The Stonecutter Who Learned to Be Himself

The Stonecutter Who Learned to Be Himself

by Bob Carey

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

I’m going to tell a story at the beginning, so it’s alright for them to stay, and then we’ll sing “Jesus Loves Me” again after the story. I think it’s important when we start out together to recognize that in some ways we’re all a little uncomfortable.

We’re self-conscious because some of us don’t know each other. We’re not able to be ourselves like we’d like to be. And so it’s important for us to acknowledge that and be aware of that and confess that, so to speak, so that we can all begin at the same place.

I’m going to begin today’s talk by telling a story. Some of you have heard it before when you’ve heard me speak, but I think it’s a good story, and it’s a good place to begin. It’s a story about a little boy whose name is Hashmu. It’s a Japanese folk tale. One of the things that C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald, two great writers who have influenced my life, have taught me is that a lot of values and a lot of truth come through myth and story. And here’s a story from Japan that speaks to us all, I hope. Well, Hashmu was a stonecutter apprentice, and his father was the chief stonecutter. And Hashmu was working out in the stonecutter’s yard, and he was chipping away at the stones with his hammer and his chisel. And he was thinking to himself that he didn’t like being a stonecutter.

He thought that being a stonecutter was a boring job, and that if he was really going to be somebody, or be something, and have power in his life, that he wanted to be something else, something with meaning, something that really stood out, that was important in life. He wanted to be somebody.

And while he was thinking this and chipping away at the stones, he saw coming down the road alongside of his house, a king. And the king was on the horse. The king had a crown on his head. And he had his armor on. And he had a sword at his side. And he was on this beautiful white horse. And behind the king was an entourage of over a hundred soldiers. And they were marching along. And the king looked very powerful and purposeful. And Hashmu, the stonecutter apprentice, looked at the king and he said to himself, “There is somebody whose life is meaningful and purposeful and who has much power.” He said, “I’d like to be the king.”

And a voice from heaven said, “Hashmu, be the king.” And Hashmu found himself on the white horse with a crown on his head and armor on and a sword at his side. And he felt very powerful. He felt that his life had meaning and purpose. And he looked behind him and he could see the soldiers marching along behind him. And he even felt more powerful.

And as he was riding along, the sun came out. And the sun shone down upon the soldiers and the king. And it started to get very hot. And little by little, the soldiers started to fall to the left and to the right. And they fainted. And Hashmu, the king, looked behind him. He could see that he was losing his army. And he was starting to get hot. And his armor was getting hot. So he had to take off his crown. And he had to take off his armor. And he threw it to the side.

And he looked up in the heavens and he said, “The sun is more powerful than a king. I would like to be the sun.” And a voice from heaven said, “Hashmu, be the sun.” And so Hashmu found himself in the heavens. And he was looking out upon the earth and the planets. And he shone brightly. And he felt his power. And he caused the crops to mature in the fields. And he felt so powerful that he decided to dry up a few rivers and streams. And create some situations where there was a high fire expectation in the forest. And he just exercised his power. And felt like his life had meaning. And that he was purposeful.

And all of a sudden, off to the right, a dark cloud started moving in between him and the earth. And this storm cloud that was dark and unpenetrable moved in front of him. And he tried to shine upon the earth. And he couldn’t. The sun could not penetrate the storm cloud. And Hashmu said to himself, “Now this storm cloud, this dark cloud, is more powerful than the sun. I think I would like to be the storm cloud.” And a voice from heaven said, “Hashmu, be the storm cloud.” And Hashmu found himself a storm cloud, dark and powerful. And he rained upon the earth. And he sent torrents of water into the rivers. And he flooded the rivers this time. Sent lightning out. Flashes of lightning came out from the storm cloud. And he felt very strong and powerful. And he felt that life had meaning and purpose.

And he beat it. He sent out these torrents of water upon the rocks surrounding the rivers. And he noticed that the rocks didn’t move, even though he rained hard upon the rocks. And he beat against the rocks with the wind and the rain. And they were immovable. And he said to himself, “Now those stones, those rocks, are more powerful than a rain cloud. I think that I would like to be a rock.” And a voice from heaven said, “Hashmu, be a rock.” And Hashmu found himself a rock, strong and purposeful, unimmovable, eternal, powerful, steadfast.

But then he looked down the pathway alongside the river where this huge boulder was. And he saw a little boy walking towards him. And the little boy had in his hand a hammer and a chisel. And the little boy walked up to the rock and started hammering and chiseling away at this rock.

And Hashmu, the rock, looked down at the little boy and said, “Why, this little boy is more powerful than a rock.” He said, “I think I would like to be this little boy.” And a voice from heaven said, “Hashmu, be yourself.”

Now that story is about what God is asking us to do today. He wants us to be ourselves. Because unless we’re really willing to be honest about who we are and be ourselves, truly, fully be ourselves, we can’t move anyplace. We can’t grow.

We need to be ourselves with each other and feel free to trust God and everyone in this group so that we can be who God wants us to be and not who we think others want us to be or who our father or our mother wanted us to be or who the people in our communities want us to be.

We want to be ourselves. We want to be who God wants us to be. And it’s then that we can grow and be healed and become fully the sons— Now, it’s time for the children to leave, so let’s sing “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know” again. Jesus loves us just the way we are, unconditionally.

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong; they are weak, but He is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so. Let’s sing it and say, “The Spirit tells me so.” Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Spirit tells me so. Little ones to Him belong; they are weak, but He is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. The Spirit tells me so.

I’m going to read to you a few pieces of Scripture, because I think that one of the hardest things for us to do is accept the fact that Jesus loves us unconditionally. And I really believe that unless we know that and understand that, we really can’t grow. And we can’t really reach out to others in the compassion and love that Jesus has unless we know that ourselves.

That was tricky. I want to begin by reading 1 John 4:17 through 21. It’s something that’s very familiar to all of you. God is love. He who dwells in love is dwelling in God and God in him. This is for us the perfection of love, to have confidence on the day of judgment. And this we can have, because even in this world we are as He is. There is no room for fear in love. Perfect love banishes all fear. Alright, 1 John, basically what I want to share with you is the fact that God is love. God is love. That’s the initial premise that I want to begin with here. Because I think if we’re going to find out who we are so that we can really be ourselves, we need to know who God is. And it’s important. Then I’d like us to go to Psalm 103. Psalm 103.

Bless the Lord, my soul, my innermost heart. Bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, my soul, and forget none of His benefits. He pardons all my guilt and heals all my suffering. He rescues me from the pit of death and surrounds me with constant love, with tender affection.

He surrounds me with constant love and with tender affection. God is love. God is love. And God surrounds us with His love. He immerses us in His love. In fact, right now, even though we can’t see it, and maybe we can’t experience it fully, His love is surrounding us right now. His love wants to penetrate to the very core of our being. God wants us to know that He loves us unconditionally. With no strings attached, He loves us.

And let’s turn to Romans 5, verses 6 through 8. For at the very time when we were still powerless, then Christ died for the wicked. Christ died for the wicked, for sinners. Even for a just man, one of us would hardly die. Though perhaps for a good man, one might actually brave death. But Christ died for us while we were yet sinners. And that is God’s own proof of His love towards us. And so, since we have now been justified by Christ’s sacrificial death, we shall all the more certainly be saved through Him from final retribution.

For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son, how much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by His life? But that is not all. We also exult in God through our Lord Jesus, through whom we have now been granted reconciliation. We’ve been brought into a oneness with God Himself, the God who is love.

It’s a powerful piece of Scripture. Christ died for us while we were yet sinners. When we were His enemies, He died for us. So, God’s love comes to us even if we’re not perfect. As yet, when we’re sinners, even if we’re God’s enemies, He loves us.

You don’t have to be good to receive God’s love, you just have to receive God’s love. You have to be open to God’s love. You have to want to say yes to God’s love. You don’t have to be anything.

For God wants you to be who you are. He wants you to love you just the way you are. You don’t have to be a great athlete. You don’t have to be a good person. You don’t have to be intelligent.

You don’t have to be anything special for God to love you. You just have to be yourself. God loves you because He created you. He loves His creation. He wants you to know that. It’s important for us to begin this week knowing that. And if we don’t know it, to seek it. To understand it. To desire that love with our whole heart.

Let’s turn to Ephesians 3. Third chapter of Ephesians. Fourteenth verse. With this in mind then, I kneel in prayer to the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name, that out of the treasures of His glory He may grant you strength and power through His Spirit in your inner being, that through faith, Christ may dwell in your hearts in love. With deep roots and firm foundations, may you be strong to grasp, with all God’s people, what is the breadth and the length and the height and the depth of the love of Christ, and to know it, though it is beyond knowledge. So may you attain to fullness of being, the fullness of God Himself. The fullness of God Himself.

God is love. God is love. Love. And God sent His Son, Jesus, the perfect model of God’s love. In fact, the Son of God, who has in His fullness everything that God has, He Himself was love. He sends that one who loves us, to show us that the very nature of God, so that we can understand as we look at the life of Jesus, that God is love. Because it’s difficult to look at this invisible being out there in the heavens or wherever God the Father is.

To know that God who is so large and so powerful, that it’s beyond our comprehension to know. But we can know that God if we look at the life of Jesus. And we look at the life of Jesus and what do we see? We see sacrificial love. I was talking to some people earlier about my journey through Zen Buddhism and Hinduism. I used to travel around when I had long hair and a beard, and wore a feather in my hair and leather clothes. I used to travel around with a little leather pack. It was like a saddle bag. And in that saddle bag was the Bhagavad Gita. It was the book of the sayings of Buddha.

And the writings of Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. And the New Testament. Those were the four books in my library. But you know, I like to say that the Buddha led me to Jesus. And so did Krishna. And Sri Ramakrishna. They all pointed me to love.

And one of the things that I learned is that the Buddha, in his great compassion, was not able to enter into the suffering. He saw suffering as an illusion. But he wasn’t willing to enter into the sacrificial act of love that Jesus was able to do. The Buddha saw the truth and understood truth. But he did not model the very nature of God in action. In fact, he withdrew from the suffering rather than enter into the suffering of life. And Krishna, you know, as wonderful a spirit that he may have been in the Hindu religion, whenever a problem came up, he’d just turn himself into something else. He could turn himself into a snake or an elephant or something. But he never entered into the suffering of humanity. He never took on our humanity as Jesus did. And in the Bhagavad Gita, there’s great truth. And the Upanishads, there’s great truth. But there was no one who modeled the very nature of God as Jesus did. And that’s why Jesus is my Lord and my Savior. He’s the one that I look to to model my life after. He is the one that I have disciplined my life after. That’s why I’m a disciple of Jesus and not of Buddha or of Krishna or Ramakrishna.

I studied a lot of the writings of Sri Ramakrishna. And one of the most beautiful things that led me to Jesus was an incident in the life of Sri Ramakrishna. One day he was walking in the woods. And he saw in front of him, he had a vision. He saw in front of him a man who held out his hands. And he saw the scars of the crucifixion in the hands of this man. And a voice from heaven said to Ramakrishna in this vision, he said, “Behold the Son of God who has died, who has made the ultimate sacrifice to save mankind, to save humanity.”

It is only the sacrificial nature of the act that Jesus did that brings to us salvation. It’s not meditation in itself. It’s not prayer in itself. It’s not studying the scriptures or reading wise, profound, pithy sayings that bring salvation. It is Jesus, His life, His love for us that saves us. It is that unconditional love, that love that died for us when we were His enemies, when we didn’t even know who He was, when we were fully sinners, so to speak.

When I first came to God, I was baptized a Roman Catholic. I went forward when I was 16 at a Billy Graham crusade. I then went into the drug scene when I started smoking dope when I was about 18 or 17 or 18 and moved into the drug scene, went into the service and into the Coast Guard, spent a small bit of time in the Coast Guard, was discharged from the Coast Guard because I was into drugs and also they thought I was a little strange in the head. Spent some time in the hospital as a hebephrenic schizophrenic.

I was declared by the psychiatrist to have been… insane, not insane, but whatever you call it, crazy. You know, weird. So I spent… before I got discharged, I had to spend three months in the hospital in Key West, Florida, the Naval Hospital there.

Then I moved… when I got out, I went through a bunch of changes, attempted suicide several times, then I moved into a situation where… because I was in college and I was into art, I was exposed again to more drugs and took LSD in Louisville, Kentucky for the first time. And when I took LSD, then I came out to California, went through a period of time of searching, had many visions and experiences through LSD and other psychedelic drugs. I got in touch with a lot of the mystical things that some of the early church fathers write about, understood that there was a spiritual realm. I’d never really understood that before. In fact, when I was a philosophy student at the University of Louisville, I wrote a paper saying that God did not exist and my psychedelic experiences changed all that. I immediately became a theist and understood that there was something else beyond my own defensive self that was quite selfish.

I moved through all that into a period of time living in communes and I’ll talk a little bit more about that. But the experience, the experience that changed my life that was more than just a commitment, an evangelical commitment that I made to be a follower of Jesus at a Billy Graham crusade, which didn’t last very long, or a commitment made by my parents when I was a child, which I honor that commitment and I think that they planted some wonderful seeds in my life. In fact, very powerful seeds. They taught me the Lord’s Prayer. That’s important. It’s amazing how important that prayer became to me when I first made the transition from being a Buddhist Hindu to a Christian. And the 23rd Psalm they taught me. Now, my parents weren’t great models for Christianity. When I was seven years old, they separated and they went their separate ways. And so, I didn’t have a father for… a regular father for a model. And my mother had to work and so I didn’t see her often. And so, I didn’t have a regular family like some of you have. So, all these things, all these experiences were important to me. The honor, the baptism that my parents gave me and the… that the church and my parents gave me and the experience of going forward at a Billy Graham meeting, those were all important.

But they were sort of commitments. They were commitments of the will. They didn’t give me the experience of the unconditional love of God. It was… it was in a commune in Oregon that I experienced that. It was what we commonly call the baptism of the Holy Spirit or the infilling of the Spirit. There’s a lot of different names for it. But at that moment, and I’ll share a little bit more about that later on, at that moment, I experienced the unconditional love of God. I knew that God loved me unconditionally. God loved this guy who used to go into bars and just pick fights for the sake of wanting to hurt other people or to get hurt myself. I still don’t understand all the reasons why I did the things I did. God loved this person who had misused other people, who had hurt a lot of women, who had just really used and abused other people, whose understanding of love was, “I’ll love you if you love me,” or “I’ll do something for you if you do something for me.” But there wasn’t any understanding or an ability to act out God’s unconditional love in my life. And it was at this time when I received the Holy Spirit. I was bathed in that unconditional love.

I knew that God loved me just the way I was. God accepted me. God accepted Bob Carey just the way he was. God forgave me so that I could be set free from that moment on to grow and to become what God had purposed me to become.

So God is love. God sent His Son Jesus. And God’s purpose for us is stated here in Ephesians. The person that we really are, the person that you and I really are at the core of our being is stated here in this end of Ephesians, in the end of Ephesians here. Or this in chapter three.

Verse 19. He says here, “I hope that you may grasp with all God’s people what is the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ, and to know it, personally know it, though it is beyond knowledge.”

So you may attain to the fullness of being. So you may attain to the fullness of being, the fullness of God Himself. The fullness of God Himself. God is love. He sends His Son to show us the very nature of God so that we can become what God is. Love. The very core of my being is love.

Now, love isn’t just a good feeling. Love is just not a thought. Love is a commitment and action. Love is a good… One of the problems that we have, and I know that I’ve had it and I still have it at times, is that I think that feelings are love and so I identify with the feelings and when I don’t have those good feelings anymore, I don’t believe that God loves me.

Or, I think that when I’m not thinking good thoughts, when I’m in the midst of a temptation, that God doesn’t love me. Or, in fact, when I’m actually in the act of sinning, that God doesn’t love me. But God loves me even when I’m His enemy.

Even though I may be in the midst of sinning, God is loving me. I forget that because I think that my thoughts and my feelings are who I am. I think my actions even are who I am, but they’re not who I am. I’m something else. At the very core of my being, there is God Himself.

And I need to continually remind myself who I am. It’s one of the reasons I go to church. It’s one of the reasons I chose to be a priest in the Episcopal Church was so that I would be put in a situation. I chose to be a priest not because I’m a holy person. I chose to be a priest because I needed an environment that would force me that the people around me would force me to study the Scriptures, to pray, to go to church on Sunday. Because when I go to church on Sunday, I remind myself who I am. I remind myself who I am. In the morning when I get up and pray, I allow the voice of God to affirm me. It’s the first thing I do. I get up in the morning and I don’t have to sit in the lotus position like I used to and I don’t have to sit zazen or anything. I just have to allow God to speak to me, to open myself up to the voice of God within me that says, “You are my son and I love you.” So I begin each day with an affirmation from God Himself who reminds me who I am.

And I get together on Sundays with the rest of these people who God is affirming and we all affirm each other and we look at each other and we recognize we are the body of Christ, that we are one with each other, that we are a part of each other and that we are really not separate at the core of our being. It’s a wonderful story that comes out of a situation that when I was chaplain at St. Paul’s Towers in Oakland. St. Paul’s Towers is a home for the elderly. There is about 300 people in St. Paul’s Towers and they are all over 65 or 70 and I was the chaplain to that institution.

One day when I was eating lunch with a group of ladies who I always had fun with, it was great fellowship because they had great stories, I loved their stories, one of the women who was oh about 80 years old, she said, “You know, Bob,” she said, “I believe that we are all connected by silver and gold threads and strands of love, that these silver and gold threads connect us all. And that’s how love flows from one to another.” And I thought, what a wonderful poetic view or understanding of reality, because I do believe that that’s true. But I had never seen those silver and gold threads of love. And part of my job as chaplain was to be at the bedside of people when they were dying. When you’re a chaplain, you get to know the people. I got to know them personally. I would eat with them, share bread with them. And then when they were getting close to death, they would go up to the 23rd floor, which they affectionately called the launching pad, which was at a hospital.

And then I would be with them and literally hold their hand at the time of death. And this woman who had said that she had seen this… she believed that there were silver and gold threads of love that connected us all, not long after she had said that at a lunch, she was up on the 23rd floor. She was dying. And I was there with her holding her hand. And just before she died, she said this. She said, “Bob, I see the silver and gold threads that connect us.”

And then she died. It was a very powerful experience for me, let me tell you. And I’ve had several experiences like that with people on their deathbed where they’ve had visions, beautiful visions of God’s love as they were passing on into their greater life.

But there are silver and gold threads that connect us all. We may not see them. But in our creative imaginations, let’s visualize those silver and gold threads that connect us all. And this week, let’s remember that at the very core of our being is God’s love, and that He’s calling us to that fullness of God Himself.

It’s a high calling. It’s a wonderful calling to become that love that is God’s love, to become that caring and sensitive human being that God wants us all to become, to be honest, to be ourselves, and to know that although God is love out there, that He’s love right here.

And if we forget, we can always look at His Son, Jesus, or read about Him in the Gospels to remind us of the nature of God, and that we are called, like Jesus, to be the sons and daughters of God, to be the sons and daughters of God, and to make up the body of Christ, and to set this world free, so that it too can know that wonderful love.

Amen.