To Change One's Self

First Reading:

“I often had to recognize that the need "to do something special" was born of a restless spirit. Such persons wanted to dedicate themselves to larger tasks because those that lay nearest did not satisfy them. Often, too, it was evident that they had been brought to their decisions by quite secondary considerations. Only a person who can find a value in every sort of activity and devote himself to each one with full consciousness of duty, has the inward right to take as his object some extraordinary activity instead of that which falls naturally to his lot. Only a person who feels his preference to be a matter of course, not something out of ordinary, and who has no thought of heroism, but just recognizes a duty undertaken with sober enthusiasm, is capable of becoming a spiritual adventurer such as the world needs. There are no heroes of action: only heroes of renunciation and suffering. Of such there are plenty. But few of them are known, but even these not to the crowd, but to the few.”

--Albert Schweitzer, Out of my Life and Thought

“Transforming Oneself to Transform Others”

~ Tenzin Priyadarshi Shukla, MIT Buddhist Chaplain and Director, Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values

When Bob Randolph asked me to speak on “If I could change one thing about…”, I was reminded of an old story, in which a king of a certain kingdom is disgusted by the fact that every day, he returns from the streets of his kingdom with dirt on his feet. He soon pronounces that the entire ground should be covered in leather. People begin to work on it, and quickly they begin to run out of leather and need to import it from far-off lands. It becomes an expensive and futile project. As it often happens in such stories, a wise man appears in the court and tells the king to try covering his feet in leather, easily solving the king’s problem. Thus shoes are introduced to civilization!

Often times we are overtly focused on changing external things to find satisfaction and happiness. It is easy to do. Change a small TV for a big one, a small house for another one, a car for a preferred updated version, and we don’t even shy away from changing life partners after a time. Three houses, three cars, and two spouses later we still find ourselves dissatisfied and unhappy. The only constant factor in this entire process has been our own delusional mind that we fail to reflect upon. One should begin with a simple query: “When was the last time I upgraded myself?” This is more than acquiring new skill sets. It is about becoming a better version of ourselves than we were in previous days, month and years. In this manner we should upgrade our mind daily by eliminating negativities such as anger, hatred and greed, and by strengthening positive attributes such as kindness, clarity, fearlessness and compassion. Soon the world around us will change because our attitude and perspective on things have evolved courtesy of this new “upgraded” mind.

Our mind informs our thoughts and action including speech, the way in which we communicate. All of this is highly contagious. If you are sad and miserable then people around you will be sad and miserable. If you are genuinely happy then people around will be inspired by that sense of happiness. In this way we quietly inspire and change the people and situations around us. One should often bear in mind that whether one likes it or not, he or she is a role model for someone. You don’t have to be a famous personality to be a role model. You already are a role model to members of your family, people at work and friends. So observe your mind and your behavior, because someone will be observing and learning from you.

In one of the oldest cross cultural exchanges of ideas (around 326 BCE), Alexander the Great met with an Indian monk at the banks of the River Indus. Curious with the appearance of this monk, Alexander asked him who he was and what was he doing. The monk asked him the same. Alexander replied, “I am Alexander the Great, and I am out to conquer the world”. The monk responded in amusement because for him conquering the world was a far lesser goal than conquering one’s own negative mental states (fear, anger, jealousy, etc.) and conquering life and death. This left Alexander perplexed as he was presented with an alternate definition of “heroism” than he had previously understood. This is the notion of “heroism” we encounter in our readings from today (a passage from Albert Schweitzer and a verse from Shantideva).

So if we really wish to change the world we must begin with the smallest manageable unit, i.e. our self.

Second Reading:

Prayer of Aspiration

May I be a protector for those without protection,
A guide for travelers – a boat, a bridge, and a ship for those who wish to cross over!
May I be a lamp for those who seek light, a bed for those who seek rest,
May I be a servant for all beings who desire a servant.
To all sentient beings may I be a wish-fulfilling gem, a vase of good fortune,
an efficacious mantra, a great medication, a wish-fulfilling tree, and a wish-granting cow.
Just as earth and other elements are useful in various ways to innumerable sentient
beings dwelling throughout infinite space,
So may I be in various ways a source of life for the sentient beings present throughout
space until they are liberated.

 
-Shantideva, 7th Century Indian Buddhist Pandita

 First Reading:

“I often had to recognize that the need "to do something special" was born of a restless spirit. Such persons wanted to dedicate themselves to larger tasks because those that lay nearest did not satisfy them. Often, too, it was evident that they had been brought to their decisions by quite secondary considerations. Only a person who can find a value in every sort of activity and devote himself to each one with full consciousness of duty, has the inward right to take as his object some extraordinary activity instead of that which falls naturally to his lot. Only a person who feels his preference to be a matter of course, not something out of ordinary, and who has no thought of heroism, but just recognizes a duty undertaken with sober enthusiasm, is capable of becoming a spiritual adventurer such as the world needs. There are no heroes of action: only heroes of renunciation and suffering. Of such there are plenty. But few of them are known, but even these not to the crowd, but to the few.”

--Albert Schweitzer, Out of my Life and Thought

“Transforming Oneself to Transform Others”

~ Tenzin Priyadarshi Shukla, MIT Buddhist Chaplain and Director, Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values

When Bob Randolph asked me to speak on “If I could change one thing about…”, I was reminded of an old story, in which a king of a certain kingdom is disgusted by the fact that every day, he returns from the streets of his kingdom with dirt on his feet. He soon pronounces that the entire ground should be covered in leather. People begin to work on it, and quickly they begin to run out of leather and need to import it from far-off lands. It becomes an expensive and futile project. As it often happens in such stories, a wise man appears in the court and tells the king to try covering his feet in leather, easily solving the king’s problem. Thus shoes are introduced to civilization!

Often times we are overtly focused on changing external things to find satisfaction and happiness. It is easy to do. Change a small TV for a big one, a small house for another one, a car for a preferred updated version, and we don’t even shy away from changing life partners after a time. Three houses, three cars, and two spouses later we still find ourselves dissatisfied and unhappy. The only constant factor in this entire process has been our own delusional mind that we fail to reflect upon. One should begin with a simple query: “When was the last time I upgraded myself?” This is more than acquiring new skill sets. It is about becoming a better version of ourselves than we were in previous days, month and years. In this manner we should upgrade our mind daily by eliminating negativities such as anger, hatred and greed, and by strengthening positive attributes such as kindness, clarity, fearlessness and compassion. Soon the world around us will change because our attitude and perspective on things have evolved courtesy of this new “upgraded” mind.

Our mind informs our thoughts and action including speech, the way in which we communicate. All of this is highly contagious. If you are sad and miserable then people around you will be sad and miserable. If you are genuinely happy then people around will be inspired by that sense of happiness. In this way we quietly inspire and change the people and situations around us. One should often bear in mind that whether one likes it or not, he or she is a role model for someone. You don’t have to be a famous personality to be a role model. You already are a role model to members of your family, people at work and friends. So observe your mind and your behavior, because someone will be observing and learning from you.

In one of the oldest cross cultural exchanges of ideas (around 326 BCE), Alexander the Great met with an Indian monk at the banks of the River Indus. Curious with the appearance of this monk, Alexander asked him who he was and what was he doing. The monk asked him the same. Alexander replied, “I am Alexander the Great, and I am out to conquer the world”. The monk responded in amusement because for him conquering the world was a far lesser goal than conquering one’s own negative mental states (fear, anger, jealousy, etc.) and conquering life and death. This left Alexander perplexed as he was presented with an alternate definition of “heroism” than he had previously understood. This is the notion of “heroism” we encounter in our readings from today (a passage from Albert Schweitzer and a verse from Shantideva).

So if we really wish to change the world we must begin with the smallest manageable unit, i.e. our self.

Second Reading:

Prayer of Aspiration

May I be a protector for those without protection,
A guide for travelers – a boat, a bridge, and a ship for those who wish to cross over!
May I be a lamp for those who seek light, a bed for those who seek rest,
May I be a servant for all beings who desire a servant.
To all sentient beings may I be a wish-fulfilling gem, a vase of good fortune,
an efficacious mantra, a great medication, a wish-fulfilling tree, and a wish-granting cow.
Just as earth and other elements are useful in various ways to innumerable sentient
beings dwelling throughout infinite space,
So may I be in various ways a source of life for the sentient beings present throughout
space until they are liberated.

 
-Shantideva, 7th Century Indian Buddhist Pandita

Shrove Tuesday

For those of you who are liturgically-minded you will know that today is Shrove Tuesday, or the last day before the season of Lent is upon us. Lent is a marked time, that is to say a time set aside to live differently than we do the rest of the year. Historically this has meant giving up for the season specific activities and practices, or forswearing certain foods or habits, all in an effort to make the difference we are striving for tangible and visible to us and to our peers. Lent rolls around every late winter precisely because we have to experience this act of living differently for a spell every year lest we forget how to do it and revert back to just living the same old way all the time. Lent is a way to practice then, a tool for helping us find our true vocations as image bearing creatures.

What does it mean though to be made in the image of God, as we are told we have been in the creation narrative from the Book of Genesis? As Tom Wright tells us in the passage we read, it means that we must reflect the ”creative and redemptive love of God” back into our communities, that we must nurture and sustain growth (of our gardens for sure, but also of people), and that we must live in relationship as our God does with us. Because we are inclined to think in a materialist frame of reference it is easy for us to forget that the creation narrative was written instead from a functionalist frame of reference. So creation is not so much (or perhaps not at all) the making of matter out of non-matter, but rather the establishment of order out of chaos. And to the extent that we are called as image-bearers to also be creators, it seems to me that promoting order out of chaos is then our true vocation. Where we find sorrow, we must plant joy, where we see violence, peace, where we find hate, love. Our world continues to be full of chaos – witness the sad passing of a young man this weekend on our own campus, or in any number of other places near and far. But if we truly live vocationally, bearing the image of our Creator, we can help to overcome that chaos, by cultivating relationships, practicing stewardship, and radiating worship.

To Forgive

First Reading
Philippians 3:13-15 Brothers and Sisters, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you.
Second Reading
A moment of true forgiveness will end a lifetime of pain. Now ask God for assistance in dealing with your past actions and reactions, and it shall be given. Ask God to hold your heart in His hand, and He shall do so. Ask angels to surround you, and know that they will. And with all their assistance and support, take an honest look at how you have reacted to your brother or sister. Ask God for forgiveness, ask your brother or sister for forgiveness, ask yourself for forgiveness, and forgiveness will surround you in its light. - James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy


When Bob asked me to speak, the topic he gave was, “If I could change one thing…”
I’ve had a few weeks to think about what I would change, and for awhile it was really difficult for me to come up with something. Now, I’m not saying I’m perfect by any means, but I do try to continually learn from experiences, decisions I have made and people I have met.
Then, about a week or so again, in an almost eerie way, it hit me on what I would change. I want to be able to truly forgive. I mean truly forgive. I’m sure we’ve all had someone in our lives that has let us down – parents, siblings, friends, coworkers, roommates. People that we sincerely care about and expect to be treated the same way we treat them, with honesty, integrity, and loyalty. When those people do something that hurts us or is deceitful, it can be overwhelming and very hard to understand why they’ve done what they’ve done or made the decisions they made. BUT, in order to grow and continue to trust and move on, it is imperative to forgive, this may not mean forget, but it means to forgive with every ounce of your being and energy – every single day.
A teacher once told each of her students to bring a clear plastic bag and a sack of potatoes to school. For every person they refuse to forgive in their life's experience, they chose a potato, wrote on it the name and date, and put it in the plastic bag. Some of their bags were quite heavy. They were then told to carry this bag with them everywhere for one week, putting it beside their bed at night, on the car seat when driving, next to their desk at work. The hassle of lugging this around with them made it clear what a weight they were carrying spiritually, and how they had to pay attention to it all the time to not forget and keep leaving it in embarrassing places. Naturally, the condition of the potatoes deteriorated to a nasty smelly slime.
This was a great metaphor for the price we pay for keeping our pain and heavy negativity. Today, tomorrow and always, I will strive to forgive and I will be a better, “lighter” person because of it.

Stephanie Kloos

Being Intentional in my Personal Life

First Reading:

Modern people usually seek individuality through the severance of restraints and commitments. I've got to be me. I must be true to myself. The more we can be free of parents, children, spouses, duties, the more free we will be to 'be ourselves,' to go with the flow, to lay hold of new and exciting possibilities. So goes the conventional argument.
Yet what if our true selves are made from the materials of our communal life? Where is there some 'self' which has not been communally created. By cutting back our attachments and commitments, the self shrinks rather than grows. So an important gift the church gives us is a far richer range of options, commitments, duties, and troubles than we would have if left to our own devices.

Without Jesus, Peter might have been a good fisherman, perhaps even a very good one. But he would never have gotten anywhere, would never have learned what a coward he really was, what a confused, then confessing, courageous person he was, even a good preacher (Acts 2) when he needed to be. Peter stands out as a true individual, or better, a true character, not because he had become 'free' or 'his own,' but because he had become attached to the Messiah and messianic community, which enabled him to lay hold of his life, to make so much more of his life than if he had been left to his own devices.

~ Stanley Hauerwas, William H. Willimon,
Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony
(Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1989), p. 64,65

Last weekend at my daughter’s request, our family watched the independent Christian film, Courageous. It’s about a group of men, most of whom are police officers, who agree to take their roles as husbands and fathers seriously. They have seen and experienced the many problems caused when men neglect their families, either by physical abandonment or by emotional withdrawal. At a turning point after a tragedy in the family, the main character he says, “I don’t want to coast as a father anymore. I didn’t start well. I want to finish well.”
I’m a husband and a father of four kids, and I identify with the failings of these men from the movie. We are continuing a series this semester here in chapel on the idea, “If there were one thing that I could change…” and this is what I would change: I would be as intentional with my family as I am in my professional life. In my professional life, I plan ahead, setting priorities and securing financial resources for them and releasing people who can lead in those priorities; I daily listen to teammates and students and intercede for them, counsel and coach them in their ministries; I evaluate weekly with my team of staff and provide equipping and resources for them; I spend hours trying to clearly communicate God’s story of redemption and challenge others to find their part in that story. I’m intentional. When I get home, too often, I miss the opportunity eating over dinner or chaeuffering kids to extracurricular activities to attend to how my family is doing—to probe with questions or to relay a memory from my day. Too often I rush through the bedtime routine of brushing the teeth of my younger two children, maybe reading a book to them and tucking them into bed in order to veg out in front of the TV. Too often on the weekends, I consider my own needs for leisure or home improvement needs, rather than playing Legos with Ethan or showing curiosity about Michelle’s week.
As a Christian I do believe that God forgives me for this self-centeredness and poor stewardship. This helps. It’s hard to strive towards what God has called one to when weighed down by guilt and shame. And I have some resolutions that, by God’s grace, I will stick to:
• Keep the TV off on Wednesdays and Fridays, and on those lay down in bed with one of the kids to ask about their day and to pray
• Get the kids fed and ready for school, and drive them to school Mondays and Wednesdays
• Take Michelle out to lunch once per week for a date and have another meeting to plan towards the goals and vision we have for our family,
• Each week, plan a date with one of the kids, doing something they like to do
But another means of God’s grace that I need to tap into was shown in the movie: community. By sharing these failings with a small group of men from my church and my resolutions, I hope to find the encouragement, inspiration, and accountability to keep changing as a husband and father—faithfully living out these roles God has called me to.

Mike Bost
Campus Crusade


Second Reading:

And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another – and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

~ Hebrews 10:24-25