Consider the lilies
The news today, whatever its source or format, provides endless sources of distress. Local events, national politics, international conflict, natural disasters, and predictions of future catastrophes all contribute to our sense of dis-ease: feelings of fear, anxiety, anger, hatred, frustration, guilt, depression, sadness, helplessness, and hopelessness.
Of course, people have been upset by distressing events long before there were news media. In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses this in one of the most famous passages in the gospels.
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear? For it is the gentiles who seek all these things, and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
On first hearing, Jesus words sound pollyannish. “Don’t worry. God will take care of it.” Worse, you may have heard such sentiments from people thinking they were being helpful. And Jesus can also seem annoyingly simplistic when he tells people on multiple occasions that they need to have faith, or that their faith has healed them.
But this text contains profound wisdom if we listen carefully. As he often does, Jesus tries to get his listeners to open their eyes to see the world as it really is, learn the lessons it has to teach, and re-frame our own self-understanding as a result.
Remarkably to us, perhaps, Jesus begins by noting that all life is part of an ecosystem. The seeds and bugs birds need are simply there for the taking. Lilies beautify the fields they occupy simply by being what they are. Yet while this is supposed to encourage us in trusting that we too will be taken care of, Jesus almost off offhandedly adds that the field that is so beautiful one day will, nonetheless, be cut down and tossed in the oven the next.
Jesus joins the Buddha here in teaching the most basic lesson: nothing is permanent, including you and me. An emotional reaction to distressing news is natural, whether it’s something happening right in front of us or halfway around the world. But when those emotions begin to overwhelm us and we can’t find peace again, then something else is going on. We are clinging to what can’t be held on to.
Buddhist priest Norman Fischer summarizes this Buddhist teaching.
Practitioners have always understood impermanence as the cornerstone of Buddhist teachings and practice. All that exists is impermanent; nothing lasts. Therefore nothing can be grasped or held onto. When we don’t fully appreciate this simple but profound truth we suffer…. When we do, we have real peace and understanding…. As far as classical Buddhism is concerned, impermanence is the number one inescapable, and essentially painful, fact of life. It is the singular existential problem that the whole edifice of Buddhist practice is meant to address.
Jesus is, perhaps, less systematic than the Buddha but his response to impermanence is essentially the same. “Seek first the kingdom of God,” Jesus says. That is, seek what is permanent and stop looking for security and peace in the impermanent, what is so pretty one day and tossed in the oven the next.
Now here, of course, we run into the problems of language and the corruption of language. For most today, a statement like “seek first the kingdom” drips with a cloying piety from generations of manipulative preachers and evangelists. Jesus’ concern isn’t with religion, however, but daily living.
“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
We hear this expressed in AA as living” one day at a time” and in nondual spirituality as “living in the now.” Neither past or future are real; they are only ideas in our head. And those ideas are the source of most our distress, anguishing about what did or didn’t happen in the past or what might happen in the future. Real life happens only here and now. This is the meaning of existence and is our true being. Anything else is fantasy.
The medieval theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart said that God is “the ground of being.” That phrase was embraced in the 20th century by the German American theologian Paul Tillich and has grown in usage since. Being is the Really Real. “Ground of being” echoes the famous story of Moses at the burning bush. When Moses asks for the name of this God, he is told it’s “I AM”, Being Itself, speaking to him.
Mystics of all religious traditions have said that, in some profound way, existence itself it the ultimate revelation and experience of God. Reality’s countless forms are expressions of existence, of Being, but they are all transitory, constantly changing, impermanent, forever coming and going.
To “seek the kingdom” as Jesus says, is to find and ground ourselves in the permanent, the timeless, the Really Real, and to let go of the transitory, that which is forever changing and impermanent. To do otherwise, Jesus and the Buddha both say, is to live in confusion and suffering.
How do we respond to the world’s chaos and crises? “Today’s trouble is enough for today,” Jesus says. Do what you can and are moved to do here and now: donate, write a politician, vote, volunteer, etc. But endless thinking, ruminating, fuming, stressing about this problem or that crisis won’t accomplish anything.
When these emotions get us in their grip and won’t let got, nonduality teacher Angelo Dilullo says it’s time to practice a type of meditation called self-inquiry. In this practice, we look inwards to find the underlying emotions that have been triggered by the event or events that have so distressed us. What painful experiences or negatives ideas have been opened within us? Often the question will be, what are we clinging to that we need to let go of?
The events and situations causing so much distress to people today are not trivial but often have little direct impact upon us. And in most cases, there is usually little we can do about them. Obsessing about them in response to our powerlessness, including feeling deep anger or depression, does nothing. This is the suffering that comes from clinging to the transitoriness of life.
Tying ourselves in emotional knots over the latest news story or headline disconnects us from living here and now. It closes us to the beauty of the world around us and to the opportunities we have to bring hope and healing to situations right where we are. “Today’s trouble is enough” to challenge our abilities and to create new possibilities of love and life, if we can be centered in the Really Real, the kingdom which Jesus says is all around us and within us.
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