The Hungry Ghost and the Holy Ghost (Sermon)

I had grand plans to preach a sermon that would somehow tie up the strands of Christianity and Buddhism and modern day psychological wisdom and allow all of you to leave this building feeling vibrant and renewed and inspired and full of understanding, and incidentally think I was a really great preacher. Instead, all I wanted to write about was my eating disorder. Is that even a sermon? Isn’t that totally narcissistic? Isn’t that completely inappropriate? I don’t know, but I do know this is West Cummington, and if someone’s going to stretch the definition of “sermon” anywhere, this is the right place to do it, though I have cleverly hidden the fact that the protagonist of the sermon is really me. Lately the word “Abundance” has made its new-agey way into my various lines of vision—the books people give me to read, the emails that come across my desk; it’s peppered into sentences from the mouths of some of my best friends. And when I’m face to face with one of these friends, it’s all I can do to keep my mouth from twitching or my eyes from narrowing. And it’s not just that the word is new agey. After all, I’m a life coach. How much more new agey can you get? It’s that the word “Abundance” has to my mind the ring of winning the lottery, or a roasted pig with an apple in its mouth. That and people who use it in a sentence often precede it with the phrase, “manifesting your.” Warning: If you listen closely to this sermon, you will find the word “manifest” in several of its manifestations at least three times. To this descendent of the Calvinists, the word “Abundance” smacks of greed. It makes me nervous. And I happen to have a client—I won’t say she’s my favorite client, but she is definitely the one to whom I pay the most careful attention. This client, you see, when she hears the word Abundance, for some reason it makes her scared she’s going to gain weight. So I said to this client, “really? How strange.” And then I give her the instruction I give all my clients: I tell her to meditate every day, and to notice her habitual thoughts, what Jack Kornfield calls our “top ten hit parade.” You know, the top ten things over which each of us as individuals obsesses. Some of us obsess about our neighbor’s terrible taste in Christmas decorations (and how they are still up, even though it’s mid January) and others will obsess over the big game in high school where the should-have-been winning field goal missed by inches. I have plenty of respectable fears: fear that the world will be destroyed by our greenhouse gasses, fear that humankind will not overcome our prejudice and hatred in my lifetime, fear that my small beloved Northampton will become so yuppified and gentrified and supersized by the time Lila’s a teen-ager that we may as well live in the Washington DC suburbs where I grew up. I suspect, knowing this congregation, that you might share some of these fears. They may even be in your top ten list too. My client, however, believes that if she eats an almond she will instantly gain five pounds. And she’s not alone, either. One morning last week, I picked up the new York Times and read a story about how, in Brazil, their once rather zaftig ideal has been replaced with our insidious anorexic one, and to date, six Brazilian models have died from complications of anorexia. Meanwhile, in our country, we have what the same newspaper commonly refers to as the obesity crisis. So while I’d like to joke about my client’s obsession with weight and body size, I know it’s no laughing matter. Not for her, and not for anyone else who is in pain at the sight or thought of a doctor’s scale. My client, you see, is in recovery from an eating disorder. Sometimes she wants to say, “I have recovered from an eating disorder,” but as anyone who’s been through a 12 step program can tell you, members never really recover; they simply have a daily reprieve from the addiction, compulsion or manifestation (see, that word again!) based on their fit spiritual condition. (By the way, I know people who are addicted to going to 12 step meetings. I have a friend who’s been in recovery for over 30 years and she goes to 21 meetings a week. Her two children barely know her. She’s a wreck. I saw her recently and she told me she’s hit bottom and is now going to Overmeeters Anonymous.) Anyway, as I was saying: some days my client feels completely free from her crazed thoughts about how huge her body is, how in just a few minutes she is surely going to balloon up to twice her size and how even a whole roasted pig with an apple in its mouth isn’t anywhere nearly enough to satisfy her boundless appetite. Some days, she might have a shadow of a thought like this, and from her evolved 12 steppy/ Christian/Buddhist/Somatic Experiencing place of Witnessing, she can gently offer compassion to that Jungian shadow self. She breathes in and out and feels her heart expand to twice its normal size, and she knows that she has enough, she does enough and she is enough. She is free. She would no more get on the scale than she would eat a whole pig. And then there are the other days. These are the days when she rushes into Barnes & Noble to buy a friend’s child a copy of Jon Muth’s wonderful “Zen Shorts,” a children’s book based on Buddhist stories, and she passes by the display of the newest diet books. She pauses. Then she keeps walking: Stay away from the book display! Just say no! And then on the way back, she pauses again, thinks, “One little peek won’t hurt me. Well, it might hurt me, but it won’t hurt anyone else.” And so she picks up the latest diet book—this one is about how if you remove all flavor from your food, you will soon lose your appetite and pretty much be able to eat whatever you want and never gain weight, because food now has the appeal of dried old shoes to you. All you have to do is boil your chicken, boil your potatoes, eat a lot of kale and make sure you keep everything separate because it’s in the mixing of foods together that temptation gets its evil foothold. Oh, and take fish oil supplements. She starts to imagine how she will explain to her husband why they are suddenly eating nothing but boiled cabbage for dinner. But before she picks up the book and races to the counter with it, she pauses (see, her life coaching is paying off.) And for some reason, the passage from Mark about the loaves and fishes comes to mind, and along with it, the word “Abundance.” She suddenly has an image of a vast spring meadow, somewhere far up in an alpine setting, Jesus’s lilies of the field, purple and yellow violets everywhere, Grieg’s springtime piece fluting away in the background. She takes one of those famous deep breaths and puts the book down. She begins to talk to herself, gently. Why do I have to do so much all the time? Why do I worry so much about being hungry? Why do I equally worry so much about getting fat? Many people who suffer from addictions or compulsive behaviors get diagnosed with anxiety disorders. This is a fancy way of saying that we’re scared and that taking in the substance or acting out the behavior calms certain regions of our brains, allowing us for awhile to feel less anxious and believe we appear to others as more normal. Addicts are famous for hoarding. The text for Alcoholics Anonymous is full of stories of alcoholics hiding bottles in hampers, the tank of the toilet, in pockets of dressing gowns, etc. Food addicts find clever ways to eat entire pies and cakes from the bottom up, so that when family members remove the lid of the cake tent come across just the frosting, hanging out above a nibbled away skeleton. We do this because we’re afraid there’s never going to be enough. How could there be when this hole inside me is so vast, so bottomless, so…abundant…that no amount of anything could ever fill it? We live in an entire culture based on the Abundance/scarcity spectrum. The people who immigrated here over the past five hundred years were generally escaping terrible circumstances—famine, poverty, crowded living conditions—scarcity. And what they encountered, or at least what they hoped to encounter, what is part of the American Dream, is Abundance. Geographical, financial, psychological and emotional (for what is the guarantee of the Declaration of Independence? We have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We do???) And we have ample ways of getting our caloric needs met. We evolved as a species designed to keep from starving at all costs, which is why so many of us lucky survivors inherited our ancestors’ slow metabolisms. Their efficiency led directly to our existence. Up until really midway through the last century, chubbiness was a sign of wealth. The waif-like were poor people; people who used their bodies to make a living; people who couldn’t afford to eat meat or sugar; people who measured out their precious sticks of butter as if they were gold. Now, the cheapest food sources are also some of the most densely caloric; sugar, flour and fat are plentiful, and a large part of our population subsists mainly on these three food groups. It’s meat, fish and vegetables that are dear. In earlier times, we knew instinctively that these were the prizes of the hunters and gatherers, of the farmers and gardeners alike. We worked hard to put these things on the table, knowing that sugar and butter, though equally hard to come by, weren’t the foods that would keep our children strong and healthy. You would think that we would relax now that we have enough to eat. But somehow we don’t. Rather than be grateful for what we have, we remain anxious that we don’t have enough. My client knows this all too well. Some days her anxiety revolves around fear that she won’t get enough cereal in her bowl. Some days it revolves around fear that her jeans will be too tight. It’s the same coin; different sides. But she’s been paying attention recently. She’s been noticing this feeling, this godawful never enoughness, this sudden fury with her body for having such a ridiculously slow metabolism that keeps her 1. fat and 2. hungry, and she’s been watching it. In Buddhism, this constellation of feelings is imagined as a Hungry Ghost, a being with a huge body and a tiny head and mouth. This Hungry Ghost takes over her body at various times with alarming predictability. When she gets on the scale, for example. No matter what the number is, the Hungry Ghost seems to rouse himself and peer down and if the number is low, he says, “Whoopee!! Let’s party!” If the number is high, oddly, his body grows larger and his head and mouth grow smaller. He feels greedy, selfish, like a loser, and this makes him want to overeat. My client notices when she’s gained a pound or two she also gains a fear of being hungry. And furthermore, she notices that this fear of hunger is actually worse than the hunger itself. So she eats a little more at her meals in order not to feel hungry mid-day, or, worst of all, hungry in the wee hours when she wakes up thinking about her daughter’s college education or how terrible she is at keeping house plants alive, or how she’ll never write another coherent word again. The wee hours are when the Hungry Ghost is at his most powerful. My sense from the passages we read is that Jesus probably knew the Hungry Ghost. Jesus surely met him during his forty days and nights in the wilderness. The devil tempted him not dissimilarly to the ways in which our immigrant ancestors were tempted: with food, with land and with power. Jesus was hungry—it said so in the Bible. And yet he was wise—being Jesus—and he knew that the food with which the devil was tempting him was not real sustenance. It was the kind of food that fills with no real nourishment: “Man does not live by bread alone,” he says to Satan. And, when we take our awareness away—when we are asked to play God, as Jesus was when the Devil challenged him to test his powers or promised him omniscience—we believe the Hungry Ghost’s lies—that it’s all up to us, that there’s never enough, that we’re going to have to eat and eat and eat through that tiny little mouth while our belly grows ever bigger. Jesus didn’t eat, didn’t take the bait, so to speak, because Jesus had faith in his God. He had made a commitment to fast for forty days—to be with life on life’s terms, to be with what was-- for his own reasons. I suspect he knew there would be a prize far greater than the present ending of his sufferings if he stayed his course. Similarly, the Buddha sat all night beneath the Bodhi tree to witness all of his fear—the armies of Mara-which came to torment him, and at the end of his suffering he placed his hand upon the ground so that the world would bear witness to his ability to stay present. To stay awake, to remain aware, to be mindful. When my client eats a meal, she has to be mindful. She can’t zone out and grab a handful of nuts. She has to look very carefully at her portions and make sure she’s getting not too much and not too little. To do this, she can count on what the Buddhists and the somatic experiencers call Awareness, what the 12 steppers call Higher Power and what the Christians call Jesus. And after years of hanging around wise people, she is learning that she doesn’t need the Hungry Ghost to go away. She just needs to know he’s there. She still might feel ravenous and fat simultaneously, but she doesn’t have to act on either of those feelings when she has that divine quality called Being Awake. And oddly, the feeling of never enoughness, that hole inside her, seems gently filled when she comes into presence with the breath, with the Hungry Ghost, with the teachings of Jesus. Last week in church, Cherylann talked about rituals, and I realized that my client’s ritual of bowing her head and thanking God for her food and also for her ability to eat the right amounts is a big part of the solution to her previously disordered way of eating. When she takes this time to thank God, she is practicing gratitude: thank you for this food. Thank you for mindfulness. Help me to be awake as I eat; thank you for enough. Help me to see what is enough. I don’t get to know why I am so fortunate to have this beautiful bountiful meal while someone else goes hungry, and I eat it gratefully in the name of that one who doesn’t have enough. And suddenly, I got it about Abundance. When we give thanks from our hearts and souls, we feel richly blessed and right-sized and incredibly grateful. Abundance, after all, is gratitude made manifest, the tangible form of gratitude. Abundance is what we experience as soon as we become grateful. My daughter has learned how to wave. One of her babysitters taught her last weekend while I wasn’t looking, and now she crumples her hand in towards herself, thoughtfully and meditatively watching the collection of fingers pulling in to the hand. And although friends say, “Just you wait; it only gets better,” I can’t imagine anything better than this moment in time, this fleeting milestone of development, this nascent greeting, this early communication. She seems to be in an in-between place currently; in between infancy and the toddler she is threatening to become every time she does her army crawl across the carpet, or almost lifts herself to standing by grabbing onto the neck of my guitar. But then again, she has been on her journey since the moment she came into the world--always in between one stage or another. And anyway, I think my work is to notice that hers is not so much a journey as a constant arrival: now. Now. Now. Now Now. For me, this is the definition of the Holy Ghost: the merging of the sacred and the everyday, recognized in the present moment. When I can be fully present with my daughter and see the holy in her, a third presence manifests. “Wherever two or more of you are gathered, there will I be,” says Jesus, who left his Holy Ghost to remind us of his ever attentive, ever present completely unusual and absolutely ordinary humanity. So when my client comes over for a meal, which she does with uncanny frequency, we’ve been inviting the Hungry Ghost to join us at the table. And we invite Jesus too, since he’s a relaxed kind of guy and always seems both patient and amused by the Hungry Ghost parts of us. We sit down to our meal; the flavor and textures, the way they mingle, we breathe a few times. We imagine that field up in the mountains, the one full of violets and lilies. We eat until we’ve had enough, and to my great surprise, my client has left food on her plate. There’s food in the serving dishes, which we will wrap up for another meal. We give thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Scripture Passages: The Temptation of Jesus 1Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. 2After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3The tempter came to him and said, "If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread." 4Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" 5Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. 6"If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down. For it is written: " 'He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'" 7Jesus answered him, "It is also written: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" 8Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9"All this I will give you," he said, "if you will bow down and worship me." 10Jesus said to him, "Away from me, Satan! For it is written: 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.'[d]" 11Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him. Matthew 6:28-30 28"And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, 29yet I say to you that not even Soloman in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. 30"But if God so clothes the (C) grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? (D)You of little faith! Mark 6:39-45 (New American Standard Bible) New American Standard Bible (NASB) 39And He commanded them all to sit down by groups on the green grass. 40They sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. 41And He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up toward heaven, He blessed the food and broke the loaves and He kept giving them to the disciples to set before them; and He divided up the two fish among them all. 42They all ate and were satisfied, 43and they picked up twelve full baskets of the broken pieces, and also of the fish. 44There were five thousand men who ate the loaves.