The thing about faith of any type is that it is actually about not knowing. Do you have faith in bus timetables? Do you act as though the bus will come along at the time it says in the timetable, even though you will not be surprised if it doesn’t arrive as predicted?
Faith is about acting ‘as if’, using some kind of mental model for how the world works, making some kind of decisions about how you can use what the world offers — even if that mental model, like the bus timetable, doesn’t completely represent what then takes place.
People who hold a religious faith are doing exactly the same. They have in mind some sort of working model for how to get their lives together, some sort of feel for what the whole universe — what is in it, and what is beyond it — is grounded on. And then they act in line with their model and make decisions about their actions, actions that show up in the real world.
But if any religious person claims to know, better than a non-religious person, what is actually going on, they are deceiving only themselves.
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And that’s what our gathering on 18th August was all about.
It was all about the great unknowing. We don’t know, and we can’t know. Nonetheless, we have to have some kind of picture that we work to. Some kind of ‘as if’.
We started with a poem The People’s Anthem by Ebenezer Elliott, written in 1848, querying whether crime will endlessly support the powerful and whether the powerful will endlessly tread down the majority. The poem cried out to God, in some form or other, to save the people from endless toil and bondage, asserting that people are all children of God. In these troubled times it seemed particularly apt, even if we don’t know what type of God we are crying out to and what we mean when we say people are children of God. But the poem was actually set to music and forms part of the musical Godspell — so it has become a memorable hum-along tune. You can find it here on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw1j8QvtZZc&list=RDg2RBaN3uWOY&index=8
Then we reminded ourselves that we were sitting in a sanctuary of peace, prompted by words by Rev Tony McNeile, closing with, “This is me. This is who I am. Here I can open my arms and my soul to the divine and the sacred and be at one with them.”
You can find Tony and some of his words here https://tonymcneile.wordpress.com/
John Denver helped us along our way next, with his song Looking for Space. In this song he firstly identifies that looking within often provides a sense of clarity, and secondly he suggests that in the final analysis, “If there’s an answer, it’s just that it’s just that way.”
You can listen here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU-qwrK3i-c
Running alongside the service’s theme of unknowing, or not knowing, there was a repeated question that kept popping up. Inspired by the American Zen Buddhist teacher Adyashanti, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adyashanti we were asked this several times at key points:
Where are you going to operate from? What’s your intention? What do you really value? Do you value connectedness and deep truth, or do you value fear and survival? Where you feel uncertain, where you don’t know the outcome, when acting from the deepest truth and love will cost you something, what are you going to do? What do you value the most?
We had two readings. One was the The Parable of the Sower, from the Bible, Book of Mark chapter 4 vv 1-9. The second was a commentary by the same Adyashanti on a saying that is within the Gospel of Thomas. Adyashanti says, “In order to come into our full potential and to embody the truth and radiance of what we are, we must come vitally alive; we must lean once again into presence; we must pour ourselves forth into life, instead of trying to escape life and avoid its challenges.”
The atmospherics of the gathering were built up one more time by music, in the Gerry Rafferty song The Right Moment, describing the temptation to put off change in one’s life, by spending life looking for a sign instead of just waking up to what’s real. Hear it here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ApL0lTQHE8
The heart of the service was an intense prayer contemplation inspired by John D. Caputo in his book Hoping Against Hope. It started with the words, “How is it possible to pray without knowing if anyone is there to hear our prayer? But how is it possible not to?” It included the thought that we would probably not be content to pray to any model of God that we can imagine. And also the thought that if we knew to whom we are praying we would know everything and therefore not be in need of prayer.
It really did evoke the confusion of the state of unknowing, which most of us who hold faith find ourselves in, most of the time. How can we pray? But how can we not pray?
We then prayed for others who are in our hearts for now, in the faith that by focusing on them some remote action may yet take place, where they are, to improve their situation. We don’t know if prayer works. But we act as if it does.
A face to face gathering wouldn’t be the same without the chance to sing some hymns, so there were two. One was a hymn of recognition (some traditions call such hymns 'hymns of praise') of the source of all being that is the centre of every physical dimension but also the closest presence there is at the heart of every human being. The second was a hymn of thanksgiving for all who have brought our faith to where we are now, and whose work and actions before our own lives have provided what we need to survive today.
