Wisdom and Difficult Decisions — Lent, Ukraine, COVID19 and a cable passing through the eye of a needle #Unitarians in Ringwood 12 March 2023

No that's not a typo in the title.  Only some versions of the Bible have (in the book of Matthew, chapter 19 v 24) a camel passing through the eye of a needle.  At least one version has a cable passing through the eye of a needle.  It's worth researching different versions.  Jubilee Bible 2000, Matthew 19:24 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew 19:24&version=JUB  

It’s just worth noting that the reports on this blog run the risk of misrepresenting what it feels like at one of our gatherings.  There’s not just a wordy ‘sermon’ by the president for the day.  But in order to feel the experience — of the prayer words, the mutual silences, the recorded music (dramatic incidental music as well as hymns), the heartfelt expressions of joys and concerns as we mark the movements in our lives with careful listening to each other as well as with candles — you have to be there.

It’s just that the bits that most lend themselves to a written record are the readings and the reflection on the readings by the president for the day. 

We are part of a tradition that used to centre aspirations for spiritual and societal development exclusively on the narratives inherited from the Christian Bible.  Friends of ours in sibling Unitarian congregations and broader networks may not look so much to those roots; but we in Ringwood have chosen to have a look at them as often as we can.  We are not traditional Christians, but culturally we feel more at home with wisdom from Christianity than we do with wisdom from other faiths.  We feel our tradition provides a homing ground, and something we can point at that holds us together.  So when we meet as a group we gravitate to stories from Christianity to help us with our lives, even if personally, individually, none of us necessarily goes to Christian writings as our first resort for inspiration. 

This month we were reminded that this is the Christian season of Lent, that it’s a year since Russia started the war on Ukraine, and three years since the first lockdown in UK as a result of COVID19.

During Lent we remember that the teacher Jesus is depicted as being strenuously tempted, during a long period in the wilderness out of contact with society and all the usual nourishments of home. The story of Jesus has it that he passes every test, by making decisions that put reverence and humility at the heart of his spiritual practice. He sets aside his own ‘will to power’ for the sake of ‘will to mutuality’ — in the story, Jesus is seeking a mutual relationship with the Creator. 

Regarding the failed, despicable, vanity project of invading Ukraine, aimed at satisfying the greed for continued power, largely on the part of one man, we remain shocked and dismayed as the war staggers on.  The temptation of the ‘will to power’ is there for everyone.  But let us remember that not all lunges for power are so obvious, lest we imagine that we ourselves are above them. 

On 26 March 2020, three years ago, the UK went into the first lockdown of the COVID19 pandemic. There are direct comparisons that can be drawn between Jesus’ time in the wilderness and our nation’s confinement, in which we too, all of us, were subject to temptation. We know only too well the stories of those who were unable to contain themselves, to restrain themselves to act in mutuality. The pandemic was a time when people were being asked to make important and difficult decisions, with scant information. A time when wisdom was called for, and was sometimes in short supply. 

Lent is associated with renunciation, self-discipline, resisting temptation.  It’s sort-of a ‘No pain? No gain!’ period in the calendar.  It’s a time when we get to know ourselves better by finding out just how hard it is to choose a way through when, in reality, there’s no one to police our choices but ourselves.

So our president for the day brought to our attention those times when personally we are facing really tough decisions, when we are trying to decide which path to take, whether we really know ourselves at all, and what sources of advice there might be available to us as we agonise over what to do.

With this as a backdrop there were two readings.  The first was about the rich young man who asks Jesus for advice about the next step he must take to assure his pathway to the kingdom of heaven. And the second was simply a hotchpotch of snippets from the Christian Bible regarding taking decisions, or sources of advice. It thus included words from Proverbs, Sirach, Matthew, James and Paul.

We heard the following from our president for the day.

In the first reading, the middle class, nouveau riche, or aristocratic and moneyed, young man is yet mature enough to see that a committed, personal, spiritual practice is essential for an authentic aspiration to find the kingdom of heaven. And he sees that here’s a teacher who has attracted many people. So the young man thinks Jesus might provide the key he has been looking for, over and above the faithful practice he already commits to. 

But instead of getting an answer he can handle, the young man is told to look at his outward context — there is no mention of principles, philosophies or of his inner landscape. ‘Sell all your possessions, give the money away to those who are in want of the basics, and that act of giving will generate in you lasting riches — and then come along and live with me; live like I do.’ 

The young man feels bereft and in a quandary. His preconceived complacency around the next piece of advice, his next stage of learning, has been both pinpointed and stripped from him. He is torn by the choice placed before him. He has been told he lacks only one thing. This thing. This giving away of his comfort based on worldly possessions. This shedding of his self-image as a man of consequence, in exchange for a strengthened mutuality with those who hadn’t the basics. 

The young man is a devout Jew, engaged in a robust spiritual practice. He presumably has had access to all the usual sources of advice — the Hebrew Bible, the learned men of the day (the Pharisees), the poetry and folk wisdom of the land he lives in, and the voice he hears when he is quiet enough inside. Apparently none of those sources of advice have shocked him in the way that that simple advice from Jesus shocks him.  It is as if the idea Jesus gives him was completely new to him. Yet it resonates sufficiently within him that he is unable to dismiss it. Had he known it was not for him, he could have dismissed it at once.  But he doesn’t dismiss it.  He can’t.  He hadn’t registered this idea before, and yet, now he hears it, it sounds a bell inside him. Something about this advice registers with him as true; he doesn't like it, but he can’t turn away from it. Oh! the agony. 

We are not told what he chooses to do. This story isn’t about answers.

And with that ‘unanswering’ ringing in our ears, pretty much all of what we heard afterwards was a series of questions:

Do we make decisions in a vacuum? 

What is there around about us that we could use, to help us make these sort of difficult decisions? 

What sources of advice do we have? 

Which sources can we trust? 

Quakers talk about “the leadings of God” — where are these to be found, or heard? In the natural world? In traditional narratives and writings? In face to face discussions with trusted counsellors, friends, advisers, sages? In the still small voice encountered after long inner struggle or hours of quietude? 

When there is a decision before us that is agonizing, what weight can we give to advice? Does the answer simply have to come, in the end, from inside?

Is conscience the leadings or promptings of what lies outside time and space and human imagination, or do we build it for ourselves, different in every age, based on habit and culture? A socially-constructed code of behaviour?

Or even more drastically, is conscience a genetic trick set up by our selfish DNA to exploit every opportunity towards survival? Ethics and morals nowhere in sight? 

How do we know the will of God? How would we recognise it, if it were revealed to us? How do we know the truth? How do we know God? How do we know the will of God? How do we know the nature of God?    [Spoiler: We don’t! ]

So when we are presented with advice in the face of a decision, how do we decide which advice is true? How do we decide whether advice received is relevant or useful or misleading? 

The Bible is full of advice about decisions, and their contexts.  Which angles out of all the angles offered in it might we dwell upon, as we face hard decisions? 

Setting down the Bible again, does it all come down to experience? Have we lived a life where, through chance, things went well for us after taking advice from groups of people we knew? Was something in a book we read, which we decided to act upon, instrumental in our success? Or did luck come into it when we trusted our own judgment alone?  Or have we had the other experience, of taking wise advice and making ostensibly sound judgments, and nonetheless finding life bitter and treacherous?

Why don’t I sell all my possessions and give the money to the poor?