Being in Beginner’s Mind
Reverend Sally Hamlin
May 31, 2009

Do you remember the first time you set foot in this sanctuary?  Do you remember how you felt when you first walked through these doors? Were you nervous?  Were you awestruck?  Did you feel shy?  Did you wonder if this would be your place, your church?  Did you come a few times before you knew for sure, or did you know right away?

Perhaps you grew up in this congregation, and if so, you do not have a clear memory of your first glimpse of the sanctuary, but have a story of your welcome you inherited from your parents.

But what is true for each of you this morning is that there is something important here that keeps you returning.  There is something that filled an empty spot in your life; or perhaps acknowledged a longing you did not know was there; or sweetly revealed to you the ways in which we are all connected, and in this place a sense of belonging became, for you, a lived experience.

Whatever your story, at some point, you were new.

Today we welcome new members into our community of faith. As you once did, they found their way to our door, and over the course of several months or so have determined that First Universalist is the place where they belong, where they want to live out their beliefs and ask their questions, journeying along with others, building the Beloved Community together.  Janet and Harvey and Jennie and Rob each have their own story to tell.  Little baby Wyatt will be one of the ones who has no memory of the day he began to belong here, but will have to hear the story from his mother and father, which will then become his story.

When we first start on a new adventure, when we enter into a new relationship of whatever sort, we come with a fresh open mind, a hopeful attitude, a good dose of curiosity, eager to learn. We are Beginners.

When new, we return week after week and go home inspired and refreshed, renewed or filled in some new way, with a gift to take home and ponder for the week.  We are excited about our discovery of this unique church where our doubts are welcome, questions invited, and everyone seems friendly and warm, where we don’t have to subscribe to a creed that we don’t believe in to have a community where we belong.

As new members we are open to all this new experience has to offer. This feeling of newness, excitement and adventure can go on for awhile.

But perhaps after a few months you notice one Sunday that the sermon really wasn’t your thing; it hit you the wrong way.  Perhaps someone on the other side of the sanctuary was singing too loudly or a bit off key; or you just came in a bad mood and became annoyed that the church service didn’t correct it for you. Or maybe you overheard someone making a disparaging comment about something, or another congregant, and, suddenly, the bubble burst.

And you may wonder: did I make the wrong choice?  Is this really the church I thought it was?

This is the moment when the rubber of your commitment hits the road drawn on the map of the ego driven mind that can detour your faith journey on a long side trip, away from self-realization and spiritual actualization.
With this sudden crash, the reality of our held assumptions are exposed to the raw light of the experience of all humanity: that human beings are imperfect; we make mistakes; we miss the mark; we fail; we begin again; we stumble; we start over.

This is a theological crossroads, and this intersection presents an awesome responsibility in the form of a choice you can make, on which direction you will go.

It will require some submission on your part, and taking responsibility for your perceptions and beliefs, and a good sense of humor as you learn to laugh at yourself and your own shortcomings.

So what does all this have to do with our topic for today, which is Being in Beginner’s Mind, on this, our new member Sunday?  What is Beginner’s Mind?

Consider this quote from the Zen Buddhist teacher Shunryu Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” [i]  Also known by the Japanese term “shinjin”, beginner’s mind is central to the Zen tradition.  Beginner’s mind is not a separate mind from our ordinary mind, but more of an attitude, a spirit we bring to anything new.  When considering how to deal with the inevitable disappointments and setbacks we encounter in life, staying in Beginner’s Mind can help us remain fresh and open to all possibilities that exist in the realm of thinking and being.  Beginner’s Mind can allow us to honestly examine our strengths and weaknesses, and in the process, come to a clearer understanding of who we really are and what we are meant to do with our life.

Buddhist teachers call the opposite of Beginner’s Mind, an ‘ego-mind’, which is a closed mind, one that thinks it has all the answers, and possesses an over inflated sense of one’s self-importance.  With the ego-mind in control we experience life through the lens of our own personal bias, which is always present.  This skewed focus can be the cause of much personal pain and suffering.  By being in and nurturing Beginner’s Mind we can become aware of the process of our skewed thinking and observe its influence in all aspects of our life.

Let me tell you a story about Peter Hata, a jazz guitarist and teacher and advisor to a California Buddhist Temple band.  Peter asked the band to suggest tunes for their new songbook, and found himself surprised when someone suggested a song by the boy band N’Sync called “I Promise You”.    Hata says that he just knew that this simple song performed on pop radio, and loved by teenage girls was just too far below his musical standard, and, furthermore, as a ‘real guy’ he was not supposed to like N’Sync. It violated his sense of who he was as a man and as a musical professional.

But then something happened to Hata as he sat and listened to the song more closely, figuring out the chords.  As he rehearsed the song over and over eventually his thinking mind retreated and he relaxed into the experience of the music.  He found himself moved to the point of tears –although he calls them ‘man tears’-by the lyrics and the notes.  Hata felt embarrassed and humbled as “his preconceived and narrow minded notions about music” and about himself, revealed what was his “skewed focus”.

Obtaining Beginner’s Mind does not mean we do away with our ego, as ego is necessary to navigate the everyday business of our lives. But Beginner’s Mind does not come about without effort and practice: it requires a sense of urgency, of purpose, of devotion, in order to achieve and maintain it, to find and unlock the treasures that lie within any spiritual tradition or heritage.

For Unitarian Universalists to remain in Beginner’s Mind means we must pay attention to the places where our judgment and ego meet and conspire to keep us away from the treasures hidden within the Beloved Community.  This does not mean we stop valuing reason, but instead we must learn to temper reason with compassion.  We must learn to apply the practice of deep listening to others as well as to ourselves, and to pair the practice of deep listening with the practice of appreciative inquiry.

This means we must practice remaining open to understanding- really understanding- another’s belief and opinion, even while disagreeing with it.  This means we must at times be willing to hear with an open mind about what someone else considers sacred, while we may find the same thing irrelevant or silly.  We need to practice until perfect the ego checking process involved in moving toward full self awareness of the moments when our judgment meets our critical mind- what I call the search and destroy mode- and change that pattern, so that it no longer is our operative default method of interacting with others.

Peter Hata says that musicians call the process of mastering a musical piece ‘woodshedding’, literally locking oneself into a shed and not coming out until one ‘gets it’, one knows the piece inside and out in an intimate way.
When we use woodshedding to learn how to stay in Beginner’s Mind, it calls us to stay the course, even when the road of traveling the Beloved Community becomes bumpy and rocky along the way.

Today, as we celebrate our new members and dedicate ourselves to the spiritual nurturing of our little ones, may we, as Hata says, “humbly and honestly take responsibility for our life, in order that our failures can actually turn out to be great teachers. Eventually we may come to realize that the ultimate goal in life is not getting everything to go our way, it is rather to learn from every thing and everyone around us, to deeply appreciate the beauty that life has to offer” [ii] , and that includes each and everyone. And to each and to all today, we say, practicing Beginner’s Mind: “Welcome!”

May it be so. Blessed Be. Amen.

Endnotes:

i: Chadwick, David, Crooked Cucumber, The Life and Zen Teachings of Shunryu Suzuki: Beginner’s Mind; www.cuke.com

ii: Hata, Peter, What is the Beginner’s Mind?, www.livingdharma.org

Herrigel, Eugen, Zen in the Art of Archery, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1953.

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