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Just in case a passing viewer is wondering - there is not a national Unitarian church. What there is, is a national association of local, independent and self-governing churches and fellowships (although it is allowed for individual persons to also affiliate as Associates to the association). The association is called the "General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches", and it is therefore a 'community of communities'.
The gathering opened with a roll call of the Ringwood Meeting House worshippers who were killed in military service during the First World War. This was not an act using the memory, but an act using the imagination, and invoking emotion.
Then, in the light of the COP 26 climate emergency conference of the nations, the president of the day (Lucy) offered a deeper perspective on the relationship between imagination, emotion and memory. She considered the future, reminding us all that the climate emergency is ‘only’ about accelerating the extinction of the human species and not about the end of life as we know it on Earth, nor even about the destruction of the planet itself. That event will come much later, and will be caused by the explosion of the Sun.
In imagining the future explosive death of the Sun, which will obliterate the Earth, we may experience the emotion of sorrow for loss as we imagine the ending, ending of our personal era, and indeed the whole Earth. We respond like this because we have experienced loss in our own lives; our sorrow is based on our personal memory of previous loss. But of course this is hugely ironic as, when that future destruction of the Earth occurs, there will long since have ceased to be any humans, so there will be no sense of loss.
Lucy then looked to the Bible for thoughts that might assist us when we are experiencing loss. The loss, the overwhelming loss, featuring in the Christian consciousness is the loss of the personage of the poet and teacher Yeshua who is also known as Jesus. Early followers of Jesus had imagined and eagerly awaited a new everlasting era with Jesus recognisably holding sway over the entire course of human events, and they must have been devastated in the face of losing him. Thus it was suggested that the New Testament is, in essence, an anthology attempting to help successive generations of disciples come to terms with the loss of Jesus, and helping them to remember him.
She said: “As Christianity crystallised, very early on Jesus became seen as supernatural. Then Jesus could not be equated with other humans and the loss of Jesus could not then be equated with the loss of other humans. In the form that the New Testament finally took, the reader is almost throughout the compilation being encouraged to seek their comfort in their faith in Jesus as the Risen Christ. And it’s quite hard work to read the New Testament in any other than the traditional way. So, if as Unitarians we do not accept the traditional views of the supernatural nature of Jesus, then it can be hard to find much help in the New Testament for our everyday and oh so ordinary experience of loss.”
So it was to the Old Testament that Lucy turned. The OT focuses on Jewish life and traditions before the emergence of Jesus, so the loss themes in the OT are those experienced as a community by Jewish people throughout the centuries. In it, perhaps the most basic loss, the most continuously noted loss, is the loss of the homeland and its sacred spaces and places. So this loss, and other calamities that befell individuals and kingly Jewish states, are more akin to social and personal problems of today, and may speak to us with more relevance. The inspiration we may get from the OT comes from the record of the Jewish struggle to understand how they came to be exiled and oppressed, with a basic loss of control over their lives, and how to retrieve the situation.
The OT books of the prophets and the wisdom books help us by supplying a range of different responses to loss and sorrow. The prophetic books include a sense, described by mystics as having been given by God, that loss will be washed away by God, no demands made. To illustrate this there was a reading from Isaiah (Isaiah 44:21-26 (New English Bible)). This was a radical approach when it was experienced and recorded by the Arameans/Hebrews/Jews, as it denotes a loving God, a merciful God. A God who did not need the ritual human or animal sacrifice of older belief systems.
In contrast with the prophetic books, the wisdom books of the OT rely less on an interventionist God to help through loss, and more on a human, personal, internal change of attitude in the face of loss. An example was the second reading was from the book of Ecclesiastes (edited from Ecclesiastes by A World Religions Bible (page 282)). The teacher and poet Jesus would have been living and working against the backdrop of these and other Jewish scriptures.
Lucy reflected: “We each deal with loss on perhaps a daily basis — loss of people, loss of opportunity, loss of resources, loss of self-esteem, loss of memory, loss even of basic forms of trust. With a Unitarian heritage coming from the Christian culture, we may be able to find insights, from examining certain Bible passages and letting our imaginations roam freely, that will help us to cope with loss. The culture and governance systems of our land are steeped in traditions and systems coming out of Christianity. So we might imagine we no longer need the Christian sources, now that our society has mainstreamed ideas from Christianity, in particular in relation to justice, and support for those least able to cope with life’s demands. But a German academic, Dr Isolde Karle, once said at a conference:
“The Christian cultural memory cannot be taken for granted. It is completely imaginable that one day the story of the Good Samaritan will no longer be known or understood. Solidarity with the powerless, deliberate care of the marginalised, of the sick and of people in need are not self-evident.”"
Lucy suggested that we live in times when common standards of integrity and moral behaviour are being shunted out the door and the public expectation of what counts as acceptable behaviour is in danger of being re-normalized to a new low. And worse: there seems to be no visible, widespread public outrage at how our representatives are behaving, and no recognition of the danger that we risk, if we do not return to ‘word being bond’, general trustworthiness, and the courage to maintain and insist on truth.
Under these circumstances the possibility exists that anything or everything can be lost, even the Christian cultural memory. So it is surely important to us who inherit the culture to keep alive the compassionate standpoint of the Jewish poet, teacher and leader Jesus, and all who followed after him, even if we no longer hold the beliefs in a supernatural Jesus that drove most of those followers on?
At the end of our gathering, after the readings, and hymns, and lighting of candles, and contemplation in silence, this was our witness, the closing words we all said while muted on Zoom:
"We are aware, and we affirm that we do not find our peace
in the certainty of what we confess,
but in wonder of what befalls us and what we are given;
that we do not find our destination in indifference and greed,
but in vigilance and in connection with all that lives;
that our existence is not fulfilled by who we are and what we possess,
but by what is infinitely greater than we can contain.”
Extract from 2006 Confession of Faith of the Dutch Remonstrant Church
