'The Sacred Body'

Sermon Delivered at Unitarian Universalist Congregation 

of Tacoma WA  11/10/13 by Fred LaMotte

SYNOPSIS: It is important for us to return to the sacred body, because the healing of America’s anger begins in healing our anger against our own bodies, the wounded divide between what we are, and what we think we should be.

Because we are profoundly uncomfortable in our bodies, dis-eased in our bodies, we are alienated from the environment, from the body of mother earth, and we take it out by abusing the indigenous peoples of the earth. The solution to America’s angry divisions may be as simple as coming home to our bodies with a simple breath….

_________

What shall I choose for my text today?

I could take any of these marvelous utterances from history: "God became human so that humanity could become God." ~St. Athanasius, 2nd C.

Or from the 14^th C Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich: "God is in our sensuality."

From the ancient sacred text of India, Shrimad Bhagavatan: "Blessed is this human birth. Even the dwellers in heaven desire this birth, for true wisdom and pure love may be attained only by humanity."

Or from the modern master of Buddhist meditation, Thich Nhat Hanh,  "We can get enlightened, we can get liberated, just by looking deeply into our body. There's a Buddha in your body. The Kingdom of God is in your body." 

But this is a Unitarian congregation, so I will stand on more rational ground and choose my text from Sir Isaac Newton: "The changing of bodies into light and light into bodies is very comfortable to the course of nature, which seems delighted with transmutations."

I marvel to tell you that in those words, "The changing of bodies into light, light into bodies,” is the whole science of Yoga. And “very comfortable with the course of nature” presents the whole Tao of Chinese medicine. Finding “delight in transmutation” is the essence of Buddhism:  accepting the flow of change and impermanence.

I am sorry to inform the rationalist that Sir Isaac considered himself an alchemist. This word is from the Arabic Al-Kemiya, God of the Dark Land, which in turn is from the earlier name for Egypt, Khem, land of the Khemites. This root means Darkness: the darkness of the void, the mysterious womb of Mater, Mother Matter. And all modern physics is an extension of alchemy, the ancient quest for the source of the material universe.

Strangely enough, contemporary quantum physics confirms what many of these ancients were trying to tell us: matter arises ex nihilo, from nothing. In the beginning, there was just Tohu wa Bohu, formless and void, according the Hebrew Bible. For some reason science cannot fathom, but which the rishis of India called lila, meaning “play,” just sheer delight in playing, Word of creation vibrates as Light from that uncreated silence of the divine darkness: “ya’hi Or, wa’ ya’hi Or.” “And God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.”

Now the materialist may insist there is a great deal of difference between ancient and modern views, because the old ones believed that behind this vibration of matter from silence, is a mind. And those silly alchemists sought the golden light of Consciousness in the dark source of lead, the heaviest element of matter they could find. Surely modern science implies nothing like this!

But again, I must inform you that its not that simple. The great quantum physicists of the 20^th Century recognized an immaterial intelligence at the basis of matter. The founder of quantum physics, Sir James Jeans, wrote, “The universe begins to look less like a giant machine and more like a giant thought.” And his fellow quantum founder, Sir Arthur Eddington, president of the Royal Academy of Science, wrote: "All through the physical world runs that unknown content which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness.... The stuff of the world is mind-stuff."

 In the words of Max Planck, another monumental 20^th physicist, "All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter."

But my subject today is not to renew the debate between Plato and Aristotle, idealist and materialist. I want to take you to the time when these two contraries were one, soul and matter inter-twined in one sacred body. I invite you to practice the most ancient spiritual method: dissolve the mind into the heart and become alive in the present moment…

Because we are never going to solve the ancient argument, the dichotomy of spirit and matter, by a thought: a conclusion at the tale-end of a logical argument. It is solved through Presence in the body, a golden wholeness!

So I would like to bring the ancient myth of the creation story home to your own life experience, by asking you to meditate on a few of your primordial memories about your body: how it felt to be in the body before you formed a concept about “the body.” And then, remember the moment you first formed that concept, the moment you became separate from your body, the moment you began living in the concept rather than the radiance of your own marvelous molecules and atoms.

This memory of the separation between your mind and body, is the real Fall of Adam and Eve, our culture’s most primordial myth. It is the moment each of us becomes separate, and begins to live in exile from our body.

Can you recall your Garden of Eden? You were there. The garden was your sacred body. The tree of life was your spine. Adam and Eve were the primal energies, Shiva and Shakti, Yahweh and Shekinah, Christ and the Magdalene, the male and female energies of the divine, spiraling around your stem, connecting earth to heaven through every breath that rose and fell from your head to your belly button.

And what of the serpent? The serpent was not evil. It was the most sacred energy inside you: the dance of innate intelligence through your nervous system. This serpent of innate body-wisdom is one of the most universal symbols in all of world mythology: called Kundalini Shakti in India, Chi in China, Holy Spirit in Biblical tradition, where the word for Spirit and Breath are the same, ruach. Notice that the serpent is often winged, as is the form of the dragon in China. As snake, this wisdom dragon is rooted in the earth; as bird it is rooted in the sky. Jesus referred to the winged serpent of body-wisdom when he said, “be ye wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” This winged serpent twined around the human spine, survives today in the symbol of medical science, the Caduceus of Hermes.

In the nourishing garden of your body you were whole and one, undivided into spirit and flesh. Soul dissolved in the body as sugar dissolves into water: all its sweetness there, but without separation. You lived by a constant stream of luscious green intuition. You did not so much think as bathe in the voice of a trembling silence, who advised you not to eat from that other tree, the tree of mental complexity. For that is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which fractures our wholeness into conflicting opposites…

 In the natural course of events, you rebelled against the better angel of your intuition. You began to think too much, fell into duality, and became an exile. Natural intuition, where every thought corresponds to its present event in the body, was replaced by anxiety. Speculation about the future, regret over the past.

Let us now demythologize this so-called “Fall from Grace.” We don’t require a Miltonic poem, a lofty drama that sets Heaven against Earth, God against Satan, or even Man against Woman. We need only to remember that simple loss of innocence, that personal moment, when we first became alienated from our own body. That was the fall, that was our exile from Eden.

Some voice of judgment expelled you from the Garden  – one Hebrew root of “Eden” means bliss. Some minor incident cast you out from holy healing wholeness – all those English words are related in their root.

That voice of judgment was not an angry God. It was a parent, or a sibling, a school teacher, an older kid. And it was just a passing comment, not intended to be the world shaking prophecy that became your life-sentence, condemning you to live in a borrowed concept about your body, rather than the body itself.

“You’re too wiggly, be still!” “Fatty!” “Look what you did, you’re like a bull in a china closet!” “I don’t want you on our team, you’re too skinny.” Or perhaps you slipped and fell, and they laughed at you. Or you bounced and giggled with joy, but some lugubrious formidable uncle told you to be quiet. Or your body surprised everyone with a sudden flood of adolescence. And with that slight comment, that insignificant and entirely natural faux pass – your mind created shame, became a separate world, a concept of  “my body.” And you’ve been living in the prison cell of that concept ever since. Even when you look in the mirror, you see that, and not the stunning radiance of your flesh.

So now, relax, breathe back into your garden. Enter the space of the heart through this breath. And in this safe place, please remember that voice, that event, however insignificant. Because in the unconscious, nothing is insignificant, there is no time, and a past event is still resonating as if it just happened.  (Pause to meditate)

And now I want you to go back even further and remember a moment when you felt good in your body. What was it like? There was no separation between being “spiritual” and being “material.” There was no struggle to be stronger or thinner, more feminine or masculine, no need to pump iron or lose weight or be pretty or tough or take botox injections. It was just You, radiantly alive as your body, sparkling through trillions of photons of light. (Pause to meditate)

And now here’s your take-home practice. Re-mind yourself, re-breathe yourself, what it felt like before your “fall” from the garden. For the sake of your health and sanity, for the sanity of our whole alienated, dis-eased, dis-embodied culture, please find a way to stop just for a moment – do it several times a day. Just for the duration of a breath, consciously be in your body. Be in your body for a whole breath in and a whole breath out... This innocent practice will “change your body into light, and light into your body.”

POEMS

1.

Sparrows don't wait for dawn, they just start singing.                   

Plum buds feel a tug of warmth deep down blind naked twigs.

Even if you can't dance, there's rhythm in your breathing.                   

This round earth wants to be your whirling partner.

                   

It’s already started, the trembling of seeds

in the dust of your spine.               

Separateness is just the shimmering.

Keep kneeling to kale and pumpkins in your garden.

Keep kneading the moon into your loins

until the loaf of the world is risen.

Strive ever downward toward the Divine.

Your flesh’s humblest photon is the palace door.

Didn’t you know? Every particle pulsates with a Psalm.

Friend, your yearning for light is light.

2.

Your body has a glow inside
like the brook that sparkled and eddied
down Mary's spine,

dripping into her womb.
This is how Gods give birth
to themselves in human bodies.

They do it for just one reason.
You must find that out for
yourself.

I am only at liberty to give these hints:
the taste of mint on brown skin,
bare feet in the garden,

the sound of laughter, tears,
the shape of an egg
formed by a mouth crying "O"

at the beginning of a prayer,
any prayer, and the silence
of the Breathless between breaths.

3.

There's a heart within your heart.

When this one beats

that one sings about light;

the gong in the atom’s hollow,

photons echoing a golden bell

never struck.

This sound could only mean one thing:

a Lover whispering your name

before you were conceived.

  

Why should your flesh be filled with

anything but music?