The Blessed Ones

We are troubled, perhaps, by the strange and counter-intuitive saying of Yeshua in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are those who mourn.” Equally difficult may be the injunction that whoever does not take up his or her cross and follow the Master, is not fit for the Kingdom of the Heavens. This last statement is weighed down with the theology of the atonement that insists we are all sinners, estranged from the divine by virtue of our very being, and that the only cure is to accept the blood sacrifice Jesus made on the cross as the way back to redemption. Together these two phrases may press heavily against us and into some perpetual state of remorse for being who we are, and justly so. There is, however, a different way of reading these things suggested by Pemo Chödrön in her work, The Wisdom of No Escape about not preferring Nirvana (escape from suffering) to Samsara (the experience of suffering).

She quotes Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun [Nirvana]. Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.

Then she herself goes on to say:

I was struck by [this] because when I read it I realized that I myself have some kind of preference for stillness. The notion of holding the sadness and pain of samsara in my heart rang true, but I realized I didn’t do that; at best, I had a definite preference for the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. My reference point was always to be awake and live fully, to remember the Great Eastern Sun—the quality of being continually awake. But what about holding the sadness and pain of samsara in my heart at the same time? The quotation really made an impression on me. It was completely true: If you can live with the sadness of life (what Rinpoche often called the tender heart or genuine heart of sadness), if you can be willing to feel fully and acknowledge continually your own sadness and the sadness of life, but at the same time not be drowned in it, because you also remember the vision and power of the Great Eastern Sun, you experience balance and the completeness joining heaven and earth, but really they are already joined. There isn’t any separation between samsara and nirvana, between sadness and the pain of samsara and the vision and power of the Great Eastern Sun [the Kingdom of Heaven]. One can hold them both in one’s heart, which is actually the purpose of practice. As a result of that, one can make a proper cup of tea.

One can also live properly bearing in this world the “cross-beams” of heaven and earth, which is the burden of the Master of spiritual life in the tradition of Yeshua. This is also the full support of the oneness of All Things, about which he spoke and taught so eloquently—and thus, “Blessed (in fact) are all who mourn.”