[AUDIO AND TEXT]
Note: this is the first Holy Week retreat talk given by The Rev. Alice Cabotaje Roshi.
Reading: Psalm 19 c
Help me to be aware of my selfishness,
but without undue shame or self-judgment.
Let me always feel you present,
in every atom of my life.
Let me keep surrendering my self
until I am utterly transparent.
Let my words be rooted in honesty
and my thoughts be lost in your light.
Unnamable God, my essence,
my origin, my life-blood, my home.
Good evening and welcome to our 2024 Holy Week Retreat! I am so happy to see those of you I know and those of you I will get to know. Nona Strong Roshi, deep gratitude for being here, blessing us with your presence; and to Mary Fuchs, for being Mother of the Retreat. Much appreciation for all the behind the scenes work you put into our retreat!
Thank you all for being here to be in each other’s lives over the next four days as we practice together in silence as a community. I encourage you to completely retreat into this time: tuck away your cell phones, other electronic devices, and even books. This will be a time for contemplation and meditation.
I also encourage you to attend every sitting session.
Tonight, and until Easter Sunday will be a time of stillness and silence as we open ourselves to whatever comes up, whatever shows up, whatever presents itself internally and externally. No striving for achievement. Let us simply be in a state of receptivity, in a state of surrender, and in a state of honesty with ourselves. Let us simply BE.
Our retreat will be a time of deepening our intimacy with the Divine through contemplation, meditation, and the practice of sitting, walking, and eating with awareness.
Our time together will be a time of practicing attention, full, focused attention.
As my teacher Fr. Greg Mayers Roshi said: “Attention is a skill we can develop and a gift we can receive that unifies the Absolute and everyday life. As a skill it means waking up to whatever flows across the field of attention, whether that is inner or outer experiences, thoughts, feelings, or perceptions. It means not picking and choosing what arises to awareness, and not hanging on to what falls away. It means not being disturbed by the content of attention, not being obsessed with it, not being compulsive about being attentive.”
So when we practice attention, I would like to invite us to use the word “ONLY.” When breathing, ONLY breathing; when sitting, ONLY sitting; when standing, ONLY standing; when walking, ONLY walking; when listening, ONLY listening; when eating, ONLY eating; when drinking ONLY drinking; when smelling, ONLY smelling; when sleeping, ONLY sleeping; when looking at a tree, a flower, a bird, a leaf, ONLY looking; when are legs or our backs hurt, ONLY pain; when feeling sad, ONLY sad; when feeling angry, ONLY anger; when feeling lustful, ONLY lust; when feeling afraid, ONLY afraid; when feeling happy, ONLY happy; when bored, ONLY bored; when feeling restless, ONLY restless; when at peace; ONLY peace.
ONLY this…ONLY this.
I would now like us to turn our attention to the significance of today — Holy Thursday — in the Christian tradition. It marks the end of Lent and the beginning of the sacred Triduum, or the sacred three of Holy Week. Triduum runs from the evening of Holy Thursday to the evening of Easter Sunday.
What happened during the original Holy Thursday? There were many events during that day. I would like to focus on the mandate that Jesus gave us. And that is why Holy Thursday is sometimes called “Maundy Thursday.”
The word “Maundy” is derived from the Latin word mandatum, or “mandate.” This mandate is in John 13:34 where Jesus said “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”
What does it mean to love? On that Thursday, Jesus showed what loving the other involves. In the washing of his disciples’ feet, he practiced service; he embodied humility. During their last supper together, he offered himself as the Passover sacrifice.
Some may cringe at the word sacrifice because of the notion that one has to give up one’s life for another, for country, for a mission, for something greater than we are. Sometimes it is equated to being a martyr in an unjust situation. True, we must discern what sacrifice means.
When I think of sacrifice, I consider one of its meanings, which is to make sacred, to make holy.
In serving the other, which would be all beings, in humbling ourselves before the other, in making sacred and holy our behavior towards another, all these require a dying to self.
Dying to self would be more of a practice of subtraction rather than addition. It would not be adding virtues, but rather leaving behind everything that we can possibly leave behind.
Dying to self is not a one-off thing. It recurs, over and over, moment by moment, day by day. Dying to self requires the willingness to serve, to make sacred, to make holy, to be stripped bare, to be emptied of notions and expectations of what should be.
It is this repeating process that would help us practice the mandate of Jesus in John 13:34 where he said “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”
To love is to practice repeated embrace and complete welcome of ourselves. To love is to pay attention, which is a practice of generosity to ourselves and to the other. With such practice, we can truly love one another.
As one monk said, “One only can love what one stops to pay attention to.”
ONLY love. ONLY this. ONLY love.
Gassho.
EMPTY CLOUD ZEN 