Sermon 9-30-07
Jim Burklo
Sausalito Presbyterian Church
"I Want..."
The Soul Year Prayer:
Dear God: I feel, I want, I release, I accept, I thank…. Amen.”
Jesus had a most unusual job. His job was to wander around Israel and ask people what they wanted.
In the gospels in the Bible, we see the record of this work. In the story we just heard, Jesus asked a blind man what he wanted. Now that might have seemed like an almost silly or insulting question. Of course the blind man wanted to see! But the great wisdom of Jesus was to ask the question anyway. Because the answer wasn’t obvious at all.
Nor is such a question trivial for us. Imagine. You come to church, and your minister asks you what you want. Inside the church, and actually inside and alongside and around everything and everywhere else, is a place called heaven that can only be experienced if the soul is awakened to it. It is all around you, right here and now. Heaven is breathtakingly beautiful, its peace is overwhelming, the sensation of infinite possibility is staggering. But you are mostly blind to it – you barely comprehend its existence – you have had little glimpses of it now and again, and have only a vague sense of what it might be. So vague that you don’t want it, because you don’t know enough about it to want it.
It’s a lot like a person blind from birth. How bad can such a person want something she or he can hardly imagine or describe? Such a person might want to be able to see just to be able to relate to people who can see – for social reasons, to function in society. But how badly can they want to see a sunset, or the smile on a child’s face, without some experience of what that might be like?
So it is not a trivial question at all to ask a blind person what he or she wants. Any more than it is a trivial question for your minister to ask you what you want. You might say, I want an Egg McMuffin. Or you might say, I’d like to have the eyes of my soul opened so that I can see heaven right now.
So what do you want?
And if you say Egg McMuffin, I’m cool with that! There’s no judgment here in heaven. What you want reflects where you are on your journey. If you know where you are, you can begin to figure out where you might want to go next.
Asking what you want, saying what you want, sharing it with your higher Self who is God, can be a prayer, and prayer is a process of refining, clarifying, sorting out your wants.
Buddhism teaches that suffering is the product of desire. Drop desire, and suffering abates. And there’s a lot of truth in that.
Alongside Buddhism, not really in contradiction to it, Christianity says that the exploration of desire, the contemplation of desire, the refinement of desire can relieve suffering and lead us to the kingdom of heaven. In a way, Christianity is a more laid-back religion. It is a bit less demanding than Buddhism. You aren’t expected to abandon desire. You are just invited to refine it down to the pure gold that is God.
And you can’t redirect it until you know what it is that you want now. So that you can contemplate what else you might want even more.
And what you might want even more is heaven.
Your desire for the mystical experience of the Divine has a life of its own, if you will wake up to this deepest wanting, and let your desire for God work on your heart.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this poem about this wanting:
Because One wanted so much to have you,
I know that we can all want you.
Even when we throw all depths away from us:
suppose a mountain has gold
and no one is allowed to mine it anymore;
the water will bring it to light, the water
which reaches into the silence of stone,
it does the wanting.
Even when we do not use our will:
God is growing.
Hearing Rilke’s poem, I imagine how desire for God is like water filtering down through cracks in the earth and slowly, slowly, steadily washing away all that gets in the way of the gold. It’s a holy wanting that slowly, slowly, steadily works its way through the dross of our lives in order to reveal the heaven that is within us.