It Ain’t For Sissies

After people got a chance to see Bruce Lee way back in the 70s, everybody wanted to learn kung fu.  Kung fu schools started to sprout up everywhere.  That’s when our kung fu school started.  Back then, we were located in a large space in Venice, California.  Every class had more than twenty students.   The place was packed.  Today, we’re lucky to have five or six people there.  There are two reasons for this.

For one thing, martial arts seem to go in fads.  In the 60s, it was all karate, thanks to Ed Parker and the Green Hornet (well, actually Kato, played by Bruce Lee, on the Hornet).  In the 70s, it was kung fu.  During the 80s, there was a lull for a bit, then everybody wanted to be a ninja, so they went for ninitsu.   Then Thai kickboxing became the rage.  During the 90s, people began to worship Brazilian Ju-Jitsu.  And right now, everybody wants to go in the cage with Mixed Martial Arts.

The other reason is that kung fu is pretty damn hard.  Yeah, it looks like fun, jumping around, kicking and hitting shit (well, it IS kind of fun, actually), but you have to go through several years of hell on toast to get to that point.  So people start off, but after a little while, the work outs are a little too hard to handle.  So they quit.  Kung Fu is kind of like faith.  The only thing that keeps you going is the faith that all that hell on toast pays off.

It’s the same with the quest for spiritual meaning.  There are all these holy Joes, right?  There are all these people that we all acknowledge are, or were, really spiritual people, the sort of people we all wish we could be like, people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Ghandi, Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama, and we all admire them.  We all want to be like them.  But we aren’t.  We aren’t because it’s really really hard to be that kind of person.  The quest for God ain’t for sissies.  This story from the Gospel According to Mark illustrates this idea.

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up,
knelt down before him, and asked him,
“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus answered him, “Why do you call me good?
No one is good but God alone.
You know the commandments: You shall not kill;
you shall not commit adultery;
you shall not steal;
you shall not bear false witness;
you shall not defraud;
honor your father and your mother.”
He replied and said to him,
“Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth.”
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him,
“You are lacking in one thing.
Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
At that statement his face fell,
and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

Jesus looked around and said to his disciples,
“How hard it is for those who have wealth
to enter the kingdom of God!”
The disciples were amazed at his words.
So Jesus again said to them in reply,
“Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle
than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
They were exceedingly astonished and said among themselves,
“Then who can be saved?”
Jesus looked at them and said,
“For human beings it is impossible, but not for God.
All things are possible for God.”  (Mark, Chapter Ten)

Which is just to say that try as you might, you can’t be God.  If you go back to the original Adam and Eve myth, that’s what it’s all about.  Eve ate the fruit because she wanted to be like God.  That’s what the serpent offered.  The young man asks Jesus this question because he knows that even after following all the religious rules and living a “good” life, that something is still missing.  It’s that connection to the divine.  You don’t get it by doing stuff.  You get it by not doing stuff.  You have to let go.  You have to let go of fear.

That young man is rich.  He has a lot of money.  And money, especially in first century Palestine, is security.  Jesus tells him that the way to find God is to give over your illusions of security.  He has to let go and trust.  And that’s hard to do.  It’s hard to trust.  It isn’t that money is a bad thing intrinsically.  It’s that we look to money for security.  We don’t trust.  The connection is already there.  The big “lie” to Eve was that she needed the fruit to be like God.  We were never not connected to God.  That’s why Jesus says it isn’t possible for human beings to save themselves.  They are already saved.  There is no reason to save something that doesn’t need saving.

The disciples were astonished because to them, being rich was God’s way of saying you were already in His good graces, that you were a holy guy.  If a rich guy couldn’t be “saved”, then what chance to the rest of us have?  Jesus tries to tell them that it has nothing to do with you.  You are connected to God no matter what. The connection is there.  You just have to relax and let it happen.  The only thing we need saving from is our own illusions.  But we don’t trust and we don’t let go because it’s hard to do, and that’s why there are so few Mother Theresas out there.

It’s easier to hang on to our fear.  We know our fear.  We’re comfortable with our fear.  We know what to expect from it.  If there’s one thing we don’t like, it’s the unknown.  We may not be happy with our lives, but at least we know what to expect from them.

That young man had a lot of possessions.  So do we.  Sometimes those possessions are material, like money and stuff.  Sometimes those possessions are other things, such as fear, or anger.  We can’t connect to that spirit of love as long as we cling to those things.  It’s like my kung fu teacher says, you can’t do two things at once.  Money and stuff were holding that young man back.  What is holding us back?  What keeps us from being the kind of people we want to be?  Is it fear?  Is it anger?  Are we clinging to some preconceived outdated code of behavior?

We would all like things to be easy.  But everything that is worth attaining requires a lot from us in order to attain it.  Even letting go and doing nothing requires a lot of effort.  The Buddha said we had to let go of all our desires, even the desire to be free from desire, in order to attain enlightenment.   It would be a lot easier if there were just some sort of code to follow, or some ritual to perform.  The fundamentalists would have us believe that all we had to do was claim Jesus for our own in order to find peace of mind.  But even the scriptures they believe are absolute fact makes it clear.

While Jesus was speaking,
a woman from the crowd called out and said to him,
“Blessed is the womb that carried you
and the breasts at which you nursed.”
He replied, “Rather, blessed are those
who hear the word of God and observe it.”

The people who are blessed are the ones who follow the teachings.  Peace comes through love and service to each other.  And that takes a lot of work.  It isn’t easy.  Ghandi said, “I like your Christ.  I do not like your Christians.  They are so unlike Christ.”  He also said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”  And this is what Jesus said also.  That’s what the young man failed to understand.  It isn’t about what you do, it’s about what you are.  And that means letting go.  You cannot become something else until you let go of who you are.