On becoming bread and, in that, becoming bread for one another

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New post on Interrupting the Silence Could We Be The Bread of Life? – A Sermon On John 6:35, 41-51 by Michael K. Marsh We so often hear Jesus say, “I am the bread of life,” and we assume he is the only loaf in the basket. But what if that is not what he is saying? What if he is not claiming to be the exclusive loaf of bread in this world? What if he is teaching us is what the bread of life looks like so we can find it in this world, so we can become that bread, so we can be that bread for another? Read more of this post Michael K. Marsh | August 23, 2018 at 11:17 am | Tags: Bread of Life, Bread of Life Discourse, John 6:35 41-51, Proper 14B | Categories: Sermon | URL: https://wp.me/pprAI-2N8

Organ Donation - The Gift of Life Forum - Interfaith views

PLEASE MARK YOUR DIARIES

The Gift of Life Forum 

Sat, 4 August 2018; 2:00 PM – 5:30 PM 

Avalokitesvara Yuan Tong Monastery; 270 Hampshire Road, Sunshine  

View Map

On Saturday 4 August 2018 the Avalokitesvara Yuan Tong Monastery in Sunshine will host "The Gift of Life” Forum. 

Supported by the Brimbank Maribyrnong Interfaith Network and Donate Life Victoria this forum aims to raise faith and religious communities awareness of the benefits of donating organs to save (or relief) sick people who are suffering due to the malfunction of their own organs.

In this forum members of the Brimbank Maribyrnong Interfaith Network and 

Donate Life Victoria will present their view of organ and tissue donation. 

Short presentations will be will be given from the perspective of:

• Buddhist - Ven Phuoc Tan of Quang Minh Temple 
• Christian Faith - Ray Gorman, Uniting Church, Sunshine 
• Sikh Faith - Kawal Singh, Sikh Interfaith Council 
• Salvation Army - Colin Reynolds, Salvation Army Sunshine
• Muslim faith - Nayran Tabiei, community leader 

The event will also include speakers from Donate Life Victoria. 

This is a free community event and will include light refreshments.

Register to attend today

Sacred: agnostic filmmaker's film about religion by Thomas Lennon

An Agnostic Filmmaker’s Film About Religion: 

Thomas Lennon (Best Documentary Oscar-winner) 

on his new PBS film “Sacred”

Pictured Above: Thomas Lennon in a Beijing Film Studio. 

Lennon’s earlier work in China earned him an Oscar and two Academy nominations.

Our Guest: 

This time on “Interfaith Matters,” host Maggi Van Dorn talks with Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Thomas Lennon about “Sacred,” his recent million-dollar global documentary for PBS.  Two years in the making, and utilizing more than 40 film crews in more than 20 countries, “Sacred” explores ritual practice around the world through stages of life the film terms “Initiation,” “Practice” and “Passage.”  As the film journeys through the milestones of private life and the faith practices of individual human beings, a singular story begins to unfold, of universal humanity.

“Sacred” is premiering around the country this year, and, as a WNET-TV production, will be on public TV in 2018.  Jump to the link below to watch the trailer. Click here to check for upcoming film screenings in the United States and around the world.

Podcast Highlights:

On what motivated him as an agnostic filmmaker to produce a film about religion: “Jonathan Sacks said, ‘Religion is fire: it can warm, or it can burn.’  The media have done a very good job of looking at the ways in which it can burn. And I thought why don’t I go off by myself and take a few looks at how it can warm.” 

On faith as a primary human experience: “The wisdom of [religious rituals], psychologically, does not require you to be a person of faith for you to recognize and be grateful for that transmission of advice from generations before you.”

On his experimental approach to global film-making: “If there is a scene you want covered in Myanmar or in Madagascar… the chances are very good that there’s a filmmaker there who’s going to have an intimacy of relationship with that scene, with that language, with that culture, with that faith, that you do not have – and so it behooves you to invite them into a collaboration.”

On the spiritual creativity of prisoners: “It’s an extraordinary act of existential choice to say, ‘I’m not going to think about the fact that … I’m not going to leave these prison walls except in a body bag…I’m going to think about this other reality that I’m going to insist is the dominant reality.'”

Listen or Download the Podcast:

http://interfaithcenter.org/an-agnostic-filmmakers-film-about-religion-thomas-lennon-best-documentary-oscar-winner-on-his-new-pbs-film-sacred/

A change must occur deep in our souls .....

"It is clear that there will be little development of life here in the future if we do not protect and foster the living...
Posted by Spiritual Ecology on Friday, 16 October 2015

A Zen master explains death and the life-force

One of the most brilliant sites on the 'net is a site called Brain Pickings run by the marvellous Maria Popova.   The site is a miscellany of stuff. You never quite know what Maria will come up with next.  Please go to the site and explore.  Interfaith friends, I hope, will enjoy this.

A Zen Master Explains Death and the Life-Force to a Child and Outlines the Three Essential Principles of Zen Mind

If death is so enormous a mystery that we remain unable to wrap our grownup minds around it, despite comfort from our great poets and consolation from our great philosophers, how are tiny humans to make sense of it all? Although there exist some exceptional children's books about loss and grief, explaining death to a child remains one of the most challenging tasks for a human being to undertake.

Because the language of Zen, holding great complexity of experience in great simplicity of expression, is so organically suited to the child – children, after all, have a way of leaning their minds toward the profound by way of the simple – it is perhaps the best language we have in offering a befitting explanation, as much to ourselves as to our young ones.

That's what the great Korean-born Zen teacher Seung Sahn Soen-sa(August 1, 1927–November 30, 2004) offers in one of the chapters inDropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teachings of Zen Master Seung Sahn (public library) – a tiny treasure of a book originally published in 1976, irreverent yet immensely spiritually invigorating, collecting his correspondence and conversations with Zen students in the West.

Soen-sa recounts his conversation with Gita, the seven-year-old daughter of one of his students at the Cambridge Zen Center, after the death of the center's beloved cat, cleverly named Katz. ("KATZ!" is the transcription of the famous Buddhist belly-shout, used as a way of focusing energy and intention during Zen practice.) Katz had died after a long illness and was given a traditional Buddhist burial, but the little girl remained troubled by his death. One day after practice, she came to the great Zen teacher for an explanation. He relays the exchange:

"What happened to Katzie? Where did he go?”

Soen-sa said, “Where do you come from?”

“From my mother's belly.”

“Where does your mother come from?” Gita was silent.

Soen-sa said, “Everything in the world comes from the same one thing. It is like in a cookie factory. Many different kinds of cookies are made – lions, tigers, elephants, houses, people. They all have different shapes and different names, but they are all made from the same dough and they all taste the same. So all the different things that you see – a cat, a person, a tree, the sun, this floor – all these things are really the same.”

“What are they?”

Illustration by Edward Gorey from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot

With an eye to our tendency to mistake a thing's name for its thingness, Soen-sa answers by urging the little girl to contact the universal life-force of the metaphorical cookie dough:

“People give them many different names. But in themselves, they have no names. When you are thinking, all things have different names and different shapes. But when you are not thinking, all things are the same. There are no words for them. People make the words. A cat doesn't say, ‘I am a cat.’ People say, ‘This is a cat.’ The sun doesn't say, ‘My name is sun.’ People say, ‘This is the sun.’

So when someone asks you, ‘What is this?’, how should you answer?”

“I shouldn't use words.”

Soen-sa said, “Very good! You shouldn't use words. So if someone asks you, ‘What is Buddha?’, what would be a good answer?”

Gita was silent.

Soen-sa said, “Now you ask me."

“What is Buddha?”

Soen-sa hit the floor.

Gita laughed.

Soen-sa said, “Now I ask you: What is Buddha?”

Gita hit the floor.

“What is God?”

Gita hit the floor.

“What is your mother?”

Gita hit the floor.

“What are you?”

Gita hit the floor.

“Very good! This is what all things in the world are made of. You and Buddha and God and your mother and the whole world are the same.”

Gita smiled.

Soen-sa said, “Do you have any more questions?”

“You still haven't told me where Katz went.”

Soen-sa leaned over, looked into her eyes, and said, “You already understand.”

Gita said, “Oh!” and hit the floor very hard. Then she laughed.

Soen-sa ends the anecdote with an exchange intended to be funny, but in fact a tragic testament to contemporary Western education beinga force of industrialized specialization, deliberately fragmenting the unity of all things and deconditioning our inner wholeness:

As she was opening the door, she turned to Soen-sa and said, “But I'm not going to answer that way when I'm in school. I'm going to give regular answers!” Soen-sa laughed.

Illustration from The Book of Memory Gaps by Cecilia Ruiz

In another section of the book, Soen-sa examines the principles and practices that help us cultivate the pre-thinking mind necessary for truly tasting the metaphorical cookie dough of the universal life-force. Responding to a letter from a Zen beginner, a young woman named Patricia who had trouble grasping the value and very notion of "don't-know mind," he writes:

Throw away all opinions, all likes and dislikes, and only keep the mind that doesn't know... Your before-thinking mind, my before-thinking mind, all people's before-thinking minds are the same. This is your substance. Your substance, my substance, and the substance of the whole universe become one. So the tree, the mountain, the cloud, and you become one... The mind that becomes one with the universe is before thinking. Before thinking there are no words. “Same” and “different” are opposites words; they are from the mind that separates all things.

A few months later, in another letter to Patricia, he explores the three pillars of Zen's don't-know mind:

Zen practice ... requires great faith, great courage, and great questioning. What is great faith? Great faith means that at all times you keep the mind which decided to practice, no matter what. It is like a hen sitting on her eggs. She sits on them constantly, caring for them and giving them warmth, so that they will hatch. If she becomes careless or negligent, the eggs will not hatch and become chicks. So Zen mind means always and everywhere believing in myself... Great courage ... means bringing all your energy to one point. It is like a cat hunting a mouse. The mouse has retreated into its hole, but the cat waits outside the hole for hours on end without the slightest movement. It is totally concentrated on the mouse-hole. This is Zen mind – cutting off all thinking and directing all your energy to one point. Next – great questioning... If you question with great sincerity, there will only be don't-know mind.

Complement Dropping Ashes on the Buddha, indispensable in its entirety, with the great D.T. Suzuki on how Zen can help us cultivate our character, Alan Watts on death, and beloved Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn on how to do "hugging meditation."

World Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission : Climate change, slavery, apartheid, human sexuality and matters of life & death.

WCC Faith and Order Commission charts future directions

Posted on: June 25, 2015 11:25 AM

Participants in a meeting of the WCC’s

Faith and Order Commission

at the Caraiman Monastery in Romania.

Photo Credit: Romanian Orthodox Church

[World Council of Churches] Meeting from 17 to 24 June, the newly reconstituted Commission on Faith and Order of the World Council of Churches (WCC) has begun to define its principal trajectories for ecumenical study and common activity from 2015 until the next WCC Assembly in 2020.

Gathered at Caraiman Monastery in Romania, the 49-member commission determined to focus its upcoming work in the areas of examining theological foundations of the WCC program emphasis “the pilgrimage of justice and peace”, continuing work on dialogue and the discovery of common ground among churches regarding the Christian doctrine of the Church, and coordinate consultations and seminars on how churches engage in processes of “moral discernment” when deciding policies leading to action on such topics as climate change, slavery, apartheid, human sexuality and matters of life and death.

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Life .... from Sai Baba

From Sai Baba ~~~