June meeting

Whereas in May our worship service had looked at “compassion”, and how that must translate into practical, outward action in the world, on 14 June our service focused on an interior aspect of a life of faith.

One of the defining features of Unitarian thought is its focus on the “one‑ness” of the divine.  This was one of the ideas that caused a schism between ministers of religion in the 18th century.  There were those who – in the best tradition of Protestantism – read the Bible for themselves, deeply and carefully, yet could not find any authentic reference from the earliest time to the Holy Trinity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.  They saw all the teachings of ancient Judaism and the more recent teachings of Jesus as consistently pointing to a holy One.

In our service we started with a reading from Hinduism, which also points to the holy One.  Hinduism struggles with the different ways in which God is felt by people, and this results in Hindu people choosing – from among many faces or names for God – the aspect of God that resonates best for them.  But God is still seen as whole and one.  Hinduism contrasts with the faiths of classical Christianity, Judaism, Islam and even the Baha’is, in all of which God is seen as quite separate from creation.  But Hinduism is in tune with Paganism and the more liberal branches of Christianity – in these the one‑ness of God is seen as extending right into the created universe and into we ourselves as humans.  The word for this is panentheism  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panentheism .

We then silently shared a flame (light), bread, water, smoke (air), each placing our own private construction on the simple ritual.

Next we heard a reading from a Unitarian scholar and minister, Dr David Doel, who has written about what he sees as the nature of salvation.  He sees salvation (true peace) not as the reward for holding certain beliefs but as the fruit of an experience – the experiential recognition and acceptance of the love that lies at the heart of the universe and at the core of what it means to be human.

But this took us to the heart of our service.  The word “love” drives us to use the words “of”, “from”, “to”, “towards” or “between”; or else the name of what is loved.  The idea of love requires there to be two identities, with love as a draw or pull or flow between them.  So now we have ideas that apparently contradict.  The “one‑ness” of Unitarian panentheism and the “two‑ness” that the Unitarian experience of love points at.

We did not attempt to solve this problem.  But it was suggested that perhaps to make it possible to live with this contradiction would be to use the word “relatedness”.  Religion – a life of the spirit searching towards the divine that lies undiscoverable beyond existence – is perhaps about relatedness and mutual invitation.  And perhaps, at heart, this is what the idea of the Holy Trinity, with God playing as both parent and child and the flow between the two, was also trying to get at.

After hearing all this, we then used our customary seven‑minute silence as a time for our own private practice.  After candles of joy and concern we finished the service and made ourselves cups of tea.

During our service we had sung hymns about the different ways to view God (Hymns for Living no. 35) and how the church is a place of trust and searching (Hymns for Living no. 174).  We enjoyed the hymns tremendously; so much so, that after the service was over we carried on singing some more, using our hymn books and the recordings of the Unitarian Music Society.