The flame of ritual is re-lit for #Unitarians in Ringwood at Easter 2023

Like an empty cross

Stands the lone cold wick.

Like a cold bare tomb

The fire’s grate.

The flame recalled, in hope no doubt,

Rising from the ashes of the light snuffed out.

(Words for lighting the candle in the chalice)

Last Sunday, Easter Sunday, we included physical ritual in our gathering for the first time since the COVID19 pandemic, and it’s a sign that we in Ringwood are at last throwing off the mental shackles associated with the pandemic, and getting back to how we were before it all started.

In a reflective and meditative service, we built on our overall approach to the Gospel — and, in particular, the book attributed to Mark — as ‘shared story’ for personal reflection.  In this service, the ‘shared story’ vehicle for the reflection and meditation was not a Bible reading, but instead a version of the 'Stations of the Cross' meditation, used for hundreds of years in various Christian traditions. 

There were only a few words offered as content, those being the words used at lighting the candle in the chalice, and the words used as the response for the prayer at each station.

Leader: "With compassion we gaze on thy story.

Response: "Because in it we see something of the world."

Rather than being a wordy service, there was much time for personal quiet.  Participants were invited to picture the moment at each station, and let our reflection go where it will.  Recorded chants from the Taizé-style of worship were also played during the ritual.  Traditionally, inside a church building the Stations of the Cross would be carried out by walking to a series of physical locations in the church.  But with all our participants seated in a circle, our president for the day decided to mark each of the fourteen stations by passing a candle round the full circle, hand to hand.

"I have come to feel that [rituals] have another purpose — to end, for a time, our sense of human alienation from nature and from each other…….Rituals have the power to reset the terms of our universe until we find ourselves suddenly and truly at home."

Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon

"Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation.  To do ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way.  That inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power.  If you aren’t willing to be changed by the ritual, don’t do it."

Starhawk, Truth or Dare

To this last quote, we would add: if you aren't willing to be changed by the ritual, you are not, in fact, doing the ritual (no matter that it looks like you are).

Stations of the Cross (source: Wikipedia, adapted)

The Stations of the Cross or the Way of the Cross, also known as the Way of Sorrows or the Via Crucis, refers to a series of images depicting Jesus on the day of his crucifixion, and accompanying prayers. 

The Stations of the Cross ritual has existed in one form or another for at least five hundred years.  The earliest use of the word "stations", as applied to the accustomed halting-places along the Via Sacra at Jerusalem, occurs in the narrative of an English pilgrim, William Wey, who visited the Holy Land in the mid-15th century and described pilgrims following the footsteps of Jesus to Golgotha. It has become one of the most popular devotions and the stations can be found in many Western Christian churches, including those in the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Methodist traditions.

Out of the fourteen traditional Stations of the Cross, only eight have a clear scriptural foundation.  To provide a version of this devotion more closely aligned with the biblical accounts, Pope John Paul II introduced a new form of devotion, called the Scriptural Way of the Cross, on Good Friday 1991. 

Ruminations on the Cross, Good Friday 7 April 2023

Good Friday.  A bank holiday.  A sombre day for those engaged with the Jesus story.  It's an annual remembering of the brutal execution of one who had been thought of as having profound answers to the problems of human existence.  But he was killed anyway.

The Cross is a symbol of oppressive power but we can and must also ascribe to it the symbology of hope. 

Life is oppressive and brutal.  And in the time of Jesus the ultimate sign of brutality was the Romans' choice of torturous execution — crucifixion. What did Jesus say about the Cross? — “Take up your cross and follow me.”  And what does that mean but: 'Live a life of self-discipline in the service of love of all, even though you know it means a certain death for you’?  Or even a slightly more abrupt and shocking interpretation: ‘If you love, they will kill you.  But if you do not love, you are dead anyway.’

So where could we find hope in the Cross?

Perhaps what the Jesus narrative is showing us is that it is possible to love and trust God so much that you can even walk to your death in that trust and love.  Jesus' triumph is that he knows what is going to happen, and, though he struggles (in that he wants it not to happen), in the end he goes anyway.  The story of Jesus, even if metaphorical, reminds us that we know fully documented stories of people who acted in this way.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example.  So the motif of Jesus can be used to represent them.  This act, truly, is humanly possible.

Another hope in the Cross is this: at the Cross we see that even under the most horrific and unlikely of circumstances it is possible for people to change, to act so as to fulfil the hope that 'might as right' and power to oppress will not ultimately triumph.  There is much more on this on another post on this blog, linked here March 2022

"X marks the spot”.  A long tradition is that God  — or if you prefer, the source of divine vitality — meets us in material reality, in our bodies.  And nowhere more so than at the Cross, a metaphor for our suffering.  The sense of the nearness of God as we suffer has roots in Jewish scripture (Isaiah 63:8-9): 'For he said, Surely they are my people, children that do not lie: and he was their Saviour.  In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the Angel of his face saved them: with his love and with his clemency he redeemed them; and he bore them and carried them all the days of the age.’  

There again, how about hope that can be inspired through the icon of the Jesus story?  The self-sacrificing love that we can witness in Jesus at the Cross, if it stirs in us through our imagination, will untie us from our knotted-ness and wrongness, our failure to hit the mark, and put us right with God.

The Cross  (by Darren Canning)

Gallow tree

And Gibbet 

Raised to frighten me

A shade

To cow

And bow

The head

Or break the back

Of those beneath it

At the foot

Under the heel

Of a cruel world

Where those that write the text 

And those who drive the nails 

Seek to fix

And set the story

Forever 

In their favour 

But whether in the eyes

Of those who look on

Mournful 

Or in the eyes 

Of those who suffer on

Outraged 

The light

Burns 

With every rise and fall

And rise again

As the walls of this Jericho

Are slave-like circled

Waiting for the sounding cry

That will see them fall

And a New Jerusalem

Arise

Be wanton

The welcome

Given

Freely

For the tree

Of life

Of sweet scented blossoms

Will never frighten me.

 

A personal reflection on Maundy Thursday 2023

Bear in mind, dear reader, that this post, like all the posts on this blog, has been supplied by one of the Ringwood Unitarians – and not necessarily always the same one.  It should not be assumed that any other Ringwood Unitarian, or any Unitarian from anywhere, thinks or feels the same as this. Or that the rest of our Ringwood group are even interested in this train of thought.  That’s the beauty of any Unitarian community – we worship and we connect, but we don’t expect each other to think about the same things or to think or feel in the same way.

It’s Maundy Thursday today.  That’s the day of the Jewish Passover.  In the story of Jesus, the teacher Jesus and his students have gone to Jerusalem for the Passover festival.  This is a joyful and celebratory worship of the just and merciful God, who allowed the ancestors – Hebrew slaves in Egypt – to escape the deaths overnight of the first-born, which God inflicted on the then unresponsive, cruel slave-masters, the Egyptians.  It is the festival that recognises that God, or Life, will act kindly towards people who act in accordance with the edicts that God, or Life, demands.  The Egyptians were given their chances to comply, and chose not to.  So they suffered the loss of the first born of every female, human and other mammals.

This recognition – that Life acts kindly towards people who acknowledge its edicts – is found not only in Judaism but right through all the faiths, right across the spectrum of faiths, even in an oriental belief system that shies a long way away from the Jewish idea of a “personal God”, by which I mean Taoism.  Passover, or pesach, is a festival for everyone who has had a good experience of their faith.

So Jesus and his students, friends and family sit down to the Passover meal, the seder meal, to quietly await the arrival of the next day, the commemoration of the day when Hebrews woke up to find that God’s word had been carried out.  The morn when, of course, the Egyptians were shocked and frightened to find their first-borns had died, so before they retaliated in anger God warned the Hebrews to get out of Egypt very quickly.

Over that seder meal Jesus seems to be very sure that his time was coming to an end.  Perhaps he too is shocked and frightened; or perhaps he thinks that within a day or two it will be his followers who will be shocked and frightened.  You see, he has been in Jerusalem since the previous Sunday and he is aware that all sorts of people have all sorts of expectations of him that he will not necessarily fulfil. 

Some people want him to renounce some of the things he had said about relating to God.  Others want him to lead a zealous and possibly armed rebellion against the Roman occupying forces.  A few others seem to think he is bigging up his part as a wise man with a following, at the cost of wasting money that could better be spent on supporting the poor.  Jesus gets the vibes.  He knows the show-down is coming.  So he spends some time that evening over the meal reflecting back to his followers what it is that he stands for, and asking them to remember his words always – by tying them inextricably with the bread and wine of the seder meal, which he knows they will celebrate year after year, so they will have no occasion to forget them.

And in my reading of it, the message of Jesus is this.  We are in a covenant with God – which is an old Jewish message.  We are in a relationship, said Jesus, a relationship we cannot own or control – it’s a connection we can enter.  We are loved into being, we are all sustained by love throughout our lives, and we are received in love at our ending.  Jesus lives as if it were both task and gift to strive to echo that love, right up until his life's end. And he refers to the relationship as 'the kingdom of God' (Mark 1:15, Luke 11:20, Luke 17:21, Gospel of Thomas 11).

The kingdom of God, says Jesus, this relationship, the way to lasting life lived true to our best selves, lies within; and it is accessible to all.  But to find that kingdom, to enter into that ultimate relationship with the just and loving God, you have to be prepared to open your eyes to it, to let go of yourself, and act in all humility.  As though you and your wants and desires were all just by-the-bye, scarcely relevant at all.  

Jesus demonstrates that he thinks everyone, including the most acclaimed ones amongst us, need to see ourselves as fit for the most unpleasant and menial jobs; like taking off the sandals and washing the dusty, smelly feet of our companions after a day on the Galilean plains; like taking without comment an unwarranted slap across the face; like carrying the load of someone who chose to press us into service against our plans and expectations – and not just the mile they demand of us, but an extra mile too.

My message, says Jesus, is that we have to try to mirror God – who is in all people, including the most disadvantaged and disregarded, the ones cast out by the establishment, and the ones who self-injure by getting knotted up in their pain and difficulty.  The kingdom really is there to be experienced, but you have to work very hard to put yourself out of your own view, to put yourself gracefully out of everyone else’s way, and to be prepared – despite your fear – to relinquish your own comfort and control over what is happening to you.  Look, says Jesus, I mean we have to relinquish our own safety and comfort right up to the most painful and bitter end.  Right when it hurts most, right when we don’t think we can go on, we have to stand quietly in trust, and surrender ourselves in all humility to Life, to God – both in God's direct presence as we feel it, and as we feel it coming to us through other people.  Love the very people who cause you grief and pain, because God is in them too – it’s the only way to be fully human.

Despite the power of this mythic narrative, I can’t imagine the inspiration Jesus experiences.  But I can see what a strong man is being spoken of.  What serenity and peace and fulfilment he finds in his love for God and others.  How he disregards himself.  And, though at the end even Jesus feels abandoned, I can see that that doesn't prevent him from offering himself to God.  What a model.

So this Maundy Thursday I celebrate the life and message of the rabbi Jesus with the unleavened bread and the wine of the thanksgiving meal.