Jim Sherblom's Blog, page 5

Spiritual Audacity Radio Interview

Here is the link to my Spiritual Audacity radio #interview: https://tinyurl.com/ybgxkx9n  @revjimsherblom @prn_radio #spirituality #podcast #spiritualjunkie #listen #resist

Spiritual Audacity radio interview

Next Thursday August 17, 2017  from 3 pm to 3:58 pm Eleanor LcCain will interview me about my new book SPIRITUAL AUDACITY: Six Disciplines of Human Flourishing on her “All Together Now” radio program on the progressive radio network (www.prn.fm)

You can listen to it live at:

http://prn.fm (on your computer)

http://prn.fm/mobile (on your mobile device)

@PRN_Radio-http:twitter.com/prn radio (on Twitter)

http://facebook.com/PRNfm  (on Facebook)

Or listen to the archive of the show later at http://prn.fm/?s=LeCain

Heaven and Hell

So what about heaven and hell after death? What role do they play in human flourishing?

When my kids were little, my parents would sometimes come up to spend the weekend with us in Concord. On Sunday mornings, we would attend First Parish in Concord, and of course, my parents would come with us. I remember one particularly beautiful Sunday morning standing on the church’s front steps with my father following worship.

“How many people attended worship this morning?” Dad asked.

“About four hundred or so,” I replied.

“And none of them believe in hell or eternal damnation?”

“We are universalists,” I said, “so none believe in hell or damnation.”

“So why don’t they stay home on Sunday and read the New York Times?” he questioned.

“UUs come for spiritual community,” I answered, “neither for fear of hell nor lusting after heaven.”

The religious metaphors of heaven and hell are, I think, usually intended as aids to devotion. These concepts are borrowed from mystics who describe heaven and hell as a human psychological state in the eternal now. These metaphors are often then used to encourage moral behavior and, perhaps appropriately, provide comfort during the grieving process. They can serve a very useful purpose in that regard.  But they are metaphors for states of being.

If heaven and hell exist, and I think they do, it is in the here and now.  To concretize heaven and hell as only in the hereafter seems to be misusing metaphysical concepts in ways that can be as harmful as they are useful. An eternity in a static heaven never held much appeal for me. It may sound like heresy to some Christians, but I don’t think there is an eternally unchanging, unchallenging place called heaven following death, at least not as generally depicted. Even if such a heaven did exist, I wouldn’t want to go there. And I am certain our loving God doesn’t send anyone to hell in eternal damnation.

So why do so many people chase after these illusions? The Sunni Muslims’ promise of twenty-one virgins for religious martyrs seems to my ears preposterous. Even the Quran declares heaven is open to everyone, though allows for the possibility of a time in a post life correctional sphere for those who die unworthy of heaven.

The Hindu notion of returning in another life as a plant or an animal seems no more than a misplaced metaphor. Even if there were life after death or some form of reincarnation, this is the only life we know of from our own direct experience. So lay Buddhists working and praying to improve their lot only in their future lives seems to misrepresent the fundamental experience of the spiritual journey.

Time is an illusion. Spiritual transcendence, if achieved at all, is achieved in the eternal now. Spiritual mystics from every religious tradition affirm heaven is accessible in the here and now, not only hereafter, not only after death. These teachings all point at a deeper mystery of human existence: how we live our lives matters very much as we seek deep, transcendent living in the eternal now rather than in some postulated hereafter.

As much as possible, one ought to always be respectful of long-established religious beliefs. But there is a limit to how far faith can exceed reason and experience. Beyond that limit, tradition becomes a dead corpse.  Mystics seek the spark of the divine.

If we enjoy a good meal or an intimate touch, these are to be appreciated as gifts of this world. This practice of remembering or being mindful of the good things in life is an important part of becoming fully aware. Buddha’s non-delusional mindfulness leads us to cultivate a clear comprehension of what we are doing in every moment and why. Sometimes when walking in the woods or by the sea, or when sitting in mindfulness, meditation brings me to that state of ecstasy.

During the times of our life when we are students or householders, these mindful moments of ecstasy may be as close to awakening as we can come. At certain stages, we are more grounded in worldly matters than spiritual matters. We must be fully engaged with the world and the responsibilities, pleasures, difficulties, joys, and sorrows that come with it.

Spiritual maturity requires a shift in perspective. Tradition tells us that following his enlightenment, Siddhartha, the Buddha, spent forty-two days contemplating his transition from worldly to spiritual concerns. This foreshadows Jesus’s forty days spent in the wilderness, being tempted by Satan with worldly pleasures and power. Afterwards, he was able to take up his career, focused as it was upon spiritual concerns, and he lived faithfully between two worlds. These traditions show it takes time to consolidate a change of perspective from worldly to spiritual concerns.

This is the purpose of deep meditation—to transform our feelings, our thoughts, and our hearts. Having made peace with our embodied state, the Buddha teaches us to make peace with our feelings. The Buddha distinguishes six types of feelings: pleasant worldly feelings and pleasant spiritual feelings, unpleasant worldly feelings and unpleasant spiritual feelings, and neutral worldly feelings and neutral spiritual feelings.

Beyond regulating our body and feelings, the Buddha taught us how to regulate our mind. From the Zen Buddhists, I learned this spiritual practice of achieving equanimity through deep meditation; from the Taoists, concentration through focusing my mind. I learned to become like Budai, the impish so-called Laughing Buddha archetype, to achieve enlightenment through my natural inclinations.

My mystical teachers built upon the inherent, intense focus and tenacity that I first experienced growing up; playing marbles; surviving Yale; and becoming a successful entrepreneur, investor, and parish minister. Like Mr. Miyagi having Daniel wax his car in The Karate Kid, my teachers helped prepare my own nature for enlightenment through the discipline of fifty years of seemingly unrelated activities.

My enhanced concentration allowed me to overcome inevitable obstacles in my path, including sensual desires, aversion, boredom, anxiety, and doubt. Through spiritual practices conducive to my own nature and temperament, I learned how to remain awakened. When these obstacles burn away, peace and vitality remain, leaving a greater sense of purpose for your life. Reality is seen finally for what it is. And it is a thing of beauty

Discipline Six: Awakening

Seeking direct experience, but mindful of my physical limitations, I found myself on a long flight to India on New Year’s Eve. I was in search of enlightenment, knowledge, gnosis, wisdom, insight, oneness, ecstasy, and awakening—all terms used to point toward that spark of the divine which feels like salvation in one religious tradition or another.

Plato offered one of the most cited metaphors of this spiritual state of clarity in his allegory of the cave. He describes a group of people imprisoned in a cave since childhood, chained in such a way that a fire burns brightly behind them and casts shadows on the wall before them. Talking among themselves, they come to understand what is happening out of their range of sight simply by paying attention to the shadows on the wall. This is the only reality they have ever known.  Then one prisoner breaks free, and his reality is changed forever. As this former prisoner’s eyes adjust to the sunlight beyond the cave, allowing him to see all the beauty of the real world, he is struck with awe and delight.

This is what it means to momentarily glimpse enlightenment, to suddenly see directly that which has only ever been surmised before. We live most of our lives in the shadows of reality. Many cannot see beyond the cave of our constructed reality. Others simply refuse to believe any other reality exists, even if we catch a glimpse in our peripheral vision. It is too scary to conceive of a bigger reality than that which we have always known.

So this former prisoner returns to his mates, explains what he has seen, and encourages them to join him on the journey. Few will. In fact, many people will disbelieve, perhaps even seek to kill or dismiss the person carrying this new message.  But a few will always be willing to see. The Buddha’s Middle Path brought him inner clarity and enlightenment, so he declared himself awake. Then he taught his wisdom about the co-arising interdependence of all realities to all who would listen.

Sufis drink neither alcohol nor caffeine yet grow intoxicated with the sweetness of divine mystery and stumble forth to dance with the beloved. The goal becomes mystical union with the divine. As the fourteenth-century Sufi poet Hafiz wrote (in a Daniel Ladinsky translation): “God and I have become like two giant fat people living in a tiny boat. We keep bumping into each other and laughing.” Such can be a mystic’s experience of awakening to union with the divine.

In Europe during the so-called Middle Ages, Jewish mystics employed the wisdom of Kabbalah to achieve mystical union with God. Christian mystics practiced the presence of God, giving us spiritual practices—such as perpetual praying, the dark night of the soul, and the incredible lightness of being—that can lead us into union with divine mystery. Sufis practice love’s surprising joy. All three Abrahamic mystical traditions seem to point to this state of being, which is described as beyond understanding.

This is also the awakening sought by the Hindu sadhu and the Zen Buddhist monk. It is what Taoists describe as the perfect yin-yang balance in harmony with life’s core vitality and spirit. Vitality has to do with our life force and spirit with our primordial essence. For many people, myself included, vitality was in ascendency during the first half of my life. It was only after midlife that spirit came into ascendency. Both vitality and spirit seek to remain harmoniously in balance, creating a sense of heaven, even as the balance shifts over a lifetime.

The Buddha taught that each person receives insight according to his or her nature. Some rely on philosophical reasoning. Others draw upon ancient sayings and traditions. And yet others rely upon their direct intuition of the divine mystery. All three function according to our nature.

I discovered for me to truly experience spiritual awakening, I must draw, according to my own nature, from reason, traditions, and direct experience. Until this stage of my life, I had not yet been ready. Given my particular life story, finally by the age of sixty I felt I had lived enough to draw upon my reason, tradition, and experiences to finally discover the nature of deeper spiritual maturity. On my own pathless path, with many teachers, I traveled forth to awaken to divine bliss, to dance with the beloved.

But could I truly awaken without a sangha or spiritual community? Test my thoughts and experiences without an enlightened teacher? For decades, I had followed the path of the independent scholar and practitioner, never actually meeting most of my teachers in person. I possessed many good and valuable books with important insights and had encountered mystics who had taught me along the way. But I had never submitted myself to the discipline of a single master teacher. Would this be enough? Was I finally ready?

The Japanese Zen Buddhist monks had decades earlier shown me the way, set forth in their Rhinoceros Sutra, one of the oldest Buddhist texts, perhaps reflecting the Buddha’s own teaching. In this sutra, early Buddhism describes three different kinds of buddha, or awakened or enlightened beings.

The most famous, the sammasambuddha usually called Gautama Buddha, achieved awakening so he could teach the path to all who followed him. A second kind, a savakabuddha, includes most Buddhists I have ever met. They train in one of the lineages of Gautama Buddha’s followers, relying upon the Three Jewels: the teacher, the traditional teachings, and the spiritual community. A third kind, called a paccekabuddha, arrives at awakening through a spiritual journey of his or her own. To attempt to live into awakening on one’s own requires a certain spiritual audacity, but the pathless path is there. I was following this path.

So I flew to India, arriving in Kolkata on New Year’s Eve to begin 2016 by traveling up the Ganges River with a small group led by a Harvard comparative religion professor. We would journey in the footsteps of the Buddha. This would be the occasion of my enlightenment, my awakening, my coming into spiritual maturity, my bliss.

 

Discipline Five: Mystery

The first mystery is simply that there is a mystery. A mystery that can never be explained or understood. Only encountered from time to time. Nothing is obvious. Everything conceals something else. The Hebrew word for universe Olam comes from the word for hidden. Something of the Holy One is hidden within.  — “Honey From the Rock” by Lawrence Kushner

 My childhood faith was formed within a loving caring small town Baptist community.  But as to the nature of God, more was concealed than revealed.  As young adults Loretta and I chose to raise our kids and anchor our faith within the Unitarian Universalism of First Parish in Concord.  Its broad inclusive affirmation of the worth and dignity of every person, seeking justice, equity and compassion in human relations, and acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations fit our sense of the divine mystery.

But what do I intend to convey with words such as God or divine mystery?  The existential “God is dead” movement was popular among some Protestant theologians when I left the Baptists.  This was the death of the big white omniscient and all powerful “God in the sky when I die” metaphysics.  Such anthropomorphizing of the divine mystery no longer felt culturally appropriate.  It disavowed our participation in divine mystery while disempowering humanity.

Perhaps like quantum physicists, trying to simultaneously describe attributes and actions at the quantum scale, mystical theologians must accept that any comprehensive explanation of the nature of God limits divine mystery to our human understanding.  Any comprehensive description of God is inherently less than fully true and hence in some sense a form of idolatry.  A mystic can speak of their own experiences, or teachings of faith traditions, but neither can fully capture the entirety of that which we mean by divine mystery.

 

Discipline Four: Generosity

Discipline Four of Six: Generosity

My spiritual memoir Spiritual Audacity is built around six spiritual disciplines of which the fourth is generosity.  Is this an important discipline in your spiritual life?

Generous means “freely giving more than is necessary or expected.” So generosity includes the idea of open-handedness, along with a connection to our internal experience and spirituality. . . . Generosity ennobles us; it makes us great souls.”  From The Generosity Path by Mark V. Ewert

How has generosity helped shape your life and well-being?

Generosity takes different forms, depending on our financial circumstances. Jesus expressed this in his story of the widow’s mite. She had very little and therefore could give very little. Yet what she gave was everything, so far beyond the large gifts of the rich man. This is the gift of spiritually transcending scarcity.

Each of us chooses how we will live, and that choice alters our spiritual opportunities. So choose abundance. All religions teach some form of this wisdom. Generosity enhances the joy we receive from living. This has always been true. No matter how rich or poor we are at any point, a generous spirit creates opportunities that scarcity won’t.

Generosity: A generous spirit transforms the soul. Central to practicing generosity is the practice of tithing, to give back to those with a greater need than ours 10 percent of everything we receive. Loretta and I have been practicing generosity, often including tithing, in one form or another over our thirty-six years of married life. Giving generously makes what you keep sweeter.

Once you set your mind upon it, it is so easy to do. It changes your orientation to material things. Loretta and I have been richly blessed, partly because of our attitude toward money and material things but also because of our practice of tithing.

We accept what we do receive with gratitude, recover more quickly from any wounds and sorrows, look with joy to the common good, and practice generosity. We have a happier marriage, are more connected to community, and help bend the arc of the universe toward justice, all by giving away a mere 10 percent! This is a powerful spiritual discipline.

Why not be generous? The average American will have lifetime earnings greater than $1.4 million, so by tithing they can give away $140,000 to make the world better. The average family in this congregation will have a lifetime household income of over $4 million, so we can do three times as much. And some families will have lifetime household incomes three to four times that level.

However, generosity is measured not in the absolute amount we give but rather in its relative proportion and our attitude toward it. We read about people who never earn more than a middle-class income but who adjust their spending so upon their death they leave millions of dollars to what they care about. The spirit of generosity, with an open heart, matters more than the gift.

Spiritual Generosity by Rev. Jim Sherblom is now available for pre-order at amazon.com

Discipline Three: Gratitude

My spiritual memoir Spiritual Audacity is built around six spiritual disciplines of which the third is gratitude.  Is this an important discipline in your spiritual life?  Robert Emmons, PhD, in his book Thanks! says it is key to our health and well being:

Grateful people experience higher levels of positive emotions such as joy, enthusiasm, love, happiness, and optimism. The practice of gratitude as a discipline protects a person from the destructive impulses of envy, resentment, greed, and bitterness.

So what role does gratitude play in your happiness with life?  I love the metaphor of how we see the world in The Joy of Living by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

“Imagine spending your life in a little room with only one locked window so dirty it barely admits any light. You’d probably think the world was a pretty dim and dreary place, full of strangely shaped creatures that cast terrifying shadows against the dirty glass as they passed your room. But suppose one day you spill some water on the window. . . . A little of the dirt that had accumulated on the glass comes away. Suddenly a small patch of light comes through the glass. Curious, you might rub a little harder, and as more dirt comes away, more light streams in. Maybe, you think, the world isn’t so dark and dreary after all. Maybe it’s the window. . . . In truth, you have not changed anything at all. The world, the light, and the people were always there. You just couldn’t see them because your vision was obscured. But now you see it all, and what a difference it makes!”

I would say gratitude transforms us from spiritual consumers to people of faith. This sounds easy. We all know how to practice gratitude, but how often do we actually do it? We are grateful for our loved ones, our children, our friends, blessed things that happen to us. But what beyond these gifts? When does gratitude actually becoem an important spiritual practice?

How many of us can be like Rumi—grateful for the joys of life but also our depressions; grateful for random acts of kindness and also random acts of meanness; grateful for momentary awareness of the breaking dawn but also our accidental micro-aggressions? As Rumi would ask: Do we welcome and entertain them all? Do we recognize they may be preparing us for the people we were born to be?

The dark thought, the shame, the malice—can we meet them at the door laughing, grateful for whatever comes? For this is truly to know the practice of gratitude. Being grateful for whoever comes because each could have been sent as a guide from beyond.

 

Discipline Two

Second Discipline of Six: Surrender

My spiritual memoir Spiritual Audacity is built around six spiritual disciplines of which the second is ego surrender.  Is this an important discipline in your spiritual life?

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they are a crowd of sorrows . . .

—Jalaluddin Rumi (Coleman Barks translation)

How and when does spiritual submission or ego surrender factor into your life today?

Ego Surrender: It is in surrendering the separate ego-self to the greater good of the broader community that we grow spiritually. Each person chooses where and when he or she wishes to be involved in any intentional community. Congregations are an intentional community. But a consumer approach to community seldom meets real spiritual needs.

You may not want to get involved.  You may not like teaching or greeting or singing in the choir or committee work. But when asked, your spiritual discipline could be: “Where does this spiritual community need me most?”

The Sufis taught me the joyous power of surrendering our ego-self to discover the seven richer, deeper selves, which can be discovered through loving compassion, connection, and community. If we bring our gifts for greater good into the congregation, are drawn into service wherever we are most needed, and sacrifice our ego-self through our service, we will be transformed in the process.

A spiritual community can confront, defy, and heal consumerism, classism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other sicknesses of community if we confront them as a faith community. We are more powerful as a community than as individuals. We don’t each get our own way, but we can do it together. This is the power of surrendering to community to discover how to do together what we cannot do alone.

 

Discipline One

Discipline One of Six: Resilience

My spiritual memoir Spiritual Audacity: Six Disciplines for Human Flourishing is built around six spiritual disciplines of which the first is resilience.  Is this an important discipline in your spiritual life?  How has it become or not become the basis of your flourishing?

Resilient people use a well-developed set of skills that help them to control their emotions, attention, and behavior. Self-regulation is important for forming intimate relationships, succeeding at work, and maintaining physical health.

—The Resilience Factor by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatté

How does spiritual resilience factor into your life today?

Resilience: The single most important spiritual practice in my life. Having lived with and through so many difficult circumstances in my life, I have needed to make resilience a core spiritual practice for myself. This is largely about transforming suffering.

One of my teachers compares transforming suffering through resilience to feeding a family from a spoiled dead fish. A dead fish stinks. You want to keep it as far away as possible from your supper. Yet if you compost it in the ground, with lots of water and sunshine, it can become a source of new life to make a meal for all.

Life grows forth from death. No matter how hard we fall or how difficult it may be to recover, even if we want to give up, resilience will always lead us to something good in the end. That dead fish can be transformed into food for the soul through the practice of resilience.

 

Lift up and tell the stories of resilience in your own life.  We all can practice this spiritual discipline, and with practice, we all become better at it.  All will be well.

 

 

October 1987 Crash

I had hungered to be wealthy even when I didn’t become a millionaire before the age of thirty. So after leveraging our debt to buy Genzyme founder’s stock from Sam, then taking Genzyme public in 1986, I borrowed as much as I could on margin to buy yet more Genzyme stock. I believed by taking on margin debt, and raising the value of our Genzyme holdings, though heavily leveraged, we could better reap the fruit of all my hard work.

Loretta asked me how low the stock could go before we lost it all. Genzyme had gone public at $10 per share and traded as high as $16 per share. I told her Genzyme had never traded below $7 as a public company and we could meet any margin calls as long as the stock was above $5.25 per share, which was less than half its current level, and 25% below its lowest price ever. On the other hand if Genzyme went to $30 per share as predicted by analysts we would become wealthy.

Then came the stock market crash of October 1987. For ten days stocks were in free fall with no apparent bottom, each day worse than the day before, Genzyme falling from $16 to $12, $12 to $10, $10 to $7.50, and then for the first time ever below $7 per share. I was deeply scared but there was little I could do. I called our major investors to try and lessen their anxiety.

Genzyme was fundamentally sound. Someone would step in at some point to begin buying again. One large investor said he had seen the reports of my buying stock on margin. He asked the same question my wife had asked. At what point could I not cover the margin call so I would go personally bankrupt? I gave him the same answer. I had given Loretta.

Three days later Genzyme traded at its lowest point, $5.75 per share, and he began aggressively accumulating shares. I called a few weeks later to thank him. He said no problem, he had made an extraordinary profit on Genzyme when the stock rebounded. He thought having a bankrupt CFO might hurt Genzyme and his investment going forward. So complete financial disaster was forestalled by a prudent investor. I learned from this near bankruptcy experience, but did not scale back my appetite for risk, just managed it a lot better.

I learned to better calibrate and diversify risk. To make sure the risks I was taking were well worth the risk involved. Joining Genzyme as CFO was an incredible career risk but through hard work and luck we made it work. Joining TSI as Chairman and CEO was another incredible career risk yet I set out to build a team that could make it work. I sold my Genzyme stock and took TSI public in 1989 in my 33rd year. TSI’s miraculous 800% rise in stock price over the next four years meant we were, at least on paper, already wealthy in 1993, when I was only 37, at least by our modest standards. But we stayed grounded in our values and our integrity.

http://www.jimsherblom.com