Rainforest Mind: Zen and Christianity

It's Rainforest Mind with me, Casper Thomson. See, I did change the name of the podcast after all. It felt like it was early enough days that I could get away with it. This week is sort of part 2 of the Buddhism and Christianity episode that we did a few episodes back, and today I'm talking to Reverend Ian Spencer, who's an Anglican priest currently running a retreat center about half an hour away from here. In this conversation, we talk about how he brings together these two, perhaps on the surface, quite different traditions, and we get to the mystical heart of each of them. Anyway, without any more waffle in the introduction, Here's the conversation. Enjoy.

So, Ian, so maybe, and you could just start by telling us about your two different lineages, if you like, spiritual traditions.

Well, uh, so from a Christian point of view, which is my home, uh, tradition, it's my kind of root, um That really just, that really actually began with marriage, really, interestingly enough. That I wanted to get married and I went to a church and the vicar there said, well, look, you can get married here, but this actually isn't in your parish where you're going to live. So you'll have to come to church for 6 months and then you can be kind of put on this thing called an electoral roll and then you'll be part of the church and da di da. 'And then I can marry her.' It's just really the sort of tedious kind of formality of Anglican church life. But doing that, I said—

So was it, so there was something about that church in particular?

Not really, no, no, just it was in the countryside and it was pretty and la-di-da. But going to that church with it, and they were very lovely people, and it was a lovely church, the vicar was lovely. You know, you either went for 6 months, you know, just to get a tick in the box and get married, or it changed you.

It's a long time to just to get a tick in a box.

Yeah, it is, it is. And we went, my wife and I, and, well, she was my fiancée at the time. But that tradition was middle-of-the-road Anglican, really, you know, but it suited me. At the time and was welcoming and loving and expressed something of, you know, the tradition that I'd inherited just through family life and school.

And did you go into that church having some sense of God, say? Was that sort of— yeah, it was something that was around for you?

I've never really been with that.

Yeah.

I don't know why, because my parents didn't go to church. But they would have called themselves Christian, but they didn't go to church. They would have said that they got belief. My mum's 88 this year and she's certainly pries and she would certainly say she has a belief. But so that was where my Christian life began and the way it unfolded really was a connection, it deepened through Celtic, the Celtic tradition. Because I love being outside and the natural world. And, um, I kind of feel pretty close to something divine, you know, when, you know, you're in the woods or by the sea.

Absolutely. Yeah.

So that was, you know, that kind of deepened, uh, things for me. Um, and eventually, um, that continued to unfold, uh, found the Franciscans, which if you enjoy the natural life of Saint Francis, calling all of the created order his brothers and sisters. Brother Sun, Sister Moon, you know.

Famous image, isn't there, with him teaching the birds.

Teaching the birds, yeah. And he taught the fish. And if you read, if you read the another book that came out of his life, written very soon after he died, The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, it's called, you'll see that both he and many of the monks, they were always teaching the crows and the fish and things. It was— and allowing them to teach them.

Yeah. And I think for me that's actually more important.

Yes, it is. Yeah. So I enjoyed— so, you know, finding Francis, uh, was a development as well. And, and then the monastic life, which I'm not a monastic in any official sense, but there is some kind of monastic heart in me. Um, and then on into the Christian mystic, um, contemplative.

When you say, uh, monastic heart, what does that evoke for you?

Uh, silence, really, and, um an attentiveness and awareness, gratitude, a depth to things, in inverted comma, that is kind of eternal. So when one gazes up, so when a monastic, for example, when a Franciscan monastic at least, You know, I think they would all say this, but when a Franciscan monastic perhaps gazes at a tree, he doesn't see an oak tree. He does see an oak tree, but then he goes beyond the name oak and beyond the name tree. And there's a depth to that particular being that its form and its names can't articulate.

Yeah, makes me think of the William Blake poem about the— is it—

or the Grain of Sand? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. And, and Saint Julian, you know, Julian of Norwich, Dame Julian, when she says she, she holds a little hazelnut in her hand and she says, here I have the entire universe in the palm of my hand. Well, no, it's not, it's a nut, right? Okay, but yes, it is.

Yeah, because she's—

because she's a mystic.

Yeah.

Or a contemplative, or, or has, uh, eyes that can see beyond the simple, uh, the simple form, if you like.

It also makes you think— we will perhaps come to this later— Indra's net as well, the image of all the jewels of the universe.

Yeah, that's very lovely.

Each reflecting all of the other jewels.

Yes, for sure, for sure. Yes. So I guess that's a little summary of my Christian journey and that's where I am now in terms of my Christian life and that's, um, and at some point continues to unfold.

Yeah, at some point in that you became ordained.

Yes, I had a ministry, uh, 1992 to, uh, 2002. I had a 10-year ministry as a as a lay minister, what in the Anglican Church were called readers, but you have a couple of years part-time training for that and then you can preach in church and a few other things. So it's a ministerial order within the Anglican tradition. And then I felt called to maybe deepening that, which would which involved the possibility of ordination to the priesthood within Anglican tradition. And so, you know, you go along and you see the Director of Ordinands for the whole of that start. So that was another couple of years' journey, but I was eventually ordained in Worcester Cathedral in 2005.

Okay, great. And the Buddhist roots is something more—

a bit more recent. Yeah, so I guess Buddhism came knocking on the door of my life about 7 or 8 years ago. I'd be— I was reading work by Christian contemplatives, one of whom I was very fond of called James Finlay, who was a Cistercian monk for a while and a novice under Thomas Merton, who was a pretty massive figure in contemplative Christian history of last century, in the 1950s, '60s. Um, but, uh, James Finlay wrote a book called Thomas Merton's Palace of Nowhere, and he introduced Zen in that. And I was completely blown away by that. And then, of course, I discovered that Thomas Merton wrote a book called Zen and the Birds of Appetite, and then you read— and then I discovered there are other Christians, Jesuits, a guy called Reuben Habito, who wrote Loving God, Loving Zen, who had gone a step further and was an abbot of a Zen monastery, but a Jesuit Christian as well.

So what was it that was speaking to you from those pages of Zen Christian books?

So I think what I liked about Zen was its directness. In that, it's— it's— I spoke very eloquently of mystery, because in the Zen Buddhist tradition, you're not allowed to hang on to ideas, concepts. So it's not enough to call God Father anymore, because God clearly isn't a bloke, right?

Yeah.

So, you know, uh, the work So you can call God Mother. That's beautiful. It's about time we started doing that a bit more. Yeah, but that's not right either because it's also limited. It's limited. So Zen, it says, that's fine, that's helpful, but you can't stay there. You gotta push on. And so not only does it speak of mystery, uh, and sort of infiniteness. But it's also massively inclusive because nothing is excluded. Everything is allowed its place.

Yeah.

Even though you can't stay there, but everything has its place. Um, beginner's mind, as Shunryo Suzuki puts it, you know, you just wake up every day and start afresh. And have a fresh relationship with things and people and your life as it arises in that moment, during the day, during the night. So one recommits to one's life, to this kind of beginner's mind, which is the Zen mind, which another way is ordinary mind, they call it. The Zen tradition is very, um, It honors ordinariness. It honors the washing up, you know. It honors the putting of your shoes away, you know.

So it sounds like in that reading and experiencing of Zen, there was an invitation to go deeper or even go beyond the sort of the symbolic life of the church that you'd been embedded in.

Yeah, I'd say that's a good summary, Casper, that's good. Because it, you know, it takes, it takes, it doesn't sort of disavow any of that, but it says, it just says, well, this is good, it's fine, but it's not enough. Okay, so you, because you, how are you supposed, do you really think it's possible to capture the essence of the divine in some dogmatic statements.

Moving from certainty to uncertainty.

Yeah, yeah. And in the Zen tradition, not knowing is most intimate. Yeah, that's one of the Zen masters put it. Lots of folks don't really understand that. I think knowing is intimate, knowing is— but knowing is limited because you know, don't you?

Yeah, I guess that's for me, there's some— there's almost like there's the original not knowing, which is not at all intimate because it's distant and disengaged and not interested.

Yes.

And then there's knowing, which is okay, coming into relationship, finding things out, beginning to make sense of things.

Yeah.

And then there's the not knowing that's beyond that, which is, which is like, and there's something else, there's something limitless about what I'm encountering, that's for sure.

I'd agree with that. Yes, not knowing is not about ignorance or some sort of— it's not about distance. It's about, you know, when you don't know something, then you get close to it, don't you? You get close, you have a real good look. I have a little grandson now who's really, who's for some reason really interested in lawnmowers.

Why not?

Well, I don't know what that's about. He's 2. He loves— look, I think it's the noise. Yeah, the engines. But when he comes to my house, he's only 2. What does he know about lawnmowers?

Nothing.

However, he gets his face right in amongst. Yeah, he gets right in amongst, as close as he can, to look at all the things that make up a lawnmower. So this, this not knowing breeds or, or kind of calls forth an intimacy.

Yeah, I like that. I, I think a good translation of Nembutsu could be intimacy. Nembutsu is that the practice that we have here of calling the Buddha's name.

Yeah.

And yeah, I think intimacy is one way of describing that. Yeah, coming into closeness with something and the name that we call is unlimited. That is the translation of the name.

Yeah, that is completely beautiful, and that has such a Christian, actually, and Jewish overtone. Let me share something with you that just occurred to me after 30 years of going to church and reading the Bible. I'd never looked at this particular passage in this way. It exactly describes what you just talked about, about intimacy and and name and not knowing. Because there's a little bit in the Bible— it gets read a lot in church and in the synagogues— where Abraham is in the desert and his eye is caught by a bush that's aflame, a burning bush. It's quite a well-known story. There's this bush and it's burning and he can't work it. He looks at it, he thinks, well, why isn't it being consumed? By the flames, you know, it's burning brightly and it looks a bit odd. So he doesn't know, not knowing, he doesn't know what it is, so he thinks, I'll go and have a look. So he goes and has a look, and when he gets near the bush, a voice calls to him from the center of the bush, which would be a bit disconcerting, but nevertheless, a voice calls to him from the bush, which, you know, you know, this is a hard thing. I mean, Voices call to me from bushes all the time. It's a bird, or it's just a— do you know what I mean? It's not the modulations of air, okay?

Yeah, it's not how I imagine it, which is perhaps the voice of God from The Simpsons.

"Hello, Abraham!" No, no, it doesn't require vocal cords. But he's nonetheless— he's called.

Yeah, he hears something.

He hears something. It's his heart.

Or he experiences something that he describes as hearing.

So he goes to this burning bush and the voice says, 'Take off your shoes, Abraham, because this is holy ground.' The act of taking off your shoes is an act of intimacy, clearly. Yeah, yeah. Barefoot on the soil, that's an intimate act. So there's a second act of intimacy, right? Second act. So now he's, now he's barefoot kneeling at by this bush, which has captivated him. And at the end of this little time he has with this bush, God reveals God's name. That is an intimate, intimate thing to do. It's the first time God reveals God's name in the Bible. And what is God's name? I am. That's endless, isn't it?

Yeah, that's—

you can't— what does that— how do you capture that? I am, I am Yahweh. So that moment— have you?

Yeah. Wow, because that's the perfect description of the holy, of the activity of a holy person. Yeah, becoming intimate with reality.

That's it. See, Abraham was a contemplative, right? I mean, clearly, you know, to have noticed the bush— most people running around wouldn't notice a bush. It was on fire, you think, well, let the firemen put it out, or it'll just, you know, whatever.

And if you want to, you know, you can say that it was on fire, but you know, you can also say that all the bushes are on fire.

Oh, there was that beautiful poem, isn't there? All the bushes are on fire. And of course, I mean, I've seen bushes on fire at Holland House. Yeah, they haven't been on fire. There was one, and I had a very similar experience to Abram— not quite the same, but I had a similar experience to Abram— when a bush captivated me for a short time.

Why not?

And it was, it was a sunset.

Yeah.

And the whole tree, the sunlight was reflected from the leaves in such a way as you'd have thought the bush was on fire. Uh, and I spent a little bit of time with, with that. That's a gift really.

Well, you used the word when we were talking at breakfast, grace, and to me that's one experience of grace.

Yes.

That captivation, discovering that the bush is holy, that the bush is God.

Yeah, absolutely. It's got something important to say. It's a word. And then, of course, in the Christian tradition we talk a lot about the Word of God. Of God. That word being a revelation of the presence of God. And in the Zen Buddhist tradition— see, this is another lovely connection for me— the Zen Buddhists talk about the 10,000 things, which is another way of saying the universe, the cosmos.

Yeah.

And they say the 10,000 things Each thing on its own, in its own integrity as a thing, and the whole lot together, they're all word. They're all Dharma gates. Yeah, everything is a Dharma gate. Everything is the voice of the Dharma.

Yeah, and of course when you say 10,000 things, it makes me think of, uh, that wonderful quote from Dogen: to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to be enlightened by the 10,000 things.

Yeah, that is a sort of one of the core, uh, texts in Zen.

And as a Pure Land Buddhist, I might say that upside down. To be enlightened by the 10,000 things is to forget the self.

Yes.

Oh yes.

Yeah, that you begin— I begin by going to the bush. My spiritual experience is that actually both those things happen to get their eyes together.

There's no separation.

Yeah, as you approach— in order to approach the bush and be enlightened by it, you— there must be a space through the ego for the light to shine. And yet, for sure, the light is always shining, sort of forcing its way through from its own side.

Yeah, yeah, it's never without the light. Oh, that's, that's, uh, Buddha nature is, or in the Christian tradition, Christ is, the Christ Self is. There's never been a moment in the unfolding of the cosmos when that hasn't been the case. I quite like the idea, that idea of what we have to do is not that we're separate from anything. And that's certainly when I do my contemplative days at Holland House, and I try to, you know, constantly kind of trying to reassert, because people feel separate from one another, from the creation, from God, quite often from themselves, particularly those bits of themselves that they're not very happy with, um, and try to box them off or feel a huge gap, but there is no separation. This is another point of view of God, of course, that's true.

But from the point of view of ordinary beings, we experience separation. Yes, we do.

Yes, we do.

Yeah. And you're right, there's something about— for me, my experience as a practitioner, the more of myself and my shadow I can include in my practice, the more space there is for God.

Yes.

Because the walls that separate me from my darkness also separate me Yes, well, you think that they don't.

It just feels—

was it from its own— from, from God's side, it's like, hello, I'm right here.

Yeah, yeah, what are you doing?

But from my side, I'm like, no, I can't look over there.

Yeah, yeah. But so, and this is the difference in relative truth and absolute truth, isn't it? They're relatively speaking because of one's conditioning. Yeah, all the stuff that's come up in one's life from the moment you're born to this this particular moment right here, right now, because of the conditioning, 99% of which you've had no choice in. That's not to say we don't make choices, but even those choices are based on—

heavily weighted choices. Yeah.

So because of our conditioning, uh, uh, we live, uh, you know, relative lives, and that's fine, isn't it? I mean, when one can understand One way of looking at that is that, well, one might say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, relatively speaking. That is relative to the earth. It most certainly does. Absolutely speaking, it's nonsense. The sun doesn't move anywhere.

Who knows?

Well, for one thing for sure, it doesn't travel. The sun doesn't rise in the east and set in the west. The earth turns.

So relatively speaking, depends where you put this in. I mean, we're going to get into a long, complicated discussion now because I would say that both are true, actually. Yeah, you know, and I also perhaps would— I'm more of a dualist than the Zen could be. Um, people's experience is true. It's not that, you know, I, I sort of don't want to de-emphasize the experience of separation because that is the living reality. Yes, most of us, most of the time.

Yes, I know, I wouldn't disagree with that. I certainly would not be saying that, uh, that, um, it doesn't matter, B, it's not true. I would hold both.

Yeah, as just something else, something else.

And there's an absolute truth.

Yeah.

And the absolute— this is, this is Zen teaching.

Yeah.

But the abs— but I'd say, I see it in the Christian tradition, in the contemplative side of things, that the absolute truth includes the relative. So it's not— nothing is lost, you know, it's both are honored.

Yeah, good. Um, there is one question I wanted to ask. Yeah, because it sounds like— and I'm really appreciating how inclusive your spirituality is and your sense of actually everything becoming holy, every— everything becoming a word, a Dharma gate. In that context, how do you make sense of the idea of Christ? Because for many Christians, he is the word.

Yes.

And other things don't sort of, you know, it's that, that is, that's the gate, that's the only gate.

Yeah.

Yes.

I am the way and the truth and the life. Yeah. Well, I don't have a problem with that because I think what people get— there's a confusion happens when they hear that. What people think is they get doctrine and dogmas mixed up with Christ. So when people say, well, this the only way to God is through Jesus of Nazareth, or Christ. What they really mean is the church, or particular doctrines and understandings of Christ that have arisen since the Christ event, and have taken 2,000 years to articulate. All sorts of councils, all men by the way, mostly, but all sorts of councils have got together over the years, over the centuries, and tried to understand the Christ event, put some words around it. What does this mean? How do we articulate it? And then of course those doctrines become traditions and rules, which you have to abide by, and if you don't, then you're on the outside, not the inside. Side and all the rest of that. Okay, yeah. So when they say— when people say the only way to God is through Christ, what they really mean is the only way is through formulations of belief since the Christ event.

Not just through the church, but through my church.

Well, very often, yeah. But of course, what we forget is that when Jesus said that, there was no church. There were no Christian doctrines or dogmas whatsoever. They hadn't even been written. They hadn't been thought about. Because Jesus was a Jew, right? So, if you want to really think that what Jesus meant was doctrines and dogmas, you've got to adhere to the Jewish tradition, not to a Christian tradition, which didn't exist. But that can't be right either. Clearly wasn't, because St. Paul went off and preached to the Gentiles. And said, well, actually, Jesus isn't just for the Jews. So really, what do we mean when we say Christ is the way, the truth, and the life? Do we really mean the Christian, particularly Christian traditions, or particularly Jewish traditions? Well, the answer, as far as I'm concerned, is no. The way to— the way— the reason why Jesus said that is he gives us a big clue, because he says, so follow me. What he means by 'follow me' is 'do what I do.' Hmm.

Follow my— follow my example. Take part in my spirit. Yeah. Well, join the dance.

Yeah, join the dance.

Lovely.

Yeah. And what did he do? How did he conduct his life? Well, he did it like this. He was compassionate to all beings everywhere.

And he had a life of prayer.

A life of prayer.

Yeah.

So, you know, he healed people and it didn't matter to him whether they were a Jew or whether they were a Gentile, whether it was a woman that was bleeding who should not have touched, whether it was somebody that died who we should not have touched, whether it was a man who'd lost his mind, you know, was suffering great mental distress in Gennesaret, which was a a Greek place, because there were pigs roaming around. So what was he doing there? He should not have been there, but he was. Whether it was a legionnaire who was actually a member of the occupying forces, who perhaps that morning had been to worship his own gods in the temple, and who'd come up to Jesus and said, 'My daughter's dying. I've been to everybody, there's nothing I can do. I love my daughter. I've heard about you.' I've seen you about the place. Would you heal her for me? Would you heal her for me? And Jesus says, you know what, I'll come to your house. And the Legionnaire says, you haven't got to come to my house because actually I know that if you just say she'll be healed, she'll be healed. I trust you that much. And Jesus says, no, my life, nowhere have I found anybody with the faith such as this. Yeah, this is This is a Roman legionnaire, and that moment his little one was healed. There was no Christian doctrine, there was no formulation of Christian dogma. The man just had spotted Jesus, had seen the kind of human he was, trusted in him. If you want to— the only way, in my view, to interpret that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. He's basically— is a call to follow him in his glorious divine humanity, of which we all share.

Could you say something like to join him in Christhood? Would that be— yeah, we throw it out to the church.

No, I know, I think that's, I think that's, uh, that's quite a theological thing to say actually, isn't it? So you'd probably get away with that. Yes, to join him in his Christhood. If by Christhood we mean the fulfillment of everything it can be to be a human, beautifully, absolutely human, in that, in it, so that his great heart and his great power which came of his great love, and it was for everybody.

Yeah, and it reminds me of the beginning of the conversation, that, that I suppose one way of describing Christ is intimacy with God.

Yes, oh, for sure. That's lovely. I like that.

So to join him in his intimacy with— yes, God, with what is— with, with the Nameless.

Yes, and that intimacy It can be your intimacy and my intimacy. And if indeed that's what we're called forward for—

reminds me, in Japanese Pure Land Buddhism, there are two words that describe the spiritual relationship of being in relationship with Amitabha, Japanese words that I can't remember. And the first word means something like, I experience all of the saving grace of Amida Satagata working for me and for me alone. I, I am receiving all of that, that love, loving kindness. It's all coming to me.

Yes.

And the second experience is the experience of, oh, it's coming to everybody. And both of those are true at the same time.

Yes. Yeah, that's for sure. I mean, you know, there's a— in the Christian tradition, at the Eucharist, we have this lovely little prayer just before we break the bread, and it says, though we are many, we are one body because we all share one bread. That's what the Christians say. Now, that's quite a mysterious thing to say, actually, when you think about it. At the very surface level, one goes, oh, we're all in the same building, we're all going to have a piece of bread, therefore we're all one, you know.

Yeah.

Which is okay.

We've all got a name on the list.

We're all gonna have a, you know, a piece of the loaf or a wafer.

But it—

that's good, that's right, but it's so much more than that. What do we mean by bread? What is this bread that we all share that is Christ? Okay, well, you know, when one sits with it prayerfully, contemplatively, that understanding of what the bread is, is vast. It's vast. One might call it simply life. One might also call it breath. We all share, you know, we all, we're all, you know, and in Genesis it says this quite clearly. It says this quite clearly, that in the beginning the little human being, and indeed actually all the animals and everything else too when you read further on, but It's very specific. It says that God made the little human out of the dust of the earth, right? So he formed this little creature out of the dust of the earth. That's all the little, that's all the humans. It doesn't matter whether you're Buddhist or Muslim or Christian or atheist. All the humans were formed from the dust of the ground. And we know that because when we die, it's a pretty scientific fact that that's where we end up, back in the ground. So that in itself, there is kind of half of the bread, if you— in one sense. But then what does he do to make this little human being?

We're all made of stars, isn't that what Moby said?

Yeah, well, we are, aren't we? It's where the carbon comes from, that's for sure.

Yeah.

And then, but then God breathes into the little human, the little kind of clay man, and the little clay man It says, becomes a living being. Breath. What do we all share? Breath. In fact, all beings everywhere share breath. So when we talk about bread, that we are one because we all share one body, we all share in the life of God, and as humans specifically, the life of a human, which is Christ, then the meaning of that— we are one body because we all share one bread— becomes expansive, inclusive, and deeply honoring the presence of God.

And because we are incarnate in that way, we all have the opportunity to realize that we're animated by the same breath.

Yeah, it's exactly it. Yeah, one at a time, as I was saying to somebody the other day. You can't bank them.

Yeah, one at a time.

One at a time.

Yeah, as Suzuki would say, Sadhguru says, 'There's no enlightened people, just enlightened moments.' Yeah.

Oh, I've not heard that.

Yeah.

Oh, I like that. That's very good.

Yes.

Gosh, yes. We do, because the next— all we have is the next inhale, right? And in fact, our entire life consists in, whether you're 23, 53, or 83, all of those years, don't they? They're all in one sense kind of compressed into and realized in the next breath, because the one before is gone. So you ain't— there's no guarantee it's going to be another one. So we live breath by breath, don't we? And you get 23,000 of those a day, give or take a few hundred. Yeah, 23,000 times to realize and appreciate the depth and the wonder of the moment of your life.

23,000 opportunities to become awake to holiness.

Yeah, that's it.

And how many do we take?

Yeah, almost none. Yeah, yeah, because we take our breath for granted though, unless, unless we get a cold and you rush for the You know, I guess the nice thing about the Pure Land practice is, to me, I talked about nembutsu as intimacy, but it can also be translated as remembering.

And actually it's like, okay, I know that I am not going to be intimate with the world all of the time because that's my human nature. But even when I'm full of ego, I can remember that the world is speaking to me, that the word is available.

Yeah.

Even if I can't quite touch it right now. And there's something about that that sort of— that allows me to relax.

Yes.

And you go, actually, I don't need to be—

no, no—

by the burning bush all the time, as long as I know the burning bush is there.

Yeah.

It's all— that's enough. Yeah.

Oh, you're never separate from the— never separate from that.

Occasionally it's given to me to that the veil is lifted and you go, "Oh, that's how it is." Yeah, you wake up to it.

Wake up to the truth of it.

But most of the time it's like, "Okay, that's in the background and now how do I live a compassionate life?" Yeah, that's for sure.

So I think, again, in the Gospels, in intimacy— no, it's not the Gospels, it's one of Paul's letters. It's such a pity we only ever read the Psalms at funerals, right? So there's this beautiful bit where Paul says that neither life nor death, nor angels nor demons, nor principalities nor powers, nor anything in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. But I don't know why we only say that at funerals, because it's such a beautiful way to live your life.

Yeah.

And my goodness, couldn't we just relax a little bit if we knew that?

Yeah, exactly.

If we woke up in the morning, well, whatever happens to me today, whatever unfolds, whatever lovely things come my way, whatever difficult things come my way, whatever thoughts come into my mind which either make me happy or make me sad or make me afraid, whatever, whatever comes along, it's simply not possible for me to be separated out from the love of God, the presence of God.

Or just from love.

Or just from love, which is the same thing. So that it's not possible. It just feels like it is, and for some people it feels— that feeling, as you said earlier, it's true for them.

Yeah, because it's possible insofar as we turn away from it, from our own sides. Yeah, but it isn't. But that doesn't mean that the— there's a phrase, Hohen wrote a poem, the moonlight shines on everybody in the village, but only you only notice it if you happen to look up.

Yes, yeah. And I think, I don't know, I would certainly for me, and probably putting words in your mouth, but for you as your priest too, that I see my role as helping people, you know, see the moon.

Absolutely.

That's sort of, you know, helping people notice their breath today.

Yeah.

You know, helping people notice that, you know, helping people come into that intimate relationship where there's healing and wholeness and peace and goodness. That's, you know, and that seems to me to be our role.

Yeah, making space for love, reminding people love is already present.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in the end, that's all there is.

Yeah.

Thank goodness.

Yeah. Yeah, great. Maybe that's a nice place to finish.

I think so.

Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you for asking me, Casper.

And, uh, thank you. We mentioned the ancestors this morning, so thank you to the ancestors and the causes and conditions that allowed us to meet this morning.

Yeah, bless them all.