May 18, 2016 - Buddha

Beloved:
Come now, you who say,
“Today or tomorrow we shall go into such and such a town,
spend a year there doing business, and make a profit”–
you have no idea what your life will be like tomorrow.
You are a puff of smoke that appears briefly and then disappears.

James 4:13-14


This is one of those remarkable passages that is unmistakably parallel to the teachings of the Buddha (or St. Josaphat as he's known in Christianity). Other passages, like Luke 12:27-28 (and Matthew 6:28) have the same message, but we tend to focus on the apparent promise of divine intervention: “Consider the lilies, how they grow. They don’t toil, neither do they spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if this is how God clothes the grass in the field, which today exists, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith?”  God does not promise to magically intervene to dress us.  But faith does invite us to keep things in perspective.  In the context of the sacred and the eternal, the anxieties of today vanish.