Being Present to What Is Present

Presence as a spiritual practice is challenging, perhaps more challenging than we might expect. As soon as we focus on presence as a practice, as something we do, we become aware of a fundamental truth: it is impossible to be present alone.  And when much of what is around us is difficult, when much of what is happening in our lives is difficult and painful and uncomfortable, we feel even more deeply the challenge of being present. For how can we be present to what is present?

OOS Dec 8, 2024

Being Present to What Is Present

Rev Joe Cleveland

December 8, 2024

 

Reading

“Meeting What Arrives” by Rev. Lindasusan Ulrich

Sermon

To be calm and at ease behind the wheel as a tarp rides the air toward your windshield, to still be calm and at ease behind the while for the moment the tarp has covered your windshield, to remain calm at the wheel and let the air continue to take the tarp on, off your windshield, over and behind your car, where it falls to the road — if I was trying to understand the practice of presence, that sort of calm that Rev. Ulrich was able to practice as the tarp came at them — that feels like presence to me.

All the mindfulness gurus urge us to practice simply being present.  I’m not sure that being present is simple.  After all, once you start to think about, what does it mean to be present?  It could just mean being in attendance.  You are all present.  Showing up is really important.  It’s one of the main ways we show someone that we care.  The New York Times Opinion columnist David French shared that one of the worst things he ever did was when he was 18 years old.  A friend of his called him one night and with a shaky voice told him that his Dad was on the way to the hospital and things looked pretty bad.  

French says his 18-year-old self was shocked and didn’t know what to do.  The next day, he tried calling his friend, but there was no answer. French tried calling again and again.  No answer.  Then he learned that his friend’s father had died.  French showed up to the visitation hours, and says, 

What happened next is burned into my heart. When I walked in the door, my friend came up to me, looked at me with immense hurt and said, “Where were you?”

French had known that his friend was in the hospital at his father’s bedside.  French says,

To this day, I can’t replicate the thought processes that kept me away. I remember feeling some irrational confidence that his father would be fine. I remember being busy. I remember feeling not quite prepared to face such pain and loss.

Now, years later, French feels the magnitude of his failure.  French says,

Simply being there was all that had been required. I couldn’t pass even that one simple test.

All he had to do was simply show up and be present. 

Maybe just being in attendance is a simple thing to do.  But I’m not sure that being present is simple.  French was at 18, perhaps for the first time, confronting the loss and hurt and fragility that is part of life.  I don’t think it is an easy thing to be present to pain and loss.

Many people have shared with me the difficulty they are having in the wake of the election.  In a way, maybe what we’re experiencing is something like what the 18 year old was experiencing: a shock of realization of the presence of pain and loss and anger and confusion and more.  It is not easy to be present to such things.  But that is the problem with presence.  To be present means being present to or with something or someone.  

If everything was good or beautiful, presence would be easier.  But that’s not the world we live in.  The Chinese wisdom text the Dao De Jing (as translated by Ken Liu) says,

Presence and absence give birth to each other. 

Practicing presence means understanding the experience of absence.  It might be funny to say so, but the experience of absence is a lot to take in.  It is a lot to be present to.

Rather than jump into the deep end of absence, I suggest that one way to take a smaller step in the direction of practicing presence is the practice of gratitude.  

In the new statement of UU values, the practice of presence is linked to the practice of generosity and gratitude.  The statement names generosity as a key value.  And what generosity means is “cultivating a spirit of gratitude and hope.”  Acting on generosity as a UU value means, “We covenant to freely and compassionately share our faith, presence and resources.”  Practicing generosity means developing a practice of presence.

In the picture book Thank You by Jarvis, the child says thank you to and for all sorts of things.  To say a real thank you requires some presence.  To thank the clouds for the puddles you get to stomp around in requires taking at least a moment to be present to the enjoyment you have in puddle-stomping.  And then you have to be present to the idea that the puddle didn’t have to be there.  Someone or something made it so the puddle could form — you need to be present to that idea — and then you need to be present to that someone or something in order to say thank you.  It’s actually a pretty sophisticated practice when you parse it out like that.  

Jarvis’s book is for kids, and we try to protect children from the nastiness of the world.  The poet (not the actor) Maggie Smith begins a poem called “Good Bones” saying

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.

The rabbi Danya Ruttenberg says that

A mature adult faith demands that we take in difficult, painful facts and allow them to become part of our understandings […] 

When she wrote that, Rabbi Ruttenberg was thinking about the Jewish holiday of Hanukah, and how on the one hand, it’s a holiday that commemorates the victory of a group of “zealous traditionalists” who weren’t just fighting the Greek army — They also violently attacked the more moderate Jews who had assimilated to some extent into Greek society.  And on the other hand, Hanukkah is a holiday about rededicating sacred space. The word Hanukah, means “rededitation.”  “Sitting in front of the candles,” of the Hanukah menorah, Rabbi Ruttenberg began thinking about other truths and lessons that seemed to also be in the Hanukah story and part of what observing the holiday might be about. She says, 

I began to wonder how I might be able to clean up the despoiled Temple of our history, to once again sanctify my faith—in Hanukah, and in celebrating Judaism as it exists today.

Things are complicated, and what we want to be able to develop is a practice of faith that doesn’t deny that complexity.  Rabbi Ruttenberg says,

We have to be honest about the history that’s happened, to take responsibility for what has been done & to use what’s past to spark discussion and action about how to behave in our world today.

We can and should embrace the rededication of our souls, hearts and minds on a spiritual level, and we should also use these tropes of rededication to look at the world at large, to see what has been defiled and how we can make it holy again.

Being present to Judaism as it exists today, for Rabbi Ruttenberg, means doing some remembering of the past and imagining what she wants practicing of her faith to be like as it moves into the future. 

It might be helpful to note at this point in this exploration of presence as a practice, that the word in Buddhist texts that gets 

translated into English as “mindfulness (sati in Pali, smriti in Sanskrit) has ‘remembering’ as its fundamental meaning. 

A mindfulness teacher notes that

This is “mindful presence”—presence that remembers.  And to be clear,

this teacher continues

“remembering” here does not just mean remembering to be mindful: it refers instead to remembering what has value, what matters most.

And to that, I’ll add that remembering our values also means being present to the future we want practicing those values to create. 

To practice presence always means being present to something.  The present moment carries with it a legacy of the past—your own personal past, as well as any number of histories—as well as at least the image or imagining of a future.  The present moment is a complicated, sophisticated, often difficult thing to be present to.  

I hope that the writer David French has come to a place where he can offer himself and his 18 year old self a little grace.  This being present is a sophisticated practice.  Practicing presence is our rededication to the world as holy and a rededication of ourselves and others as worthy and wondrous.

What I hope is that is that your recognition of the complicatedness, sophistication, the difficulty of the practice of presence is actually something that can free you.  Being present doesn’t mean taking on everything, it doesn’t mean taking all that complexity and all that hard stuff onto oneself.  The practice of presence is a practice of mindfully being in relationship.  It means practicing being aware of what is yours and what is not.  It means remembering, taking a moment to acknowledge actively what you value. And then being open and present to the possibilities your values open before you.

Jack Petranker, the mindfulness teacher I quoted earlier, describes it like this:

When I am actively present, I choose the whole: what values I will enact, what commitments I will make, what understanding I will bring to bear. […]

It is really a question of how we live in the world.  When we engage the present, we engage the whole of our lives.  When we plunge into the world, we accept the whole of what is.  

Practicing presence means steeping ourselves in our values, beliefs, and aspirations.  

May your practice of presence be you embracing the rededication of our your soul, heart, mind, and body.  

May our practice of presence be an open acknowledgement of where things have gone wrong and an awareness that we are more than that.  May our practice of presence be a practice of opening to the direction our deepest values call us to face.  May your practice of presence lead you to a discovery of your own worthiness and goodness.  May your practice of presence be a discovery of and rededication to the worthiness of others.  May our practice of presence rededicate ourselves to the world as holy and wholly wondrous.  

As Rev. Lindasusan Ulrich prays:

Spirit of Presence, may we meet what arrives with open hearts and open minds, and may our commitments and aspirations run so deep that choices become obvious, even in the midst of complexity. Amen and blessed be.

 

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