MEDITATION
OPEN HEARTS
In the Festival of Life
I
n ancient times, human beings alternated between times of feast and times of famine. In
today’s world, the cycles of primitive humanity have been replaced by a ‘new normal’. In
our part of the world feasts are always available; just visit your nearest supermarket, caterer
or restaurant so long as you have money in your pocket. Sadly, there are places where
famine is a daily torment; our televisions often show us desperate people running to escape
war, drought, typhoons and tidal waves. It does seem that we are now fully in the Kaliyuga,
a dark and perilous time on our planet.
Back in the 1960s, which now seems like ancient history, we thought that there was no reason at all for the people of the earth to suffer so. It was merely a question of re-distributing
the wealth of the First World to benefit the Third. We thought of increasing transport of food,
as pictures of truckloads of apples being plowed under were enough to cause expressions
of outrage. How simple the world looked then; how complex the world looks now, how
insoluble its problems. The upheavals of climate change and the upheavals of the entire
Mediterranean basin as well as the sub-Sahara, our seeming inability to help our First Nations people to emerge from cycles of addiction and poverty can easily cause us to become despairing or cynical.
We need to ask, from the comfort of our homes, how to approach and justify feasting when
so many are going without? If our lives do not permit us to gift large amounts of money or
to go directly into community involvement, what else might we do to raise our awareness
and to live respectfully?
Here are some of the ways I try in my life to bring this motif forward.
Whenever there is a potluck at the meditation centre I founded (Friends of the Heart, Toronto) I find myself commenting on the marvel that is the feast which is spread before us.
We begin with a prayer of reflection, giving thanks to all those who have worked to bring
this food to us: the farmers, the truck drivers, the grocers, the cooks.
Whenever I teach a retreat, I as