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.