Are we really here for this? - to seek paradise? Ringwood #Unitarians sit and listen in Feb 2023

At our February gathering for reverence we were privileged to welcome the District Minister for the London District, Rev Jim Corrigall, as our president for the day.  At a prayerful and heartfelt gathering we noticed, not for the first time, that as we gather in the Meeting House at the centre of the town, it can feel as though we are at the quiet centre of an ever turning world.  We sing, we read, we turn to prayer and we sit in quiet contemplation or meditation, all while the sounds carry on around us of chatting people moving past the Meeting House, shopping trolleys being collected, buses stopping and starting, and the bells from the parish church nearby.  Another sense of privilege: it can feel like we are anchoring the town in silence, for the benefit of all.

The Bible reading for the day came from the Book of Luke, chapter 17, and it reminded us that Jesus said that many would search here and there to find the kingdom of God, whereas the kingdom of God is to be found within us, among us.

Our president drew our attention to several readings from the book Seeking Paradise - A Unitarian Mission for Our Times, by Stephen Lingwood.  This is a book that several of us have read, and which is now on the list of ‘must reads’ for others of us.

It was a delight to hear Rev Jim read from and comment on Stephen Lingwood’s book — such a relevant theme for a small fellowship as we gathered on our ninth anniversary.  What are we here for?

My own take home messages from the book were slightly different from Rev Jim’s, and the rest of this blogpost reflect my own take on the book.

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This book is one which, by looking at the history of our tradition, particularly with regard to its mission in times past, suggests that our tradition needs to be clearer about what its mission, its purpose, might be today.  Lingwood is quite clear that he is putting forward a proposition, and welcomes other contrasting propositions, so that the tradition can hold a debate, and move understanding along a little.  

The basic question Lingwood is trying to address is: what does it matter if our church exists or not, or whether our church grows or not, if truth and salvation do not depend on it?  He says, “I believe it is only by answering the question of our purpose that we can begin to answer the question of our growth.”

In a book that covers a wide span, Stephen Lingwood arrives at his answer, which is that the Unitarian mission is both to discover and create 'paradise'.  He explores what this spirituality of paradise might mean, and how it might provide a sense of vision and mission. 

The word paradise is a word that almost everyone is familiar with, and uses in their own way.  It’s a word that instantly conveys a sense of well-being, peace, opportunity, richness, colour, beauty, laughter, contentment, happiness.  The symbol of paradise has a very long history.  It appears first in the Christian Bible in the image of Adam and Eve walking in the garden of Eden with God, in innocence, plenty, and peace.

Lingwood draws on other writers from our tradition, notably Rebecca Ann Parker, who have argued that in the church there is a persistent and rich symbol of paradise for salvation.  He reports their findings that “Paradise is the biblical image of a state of joy and abundance.  It is the garden of delights where there is no war, no disconnection, no suffering.....Paradise does not just mean a mythical time in the past when all was well.....a Christian spirituality that sees paradise as existing here and now, within us and all around us...both in the world and in the worshipping community...”

“The good news of paradise is that the world is beautiful, good, and overflowing with the love and grace of God.  But we have to open our eyes to paradise in order to make its full presence realised in the world.”

Moreover, says Lingwood, “Paradise points to a deep sense of beauty and love in this world, but this is not the same thing as saying, ‘The world is just lovely and fine as it is.’... I have seen evidence from people resisting extreme evil ....[and] I am provisionally hopeful that faith in paradise is not destroyed by the reality of suffering.”

Perhaps the punchline from the book, although it does not come at the end of the book, is this:

“What is our message? Our good news? That you live in paradise, and that the powers of Empire have lied to you.  In some circumstances, if we are bold enough, perhaps the message could even be that God loves you; that the fundamental reality of the world is relationship, and not isolation — but we each have to discover this for ourselves.”

Being open to new things and moving into a new world — Unitarians in Ringwood gather in Jan 2023

Our reader will not be surprised to read that in the last gathering of the ninth year of our fellowship, all the usual elements of our normal gatherings — prayers, a period of silence, some hymns and some readings — were all enacted as usual.

In a nod to New Year’s Resolutions, our president for the day had chosen a topic about new starts, changes of direction, crises.

The two readings were from the Christian Bible.  The first story was in the Book of Genesis and was about Cain and Abel, the two sons of Adam and Eve (Genesis Chapter 4, verses 1 to 17); and the second was about a blind beggar known as Bartimaeus, as told in the Book of Mark (Mark Chapter 10 verses 46 to 52).

The thoughts our president had about these two readings follow.

“Cain felt ignored by God, and not being fully grounded, he didn’t pay attention to the warning that he got.  He was told that he should see ‘lack of approval’ merely as feedback — on how well (or not) he had done.  He was told that if he didn’t do   what it took to get approval, the temptation would always be there for him to flounce away in disappointment, to divert from his best self, making things worse.  He was to master that in himself.

“In his resentment and disappointment, Cain did not heed the warning.  His form of making things worse was to kill his brother.  He then realised what he had done and tried to cover it up.  The punishment announced was that he was to always be a wanderer, a fugitive, having to hide from himself and society, and to struggle to support himself.  Loved and protected by God, for sure, but outside society.

“But honouring this punishment was something Cain couldn’t cope with, couldn’t take on.  He couldn’t shoulder the hardship and discipline.  He couldn’t honour the God of his parents.  He couldn’t bring himself to live as a wanderer, a fugitive.  Instead, he rejected everything in Eden and went elsewhere to build a citadel; he went somewhere to make roots — a little enclave that he could be head of, could be in charge of, where things would happen according to his own will.  And Cain even justified this to himself by naming the citadel after his son; yes, that was it, he had done all this for the sake of his son.  This was a kind of life imprisonment. And he chose it for himself.  And potentially imposed it on his wife and son as well.

"Bartimaeus was already imprisoned, by his blindness.  Probably not a self-imposed constraint.  He could hear a buzz going on about a teacher who spoke of freedom from bonds that tie, of finding the realm of God no matter your worldly circumstances; of experiencing a life of abundance and blessedness. ‘They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.’  Bartimaeus liked the sound of that so he cried out.

“And in return he heard not the teacher, but the teacher’s followers’ reply: ‘Have courage! The teacher is calling you!’ So he stood up and went to him.  That took strength of heart, and faith.  Such faith, that his life changed and he was healed — we are told he gained his sight.

“Two characters. Two responses.  Two different outcomes. The cost to one, loss of self-esteem, and permanent estrangement.  The cost to the other, having to look inside himself for the courage, the grit, the strength of will, to stand up and make his way forward towards an uncertain future, following the teacher.

“There’s a Jewish joke about a castaway mariner who builds a synagogue, then builds another.  When rescued, he explains that the second is the synagogue he never goes to.  We have all experienced this from time to time.  We make a change in our life and start something new, only to find the same problems pop up in our new situation.  It’s not the external circumstances that do this to us.  Problems don’t actually follow us: we carry our problems with us.  We have to look inside to sort out the wrinkles.  Cain wasn’t prepared to do that.  Bartimaeus was.

“One of the biggest challenges for many people is being able to hear good news when their senses and consciousness are constantly bombarded with bad news. The name ‘Bartimaeus’ is derived from two Aramaic words - “bar” (בַּר) meaning “son (of)” and “tame” (טָמֵא) meaning ‘unclean, defiled’.  So this chap is labelled “son of the unclean”, simply because he can’t see. ‘Bartimaeus’ may not even have been his name, but a nickname given him by the city folk as they cruelly judged his disability as the product of defilement or uncleanness. Bartimaeus has to decide whether to sit in his familiar place, derided and insulted by society, or to get up and take his place in the community of Jesus, with Jesus’ followers, seeking a different way of life.

“There are anecdotes about long-term prison inmates who, when their term is up, don’t want to walk through the door to freedom, because the present pain or misery is more comfortable and less threatening than the uncertainties and obligations that lie beyond.  To walk out takes courage.

“We say we like fresh starts.  Hence the popularity of New Year’s Resolutions.  But every day we have the choice faced by both Cain and Bartimaeus — either to be open to hearing new, very likely uncomfortable, things and moving eventually into a new world;  or to be more comfortable where we are, doing the same-old same-old, hugging the selfsame problems to our chests, like children and their comfort blankets.

“Maybe we need someone to keep pointing us towards a different possibility – speaking a language of hope and love and colour when we are used to words of criticism, blindness or the closing down of potential.  Maybe we need to hear the whisper within the emergency, within the discomfort; the whispered promise that, alongside and as part of new chaos, change can come — change will come.  Not because nothing is permanent, but actually because there is something, something that really is permanent.  Newness is permanent, and it comes along with change.

Video from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope

“That is our dilemma. ‘We are “atoms with consciousness,” who know that one day we shall become “one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust” but wish it to be otherwise with every atomic fibre of our being.  And  “God” is the name we give to our longing for permanence in a universe of change.’  But what we continually fail to do, is recognize that it is newness that is always there for us.  Our ability to see permanence, and hence find peace, is, by and large, dependent on our being able to imagine the mystery that is ‘permanent newness'.

“The Bible narratives we heard today are about people encountering the divine most vividly at their decision points, their crossroads, their crises.  Change, decisions, and relatedness are frequently what mark the divine mystery, the mystery of dynamism and mutual invitation, truth and uncertainty, permanent newness.  May we note our decision points well.”