Humbled by Amida's acceptance of others

I, um, I've been thinking this morning about how it is to be upset with somebody or to be hurt by somebody and how that can be a real opportunity to learn something about the nature of what it means to be human and also about Amida. 'Cause you know, there's these two aspects to Amida's saving grace. There's the Amida saves me as an ordinary foolish being, and there's Amida saves everybody else as ordinary foolish beings as well. And it's easy to say that in your head, or even when everybody's, when you're feeling good about the people you're surrounded by, it's quite easy to believe that they're all going to be saved. By Amita. Oh yeah, he will be, she will be, yeah, we're all going to the Pure Land together. It's going to be nice, we can chill out in the jewel trees and the bathing pools. And maybe people who are more unskillful, more full of hate, more full of greed, but you don't really know them so well, you can sort of get a sense, so yeah, I can work out Amita's going to take I want to take those to the Pure Land as well because as long as they are able to hear the Nembutsu with some faith, he'll appear. That faith will flourish and it will take them to the Pure Land. Fine, that makes sense. I can feel compassionate towards— very easy to feel compassionate towards people you haven't really met. But when you're in a relationship with somebody and something gets— a button gets pushed up, you get stirred up and you become angry with them or you become upset because they've been angry with you, or whatever it is. Much harder then to think, "Yeah, that person's going to the Pure Land as well," or "Amida is available to save that person as much as Amida is available to save me." You may not even like the idea of going in the Pure Land and suddenly being faced with, "Oh, what are you doing here?" I thought I was just going to be all the nice people. But as, was it Shinran who said, "If good people go to the Pure Land, how much more so evil beings." Amida made his vow for those of us who can't flourish in any other way, we're carried by his merit into the Pure Land. If you really, in that moment of not being able to really feel in your heart that, "Oh yeah, this other person is going to be saved by Amida," whilst knowing at the same time that Amida is really there for them, that's quite a humbling experience, because it shows how much bigger Amitabha is. Than our own small minds. We haven't got the capacity even to imagine that that person might be savable when we're sort of in our most fraught state. And yet Amitābha is holding his hand out to them as much as he is holding his hand out, or her hand out, to us. I was chatting to somebody about visualizing the Buddha a while back, and they said Dhammavici had given them some advice to imagine the Buddha as big as you can. And it's just to get some of that sense really of, yes, there's parts of us that are compassionate and parts of us that that are more enlightened than other parts, but the saving grace of Amitābha is infinitely more graceful, infinitely more compassionate, infinitely more accepting. And that's a very humbling and a very liberating Realization. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.