Trinity Sunday ~ Cycle C
Madeleine Tacy, OP
Nan-In, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1860-1912) received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-In served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!” “Like this cup,” Nan-In said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”
This story from the Zen tradition is used in the spirit of our brother Thomas who recognized and used what was true regardless of its source. His ability to perceive the presence of God outside what may be called official limits freed him to “write well of God.” In the same fashion we who live within the Dominican tradition are called to seek God in spite of limits. Thus, on this feast of the Trinity we come to Nan-in’s empty cup, probably an unfamiliar but still useful image. The pursuit of the empty cup is a life long journey of cultivating awareness and mindfulness, both of which are prerequisites for the attainment of wisdom.
How can I teach you Zen unless you first empty your cup? How can I teach you wisdom unless you first empty your cup? How can you be attentive to God’s word unless you first empty your cup? How can you live community unless you first empty your cup? Emptying the cup is a lifelong endeavor for it contains all the clutter of our life. We carry our family and its dynamics, our ethnic background, our education, our biases, our opinions, our hurts, our hopes, joys and fears. We also carry the firm conviction that the world would be a better place if only everyone else would be reasonable and do things our way. If by now the “not me” of Bill Keane in the comic strip Family Circle is beginning to stir within consider the energy around your thoughts and feelings about such community issues as cars, whose turn it is to cook, do the dishes, take out the trash. The list could go on and on and you probably have your own version.
If we are to cultivate wisdom and live in harmony it seems to me that we must look at what it means to empty the cup. And while we may smile or cry over the clutter in the cup it is nonetheless full. In the West the basic content of the cup is what we call the ego. In the Zen tradition it is referred to as the false self. The extent we are controlled by our false self is an indication of how full or empty our cup really is at any given time. Emptying the cup is a life long journey. For we must learn to let go. To let go of our desire to be first even if it is being first in the bathroom in the morning. It means letting go of wanting the world to run on our schedule, of winning this or that argument, of our agenda for ourselves and everyone else or of even being considered holy. Most importantly it means letting go of the image of God we have created so we are empty enough to experience the God who says, “I am.” Jesus speaks of the need for this emptiness on several occasions in words like
Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.[and] Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. Jn 12:24-25
Such a dying/emptying eventually places us in the present, not the past and not the future. Such a dying is a call to empty our cup of the last argument, the last mystical experience, or our unwillingness to forgive. It is also a call to empty our cup of a fixation on the future and how we want life to be. Paul speaks of this emptiness in the Letter to the Philippians when he describes Christ’s self-emptying. It is this self-emptying which enables us to live in the present, the now which is no easy task.
An interesting effect of living in the present, the now is what happens to all those odious tasks which fill life. You know, the desk to clear, the mindless job that needs to be done and the list of what you hate most to do. Living in the now relieves us of the need to obsess over how much we hate the task. Every occasion becomes an opportunity for practice, for being present to the now and is an experience of true freedom. Ignoring such an opportunity to practice is to live with a full cup and is like placing a pebble in our shoe each morning and refusing to remove it even though we limp all day.
Nan-In’s reply to the professor is worthy of self-reflection. We all like to think that we are fair and unbiased in what we think and how we respond to others. But, if we are honest we usually find our responses are frequently built around our own agenda. (During an intense discussion are you focused on what the other person is saying or on how you will reply.) In emptying the cup we let go of the agenda because we have come to know it is ours, ours to choose to carry or to put down. The more we let go the freer we become and such freedom is the womb of wisdom. With wisdom comes the ability to live in harmony with self, others and God.
The yearly celebration of the Trinity is an opportunity to ask ourselves if we seek to understand the mystery or to be a living reflection of the mystery. The latter would seem to be the ideal. An ideal grounded in wisdom and built on premise of our cup being empty. As we leave here today we will most certainly find we that keeping our cup empty is a life long endeavor. Each moment of each day is our opportunity to practice being present to what we are doing as we move from knowing about to knowing. Hopefully, the story of the teacher Nan-In and the overflowing teacup will serve as a reminder and an encouragement on this journey.