May 2017 meeting for reverence - how to DO religion #unitarians

For much of the 20th century, the watchwords of Unitarians were “Freedom, Reason, Tolerance.”  We opened our meeting on 14 May with a striking revamp of these words – which now become “Liberation, Inspiration, Compassion”, thus avoiding some of the sub-texts that the words ‘freedom’ and ‘tolerance’ now come freighted with; and ‘inspiration’ now integrating intuition and spirit with the logic of reason. (Our thanks to Jo James of Mill Hill Chapel, Leeds).

It is sometimes said of Unitarians that we are a church without creed.  But that’s not so – we are a church that does not state a SOLE creed.  Instead, we challenge ourselves to uncover our own underpinning belief system, a model that we ourselves are unable to deny, a personal idea of what is the most important in life.  We each are to believe what we CAN believe, rather than what someone else asserts we ought to believe.  So in Ringwood, after our chalice lighting, we privately spend a minute or two remembering our personal creed, whereas in another church we might be asked to recite out loud a set of words that may or may not hold meaning for us.

We then had the following prayer, written by Tony McNeile:

 After this, our meeting for reverence included all our usual ingredients of ritual, silence and singing.  But as always, there was a linking theme.

We spent the meeting looking at different ways of doing religion.  We listened to a song about John Ball, who was an English Lollard priest who took a prominent part in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.  John Ball’s concept was that God had set us all to be equal in Christian love – no room in religion for the for power hierarchies of church and noblemen , and that

“All shall be ruled

By fellowship I say,

All shall be ruled

By the love of one another,

All shall be ruled

By fellowship I say,

In the light that is coming 

In the morning.”

Our first reading came from the Sikh tradition.  In contrast to John Ball’s prescription, this reading suggested that “God has created the creations in countless ways and of countless kinds, colours, and sorts,” and it prescribed continuous meditation on the Name of God as the way to salvation.  “The Name of God resides within all hearts, but the true saints actually see Him residing within them.  All kinds of gifts will be bestowed by God, if we continuously repeat with affection the Name of God.  God, who pervades everywhere and owns all powers, must be ever remembered.  This will give complete protection and salvation,” (a translation of part of the Sukhmani Sahib).

Paul McCartney helped us out next, with a song he wrote after he had had long discussions with George Harrison, whom I believe to have been a devotee of Krishna, in the Hindu tradition.  Paul’s song is called One of These Days, and it is a sort of hymn to mindfulness.

And then we took a reading from our own tradition, from recent essays by our own Rev Bill Darlison, from The Penultimate Truth and Other Incitements.  Bill argued against “seek[ing] to hear the voice of God either in the words of some guru, in the teachings of a church or in the scriptures.  Some people will follow all three.  All three are, in my opinion, problematic and, increasingly anachronistic. ....  Where, then, can we hope to hear the voice of God in all its freshness in this contemporary world? – In that very source which is itself the source of all bibles, religions, gurus and deities – the human soul, the creative human mind, the genius of the human spirit.....

Dogma divides us, stories unite us.  When people ask, ‘You Unitarians, what is your ideology?  What is your theology?’ I would like us to say: “We don’t have an ideology.  We don’t have a theology.  We tell our stories to one another.”

In our meetings, instead of a sermon we invite the president of the meeting to speak in a personal capacity.  Our president for the day spoke of the trap in religion to do with DOING religion.  She said that we forget that what suits “me” and teaches “me” is not appropriate to people in other life situations or with different experience.  Scripturally-based as he was, and looking for Christian salvation of society, John Ball conveniently forgot that even having a king, under God and above the people, was a hierarchy not mentioned in the Bible (the Peasants’ Revolt was not about getting rid of the king; it was about releasing the king from the power of the establishment and returning to the level playing field of the Garden of Eden).  So being ruled by fellowship alone was never going to be a successful prescription.

We were reminded that in human history, every time a mystic teacher gives some gift to the world, their students try to systematise the teaching and turn it into a practice that will allow the rest of us to have the same experience as the original mystic.  But it doesn’t work that way.

The Sikh advice to keep repeating the thought “God” was offered as a help for focus and humility.  But much of the day we are in conversation with other people or animals.  And when in conversation, repeating the word “God” interiorly can make one rather inattentive to the other person.  Yet the other person also lives steeped in divinity, so our president suggested that not attending to the other person for the sake of saying “God” is rather missing the point.

The contemporary view we were given from Bill’s writings is a humanist view.  His idea is that the sharing of stories is just as holy as focusing on a rule, no matter who the rule-maker was, nor how insightful they were.  Bill says the holy is between PEOPLE, too.  Apparently, Rowan Williams says the same thing albeit slightly differently: he says we cannot have a satisfactory relationship with the divine unless AND UNTIL we have a satisfactory relationship with Tom, Dick and Harriet.

Summing up, the president called to mind a model from the Jewish tradition: we humans are holy by being linked together by our neighbourly relations, like people standing shoulder to shoulder in a ring; noting that a ring, a circle, necessarily has a centre.

Nothing is SEEN at the centre of a ring of people – we can only see the people in the circle; those next to us, those opposite us, those across from us.  But the circle only exists because there IS a centre; something we are all facing, whether we see it or not.  And we each have our own tie, our own relationship, linking us to the unseen, silent, empty centre.

So finally it was suggested that that ‘remembering we are a ring of people, linked together, tied to an unseen centre’, is a contemporary model of how we might best DO religion.