January 2018
marks the end of our fourth year and in February we will be four years old. So this service was one of a couplet, and
dealt with what we as unique persons bring with us when we come to the
gathering.
The service in February will consider how we weave our personal,
individual spiritual lives, like threads,
together into one overall fabric
of our spiritual community, as we start out on our fifth year together. So January was about the personal and February
will be about the corporate.
We started
with a participative prayer, heavily adapted from a prayer from the Iona
Community, reminding us of some of the many names and faces of the divine, and ending with the words:
“Overarching power of bestowing, healing,
uniting:
in these and all your many other names, in
all your many faces,
in your many-ness which yet vibrates as one,
may these your characteristics be a pattern
to us of community;
hence may we bestow, heal and unite in our
many-ness,
while operating as one.”
We carried out
our usual ritual of making the circle with flame, bread, water and a fourth element
to represent air or spirit or nature (dependent on one’s point of view). We lit candles of joy and concern. We sang two hymns from the green hymn book and
we also had a recorded song by Hayley Westenra “The Heart Worships”.
Our first reading was from the Hindu faith via Mohandas K. Gandhi, and the second from the Religious Society of
Friends (Quakers). They both declared a
firm trust that each person has direct access without mediation to spirit,
inner voice, dictates of reason. And both
were clear that we each have a responsibility to do the work to listen
carefully within, so as to discern truth and light.
Gandhi in particular suggested that there is
no danger at all to the world if very many people find and give voice to what
they find within, so we should be prepared to put up with doubtful
claimants, for the sake of hearing from as many insightful people as
possible.
The Quaker reading gave some
practical advice for how one can go about laying oneself open to the leadings
of spirit.
Our
president for the day reiterated the Quaker instruction by referring to the founder
of the Quakers, whose biography can be found here: http://bcw-project.org/biography/george-fox
The president brought forward the
famous George Fox challenge from the 1690s:
“You will say, ‘Christ said this,
and the apostles say this;’ but what canst thou
say?” and then asserted that we must, first and foremost, understand our own
being.
The
following questions and assertions were thrown out to the gathering:
·
What is the pattern of your life?
·
What qualities sing out from your
life to any spectator who cared to watch?
·
What are the things that you
didn’t seemingly choose but were just natural to you; repeated actions that you
found yourself doing wherever you were?
·
What are the things you had to
set in place when you arrived somewhere, in order for you to feel at home?
·
For these are the things of your personhood, your own unique,
individuated way of living; your personal way of living and loving and
believing and trusting.
·
These
are the things that “thou canst say”.
·
We are prompted by wise teachings
to make fewer decisions, to take less time in selecting one path over another, to
make less fuss over being human. We are prompted
to observe “me”, rather than to create “me”.
We were reminded that the
Unitarian cause includes a challenge: the challenge to find – and live up to – what
we are capable of believing, rather than what someone else says we should
believe.
And having found what must be
true for us, we are challenged to live up to it. We are challenged as Unitarians to witness to what we believe and trust,
challenged to not remain silent in the face of an unappreciative and
unwelcoming world.
We are challenged to be brave,
and self-consistent, and focused on what really matters to us.
We are challenged, in short, to
integrity; to a kind of one-through-ness; in which there are no compartments in
our lives; in which our thoughts and words and actions all marry up with the
beliefs that lie at the heart of our lives.
 |
| The Unitarian challenge involves both candles and debate! |
