How many worlds are there right now? One world is given to one person just as one life is given to one person. There are about 20 worlds this morning. Your world is not my world even though we are together in this place at this very moment. I say this because how we perceive the world that is right here is all different. How we understand the world varies. Which does not at all mean that there’s nothing objective. It is absolutely there. We just cannot perceive it as it is. For example, I am right here. You’re looking at me and perceiving me in your world. I’m appearing in your world. But you’re not perceiving me as I am since you can only do so through your senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting.
In this world of yours, people come and go and life events constantly happen. It’s a world of constant changes in which nothing remains unchanged. In this world, our ego is the driving force that constructs how we make sense of our world. In this world, we’re controlled by the ego whose faculties are thinking, feeling, and sensing. It is always dualistic, meaning there’s you and me, us and them, darkness and light, good and evil, beginning and end, birth and death, and so on. This doesn’t mean this ego-driven faculties are bad. These skills are necessary for survival. So the heart of the matter is how to use these faculties of the ego in a way that we are not enslaved by them but use them according to God’s will. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the world of the rich man is a world driven by the ego. Lazarus who is at the gate of his house is the same Lazarus who is distanced by a great chasm. Even after his death, the rich man cannot break this ego-driven world. It still is a world of duality. Lazarus, everyone else other than the rich man himself is always the other. He cannot see Lazarus as himself, thus cannot love him as himself. His world after death is actually the same world when he was alive. Which tells us that Jesus’s point is not to tell us what the afterlife looks like. The rich man continues to carry his worldview and live the egocentric world in which there’s always you and me. The gate that sets the rich man apart from Lazarus just becomes the great chasm in the same manner. Yet, the only difference in his afterlife is that he has no power to open that gate he first created in his previous life to let Lazarus in. It eternally cuts himself off from others. Even after his death, the rich man hasn’t changed much at all. He still sees Lazarus as the homeless who he can order to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool his tongue. He still hasn’t repented. He still hasn’t changed the way he looks at Lazarus. He still is the same person as he was in his earthly life. While in agony, his heart goes out for his five brothers who are probably like him. But again, his intention to reach out to them isn’t so much about treating the poor as oneself but telling them to avoid the place of torment. His request to send someone from the dead to warn his brothers is rejected. Abraham says, “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them. If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” The Law and the prophets are more than good enough to save his five brothers from torment if they truly understand them and apply them to their lives. If they don’t already do that, they won’t be open to listen to the one who is risen from the dead. Considering that Jesus tells this parable to the Pharisees who St Luke describes as “lovers of money” (Lk 16:14), he is actually telling them to faithfully follow the law and the prophets. This is another offensive criticism of Jesus against the Pharisees. They are the ones who are proud of showing their Jewish communities what it is like to faithfully follow the law and the prophets. But then, Jesus is telling them they’re not doing a good job at all. They only talk and preach about love and forgiveness to others but they themselves do not love and forgive others. Their life is far from their teaching. They set themselves apart, setting up a gate or a great chasm between them and everyone else. They’re self-righteous. And Jesus calls them hypocrites. In that sense, he knows pretty well that he’s not well received by them. The Pharisees or anyone like the rich man in the parable wouldn’t listen to his message he proclaims. That is, “The kingdom of God has come near to you. Turn around. Turn back right now.” That kingdom is nowhere near to them. They refuse to turn around. They refuse to live in the kingdom of God. They remain in their egocentric kingdom. The point of the parable is quite simple. How are you creating the world you perceive every second? Based on what foundation are you building your world? Is it like the world of the rich man in which one sees everyone else as the other, completely separate from oneself, creating a gate or a great chasm between oneself and everyone else? This is strictly related to Jesus’s greatest commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” This is the heart of our Christian faith. Then how can we actually follow this teaching of Jesus? How can we love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind when we can’t even see or feel God? How can we love God with our entire selves? And how can we love others as ourselves? This is a serious teaching of Jesus who we have decided to follow in his footsteps and live our lives like his. His teaching is not rhetorical. He means what he teaches and does what he teaches. What gets in the way for us to love? Let’s face the fact that we all build our world strictly governed by our ego. We don’t even recognize it. This is why we are so easily consumed and controlled by our feelings, thoughts, and senses. We think about something that someone said and dwell on it. Thoughts create feelings. These feelings are often negative and self-attacking. We suffer from these thoughts and feelings. How about feelings dominating our lives? We might get stuck in feelings of anger, sorrow, or despair and might believe this is all. On the other hand, this is not to say that our faculties or powers of thinking, feeling, and sensing are not important. They are necessary but we are not using them in a way that is supposed to be. We are controlled by them rather than we control them. This is what I call the egocentric world. In this world, we cannot possibly love God or anyone, including ourselves unless we get out of that world. We must transition to the world in which we use our faculties of thinking, feeling, and sensing according to God’s will. This is the kingdom of God Jesus not only proclaims but also embodies in himself. He is the kingdom of God incarnate. That’s why his words are God’s words, his deeds are God’s deeds, his love is God’s love. Only in this world of Jesus, we can love God and others as ourselves. Then how do we transition to this world? St Paul in his letter to Timothy gives us a clue. He says, “...we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it.” There’s nothing we bring to this world of the ego. There’s nothing we take out of this egocentric world. In other words, nothing remains the same. Everything changes. Literally everything. Not only things around us change but also ourselves. Not only our physical features but also our thoughts, feelings, and senses. You can experiment how quickly your feeling or thought can change, depending on situations or people you encounter. Then, look deeply into yourself. While thoughts, feelings, and senses come and go, appear and disappear, there’s something, actually someone that’s not changing. For the past few weeks, I did some exercises with some of you together, sometimes in my homily or spirituality group or coffee hours, asking this question, “Who are you?” The purpose of asking this simple yet fundamental question is to unpack or reveal what we believe to be true of ourselves doesn’t necessarily define who we are. The question, “Who are you?” can be simply answered with one’s name. Yet, it’s just a name that one’s parents give. One might say one’s age which is just a number of years you’ve been living up to now or one’s origin of birth or other aspects that might be about one’s life. Another simple question would be “Where are you going?” We might say, “I’m going home later.” But if we keep asking this question, “After home, where are you going?” We might say, “I’m going to work.” Then again, after work where are you going? I’m going to someone’s party or church or home again or so on. We might say, “I’m going to heaven.” But after heaven, where are you going? Both of these questions make us speechless, if not annoying us, because there is no single answer that we can respond with these simple questions. I can’t even answer who I am. I can’t even answer where I’m going. The point is not so much about answering it but experiencing the very fact that everything literally changes. When we reach the point where we have no answers, where we simply sit with ourselves, where we stop and suspect our thinking, feeling, and sensing, we finally meet what’s eternal in us. Say to yourselves, “I do not know.” And remain in that very moment of silence. Because you say you don’t know, it doesn’t mean you really don’t know. It’s just a way to suspend your thinking, feeling, and sensing faculties. While sitting in that very moment, there’s this undifferentiated and non-discriminating consciousness that sees things and people around you. In this state of your undifferentiated and non-discriminating consciousness, there’s no duality but everything and everyone become one. In this state, the Holy Spirit is actively working in, through, and with us. We become one with God. This world is not something we have created but purely are given by God. It’s the very core of our being as the image of God. From this place, we use our ego, our faculties of feeling, thinking, and sensing to do God’s will. For example, when we look at someone, that person indeed shows up in my world. What I want to do is to make my world as the kingdom of God. What I desire to do with my world is to make it beautiful and meaningful. The person who appears in my world becomes God’s mission for me to beautify. Some event happens to my world. Instead of being enslaved by that situation, we make the best of it according to God’s will, arising from the state of the undifferentiated consciousness or the ground of our being. This means we can only gain our strength to love others as ourselves from the Holy Spirit. Our ego has no power to do so. Whenever you see yourself creating a gate or a great chasm that divides you from others, that’s the very moment when you are to go deep down to get in touch with the Holy Spirit who is your source to love. Don’t look for her elsewhere. The Holy Spirit is already in you. It’s the most precious treasure and gift from God. We better use it then. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
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