Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye. The following is a recording of a Sunday sermon from my talk at Unity Church
earlier today. It is about God, prayer, grace, and mercy, so if any of those topics are hot button, negative triggers for you to which you cannot relate, then go ahead and skip this episode, or, if you prefer, you can listen and simply substitute all references to the word God with Universe, or Higher Power, Energy, Emptiness, Mother Nature, Father Time,
Spirit, and so on. It's an invitation for us to remove ourselves from the center of the universe and put something much greater there that isn't biased or judgmental. If you do choose to listen, keep in mind this IS a Sunday sermon at a church, not my typical message about mindfulness with a Buddhist lean, to which you've grown accustomed, but it's also not at all removed from the Buddha's teachings, it is simply made relatable and applicable to people of faith. Enjoy.
Imagine yourself climbing a mountain. It's not easy, but imagine each one of the following thoughts is an extra ten pounds of weight on your back: This sucks. I hate this. Why me? It shouldn't be this hard. I'm terrible at this. I'd rather be somewhere else. My legs hurt. My back hurts. I don't want to be here. This is terrible... you get the idea.
Now, imagine the same climb with the thought: one more step, one more step, look at that tree, one more step, one more step, the flowers are beautiful, one more step, one more step. It's the same mountain, but two very different experiences. Many of you know I was born and raised in Israel, but I was raised in a family that wasn't very religious in a town that wasn't very religious; it was a very young town.
What was interesting is you could very easily tell, as a child, the difference between classmates from a religious family to the classmates who were not, and the way we were able to do that was the very religious ones would write the Hebrew letter B&H at the top-right corner of every piece of paper. And it was, of course, the Hebrew letters, but the B&H stands for B'ezrat Hashem, meaning with God's help.
So imagine yourself filling out a job application and you write B&H at the top, and that means that if you get the job, it was God's doing. If you didn't get the job, it was also God's doing. I think perhaps that could be a practice, a ritual, that is maybe missing from many
a daily reminder of our faith. For me, personally, when I first took the monastic vows, it was a big shift for me because I wasn't born into monkhood, it was something that I shifted into. When you take the vows and you put on the robes every day, that act of putting the robes on every day was my daily practice of B&H, of B'ezrat Hashem, it was a reminder for me to trust the flow, that I've let go of trying to control the flow, but to trust the flow.
Many of you have heard the joke: If you want to make God laugh, make a plan. The practice of B&H, of B'ezrat Hashem, is now how I live my entire life. If we see everything that's happening in our lives as happening FOR us, that it's God's way of helping us, guiding us, teaching us, then we will accept it all with gratitude, no matter how difficult it may be.
It's the same as what I read earlier, as we're climbing up the mountain and there's a boulder, then we're not going to curse the boulder, we're going to learn, I must need to learn to climb a boulder because there's probably a much bigger boulder later on, and if I practice with these little boulders along the way, then I will have the tools with which to climb the big one.
That is to say, don't ignore the little God messages that come throughout life and brush them aside as unimportant or try to avoid them or try to take a shortcut, deal with what's right in front of us head-on, because it is guiding us, teaching us toward something much bigger and greater that is yet to come. My friend calls them God winks; something happens and some people may brush it off
as a coincidence. She says "No, that was a God wink." And that happened to me when I decided to leave the corporate world, sell everything I own, and move to Hawaii, and embrace a whole new level of life of simplicity and ease and intention, the law firm, you know, they offered me, "We'll pay you twice as much, "you can wear casual clothes to work, you'll be the only paralegal who will work with one
attorney instead of three." They just kept trying to incentivize me to stay, to lure me away from my new intention. And I said, "No, thank you, I've made up my mind I'm going to Hawaii, "I'm leaving the corporate world, I don't want to work under fluorescent lights ever again, "I just want to start over." And a year later, the whole economy thing happened and the law firm closed its commercial real estate department,
which is where I was working; my own boss lost his job. So I would see that now as a God wink. Like, Hey you did the right thing, you followed your heart, you stayed true to your intentions, you weren't lured by more money, or convenience, or comfort, you know your path, you stayed on it and the reward isn't just the life that you're living now if every once in a while you do look back in your mirror, you're going to see you've -for lack of a better word- dodged a bullet, so to speak.
This happened to me when I owned a condo, and again, the whole market thing happened and people were applying, again, this is so many years ago I don't remember, it was like a loan modification from the government to reduce your mortgage, so people don't have to foreclose on their homes and all this stuff, but I didn't want to be a homeowner anymore. "I am moving into a monastery; I don't even want to be a homeowner."
Of course, my parents, my friends were all, like, "Dude, just keep it, "and you'll have this passive income coming through and this will actually benefit you, "it won't make your life harder, it'll be better, it'll be easier, "and whenever you decide to come out," they thought it was a phase, "whenever you decide "to come out of the monastery and go back to your life, you will have this investment, "you'll have this real estate." And I said, "No, I don't want to be a homeowner.
"Whether I'm living in the home or not, I want to be free of any weight that's holding me back or any tether to my old life." So I sold the home, I sold it for less than I bought it for, I got rid of it.
And after four months in the monastery, I received a letter saying that first, the condo flooded, which made the tenants who were living in it have to move into a hotel and the new owner had to pay for them to stay in a hotel, and it was just a mess, and then all the cost of renovations, and they renovated everything, and two months after all that was renovated, the apartment below it had a fire.
And so the smoke damage to my condo, and you see where I'm going with this... it was just that rare instance of "I'm so glad I didn't have to deal with this "while at the monastery." You know, that I was just completely removed from it, and again, my friend would call that a God wink.
I am reluctant to say it's "God's will" because I don't like it when we ascribe to God human-like qualities, like, I don't think God has "preferences," and here's what I mean, and this may be controversial, but it wouldn't be me talking if it wasn't but... we need to be really careful when we say our prayers and what we wish for. When you ask God for strength and then your five-year-old dies, you were given a boulder to climb because that's how you will get your strength.
And I think everything that happens in our lives is FOR us. We are not being punished, we're being guided. Trusting God means trusting in His timing. It's like Mother Teresa said, "I know God doesn't put more on my plate "than I can handle, but sometimes I sure wish God didn't trust me so much."
So, I don't need to pray to God to give me strength because that implies that I don't have it, I just need to say thank you God for giving me strength because saying that will help me tap into that unlimited supply of strength.