Intro to Scripture: Matthew 3:13, 16-17
Jesus is our meditation. His story invites us to meditate on our own journey.
After today’s story, Jesus journeys into the wide-open desert. I have not been to the land of Palestine, so I cannot know exactly what that part of the earth is like. I can only rely on the pictures I can Google. One thing I know is that any desert, no matter how dry, is not dead. There are day and night, the Sun and the Moon and the creatures that exist in darkness and light, and the wild grass, bushes and small flower networks that spread where the dew falls or the hidden underground water flows.
In my mind’s eye, I picture the desert laid out in a God-created dome. Many ancient people and cultures imagined the world being shaped like a round dome. During the day the Sun makes it bright; its absence creates night. The glittering and glimmering colours of rocks and living things and human beings create a whole dynamic history of peace and war, liberation and suffering, God’s Word and human actions. Jesus came into the desert, that particular part of the dome of God’s cosmos, after being baptized in the Jordan river. Daytime in the desert can be scorching hot, and the night can be desperately cold. I do not know how he survived those extremes, on top of hunger and thirst for a symbolic forty days, but I think the empowerment received at baptism must have sustained Jesus to go through the burning of the desert place. These Lenten stories invite us to be able to look at our own lives and meditate on our own experiences — physical and spiritual hunger, thirst, possibly burnout, exhaustion, fear, or solitude, whatever they might be — something we have crossed over to find the path for our own healing and wholeness.
Matthew 3:13, 16-17
Sermon: Burnout and Baptism
Jesus is my meditation. His story invites me to meditate on my own journey.
When this year’s season of Lent started, our BVU artist Laura Giffen created the Lenten Art Fort in the Narthex — The “Glimmering Hope” between the separation of the walls painted black and white on each side, symbolizing polarization. On my first visit, I entered the fort and found the broken bowl Laura had carefully placed. The presence of the broken bowl in the fort comforted me, with the assurance that there is no shame, no stigma attached to burnout or any other experience we might go though when we feel spiritually and mentally alone.
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| Laura Giffen + Joan Mason ~ Photo: Ha Na |
A few weeks ago, I finally made the time to visit a registered massage therapist. After explaining the reason for my visit and hearing the massage therapist's suggestions, I felt a sense of novelty when I laid down and the session started with relaxing the muscles on my forehead. I didn’t expect that the process would begin with the forehead; I had mentioned tiredness in my legs and arms, but the therapist started from the forehead and moved down following the nerves from the trigeminal nerve around the eyebrows, under the eyes, cheeks, jaws, and near the ears. That moment, I was reminded of an image of a Boddhisatva I had seen in a dream. They had soft, glowing cheeks, pink like a cherry blossom or a peach. This beautiful figure of wisdom had a faint, light, and gentle smile at the corners of their mouth, with the corners slightly upturned. As the massage therapist skillfully manipulated and relaxed each muscle in my body, I found myself meditating in tandem with the relaxation of my body. At the end of the massage, she said, “I have one suggestion for you. You need to calm down. Did you know that throughout the massage, you were constantly clenching your fists?”
This conversation marked the beginning of a dialogue with my own body. When am I tensing parts of my body without realizing it? The left side of my neck? My shoulders? Am I putting more force on one leg when sitting, or constantly clenching my hands even when alone?
If this state of tension continues - though the reasons and processes vary for each individual - our exhaustion can lead to burnout. There’s no need to place any stigma or shame on burnout. It's a signal from your body, a deep calling, and an opportunity for widening and opening your inner capacity of acceptance. Acceptance — That’s what I have learned in recent weeks from adopting meditation and bringing mindfulness and mindful breathing into my daily life. As a Zen proverb says, an open hand gathers more flowers than a closed fist.
Usually, most of the time, … about 90 percent of my life so far, I have been confident about myself, thinking I can do anything, if I want, and when I do, I can do most of those things quite well, if I work on them. I have always had a stubborn confidence in my own abilities. Then, through meditation, I realized there’s one thing I don’t do well. That’s acceptance. Simply, I don’t accept what I think is not right. When I face what I think is not right, I struggle with it, cry over it, and fall into the polarizing crack of feeling I am wronged. It can be compared to the metaphor of being struck by two arrows. The first arrow is the unpleasantness of the experience – we’ve all felt that. It could be a stressful work situation, a task we are not feeling up to or are not confident about, a difficult family member or even an alarming headline or another daily dose of bad news… That’s the first wound. Then, because we are unable to accept what is happening, we tighten and resist, deepening our aggravation or aversion. This is the second arrow, the second wound which prolongs our suffering and hurts us the most. The first wound is from the reality, the specific experience. The second one is from how we react, our own aversion, and falling into polarization.
The teaching of acceptance is not about accepting what is wrong and how you have been wronged by injustice. To get through the harsh landscape of the polarized world, especially for those of us who risk our mental and physical health because of the sharp edge of polarization, acceptance is about opening and widening our capacity to be able to see what is happening, including our reaction to it, in the very moment of being struck by the first arrow. In that moment, we can remind ourselves that we can be mindful and still preserve ourselves. Accepting not just the reality, but accepting our own capacity to observe what is happening, including our own judgements, reactions to them, feeling upset, hurt, resentful, sorry. It’s the practice of non-reactivity which I will explain more on Palm Sunday. In the story that is told on Palm Sunday every year, Jesus rides a donkey to enter Jerusalem, pushing his way with non-reactivity, through the polarized crowds on the left and on the right, those who are booing and those who are praising. Acceptance is the base. Then, eventually we would be able to skillfully respond to the situation with purpose and clarity, while preserving our Cup and health and not allowing the second arrow to hurt us — the burnout, the exhaustion — even after being struck by the first painful arrow.
Recently I learned about Mountain Meditation, originally written almost thirty years ago by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I hope you can find some time to try this meditation in a comfortable and safe space in your own home or in the wild. You can Google about Mountain Meditation and even watch an adapted version on YouTube. When you need resilience, stability, empowerment, in the desert of burnout, on the way to the Jerusalem of exhaustion, search Mountain Meditation. In a nutshell, it invites you to meditate on picturing the most beautiful mountain you’ve seen or can imagine, one whose form speaks personally to you. I’ll give you two minutes. Close your eyes or watch the slides I prepared from Claude Monet’s art.
Perhaps your mountain has snow at the top and trees on the lower slopes. Perhaps it has one prominent peak, perhaps a series of peaks or a high plateau. However it appears, just sit and breathe with the image of this mountain, observing it, noting its contours, its qualities and colours and its changes - flowing with the play of light, shadow, fog and clouds.
When you feel ready, see if you can bring the mountain into your own body so that your body sitting here and the mountain of your mind’s eye become one.
Does the magic happen to you? It did for me when I tried it for the first time, when the words invited me to see if my body and the mountain of the mind’s eye can become one. All of a sudden I became a Korean mountain my family loved and still love in our hearts, the low and long range of the round peaks, the deep, deep forest with sun-dappled pine trees in the humid mid-summer. One time, when our two kids were much younger and we climbed the same mountain with my mother, we got so thirsty. We’d already eaten some cucumbers and only had empty water bottles; we picked up fallen cherries on the path, and ate them. Surprisingly, that little bit of juice was refreshing enough to keep us going that day. This is my fondest memory of mountain-climbing.
There were two gospel readings today – not just dry desert but flowing water. I have to admit that I originally got the order of the stories wrong – I thought, first desert, so dry, so hot, and then the cooling relief of the river – it makes sense. We long to know that the desert ends in its opposite – but that’s not the way this story goes. Water first, then the desert. God’s blessing before we are struck by the arrows of the polarized world. When you feel ready, see if you can bring the aspect of water into your body, just as you brought the mountain, so that yourself and the water of the mind’s eye become one. Water quenches our thirst, cleanses us, renews us, and just as the Dao Te Ching (trans. D. C. Lau, 1963) sings the praises of water, water, like Dao, can flow without contention:
“The highest good is like water.
Because water excels in benefiting the myriad creatures
without contending with them and settles where none would like to be,
It comes close to the way.”
Jesus came to the river for baptism before going into the desert, the place of burnout and stark polarization, so he could bring the water with him. Jesus traversed the desert through the teaching of acceptance and a skillful response to the polarized world, like the way Water prefers. Even when everything seems blocked or tangled, clenched and seized up, water carves its own path and breaks through where there was no channel before. I invite you to imagine in your mind’s eye the possibilities of a community like water, alive, moving, refreshing others before and after their desert journeys. Nothing is impossible to a community like that.
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