Rev. Joseph Boyd
A handsome prince was in the habit of looking at himself in the mirror and admiring himself his beautiful head. One day he picked up the mirror the wrong way, and instead of looking in the mirror, he looked at the back of the mirror and didn’t see his head. He went screaming from his palace, in terror, telling all the villagers that he had lost his beautiful head. He was so terrified and upset, that the villagers had to tie him to a pillar and gag him to muffle his screaming. The prince’s friends eventually found him, and told him that his head was still there, and as beautiful as ever, even though he couldn’t see it. The prince still didn’t believe them. He flailed and tried to escape, and tried to scream through his gag. To not further embarrass the prince, his friends carried him kicking and screaming back into the palace. They removed the gag, and once removed, the prince continued the frenzied tirade about not having his beautiful head. One friend got so annoyed with him, he slapped the prince on the cheek. It hurt. The prince was silent for a moment, then went to pick up his mirror. He saw his reflection, and indeed his head was there.  But the prince then returned to his frenzy and told his friends and all the villagers that his head had disappeared, and through a miracle it had returned again. This lasted for many years, until the prince could finally accept he always had a head.

Most of us go through this at some point. We rely on something or someone that is a source of comfort and stability. We find strength in it, we return to it in times of trouble and indecision. We look at ourselves in a mirror of our own choosing, and see what we want to see. And it is a comfort to expect to see something, and then lo and behold we receive confirmation – what we hold to be true is really true. It is a very satisfying feeling to believe something to be true, and then receive visual confirmation, that yes, this is really true. I thought I had a head, and yes, I see it plain as day in the mirror I depend on – yes it’s right there, in the same place it was yesterday. But there always comes a time when the unexpected happens to us, something we didn’t account for, something we didn’t prepare for, something we never considered to be true.

It is a terrifying moment when instead of seeing what we hold to be true, what we always counted on, we see nothing. We are so afraid of seeing nothing, that many of us will concoct scary images, nightmares, doomsday predictions, because at least this is something. But seeing nothing, seeing the absence of this thing we depended on, is one of the most scary and freeing moments. We see no reflection of what we think or what we hold to be true, and thus for a time maybe have no idea who we are or even where we belong. We look everywhere, looking for something that was lost, not sure we’ll ever get it back.

Many people find this church after some period of feeling like they’ve lost their head. For many, this was the discovery that the beliefs that guided them for so long reached a point when they weren’t working anymore. For years, these were mostly religious beliefs. But now many are finding us because some of the basic beliefs about our country, basic beliefs about democracy, basic beliefs about human goodness are being tested and not always holding up. It’s scary to realize you’ve depended on a way of seeing yourself and the world after that view is no longer an option in the same way. It’s destabilizing. It is no wonder that so many of us right now are trying to get our bearings and find out where we are. We may feel like we’re running around without a head, and we’re looking for someone to help mirror back to us something we know deep down. The empirical evidence of this moment seems to leave us lacking. We are flooded with information, flooded with predictions, flooded with conflicting viewpoints, flooded with potential mirrors trying to tell us who we are, what we should think, and what we should feel. But many of us I think want to know this for ourselves, firsthand.

In Hinduism and Buddhism, there is a goddess of compassion called by many names including Tara, Kuan Yin, Avalokoteshvara. She is a goddess whose purpose is to hear the cries of the world. Most of us know by now there is a lot of crying out there. There are many people crying out to find something they’ve lost. Many people are crying out seeking justice. Many are crying out just to know that they’re still human. What do you think this goddess looks like as she hears the cries of the world? My first thought is that she would look like myself or many of us who check the daily news – tense, angry, vaguely nauseated. But her pose is very surprising. She has a relaxed posture that is open. All her limbs are open. Her face shows neither agitation or excitement. When I first saw this image, it was very confusing to me. From my western perspective, she looked almost indifferent, unmoved, not like anyone I would want to model. But there was something comforting about her, something that I couldn’t put my finger on at the time. She offered comfort in a way that I couldn’t understand then.

Being open to the world is both a very scary and freeing thing. In being open, we don’t know what we’ll hear or what we’ll learn. We don’t know what will be mirrored back to us: something we’ve always held to be true or something we never before considered. It took me years to understand that we are not meant to be like Kuan Yin or Avaloketeshvara exactly. As human beings we have a limit to how much we can take in, how much we can hear, how much we can digest, how much we can be open. I see now that the power of this goddess is not that we become like her, but that we can turn toward a kind of openness that can hear every single cry out there. We can turn toward an understanding that no one’s plight is falling on deaf ears, even if it seems that way in the moment. This goddess is not offering us an example about how to be per se but she is offering a kind of faith, something that is beyond our own or anyone else’s limitations.

Many of us feel like we can live our lives as long as there is a certain level of control. We can live our lives if we consistently look at the mirror the same way everyday. We can live as long as we see with our own sense what we hold and believe to be true. Most of the time this works fine. But there will always come a time when it won’t. There will be a day when we pick up the mirror, the belief, even scientific belief we’ve always held a certain way, and be startled by what we encounter. We will be tempted to label some of these former beliefs as ideals of youth, and it will be tempting to double down on our sense of control as our view grows smaller and more rigid, more careful. We can begin to see openness as a foolish thing. We can spend our life trying to escape hearing any cry anywhere, maybe even especially our own.

I love what Cheryl Shartle read last week that listening to someone, really hearing them, is like loving them. It does take faith to trust that our plight is being heard by compassionate and loving witnesses. I don’t mean necessarily a faith in God as transcendent, something beyond our circumstances. I’m talking about a faith within our circumstances, something down to earth, real. We often mistake what is tangible for what is real in this culture. We often mistake not seeing our own image in the way we expect to mean that we’ve lost everything we hold dear. We often think if we can’t sense what we need in that moment, then we will never get what we need. We can mistake not seeing our own head as evidence that we no longer have one.

But the truth is we are limited in what we sense at any given time. We can only sense so much. But we can imagine a world where all the cries of the world are heard, and everyone is shown who they really are: beautiful and whole. This is real, though it may not always feel tangible in every single moment.

When we live into that reality, a reality where cries become compassion, when the whole world and everyone in it is being intimately, truly heard, we lose the compulsion to run through the village screaming. We quit being terrified, and thus terrifying everyone around us with something that they already know is our own fear, and not the truth. We learn to take ourselves a little more lightly, and we begin to lose our obsession of looking at ourselves in the same way, just to know we’re real and still there. Faith is the understanding that there is something more going on here beyond our limited view. Faith is the understanding that this is always true. Belief is the idea that we know what is going on out there. Belief is suspicious and in the end not reliable. Faith is always real, because it’s not tangible.

So I look at Kuan Yin differently now. She embodies a kind of possibility. A possibility that is real and always present. A possibility that those in distress are never alone in their plight. A possibility that though my hearing is limited, the cries of the world are being held in loving embrace not by a being, but by all of us, something I’ll never fully understand.  Faith is where the imagination and our lived experience meet. It would not be quite right to say I believe in a goddess that hears the cries of the world. It is much closer to say that I have faith that the cries of the world are never in vain, and that compassion is natural, real, and true. It is as true as breathing, as true as being alive, as true as grief, as true as every single cry. How do I know this is true? I don’t, not through tangible instruments like a mirror. How do I know I have a head? Because I’m talking to you right now. If I turn my monitor off, am I still there? It is a mistake to conflate the limitation of our vision with the limitation of the world.

In a time of great uncertainty, like the time we are living through now, there is a search for some kind of tangible certainty, something we can rely on. It’s a mistake. In a time of uncertainty, we should seek greater uncertainty, greater realms of not knowing, greater vistas of faith and imagination. This is the source of abundance. Scarcity teaches there is only so much in this world, there is only so much in our household, so much in our life. We accept limitations as the ultimate truth, the most real thing there is.  We accept loss as a given, and we think that living in a state of missing something crucial, missing out on compassion, makes us more real. We say “that’s life” without any sense of irony. We confuse our own limitations as the limitations of the world, and we confuse our limited view of ourselves to be who we really are: always missing something, always lost, always wanting. We hear the cries of the world, and they make us afraid. And they make us feel sad. And they make us feel helpless, like it’s all too much. And it is too much. It’s too much for our limited selves, our limited views, our limited beliefs. It’s too much if we rely on our limited openness. But we are actually living something more spacious and more mysterious. We are living in the reality of Kuan Yin, a reality that holds all these limitations with ease. How do I know this? I don’t. To know is to go in the opposite direction. To not know is much better. We need more not knowing in this world. Not knowing opens us up to the mysterious. It opens us up to the possible. It opens us up to others who tell us: I see your head, it’s right there. Everything you’ve relied on is still here, just not the way you thought. Everything you value and love is still here in plain sight, even in loss, even when you’re afraid.

Faith says: I’m not sure about that, but I guess that’s possible. And that’s what we need during this time, just this small tentative openness. “I’m not sure, but I guess that’s possible.” And in that small opening, our listening becomes sharper, and our whole bodies sense what was there all along.