Why the Wise Men maybe weren't so wise after all - #Unitarian gathering in Ringwood 12 Jan 2020

The topic for our gathering today made a last reference to the Christmas season, and looked at the journey of the Wise Men - a journey, a search and maybe even a discovery.  As well as music, plenty of silence, and our usual simple ritual, we heard an interesting reflection on the story of the Magi from our president for the day, Rev Martin Whitell.  What follows is taken from his address.

~~~

To our taste, there is perhaps too much talk in some religions about having found the truth rather than living in and enjoying the unfolding of the discovery. This is, perhaps, the most helpful piece of the story of the Magi or the Wise Men. Not their gifts, nor their encounter with King Herod, nor even their arrival at the place where the young child was, but their quest for meaning from the star that led them on.

One of our readings was the poem by T. S. Eliot The Journey of the Magi, a powerful piece that imagines the words of one of the Magi many years later, as he reflected on his journey long ago and his discomfort back in the land of his birth, ever since.

In it there is a strange phrase:

“…so we continued and arrived at evening, not a moment too soon.

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.”

T. S. Eliot wasn’t talking about the accommodation where Mary and Joseph were staying, in Matthew’s interesting story.  What he was talking about as satisfactory was the whole story, the journey, the difficulties, the unexpected result, the risks, the outcomes.  The whole adventure had taken them to what they hoped was going to be a new life; but they ended up going back home.  Having been inspired by the star and the journey they are now in a kind of half-light, an in-between place.  Not comfortable in the old place, but not able to repeat the journey to the new promise they had once glimpsed.

The late Dr John M. Hull, once Professor of Practical Theology at The Queen's Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education, Birmingham said of the Magi:

“To use the anthropological expression, they had been thrown into a liminality from which they had not been able to emerge.”

To be liminal is to be at the limits, on the borders, to be marginal.  The theological word with a rather similar meaning is ‘limbo’, the place which is neither heaven, nor earth, nor hell, nor purgatory, an in-between sort of place. Anthropologists, tell us that the role of the sacred is to create liminality, whether through ritual and ceremony, festivals, rites of passage, or sacred dance; somewhere where the ordinary rules and standards of life no longer apply. A place where rational judgement is suspended, where the unexpected strikes us with surprise, and we become at once rootless, disorientated, homeless and liberated.

Of course the Magi wanted to do it all again, to try to get something at least clear in their heads, even if it meant a death, or a birth as hard as death. To catch the wonder of the journey once more. But such a resolution was nothing but a wish, a dream.  

I suggest that we must realise that the sacred is not a place to remain in — no matter what it is nor whenever it comes to us.

Eliot warns us that their experience of the sacred had fixed and frozen them — not liberated them. Liminality only transforms through contrast. The sacred must meet the secular. If it becomes habitual, it goes stale.  The point of liminality and the sacred is not to stay there. It is both to go back and work and to move on and discover more.

There are wonderful religious experiences which can be life changing.  These may be people we meet, or things we see, or places we go to; it may be something like our candlelit carol service, or deeply spiritual moments we cannot explain.  But we have to learn to take it on further, even as we take it home.

We should beware, and turn away from the staleness of religious lives of the Magi who never put their experience of being at the edge, liminality, the sacred to work.

The delights of our faith must drive us to making it all real for our world.  Helping the poor and the troubled, the sick and the sad, the lonely and the unloved. 

The anonymous poem Epiphany puts it like this: 

   

The wizard kings observed celestial signs 

a moving eastern star especially bright

cast shadows in the pitchest dark of night

a hint enough to agitate their minds 

And, journeying through a sleeping world, they found 

a manger pin-pricked by a point of heaven…..

Light shines, unbidden, shows the way. 

We see new truth, new light, new life - Epiphany.

True religion is not actually about finding perfect peace or intellectual certainty: it is about discovering the pin-prick of light which agitates our minds into thought and enquiry, and the quest for new truth, new light and new life.  In contrast with the traditional reading of it, let us paraphrase a verse of the Bible, Revelation chp 21 v 5:

“It is we who must make all things new.” 

Why #Unitarians meeting in Ringwood include ritual in our gatherings

“I have come to feel that [rituals] have another purpose — to end, for a time, our sense of human alienation from nature and from each other…….Rituals have the power to reset the terms of our universe until we find ourselves suddenly and truly at home.”

Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon

“Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation.  To do ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way.  That inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power.  If you aren’t willing to be changed by the ritual, don’t do it.”

Starhawk, Truth or Dare

To that last quote, we would add: if you aren't willing to be changed by the ritual, you are not, in fact, doing the ritual (no matter if it looks as though you are).

A #Unitarian prayer for Christmastide and the new year, recycled from 1944

From “A Service for Christmas Day” in Orders of Worship - for use in Unitarian and Free Christian congregations

The Lindsey Press, 1944

(language updated)

O You who have mercifully led us through the busy year, enriching our lives with countless gifts; give us at this Christmastide the grace which was in Jesus the anointed, of Nazareth.

Let the spirit of the little child, as it knocks today at the human heart, enter our life and bless it.  Let duty become touched with delight, and justice be forgotten in love.  May every selfish thought be driven from our minds.  Let our ears hear the cry of the needy, and our hearts be stirred to sympathy for the lonely and neglected.  

Give our hands strength, not to do great things, but rather to do small things graciously.  Heal the wounds of misunderstanding, jealousy, or regret, and let the gentler breath of the Christmas spirit touch our lives, as the cold of winter is touched by the milder air of spring.  As the old year ends and the new year begins, grant us peace with the world and peace in our own hearts, that those we love and those we can help may have sweet joy and rest.  Amen.