The Inner Light

Rev. Tony Lorenzen

First Parish Church in Billerica, MA

Sunday, December 2, 2007

British Unitarian Charles Dickens’ story “A Christmas Carol in Prose” has remained a popular tale since its publication in 1843. I believe we continue to be drawn to the story not for its sentiment, nostalgia or the feeling of Christmas cheer it evokes with its happy ending, but because we connect on an intimate and visceral level with its central character. All of us can relate to being Ebenezer Scrooge. The bah-hum “bug” has grabbed us all at one time or another whether we are Christian or not, whether we celebrate Christmas as central to our spiritual life or not.

We can identify with that old “tight fisted hand at the grindstone” because his experience with Marley’s ghost and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet to Come, are a journey out of spiritual darkness into the light. Scrooge’s story is one of inner transformation. It’s a Christmas story to be sure, but like any good religious tale it’s not so much about the specific religion as it is about the spiritual journey itself. Throughout “A Christmas Carol”, we follow a man who has lost his way and lost himself, as he finds himself again. He is a man in metaphorical and literal darkness. Describing Scrooge’s rooms in Stave One Dickens writes, “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”

Scrooge needs to find his Inner Light, and master storyteller that he is, Dickens fills the story with images of light to help lead Scrooge, and us, out of what Christian mystic St. John of the Cross called the “dark night of the soul.”

When the Ghost of Christmas Past arrives we are told, “The strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light.”

When the Ghost of Christmas Present appears in Scrooge’s chambers there’s a fire in the fireplace to the extent that “such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that dull petrifaction of a hearth had never known in Scrooge’s time or Marley’s, or many and many a winter season gone.” As Scrooge accompanies the Ghost of Christmas Present, the spirit carries a torch from which he sprinkles incense that seems to literally spread the good cheer of the season.

Light disappears when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come arrives. The spirit is, as Dickens tells us, “shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand.” This spirit deals in shadows and doesn’t speak.

On Christmas morning Scrooge awakes having learned his lesson and found his soul. His inner light is alive and the weather confirms it: “Running to the window, he opened it and put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold, cold; piping for the blood to dance to; Gold Sunlight, Heavenly Sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. O glorious. Glorious!”

The spirits did it all in one night. And you know the rest. If only it were that easy in real life.

The coming weeks will be full of external lights: menorahs and twinkling Christmas tree bulbs and candles and Yule logs. Everywhere the extreme overdrive of the American economy will be pressuring us to buy, buy, buy and the advertising overload of television (and now the Internet) will light up the coming season even more. It is easy to get overwhelmed with it all and miss the meaning the behind the symbols and even get fed up with the symbols and the meanings behind them. What the coming weeks will not be full of is time to seek your inner light. That, you’ve got to carve out on your own. That, you’ve got to want to do for yourself as Marley’s Ghost most likely won’t come calling with spirit helpers, although you do get me this morning. And even if you did get the otherworldly help, it’s the easy way of fiction. Finding your inner light takes inner work. It’s more difficult, but also more rewarding. It’s not fiction. It most certainly deals with the here and now and in one of the strange paradoxes of the spiritual life, it’s best to do nothing to get the work done.

Next Saturday, December 8 is Bodhi Day, the day Buddhists remember the enlightenment or awakening of Gautama Siddhartha – the historical Buddha. Gautama didn’t sit under the Bodhi tree for just one evening. Enlightenment didn’t happen all in one night like it did with Scrooge. Gautama sat for a long time. Sitting meditation has been the heart of Buddhist practice ever since. Sometimes the practice of meditation is called doing nothing. It is about paying attention to the current moment. Meditation is not about zoning out or falling asleep – the goal is to be alert, to be awake, to focus one’s attention singularly so that all else falls away and one gains enlightenment or insight.

Being awake to the present moment is difficult. Our minds are easily distracted by brightly colored holiday lights, the sports page, the television, just about anything really except what is right here in front of us at the present moment. Even if we stop and sit and meditate, our minds find it very difficult to focus on our breath or a mantra, instead our thoughts go every which way, thinking about what we’ll have for lunch or dinner or what we’ll do at work tomorrow or why so and so doesn’t like us or remembering it’s time to change the oil in the car – Buddhist tradition calls this “the Monkey Mind” – our mind will jibber jabber and jump around and refuse to sit still and focus on the present moment.

It takes a great deal of discipline to stop, both physically and mentally and do inner work, but without it we are all Scrooges of a type, missing the spirit of this season or any season, not really in touch with ourselves. And the only place to find our inner light is within ourselves – and we must go looking for it. The Ghost of Christmas Present isn’t going to come calling tonight. The Ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come aren’t showing up either, but that’s okay, because inner work needs to start with being awake to the present moment. We are deep creatures and we hold much in our present moments. Our hearts are vast and yet our attention is short.

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us,” yet we spend so much energy fretting about what will happen next that we aren’t truly present to what’s going on right now in this moment, and we spend so much energy being angry or frustrated over what has already happened that we can’t enjoy this moment that is unfolding right now.

The holiday season seems like a difficult time to take on a spiritual discipline, but I encourage you in this season of lights, so many of them external, to seek your own inner light by setting aside time each day, if only five or ten minutes to sit in stillness. To just be with yourself. There is a light inside you. If you haven’t been sitting with yourself recently, you may not have noticed whether or not it’s still on. Of all the lights of this season, that light is by far the most important one. The Buddha, called the Shakyamuni Buddha or Teacher of the Shakya Clan to differentiate him from the idealized Buddha or Buddha nature that can equate with all of life itself is not the only person who can gain enlightenment or be awake, for that’s what Buddha means, the Enlightened one or the Awakened one.

Unitarian Universalist minister and Zen Buddhist priest Rev. James Ford offers this quote from Hakum Yasutani Roshi in his book In This Very Moment:

Enlightenment means seeing through to your own essential nature and this at the same time means seeing through to the essential nature of the cosmos and of all things. For seeing through to essential nature is the wisdom of enlightenment. One may call essential nature truth if one wants to. In Buddhism, from ancient times it has been called suchness or Buddha-nature or other one Mind. In Zen it has also been called nothingness, the one hand or one’s original face. The designations may be different, but the content is completely the same (36).

You do not need to join a Buddhist monastery to find your inner light. One thing meditation and mindfulness teach us is to take our awareness of the present moment away from our practice, away from our meditation time into the rest of our lives. We are not only holy when meditating or praying, we must learn to accept ourselves as spiritual, soulful, sacred beings in the doing of the everyday things. Being awake, enlightened, means being awake to the everyday and we are not. We let the everyday pass us by as tedium, as chore, as duty, as boredom, without actually experiencing it because we are asleep to our own experience and not awake to it.

Gary Snyder speaks of this in The Practice of the Wild (quoted by Jon Kabat-Zinn in Wherever You Go, There You Are Hyperion, 1994, p. 171).

“All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher that the religious institutions originally worked with: reality. Reality-insight says . . . master the twenty-four hours. Do it well, without self-pity. It is as hard to get the children herded into the car pool and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha-hall on a cold morning. One move is not better that the other, each can be quite boring, and they both have the virtuous quality of repetition. Repetition and ritual and their good results come in many forms. Changing the filter, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick — don’t let yourself think these are distracting you from your more serious pursuits. Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our “practice” which will put us on a “path” — it is our path.

And as our path gets filled with holiday errands and planning meals and visiting relatives, we must remember to be present to it, to be awake and to make time to sit and just be and just breathe and observe the inner light.

It’s a simple thing – to sit and be with our inner light, but it’s not easy, and that’s why many of us shy away from it. When we sit with ourselves, the first thing that we tend to notice is not light and bliss and nirvana, but darkness. Our first visitor from the realm of our inner heart is not the kindly Ghost of Christmas Present, but the dark Ghost of Christ Yet to Come or the troublesome memories of the Ghost Christmas Past. Things surface when we quiet ourselves down, the practice is to recognize them and let pass and continue sitting and paying attention. Maybe there are things and issues you need to deal with when you are done sitting. But for the present moment, return to this moment and be in it. The more often you do, the lighter it becomes.

The inner light can be fragile, like a flame on the end of a matchstick flickering in a gusty breeze. We need to protect our inner light, shield it like someone would cup their hands over and around that match in the wind, as if that match were needed to start a fire that would keep us warm, as if that fire would be our only source of heat for shelter, for cooking, for light.

For only if we tend and care for our own inner light, can we illuminate the way for others. Find your light this season. Nurture it, let it shine for others. After all that’s how the story ends, right? Scrooge awoke Christmas morning having found his light and himself and he opened his heart and his pocketbook to the world around him. And it was always said of Scrooge “that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us.”