A sermon for Rosh Hashanah by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence

September 19, 2004

Woven into the High Holy Days, in one of the central stories, there is hurt and anguish. It's the story of Abraham. As a young man trying to find his own way, Abraham falls into conflict with his father and with the entire religious and political world he'd grown up in. For this, young Abraham is once punished by being thrown into a fiery furnace. Miraculously, he's saved — but is he? As Michael Lerner¹ asks — Hasn't he been burnt and scathed — inwardly?

Do you remember what Abraham tries to do later on, when he himself is a father? He gets it into his head that God is telling him to sacrifice his son Isaac on a fiery altar. He hears in his heart the screaming legacy of pain and cruelty and confuses it with the voice of God. And then he ties his son to the altar of that crazy sadistic god in is head.

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Have your ever hurt? Do you hurt now? Do you like what your hurt makes you do?

Abraham's son is actually tied to the altar, and Abraham is ready to light it, when something happens within him. He challenges the outworn god in his head and heart and his God grows up. He leaves the small, mean god of his past behind, and unties Isaac, and walks away, with Isaac, changed. This is the evolution of consciousness pictured in a single individual's experience — through hurt and anguish to transformation — but that's where it happens.

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Do you want to get rid of the hurt, get out of it? It won't work to flee from it.

Consider it as an opening.

"The hole in the ego is where the holy flows in and out," says Sam Keen. Go into it — no, not as a cave to hide in, not as a place to live, your own private Funksville, no, — but as an opening into a beyond. A passage out of illusion and self-delusion; an inlet from a septic swamp into the ocean; a channel through some abyss into the Soul of All.

So the meaning of this Rosh Ha Shanah, this day of the world's birth — I want to give you Rabbi Lerner's own words:

The liturgy for the Jewish New Year tells us clearly that the past events in our lives do not ultimately and completely have to bind us, limit us, make us less than we could and should be. . . . Our personal lives and our collective lives can be radically reconstructed. Abraham's choice becomes the paradigm for our choice: just as he managed to transcend his past, so can we. Nor are the social implications hidden: the Rosh Hashanah liturgy explicitly presents us with the utopian possibility as a real possibility . . . Written at a time when the king of Persia called himself "the King of Kings," . . . It is a revolutionary message: all systems of oppression can be toppled.²

This is the day of the world's birth. This.

Examining ourselves, as these High Holy Days call us to do, may lead to some despair — unless we first take in the fact that all this Universe, all of Being, everything that is, including you — possesses an inherent power for self-transformation. This is the day of the world's birth.

Now, Rosh Hashana — which, on Thursday evening, was the beginning of the High Holy Days — reminds us of Creation, the marvelous appearance of the world of Life out of the Void. The gift of the breath of life; — and it comes with the question: how are you spending this life of yours; do you know that you are mortal?

But can we really transcend our past, transform ourselves? Can we do it? Is it really possible for us to do it?

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That's why it matters that this is the day of the world's birth. Of course, so will tomorrow and so will the day after. But let's do today for now!

Is there really any ground for hope? Wouldn't it save a lot of time and effort just to give up on ourselves and the world and — you know, preëmptively — proceed directly to smoke and ashes?

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Wait, wait. If only we can get our heads out of the discouragements, the banality, the fiery furnace and perfidy of these times —

Which is why I believe we need something like the High Holy Days. Withdraw from the tumult and contemplate. Actually stop and look up at the night sky long enough to feel the kinship, the implicate, intimate kinship, the communion of the Universe, and the power of it.

Something more fundamental lies under our existence and runs through it. Go there, under all the noise, go beneath it, go into it.

When the things that encumber the mind and heart are stripped away — When the clutter is cleared away: —

Light.

What you find is Light — a gentle, warm, radiant Light.
Buddhists, and people of every time and place and culture, have known it as something luminous.

Elemental Light.

It is the Ground Luminosity.

It is an Energy.

A cosmological concept. And a Buddhist one.

Here's the Buddhist one. The Buddhist concept is Ground Luminosity. Ground whatosity, you ask?

The cosmological concept has been called Zero Point Energy. There are other names. But this is what it is: just what's there, spread through the Universe since the world's birth — that inconceivable moment when Being exploded from some inconceivably small, inconceivably dense point in nothingness and became a vast somethingness. Some cosmologists calls it Zero Point Energy. All matter is simply disturbances of this great energy field, Zero Point Energy. The Greeks called it the Plenum. The physicist David Bohm called it the Implicate Order. It's more fundamental than even time and space. And from this "space-time foam" new particles are constantly surging into existence out of what we always thought was a vacuum. Always and everywhere, the day of the world's birth. And we — embedded in a living Universe, all-nourishing abyss, seamless whole.

Now I don't know precisely what this means for you or me when we're suddenly without an income, or for a friend who lies today in a coma with virtually no white blood cells and the doctors are baffled. What is it then? That is for us to contemplate, and to expand our sphere of experience.

I know this: it takes a different state of mind and consciousness to begin to grapple with the Abyss when we face the anguish and hurt.

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But now, what is this Buddhist thing, Ground Luminosity?

Well, quite simply, it's what's there, always, already there, after you've stripped everything else away, after you've been broken open. The very innermost dimension of consciousness. The Essence. The `Emptiness' that we now know is empty only of clutter and junk. What remains.

Some call it Universal Consciousness; some call it The All. Christian mystics know it as the Uncreated and Deifying Light. Buddhists call it enlightenment, know it as luminous, naked awareness. The Zohar — the greatest classic of Jewish mysticism — called it the Shekhinah.

In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the nature of everything is open, empty and naked like the sky. Everything that in life has clouded the enlightened mind has fallen away. Here is a luminous emptiness, without center or circumference: the pure, naked Rigpa — Rigpa, Tibetan for `intelligence,' `awareness' — but much more than that — `the innermost nature of mind'; a creative intelligence:

"The nature of all is open, empty, naked like the sky.

Luminous emptiness, without centre or boundary: the pure, naked Rigpa dawns."³

More than twenty centuries ago Lao Tzu captured it in these familiar lines:

There was something formless and perfect
before the universe was born.
It is serene. Empty.
Solitary. Unchanging.
Infinite. Eternally present.
It is the mother of the universe.
For lack of a better name,
I call it the Tao.

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The experience of the High Holy Days for observant Jews is quite something for Goyim like myself to behold. A week ago on Saturday night found crowds gathered in synagogues until after midnight in an intensive experience that only ended with a service. From there on out, many pieces of the clutter of usual daily routine are laid aside to make space for contemplation and worship.

All this reminds me a little bit of that dramatic New Testament story where Jesus goes into the Temple and overturns the money-changers' tables. Why? It was all clutter. Clutter in the Temple. Greed getting in the way. Clear away the clutter. Get to the Essence.

We have to get beneath the clutter, clear away the clutter, before we can know the Ground Luminosity, though it is always, already there. Yes? Is our religious life about the Luminosity, or is it about the clutter?

That's what's so great about rotten things. Consider the let-down, the failure, the loss, the hurt — consider it as an opening. "The whole in the ego is where the holy flows in and out," says Sam Keen. Go into it — not as a cave to hide in, not as a place to live, your own Funksville, no, but as an opening into a beyond. A passage out of illusion and self-delusion; an inlet from a septic swamp into the ocean; a channel through some abyss into the divine Shekinah, the Ground Luminosity.

True for us as individual persons, and it's true for this whole aching world. "After a time of decay comes the turning point" — so says the 24th hexagram of the ancient I Ching. A wrenching journey to the Abyss is an opening to the very Essence of Being, — the creative Essence.

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This is the day of the world's birth.

Not only that — this also the place of the world's birth, because the Universe also possesses the startling quality of omnicentricity. It transcends space just as it transcends time.

Can it be that we share the life of a Universe that is alive, self-organizing, intelligent — in some very measured sense, maybe you could say conscious? All of it, from subatomic particles and molecules to planets, galaxies, the whole Kosmos. And everywhere is this Zero Point Energy in which everything is interconnected. That's the reason that information from any point in the universe is accessible from any other point. It's the principal of non-locality at work! Particles exist in one location and then in another without ever travelling through the space between.

Kazantzakis' words, which we read last week, are true:

We are one. From the blind worm in the depths of the ocean to the endless arena of the Galaxy, only one person struggles and is imperiled: You. And within your small and earthen breast only one things struggles and is imperiled: the Universe.

But there that is again — imperiled. He wrote of how the life of the universe is imperiled and we are all a part of it; — and we know it is, in our time — in ways we cannot deny and for which we are responsible. And there is preëmptive war, and terror and Haliburton and petty jealousy and greed and cruelty and stupidity and superstitious religion. Imperiled. We're due and past due for another leap in consciousness.

That's the most terrible peril humanity has ever faced and yet I want you not to lose sight of this other truth:

It's always the day of the world's birth. The Universe is a roaring engine of creativity. I'm not talking about some god-up-there manipulating things, making the Creator wholly separate from the creation.

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Examining ourselves, as these High Holy Days call us to do, may lead to some despair — unless we first take in the fact that all this Universe, all of Being, everything that is, including you — possesses an inherent power for self-transformation. This is the day of the world's birth.

There is a creative intelligence that permeates everything. The grass knows how to grow. Electrons deliberately leap their orbits and create something new and genomes know how to transform themselves.

And as for us: in a marvelous book edited by Cliff Matthews, the evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahltouris describes us — we ourselves — as Zero Point Energy out having a human experience — or, as she puts it, spirit having a human experience.⁵ May we substitute the word "Spirit" for this scientific term?

Yes, it is possible, at times, to transcend our local selves and experience cosmic consciousness!

Sometimes we get there through practices of meditation, sometimes through contemplation, sometimes in sudden flashes of greater awareness. And sometimes it takes the jolt that rips a hole in the ego to break our trance, our attachment to things that can be taken from us, our absorption in games of competition and success, — sometimes it takes the jolt that rips a hole in all that before we'll let the holy flow in and out.

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Yes, this world of life is endangered, and yes, ours will be the last gasping century of life on the planet unless something changes very soon. And yes, we hurt.

And yes, this intelligent world of life, expressed in us, its cutting edge — it has a long history of evolutionary leaps in periods of great pressure. It's time for a new, wiser, gentler humanity. There is hope. These lives of ours, with the whole Universe, — flow ever new out of this all-nourishing Abyss not only 15 billion years ago but in every moment. This is the day of the world's birth!

This is the day of the world's birth.

Copyright © 2004 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.

¹ Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1994, pp 40ff.
² Lerner, 46.
³ Adapted from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, referring to the dawning of the ground luminosity during the death process.
⁴ In Garma Chang, The Buddhist Teaching of Totality: The Philosophy of Hwa Yen Buddhism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971, p. 111.

⁵ When Worlds Converge. Ed. Clifform N. Matthews, with Mary Evelyn Tucker and Philip Hefner. Chicago: Open Court, 2002, p. 70.
⁶ Duane Elgin. Awakening Earth: Exploring the Evolution of Human Culture and Consciousness. New York: William Morrow, 1993, p. 274.

Words for Parting

And now, at the beginning of a new year, we pray for blessing:

The spirit of wisdom and understanding. Amen.

The spirit of insight and courage. Amen.

The spirit of knowledge and reverence. Amen.

May we overcome trouble, pain, and sorrow. Amen.

May our days and years increase. Amen.

Life of life, soul and heart of all living, renew us for a good year.

Amen and amen.

L'shanah tovah!

Meditate

A Litany for the High Holy days

In the beginning the heaven and earth came forth from the Immensity

and the earth brought forth life
and life gave birth to humankind

And they became conscious:
Aware that they were free
to create or destroy,
to live or to die.
Conscious also that they were not alone.

Love is the thread that binds our lives in a lasting fabric which time shall fray,

Which time shall fray, but only to be rewoven by each generation.

Each generation will lift the fallen to their feet and hold them as they learn to walk.

And as they learn to walk, the sickness of our time will be healed by those who drink deep from the wells of truth.

From wells of truth they will draw strength to keep faith with those who sleep in the dust.

We praise the Source of life and power, who has implanted within us immortal yearning, undying hopes.

Now in awe we behold the wonder of being: an awesome pageant of shapes and forms—yet all akin, one family of life!

We pray for wisdom to treasure all creation; we ask for insight to see its glory; we hope for courage to trust its goodness; we yearn for grace to fill the world with gladness; we seek the strength to help redeem it.

A world released from sorrow to joy! The bowed head shall be raised, the bent back made straight. Those who dragged their chains shall dance and sing. O may violence give way to goodness, the laden be cleansed of tyrants, and the prophet's word redeemed: Peace shall rule the earth!

Peace will remain a distant vision until we do the work of peace ourselves. If peace is to be brought into the world, we must bring it first to our families and communities.

Seek peace and pursue it.

Let there be an end to sickness, war, and famine.

Let there be an end to all oppression.

Life of life; life and soul of all being: Inscribe us for blessing in the Book of Life.

Let the new year be a good year for us.

— I have modified this, from Gates of Repentance: The New Union Prayerbook for the Days of Awe. New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis (Reform), 5738/1978.

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