Continuing hope against the darkness - January 2022 - Unitarians in Ringwood muse together on the fragility of the world

For those for whom one look at the topic in December was not enough, we continued with the theme of ‘Hope’ for our January gathering.  We feel we cannot talk of hope too often.

Along with some uplifting online music, some silent contemplation, reflection or meditation, and the lighting of candles with which to name our joys and concerns, the following elements were present in our time together.

Our president of the day had selected Bible readings from the books of Isaiah and Genesis.

We lit the chalice candle and in the quiet we reflected privately on what it was that had brought us to the gathering; on what matters to us; on the ideals we hold and how we have lived up to those ideals in the recent past.

The first reading was from the King James Bible and was Genesis chapter 1 verses 1-12.  It starts with the spirit of God moving over the waters just before the creation of light, and ends with the creation of the earth and the renewal of the plants growing on the earth.

The second reading was from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible and was Isaiah chapter 42 verses 1-9a.  It describes and praises the servant that God has chosen to bring forth justice, and refers also to the creation story.

The president reflected as follows.

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In our Unitarian tradition we share in stories and images that transcend us as individuals, as communities, even as a movement.  We draw inspiration and find meaning in the re-telling and re-living of things, which unite us with many across the divides of history, geography, creed and practice. Our Unitarian tradition leads us to share our joy while not imposing our view.

And our Unitarian tradition leads us to take responsibility for what we read into our heritage and what we do on account of it.  To us the Scripture we share is not the law, perhaps not even a witness; rather, it is the account of a journey to the heart of what matters.  Scripture can move us but never command us, wake us but not force us to work.

In our first reading we heard about the making of the world: from the breath of God rippling the waters of the darkness, to a blue and green world beneath the heavens.  How beautiful and how fragile it seems.  Land so recently submerged, now between the waters above and the waters below, which could surge together at any moment. 

This fragile beauty we perhaps get a sense of from those first pictures of our earth taken by the astronauts looking back from the cold emptiness of space.  Our beautiful world, green and blue.  In that fragility we can see the audacity of hope that is at the heart of Creation.  When everything clamours for the empty darkness, when all things tend towards that, there is form, there is life, there is hope.  The philosophers ask why there is something rather than nothing.  Not just why there is this or that; but why anything at all?  Why not the empty darkness that seems to be where all things tend?  At the heart of Creation in this story, at the centre of the world we know, there is a hope that makes no sense: but it is there.  An audacious hope against all reasonable expectation.  It is not a promise of things being ok, it is not a changing of the fundamentals of the world; it is a defiant, joyful, fierce spark at the heart of all things. 

Hope is not an add-on or balm: it is the pulse, the rippling breath on the waters of the dark.  A world born of hope, and held in hope.

Our second reading takes us hundreds of years and hundreds of miles from the narrative of our first author.  The prophet Isaiah, in exile in Babylon, speaking to a people who had seen their homeland burn, their culture and certainties ripped apart and who are now being asked to hope an impossible hope.  In the face of injustice, of oppression, of disenfranchisement, they are being asked not only to imagine a better world but to start living in it.  To live in a world no more 'there' than was the blue and green of our earth, as the breath rippled the waters in the dark.  That same defiant hope at the heart of Creation burns at the heart of civilization.  Though everything seems to tend to chaos, and despite the injustice of “might is right”, that spark, that pulse of hope goes on.  Why is there kindness rather than chaos?  Why is there love rather than nothing?

Though not for all, for some of us the cadences and phrases of these two readings will be very familiar.  We will hear the echoes of the spirit moving over the waters in the story of Jesus, just before he comes up out of the Jordan at his baptism.  We will hear the words of the song of praise sung about the child Jesus as he was presented in the temple.  We will hear the justice demanded, in terms of the Beatitudes Jesus (on the Mount) offered to us as a way of life.  Again, the gospels were written hundreds of miles and hundreds of years removed from Isaiah, but once more we find a radical, defiant hope against hope.  A story of a life lived contrary to all the givens of the world around; a life not lived out of ignorance, not out of wishful thinking, not out of a certainty it would all be ok, but lived in hope.  A life lived in a world yet to emerge from the darkness, a world only yet the barest ripple of breath. 

At this time of year I wish for us all hope, hope for a better year, for a better future, for a better world.  May we feel that pulse, that breath, at the heart of our green and blue world, at the centre of our civilization, and may we respond to it courageously and generously.  I cannot tell you why there is something rather than nothing, why kindness rather than chaos, but there is; and may that fill us with hope.

From loss to hope, as Unitarians gathering in the name of Didymus get together again on Zoom 19 Dec 2021

As our gathering for reverence in November was focused on loss, the December gathering was themed on something perhaps more cheerful, namely hope.  It chimed well with the traditional period of Advent, leading up to Christmas.

There were some very upbeat musical interludes, including a song of relief and joy (the Nunc Dimittis), one of our favourite hymns (Do not be afraid), a hit from Abba (I have a Dream) and another from Münchner Freiheit (Keeping the Dream Alive).  All these and others were wonderfully available to us (on Zoom) from YouTube.

We also included our traditional seven minutes of silence for personal practice, be that prayer, contemplation, reflection or meditation.  We lit candles for people and situations that were on our minds.  And we recited or contemplated an alternative form of the Lord’s Prayer that had been written by one of our fellowship.

We had two readings, and a few words from the president of the day on what held the two readings together.

The first reading came from the Czech poet Vaclav Havel, who wrote in the days before the collapse of Soviet Communism, in what was then Czechoslovakia.

"The kind of hope I often think about I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.  Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul; it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.

It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. 

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism.  It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. 

I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from 'elsewhere.'"

Vaclev Havel (1936 - 2011)

So the first reading suggested that hope is a state of mind which sees that — despite everything — somehow, things makes sense.

Our second reading was the story of Noah’s Ark, adapted from chapters 7 and 8 of the book of Genesis, in the Bible.  This may not be a traditional reading just before Christmas, but its relevance to the mood and theme of the gathering became clear.

by Elmer Boyd Smith, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The story of Noah and the Ark suggested that how life is, is that we are all locked up together, in an ark, between an ending and a beginning.

“...and the Lord closed the door on him.”  (Genesis Chapter 7 verse 16). The narrative as metaphor: being in an ark together, all the contradictions that we present to each other are unavoidable — we cannot get away from each other — but these contradictions are also the raw material of all that we can become.  That's where it happens, in honest community and committed relationships.

The narrative also reminds us that we do not live separated from what is happening around humanity, from our ecosystem.

And the story of Noah agrees with Vaclav Havel: for our wellbeing we have to achieve some kind of acceptance of reality as it is; that in the end we can’t fix things without reference to something external to ourselves.

And the reality, either in Noah’s God, or in astrophysics, is that there is always an ending, but always another beginning.

As was highlighted in our November gathering, the human species faces a completely certain extinction in the end, before the Earth and the rest of the solar system is obliterated when the Sun dies.  So we must find a hope for our daily living that does not depend on the impossibility of unending human life.  We must get our hope, as it were, from elsewhere.

It was suggested that our hope might be for our aliveness while we live.  A conviction that it makes sense to feel aliveness while we can.  The challenge is to live in that hope and allow that hope to be enough.