Key to this gathering was the theme, running through it all: that all our attempts to describe — whether we are describing our daily domestic living, or the inner landscape, typically categorised as our ‘religion’ — all our attempts to describe, can only ever be metaphor for what is real, for what is truly occurring or existing.
Some features of our gatherings do not change, such as the singing of some hymns or listening to recorded music; such as the time set aside for lighting tea-light candles either in silence or saying as we do so a few words about what we are currently holding in our hearts and minds. And we also have some minutes where instead of talking about the divine — about what ‘divine’ might be or mean, about our inherited narratives about the divine, about what our predecessors have taught about the divine, about how a sense of the divine might affect our living — we actually spend some minutes trying to align ourselves with the divine principle (which we are unapologetic in naming as ‘God’). The word we use for this personal, private attempt to align ourself with the divine is ‘prayer’.
And so this gathering started with our usual lighting of the candle in the chalice, followed by a period of introspection and reflection. This is our private inner time to remind ourself what is our ultimate concern, and to pause and reflect on how we have recently lived up to that. ‘This is what the holy asks of you; that you act justly, that you love tenderly, and that you walk humbly in its presence’. (Bible, book of Micah, Chapter 6 verse 8).
In the introduction by the president for the day, she reminded us that New Year is a time for new starts and transformation, and that, traditionally, people like to mark new starts with rituals.
“Today we are looking at new starts and transformation, and see what those who have gone before us in our culture can say to us about those. But, importantly, as we reflect, over the next few days, on what we hear today, let us see what we ourselves can see in the old and the new stories we are about to hear.”
After the opening hymn, the first reading was from the Bible, book of Mark, Chapter 1 verses 4-11, describing the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, which turns out to be a new start for Jesus, and the start of his ministry.
It is interesting that two of the Gospel books in the Bible say nothing about the birth of Jesus, and they start instead with the baptism of Jesus — as if for those two authors everything before the baptism was of no consequence.
The second reading was from a contemporary Unitarian Minister, Cathal Courtney, from his book Towards Beloved Community (2007, Lindsey Press). In this reading, Cathal attempts to describe a completely unexpected revelatory moment of unitive experience, which happened to him once while he was on a bus in Dublin, on a wet weekday afternoon.
‘I felt my own life meant nothing in isolation from my fellows.....I look back on that experience and believe it to have been an encounter with heaven, an encounter with the selfless, poetic blessing at the heart of human living. Whatever despair I now feel in relation to my life is held in paradoxical balance to that beautiful experience. We are all the belovèds.’
When it came to the reflection on the two readings, the president acknowledged the significant influence of the teaching that she had heard and accepted from Adyashanti, regarding this Bible story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adyashanti
She started by suggesting that John the Baptist is a wild man of sorts, operating outside the bounds of society and culture.
“So, thinking, as we are, in metaphor: John the Baptist represents the mode of our being that is in a different dimension to what everyday living and customs expect of us.
“And again being metaphorical, we can view the baptism that John conducts as being one of forgiveness and release from old burdens and mis-steps. Stepping into the water, all a person’s old stuff washes away and a new person emerges. The water is like a doorway to a new future. And there is John the Baptist, right on the threshold, helping people through that boundary between one life and the next. The repentance that John the Baptist speaks of is surely that internal turning that can take you right to the edge, take you to those moments where you feel suddenly struck by something strange and compelling that awakens the spirit within you.
“And with Jesus being baptized by this wild man, it is a metaphor for a new beginning for Jesus outside the bounds of conventional society and religion. At the moment he raises his head the spirit, the breath, descends into him and he feels God describing him as ‘belovèd’. This descent of the spirit reorientates Jesus’ whole life, gives his life a new direction. From that instant, Jesus’ life will never be what it was before. His life will become what we read about in the Bible stories. In just this same way, there are moments when you say yes to the mystery, when you peer into that dark place, when you realize that you are not what you thought you were — you are not your beliefs, not your ideas, not the constrained role that society has placed on you. You are something other — in fact, you are more other than you can imagine.
“Going back to the narrative, our metaphor can continue with looking at what the descent of spirit signifies: it signifies the sensation when you say yes to your true nature. But first you have to say yes to the unknown. You have to know that you do not know who you are. You have to know that you do not know what God is. You have to enter into that place where you know that you do not know what life is.
“If water is the symbol for purification and the spiritual dimension, then spirit is the symbol for transformation. So when we open ourselves to spirit, we are opening to transformation: we are not going to be the same person that began the journey and we are not going to see ourselves in the same way ever again. Think about Cathal’s testimony: everything that happens in his life now he holds in paradoxical balance to that beautiful experience. As he said: ‘We are all the belovèds.’
“Just a moment, a split second of true availability is all it takes. That is where spirit gains its entry, and that moment is the moment of awakening. That is what happened to Cathal, on the bus in Dublin.
“That is what happens to Jesus, right there in the River Jordan when he is baptized by John and the heavens part. He awakens, and from that point on he preaches repentance — turning around and looking within at the spirit that is the radiant vitality of being. Repentance means having a change of heart. That awakening is the beginning of his new life, the beginning of his mission. He gathers together his band of twelve students, and he goes out to heal the sick and to preach repentance. So like John the Baptist, Jesus himself is also now out of the conventions of society, not conforming to what society expects.
“Now, most people do not embrace this kind of insecurity, and the few that do usually do not enter into the unknown within themselves until and unless some traumatic event shakes them so much that they begin to lose hold of their world view. Most people though, as soon as things return to normal, retreat into their prior belief systems and old comfort zones. But Jesus, in seeking baptism by John, is aiming beyond the world and the old comforts, beyond the confines of the religious structures of his time. He is seeking out someone who could help connect him with the mystery: the mystery that is found in the wild spaces, on the unknown paths that nobody walks, in a place inside that you must go alone or not at all.
“May we each find our own new way to reinterpret these stories and to use them in our lives.”
