many crosses to bear.”Continue Reading

One Christ Is Not Enough

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It’s about time.

A few years ago, my spouse, Kip, and I signed up for a retreat in Estes Park, Colorado led by Thich Nhat Hanh. I have long admired this Vietnamese Buddhist master who, with his quiet, humble demeanor, teaches that mindfulness and peace can be cultivated in every moment and every act.

We arrived in the Denver airport and boarded the chartered bus to the YMCA of the Rockies. Once there, we settled into our room, then headed for the opening gathering, joining a thousand others who had traveled from far and wide. Finding a place on the floor of the large convocation hall, we sat, waiting expectantly for Thich Nhat Hanh to appear and give the opening talk.

After awhile, one of the brown-robed monks with shaven head approached the microphone and began reading a letter from Thay—as Thich Nhat Hanh is affectionately called. It was a beautiful, loving letter. But I was confused. Why was he communicating with us in writing rather than just addressing us in person? Was this customary in Buddhist retreats?

As the monk continued reading, it sank in. Thich Nhat Hanh would not be joining us. He was hospitalized in Boston, receiving treatment for a lung infection. His community—the nuns and monks from France and their sister monasteries in New York and California—would lead the retreat.

Even though I was concerned for Thay’s wellbeing, this was an immense disappointment. I’d been looking forward to this retreat for months. But I came to a reluctant acceptance. Perhaps this was the retreat’s first teaching: to release my attachment to something I had desired so much.

The nuns and monks did a beautiful job. They gave insightful and moving Dharma talks, and although they surely must have felt trepidation about having to fill Thay’s shoes, their sincerity, the depth of their presence, and the authenticity of their teaching was an inspiration. Over the course of our days together we coalesced into a supportive community, sharing our meals in silence, joining in our small group conversations, accepting the situation and one another with grace and humor. In the absence of the revered master, the community discovered its strength.

The experience made us all more aware of how we so often project onto a single leader the capacities that lie within each of us. Had we really come to see a Buddhist super star? Or had we gathered to become a community—practicing mindfulness, compassion and peace?

As though to express the collective shift we’d undergone, at our joyous closing celebration a spontaneous dance erupted as Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” played over the sound system. (“If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, and then make a change.”) The energy in the room was extraordinary. Something powerful had been unleashed during that retreat, not despite Thay’s absence, but because of it.

The event became known as the miracle of the Rockies, a story of collective awakening when the master became embodied in the Sangha. The teaching was no longer the purview of one individual; it had become the gift of and to the collective.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the retreat had been billed: One Buddha Is Not Enough.

One of the most meaningful moments for me personally was when I was initiated into the Five Mindfulness Trainings—practices that give concrete expression to the Buddha’s teachings about right understanding and true love.

Sister Pine, the nun who facilitated our small group, assigned Dharma names to everyone in her group who had adopted the trainings. The morning she passed out the certificates she gestured me aside to quietly whisper something to me. She told me that the Dharma name she had heard for me was Living Christ of the Heart, but she didn’t know if I would be able to use it publicly, so on my certificate she wrote Joyful Gift of the Heart. When she told me, she emphasized the word Living, repeating it emphatically to convey to me that the name she’d heard didn’t refer to something or someone in the past, but to a present, living reality.

I have held the Dharma name at arms length. There’s so much baggage associated with the term “Christ.” It can so easily be misconstrued—becoming a mine field for the ego. After all, how many mentally unstable people have claimed themselves to be the Christ, sometimes with catastrophic consequences?

And therein lies the problem: people believing themselves to be the Christ, as though there can only be one. In fact, the belief in one’s specialness—that one is somehow set apart from the rest of humanity—is an indication that the mind is still operating from an ego perspective, not a Christ perspective.

As I understand it at this point in my life, Christ isn’t a person but a state of being, a state of dwelling in the reality of one’s oneness with the All. Yes, it is a state of being Jesus inhabited, and one he wanted others to experience as well.

We have now reached a point where our collective survival may well depend on all of us awakening to our Christ nature, understanding that it the fullest expression of what it is to be human.

This, I believe, is Christianity’s new calling, metamorphosing into a religion that helps awaken the Christ capacity in us all, just as Thay wished to awaken the Buddha capacity in those of us who gathered on retreat.

While I was at the retreat that summer I bought a watch designed by Thich Nhat Hanh. In the center is the word “it’s” in Thay’s calligraphy, and in the four quadrants is written the word “now.” I’m sure he intended it to be a constant reminder to be in the moment, present to the eternal now.

And yet, against the backdrop of my experience at the retreat I hear it also as a proclamation that we all have the capacity to be Buddhas, that we are all the Christ we’ve been waiting for. The time for us to awaken to that truth is now.

The Silent Tomb

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All I heard was silence.

Last week, in observance of Good Friday, I posted a blog titled The Cross Speaks, listening to the story of the tree that was destroyed in order to make a cross. This week, in observance of Easter, I considered writing one titled The Tomb Speaks. I found myself wondering what the empty tomb in the Christian resurrection story might have to say to us.

So I allowed myself to go there. In my imagination I entered a dark, empty chamber hewn out of the side of a hill. It was cool. I was alone. I sat down on the ground to listen for the words that the tomb might want to speak, but all I heard was silence. The silence was deep, and it was filled with wisdom that was beyond words. It’s wisdom was of a mystery, of an unfathomable transformation. It was not a chamber of endings, as we usually believe it to be, but a container for profound metamorphosis.

I realized then how hard we try to ward off the tomb’s silence with our trumpet voluntaries and fill its emptiness with our certainties and dogmas. But Mystery cannot be defined, its nature cannot be grasped.

This past Easter Sunday, I was taking an afternoon walk in the woods with some friends along Ridley Creek outside of Philadelphia, and towards the end of our walk I stopped for a moment, standing next to the creek as the brilliant late-day sunlight slanted through the trees. I soon found myself opening to that state of Oneness in which there is no barrier between myself and the All, between the “living” and the “dead”. I felt the presence of dear ones who have left this world — the familiar energy signatures of their love — and felt myself one with the trees, the creek, the birds, the sunlight reflecting off the water. The beauty of it moved me to tears.

It was a moment in which I perceived the mysterious truth that the empty tomb in its silence taught. In resurrection it isn’t death that is vanquished, for death is the natural culmination of life, but rather it is our fear of death, our misunderstanding of death that is overcome. This, I believe, is what the early Christians meant when they said that death had lost its sting.

May that incomprehensible Mystery that is beyond the reach of all our words hold you in its gentle, beautiful, silent truth.

The Cross Speaks

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Not long ago I was thriving on a hill in Galilee. My roots reached deep into the rocky soil.  Sunlight shone upon my leaves, the wind danced though my branches.  In the winter, rain fell cool upon my body, seeping into the soil of my thirsty roots. I drank gladly of that living water.

I witnessed the dawn of each day. At night I reached up to the Moon in her silent cycles, and the slow swirling of stars.

My body shuddered when the thunder cracked. I stood naked in the raging storm—bending with the tempest so as not to break—and when it passed I held the birds, singing in my branches.

I knew the breath of life.

But then they came for me.  Not with swords, but axes, and I was silent, like a lamb led to the slaughter.

Half of my body is still there on that distant hill, decaying in the soil of Galilee.  The other half they dragged here for their tortuous display.

The emperor isn’t satisfied with what he already has. He wants more land, more wealth, more power. Lives have to be sacrificed.

Golgotha they call it. Place of the skull. As if it were only humans whose broken bodies hang here.

Entire forests of my kin are destroyed because humans are never content with what they have, with what they are.  You would call it genocide if the victims looked like you.

I have a question for you.  Why are you dissatisfied?  Why is nothing ever enough for you?  Why are you always striving for more?

Can you not stop for once in your anxious striving and just let yourselves be still? Can you not feel yourselves rooted in the Earth? Can you not let the miracle of the sunlight, the rain, the soil, the song of the birds and the dance of the wind be enough for you?

Do you not understand that your task on this Earth is to witness its magnificence, to delight in the wonder of existence, to be the I Am-ness—the awake presence that marvels at the unfolding of life?

You are living in a falsehood, believing your destiny is separate from my own life.  I am the other one sacrificed on this windswept hill, and I suppose that has never even occurred to you.

You seem to believe you can destroy us and not destroy yourselves as well. But consider this: the man’s blood that even now is seeping into my grain carries the oxygen once breathed out by my leaves.  Are you so blind?

The one you call Jesus tried to show you what power truly is—not domination and violence, but healing, acceptance, compassion, Life.  He wanted you to see that you don’t need riches because you are already enough.  The way the birds of the air are enough and the lilies of the field are enough.

But you remained asleep in your dream of separateness and striving, and now the Earth is hanging on the cross of your empires and your egos.

We are weary, so weary.  We cannot endure your illusion much longer. It is right that you have sung “Hosanna,” for it means “save us.”

I implore you to sing it again from your heart. Sing it for yourselves. Sing it for all of us.

Sing it for me.

Just Sow

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By not attaching to results we help release abundance.

Many years ago, when I was living in the Andes of Ecuador as a Peace Corps Volunteer, one day I was accompanying a Quichua farmer as he went out to  sow barley. When we got to his field high up on a hillside, he loaded the barley seed into a metal canister he had that had a crank on the side with a mechanism that flung the seed out in all directions.  After he’d loaded up the canister, he started walking along the edge of his field, turning the crank as he walked. The seed went everywhere, some of it far beyond the edges of the field, into the weeds and the rocks and the road, and my first thought was, “Oh no! He’s wasting seed!” But he didn’t seem to care about that.  He just kept walking deliberately, back and forth across his field, letting the barley fly where it would, interested only in letting a good bit of it land in the fertile soil where it would be able to root in and grow.

Watching him work, I was reminded of one of Jesus’ teachings. He once told a parable about a sower who went out to sow seed. Some of the seed fell onto the path where it was eaten by birds, some fell on rocky soil, and some on weed-infested soil, none of which, obviously, bore any fruit. But some of the seed fell on fertile soil and produced a bumper crop.

I had always heard the parable interpreted in its traditional — rather judgmental — way, as an analogy for different types of people, some of whom are receptive to divine wisdom and some who aren’t. But watching the Quichua farmer sow his seed that day, I came to realize that Jesus was probably making a point about the sower as much as about the soil, encouraging people to live their lives as the sower sows the seed, casting their gifts out into the world with abandon and not being preoccupied with the outcome.

The term non-attachment has found its way into the mainstream, usually within Buddhist contexts although it was at the heart of Jesus’ teaching as well, and this parable of his makes me wonder how often we hold back on sharing our gifts because we are overly attached to the results. Oftentimes, if we aren’t entirely sure our gifts will be well received or will bear fruit we may not share them at all, and in our attempts to direct and control the outcome of our efforts, we end up withholding the best of ourselves.

It can be discouraging, after all, when you offer something and it comes to naught; it can make you want to hold back the next time around. But Jesus’ parable and the lesson of my Quichua friend encourage me to offer what I have anyway, knowing it’s not my place to try to dictate the outcome of my efforts or try to control onto what sort of soil they might land.

It isn’t always discouragement, though, that gets in the way of us sharing ourselves freely.  Sometimes our withholding comes out of a scarcity mentality.  We can fall into the trap of believing that if we “squander” our gifts in unreceptive environments, we’ll somehow deplete our supply.  That isn’t possible of course, because, unlike the farmer whose seed is in fact finite, our innate gifts flow from an abundant, infinite Source, so the more we let them flow, the more they flow.

Letting go of results can be tremendously liberating, and over time I’ve come to see that the only way the Universe can unleash abundance in and through my life is for me to live like the sower, releasing all my attachment to the outcome.  The only thing that’s asked of me is that I just sow.

 

 

Looking Out for One Another

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Do we have the courage to bless and share?

One day I was riding the bus back home from Center City. We had pulled over at a stop to let some passengers on, and it was taking much longer than usual. Curious, I looked out the window and saw that a couple of people were trying to help a woman onto the bus.

When the woman boarded, wearing dark glasses and carrying a white cane, I understood the delay. She sat down up front, and the woman following her sat down next to me.

“We’ve got to look out for one another,” she told me. It seemed the driver hadn’t noticed the blind woman, so this woman and her husband had intervened.

Let me pause to interject an important contextual note. The blind woman was white. The woman sitting next to me was Black. I’m white. None of which should matter, except that in a society still divided along lines of race, it does.

“We all come from one Creator you know,” she continued. “Some people think God’s a man, some people think God’s a woman.” She waved her hand as if to dismiss such a trivial question, her enormous bling ring catching the light. “Doesn’t matter.”

Then she laughed, her face beaming. “Or maybe we’re all descended from the apes.” From the same apes, that is.

“We’re all in the same boat,” I replied, offering up my feeble cliche and marveling at the incredible encounters one can have on public transportation.

“That’s right,” she said.

Then she started telling me a story. She ran into a woman once who had gone through some terrible struggles. She was down on her luck with no place to go and no money. My bus companion had only forty dollars herself, but she took out twenty and gave it to the woman.

Later on that day, something drew her attention to a listing of winning lottery numbers. She noticed one that she was sure she had played recently. She went fishing for her ticket and sure enough, she’d won $250. She was certain she never would have discovered it if she hadn’t given the twenty away.

“I always tell my friends, ‘Now I’m not sayin’ you should go out and play the lottery!'” She laughed again. “It’s not like that. God does something different every time.”

As we spoke, I remembered the story about Jesus wanting to feed a hungry crowd out in the middle of nowhere and asking the disciples how much food they had. Five loaves of bread and two fish. Enough for the thirteen of them and their inner circle of friends to have a meager meal, but nowhere near enough for a crowd of thousands.

Jesus seemed completely immune to their scarcity mentality. He took the bread, blessed it, broke it, shared it. His trust, expressed through that act of generosity, unleashed their collective abundance. The hungry masses were fed.

Some people look at that story as a demonstration of Jesus’ greatness as a miracle worker, but I see it differently. For one thing, I don’t believe Jesus was at all interested in demonstrating his greatness. If he had he would have been a charlatan, not a spiritual teacher. Instead, what I think this “feeding of the multitude” is about is Jesus embodying a teaching: this is how it’s done. When the crowds are hungry and it seems there’s not enough to go around, that’s precisely when you truly need to bless, to share.

Our instinctual inclination—especially in the midst of bleak economic circumstances—is to contract our circle of concern, curse the hungry masses and hang onto whatever we might have. Lean times can make for mean times.

Or, they can make for the most miraculous times imaginable—when acts of selfless generosity turn the whole scarcity storyline on its head.

It wasn’t long before the bus reached the stop where my dharma teacher and her husband were getting off. We wished each other well as we parted ways. But her teaching hasn’t left me: we’ve got to look out for one another.