Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
February 17, 2019
Luke 6:17-26
I ran across this passage from Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her introduction to Joseph Campbell's, Hero With a Thousand Faces.
It filled me with hope for healing a torn world.
She tells us about the ancient Hebrew concept of Tikkun Olam. which she says
…..is a daily, perhaps hourly commitment to a way of right conduct, a form of living meditation, a kind of contemplative pragmatic. Giving one’s attention and resources to repairing that part of the world that is right before you, precisely within your spiritual, psychological, and physical reach.
…and according to soul’s sight, not ego’s alone.
I understand the artful methods of tikkun olam, handed down generation to generation, to be of the most simple and humble kind: the spiritual insight that has enough of a glowing heart behind it to see beneath the suffering of things; to care for others beyond oneself; to translate suffering into meaning; to find the edges of hope, and to bring it forward with a plan; a willingness to find insight through struggle; an ability to stand and withstand what one sees that is painful; and in some way, to gentle the flurry; to take up broken threads as well as tie them off; to reweave and mend what is torn, to patch what is missing; to try for perception far beyond the ego’s to-often miniscule understanding.
You can listen to Sunday's sermon here.
