When I was twenty-one and on a Buddhist studies program in India, I ordained temporarily with two Burmese nuns. In the Theravada tradition, monks and nuns cannot eat after noon, so around 5 p.m. every day the nuns would gather to drink lemon tea and talk about the dharma.
At that point in my life, I was jazzed about enlightenment and the end of suffering. I spoke passionately and intellectually about my experiences of noticing impermanence during meditation. After I shared some such heady, proud insights, one of the nuns smiled.
“When I first ordained as a nun,” she said, “I was always hoping to get enlightened. But now, after forty years of practice, nothing has happened!”
Then she burst out laughing, overflowing with joy. “Nothing happens!”
The other nun joined in gleefully. “Nothing happens! Nothing happens!” And they continued to laugh good-naturedly about this.
Nothing happens. Try as we might.
Funny enough, this morning I opened up a book of talks that John Main, OSB gave to oblates, and the title of the first talk?
Conversion and Transcendence!
I laughed good-naturedly about this. The monk adds a Benedictine bent to the theme (from the book, Community of Love):
St. Benedict was clear in the Rule that we must approach the mystery of God not through someone else’s witness but through our own experience. He has the monk recite every day, “Oh that today you would hear his voice. Harden not your heart.” And so, a key personal word in the Rule of St. Benedict is the word “conversion.” As you know, the Christian is one converted to Christ. St. Benedict asks us to live this conversion as the main thrust of our life. What does this mean, conversion, for us as men and women of the twentieth century? What I would like to put before you now is that I think we can best understand conversion in the vocabulary of the twentieth century if we think of it in terms of transcendence. That means the expansion of our being that comes about as we cross the frontiers of our own limitations and leave self behind to cross to the further shore. The whole purpose of the Rule of St. Benedict and of monastic life is to leave self behind, to burst the bubble and illusion of egoism. Transcendence is a dynamic motion beyond ourselves in which we leave every limiting factor behind and in the power of Christ enter into a truly creative development of our own being.
Just a few more reminders that the journey is all about letting go! Here's our dear Mother Earth doing her part to teach us, too.
Let us walk in the holy presence.
