Home

Barack Obama ran for president on the strength and promise of two words. One of the words was terrible and frightening and horrendous----that word was change. The other word was wonderful and healing and calming---- that word was hope. Change is such a difficult word that Mr. Obama’s campaign embedded it in the slogan: Change we can believe in and so contacted our hearts and even our souls: the heart wants to believe, the soul counts on it. Change is what 3 dimensional reality is about: when the Buddha took a hard look at the world, change is what he saw everywhere. I once attended a day- long sand painting done my Buddhist monks. For hours they meticulously arranged thousands of grains of sand in a multitude of colors into a stunning picture. It took hours. At the end I expected them to spray it with some kind of fixident, put glass over it and frame it. Maybe even sell it in the ashram gift shop along with the laughing Buddhas. Imagine my surprise and, I must admit, disappointment when the monk in charge destroyed the day’s work with a sweep of his hand, then smiled at us all and said: “This is the world and, this is your life in this world.” In the silence of the room we all felt the shock of change, yet in the monk’s impish smile we sensed hope. © Thomas P. Baker 2009

Change is hard. In A Course In Miracles it says that change to the ego feels like a combination of death and God abandoning us. Death arrives, God leaves. Change. That’s probably where the belief in hell came from. We are extremely, in a primal way, afraid of change. Yet without change there would be no spring, the child would not grow, the butterfly would never emerge from its cocoon. Your senior picture in the high school year book would have captured you forever and you would be obedient to what people wrote over and over again: “You have a great personality, don’t ever change.” It is good you changed. Mostly good. Yet we live in a culture that is more and more against change. We live in a dream come true culture. In fact, the dogma of America might be summarized as: “If you can dream it, you can have it, and you can have it forever.” There is a commercial on television that advertises some kind of home improvement with a voice over that says, “The best dreams are the one’s that last.” In other words, dream it and keep it. Your dream will come true and then you will live happily ever after. The dream come true culture has shaped education: dream it and you can be anybody you want to be; politics: the American dream, dream it and you can have it; even spirituality: The Secret, “Dream it and you can manifest it.” Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against manifestation. I am against manifestation being permanent. Form, no matter how lovely, will not last, and we all actually do know that. Years ago I was a Catholic priest and I taught at St. Meinrad seminary. Many of my students had a dream church. They talked about it a lot and developed the details of their dream church. It would be a church in the country. There would be a beautiful but chaste housekeeper who would always have hot cocoa and brownies ready for Father when he got back from visiting his parishioners, all of whom would have easy problems to solve, whose children all behaved and were charming and precocious; and when parishioners died they would all be comfortably old and pass away in their sleep. The seminarians’ dream church was a kind of spiritual Camelot, heaven come to earth. I would reply that in my dream Catholic Church we would always have an open minded, big-hearted pope, we would learn that the crusades and the inquisition were not true and the pastor’s drinking problem really was just a rumor. The seminarians and I would always laugh, amused at our fantasy of life without it’s instructive drama, without its challenges and disappointments, void of heroism, with no need of compassion or patience or perseverance or forgiveness. More Good Housekeeping and Southern Living rather than Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams. My voice over, and I’m not selling anything, goes like this: It is good that dreams come true, but it is more deeply good that dreams do not last. For if dreams came true and lasted, if our manifested dreams were permanent we would be stuck forever like an ancient mosquito preserved in a drop of amber; a perfect relic, but dead. © Thomas P. Baker 2009

When I was a junior in college I was an English major and I dreamed of being a writer. I had a mentor, a kind professor named David Burg who took me under his wing and listened as I talked and talked and talked about my plans for the future: I would write a Pulitzer prize winning book, I would earn a tenured professorship, I would be lionized and anthologized. He would listen and even take a note or two. One day, though, he stopped me in my futuristic soliloquy and said, “Tom you’re forgetting something. Listen.” And for a moment I stopped talking. He said, “With all of your plans you are forgetting the people you are yet to meet, probably more than a hundred of them, men and women, of all shapes and sizes and colors and ages and persuasions. You don’t know any of them but they will change your life and give it most of the meaning it will have for you. And things will happen to you both welcome and unwelcome, that you will not see coming. Now. Let me tell you the secret of happiness,” and he paused and he reached over his desk and took my hand and he continued in the greater silence of the moment: “The secret of happiness Thomas is not love or fame or wealth, the secret of happiness is the willingness to be surprised. If you are willing, I might even say eager, to be surprised life will be an amazing adventure, if not, then life will be one damn thing after another.” And I said, “Dr. Burg are you sure?” And he smiled, like that monk smiled and said, “Of course I’m not sure, I may be wrong, but I’m willing to be surprised.”

Since then I’ve tried to pray like that. “Dear God, I would like and will envision these things: a well running car, a snug and cozy house, certain teaching and counseling opportunities, a long and painless life with my wife, and should I decline, a room with a view and very good books I have not yet read. But if you have better ideas, divine surprises. Try me. I’m ready. Amen.”

Home