January 2017 meeting for reverence speaks about grace #unitarians

Once again we remembered absent friends going through a difficult set of circumstances. 

The service theme was “Making space for grace.”

The president for the day had chosen poetry for the set pieces for the meeting.  Having come across a poet by the name of Leopard at the Spirit Festival last summer, the president's first reading was a poem from Leopard’s publication Leaves for the Trees.

The second reading was a longer poem called Sometimes a Wild God by Tom Hirons.

We carried out our usual silent sharing of four elements, passing them round the circle of those present so that each person had touched and held each element, and connected with the others by doing so.  After that the elements were placed on the table at our centre, next to our Unitarian chalice.
 

The elements today were bread, water, incense and flame (a candle).  The water had been brought deliberately from Glastonbury.

We always include this ritual and it is always slow and silent, which allows each person present to interpret, revere and sanctify the ritual in a private way, aligned with their own current faith and beliefs.

Hard won personal struggles over the years have convinced us that a sure way to divide people from each other is to try to insist that particular rituals and sensations must hold a particular  meaning (with the tacit and sinister sub-text of “or else you don’t belong”).   We have found that, without words, together we can carry out an activity that holds a different meaning for each of us, and those meanings can change over time.  What holds us together is the unified carrying out of the ritual.  Just like going to a wedding or a funeral: everyone at those ceremonies takes away with them something different, but they all know that they were there, at the same event.

So although you may see references to Unitarians as “creedless faith groups”, this is inaccurate.  We each have our own creed.  But emphatically, we do not wish or expect that the person next to us in our worship holds to the same faith or belief as we do.  It is enough that they show up and join in, however that makes sense to them.

This is because we consider life to be more than humdrum.  We have glimpsed different perspectives, perhaps in rare and expanded moments; perspectives that lead us to hunt for the spiritual refreshment we know exists, if only we can find the way to it.  The refreshment that brings calm unearned; or an unexpected detachment, like pearls on silk, during the bruising torrents of uncontrollable life; or which – paradoxically – demands not a “giving up” and asking for help, but a “giving up of self” meaning the need for help diffuses into the abyss, the dance.  The abyss, the dance, the voice that can be heard by everyone, says Gandhi: “Every one who wills can hear the Voice.  It is within every one.  But like everything else, it requires pre­vious and definite preparation.”

Our heritage is the Christian tradition and so we use the Christian label for this spiritual refreshment, that is to say: “grace”.  And so as part of our meeting for reverence we reflected on making opportunities in our lives for grace to break in undeserved and unearned; and also on our unhelpful tendency to behave so as to keep grace out.