What's in Your Purse?

Let me begin with a wisdom story from a Sufi writer (remember Jesus appears in the Quran as well as the Bible):

A Sufi writer once said of Jesus that sometimes people would make fun of Jesus or curse him aloud, but that he would always answer back with prayers in their names. On one such occasion his disciples asked him how he could not be angry and want to curse those people. They asked him how he could pray for those who had harmed him.

Jesus answered them by saying that he “could only spend of what he had in his purse.”

Jesus says something similar in the story from Matthew 15:10-20. To give you a little context, Jesus has been slammed for letting his followers eat without washing their hands. In Jewish tradition, it is a mitzvah - a commandment, a religious duty - to wash one’s hands and arms before eating, otherwise the person would be considered ritually, religiously “unclean.” And if one was “unclean” then anything or anyone they touched would also become unclean, plus they weren’t allowed to participate in worship or study. The person only became clean again after undergoing the correct rituals of cleansing, usually submersion in a mikveh, a bath sourced by a spring of running water.

So, Jesus took issue with this religious tradition and asserted that whether one washed or not before touching one’s food, and in fact, whatever food one eats as well, has nothing to do with whether one is spiritually “clean” in God’s eyes.

Jesus says that what is important is what is in one’s heart. Or what is in one’s “purse,” to use the metaphor from the first story.

We’re pretty sure we know what was in Jesus’ purse, given the Biblical stories about him – compassion, forgiveness, love, peace, mercy, grace, courage, understanding. But, do we each know what is in our own purse? Do we pay attention to how we respond to people and situations around us and ask ourselves where that response comes from?

Early this week, Julie was a little short with me after a comment I made, but then followed it up a couple minutes later by apologizing if she came off as being irritable because she felt irritable that morning and wasn’t quite sure why. But AWARENESS is the first step in understanding and controlling how we respond. AWARENESS of what is in our purse is the first step in understanding why we dole out what we dole out.

I’d like to think that most of us also have what Jesus had in his purse, it’s just that in our purses they seem to get buried by all kinds of other things we toss on top like self-important, ego, anger, prejudice, lack of self-esteem, anxiety, fear, grief, impatience, and so on. It behooves us to ask ourselves, how that negative stuff got in there and why aren’t we cleaning it out?

Personally, I keep a pretty small purse (which feels even smaller when Julie decides that I should carry her stuff as well as mine), and I go through it often to clean out old receipts and grocery lists and anything else that I may not need. But we don’t tend to clean out our emotional purses.

What keeps us from cleaning out our anger, guilt, anxiety, fear, pain? You know that everything that life throws at us does NOT need to go (or stay) in your purse! Chances are at some point we’ll grab in there for the quickest response to a situation and we’re going to grab something that is completely unhelpful for the situation because it was on top. Turns out it was leftover crap from a different situation, but we don’t usually slow down enough to try again… Oh, I’m sorry honey, I didn’t mean to gripe at you for not getting to the store, that was my frustration from work today that I grabbed out of my purse. Let me see if I can dig in here and find some compassion and understanding instead.

Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese monk and peace activist for over 30 years. His bio in his book, Being Peace tells us that he spent those years “combating poverty, ignorance, and disease, going to sea to help rescue boat people; evacuating the wounded from combat zones; resettling refugees; helping hungry children and orphans; opposing wars; producing and disseminating peace literature; training peace and social workers; rebuilding villages destroyed by bombs.” I emphasize this to remind us that he wasn’t a monk hanging out in a monastery removed from the real world somewhere. He lived and worked in the worst this world has to offer.

Hanh says, yes, life is full of suffering, but (basically) we don’t have to live there or carry it around in our hearts and purses. He reminds us to touch the wonder of the blue sky, the enjoyment of the warm sunshine on our faces, the miracle of our heartbeats and our breathing, the joy of friendships. This is how we keep going in the face of the tragedies, sorrows, and difficulties of life. We fill up our purses with the beauty and joy of life.

Consider for a moment what we do when we have a few moments to stop and just be, how do we fill them? Do we turn to our phones, do we turn on the TV, do we revisit our worries and concerns and to-do lists? Do we dig out the frustrations and irritations and interruptions of the day? Or could we spend a few moments instead filling up our purse with the beauty and goodness around us, like a greedy child who just broke a pinata dashing around to grab as much candy as quickly as possible?

I encourage you to take two things from this message. First, please clean out your purses (or man-bags, or backpacks) on a regular basis. And some of those moldy things at the bottom may take some serious scrubbing, or therapy. Don’t wait any longer. And, second, start filling up your moments with as much jo and beauty as you can grasp hold of. Then perhaps when difficult situations occur and we grab from the stuff in our hearts - in our purses - what we grab will be something that strengthens, heals, builds bridges and offers compassion.

Love & Light!

Kaye