Staying Put While the Earth Moves and Shakes
Are you in need of refuge, comfort, grace, inspiration, freedom or joy? Do you have five minutes to spare a day? Are you ready to let some light into your life?
Satya and I just re-launched our 30 Days of Nembutsu free course.
Chant along with us and discover the power of this ancient Buddhist practice.
We chant to connect with something that is wholesome, transcendent and beyond words. Or to remember that we are already connected.
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What’s important?
Faith
Authenticity
Compassionate Action
Inclusivity
Bright Earth Ministers met recently to discuss our values and settled on these four as being most important to the Bright Earth approach.
We can use them as mirrors in our personal practice, asking how I am doing with each of these?
We can use them to guide the choices that we make in our lives and in our community.
We can understand that they are an expression of the heart of the Buddha.
Today I want to share a piece of writing by Paramita, on the first value: faith.
Unconditional Grace
by Paramita
As I sat considering my faith and what it means to me, which is somehow not a question that I ask myself much, I realised that I take it for granted, more than I would like to admit.
I have enjoyed the benefits of relationship with Amida for quite a while now, and have experienced enough failings and fallings and enough revitalisations to allow me some degree of psychological security. This contributes toward the overall sense of resilience that I enjoy and that features strongly in many other accounts of faith that I hear.
In some ways, my taking faith for granted, which might also be seen as a sort of deep assimilation, shows that, for me, actual conscious belief plays a minor part in the dynamics that constitute the support that I get.
In other words, I don’t need to think about my relationship with Amida in order to derive strength and resilience from it; for me, faith is an energy of which I am possessed, pretty much whether I like it or not.
I came to faith with a list of expectations about what I might get and a limited pool of resources from which to give. I had already identified the need for selflessness, or altruism, in the pursuit of spiritual growth, but felt ill-equipped to implement any meaningful change in this direction.
What I felt and consciously experienced quite early on in my religious life was a softening, towards myself and others, and the beginnings of a new perspective on the matter of sacrifice, which helped me to approach the question - how much of myself do I have to give in order to be liberated from the snare of Self?
As time went on I began to realise that I don’t actually have to do anything to be worthy of faith, and this, in turn, inspired a desire to do everything I can.
For me, faith is most fundamentally the Divinely inspired courage to stay put. To stand firm and grow roots while the earth around me is moving and shaking. It is the ability through experience and grace, to suffer with dignity and face whatever comes in the fullest way possible. The bitter/sweetness, the infinite richness, the mundane and the endless potentiality.
I practice these days from a place of gratitude, which arises in me from a place that I don’t understand, and no longer feel the need to investigate. Mainly because I have enough evidence in my life that it is a good thing, but also because I feel the futility in attempting to consciously fathom the depths of Amida. My life is so much better for being able to step back and enjoy the light, whilst feeling adequate enough in myself to say, I just don’t know.
Namo Amida Bu!
Lovely piece Paramita!