Life with the neighbours — giving, but with no sense of condescension

As Chesterton wrote : ‘We have to love our neighbour because he is there – a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation.  He is the sample of humanity which is actually given us. Precisely because he may be anybody he is everybody. He is a symbol because he is an accident.’  G. K. Chesterton, 'Heresy' (House of Stratus, Thirsk, 2001)

~~~~~~~~~

For only the second time, people who usually meet under the Unitarian umbrella in Ringwood (Hants, UK) met on Zoom on 11 April 2021.

We lit the candle in our chalice at the start of the gathering.

In the gathering there were prayer and blessing words from Rev David Usher, Rev Andy Pakula, Darren Canning.  We heard a suggestion from Marcus J. Borg on a relevant way to read the Bible, 'Reading the Bible Again for the First Time — taking the Bible seriously but not literally.'  The website  www.bibleodyssey.org had also been a help in preparation for the gathering.  There was music from www.smallchurchmusic.com and the Unitarian Musical Society.  There were two readings, and we were also given the space for private, personal prayer or meditation practice in the customary seven minute period of silence.

The first reading was from the Bible, taken from the book of Luke, chapter 10 verses 25-37, a story commonly referred to as 'The Good Samaritan', but which we now prefer to know as 'The priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan.'  The take home points were these:

• Jesus presented the ethnic and religious outcast not only as the story’s hero but also as the moral exemplar and, because of the compassion he showed the person in need, the inheritor of eternal life — the one to imitate, should one be seeking to inherit eternal life.  The corollary implied by Jesus was that, on their showing that day, neither the ritually pure priest nor the Levite would inherit eternal life.
• Jesus switched the question from, “Whom should I love?” which placed the recipient of the enquirer's love as an object to 'be done to', to “What must I do to show love — what am I prepared to risk to show love — what does it cost me to show love?”  In so doing, Jesus prompted the listeners to build in themselves the capacity for loving, independent of the identity of the recipient.  And to stop treating others as objects.
• To label the Samaritan in the story “good” (a word never used in the text) is to participate in a racist assumption that being “good” is an unusual and noteworthy achievement for Samaritans.

The second reading was from 'Utopian Dreams: In Search of the Good Life' by Tobias Jones. 

Tobias and his wife Francesca took a sabbatical of a year from their usual lives and went away to find ‘the good life’ — something they could enjoy as an objective experience.  Yet while they were away their priorities changed; and they came back home to find instead a ‘good way to live’ — a way of actively being good neighbours.  So we heard again about the switch round of emphasis that Jesus had made.

When they got back home, Tobias and Francesca drew a circle of 1 km centred on where they lived, and searched out all the communities that were alive in that circle — which ones they could commit to being involved with.  We were invited to think about how their experience in localism relates to us and our lives today.  

We have all just experienced a great and shocking upheaval, and many people are re-thinking how they live and what their priorities now are.  We are discovering that there is such a thing as living much closer to home, literally.  That it is actually possible to do that, even if as yet we don’t necessarily find it the most enjoyable thing to do.  There have been some very big political issues in the past five years that have dominated the UK public sphere; but now that we may be nearing the end of the COVID pandemic we simply have to return to something much bigger, which is staring us in the face: the climate emergency.

There is much that only governments, commerce and industry can do to restructure, so as to put the brakes on carbon emissions; nonetheless, we all have a part to play.  We may not see the victims lying by the side of our road, beaten up and bleeding; but the climate emergency has victims.  So if we learn from Jesus the way to live a good life, we have to ask ourselves the cost and risk to ourselves — what we are going to have to change and give up in our own lives — of showing love to those victims.  (And, harking back to the discrimination against Samaritans by Jews of Jesus' time, we note that climate change, although something which will affect us all, is a deeply racialised phenomenon.  See the link to the Christian Aid website, below.)

Giving up our love of casual travel and the romance of the exotic may be part of the cost we have to pay, to secure the lives of those vulnerable to the effects of climate change. We may really all have to live right where we are, within a much smaller radius.  But like Tobias and Fran, we may actually find everything we need, right there.

~~~~~~~~

The Unitarian church in UK was (and remains) a founder member of the charity Christian Aid, and still has a stakeholder voice in the charity.  Find out here what Christian Aid has to say about the climate emergency: Our prophetic journey towards climate justice

May 2015 meeting

Our meeting for reverence and worship this month had a look at the Buddhist logic for compassion, and led onto some practical actions that we can take to develop our power of compassion.  These include actively responding, inwardly, when we notice the feeling of compassion arising in ourselves; focusing on that feeling and allowing it to develop, and not just ignoring it or fending it off.  Then the Tibetan Buddhist source reading reminded us that there are all sorts of excuses to not outwardly act on our feeling of compassion, but excuses are self-defeating – because one of the best ways to develop ourselves as humans is to work in the world for the well-being of other beings.  We were encouraged to appeal to our inner Buddha-nature, the archetype of the perfect human being within us, by using a little prayer, easy to remember and to repeat during our daily round: “Bless me into usefulness.”

We remembered that it’s not just professionally religious or theological people who teach us about becoming all of a piece with the universe: we heard some words spoken by Albert Einstein about the whole that is the universe, which includes us as parts, lost in our own delusions.  And we listened to a fresh, simple song by Paul McCartney, saying “it’s there, it’s round, it’s to be found in you, in me – it’s all we ever wanted to be.”

We sang two hymns, one about compassion; and the second, which may yet become the anthem for small Unitarian congregations, about how even the tiniest action makes a difference.  We had a period of silent personal practice, and we lit candles and spoke about our concerns and connections. It was good to hold in mind our neighbouring Unitarian congregations at Southampton and Bridport, whom we have visited relatively recently.

In our coffee discussion afterwards we started talking about an additional meeting format we might introduce in 2016.  Something at a different time, when buses are running in the district, and when there are lots of people around – perhaps coming out of work.  With conversation, and candles, and coffee/tea.  Perhaps based on pre-announced topics or perhaps just people bringing their own inspiration on the day.  We would want to hire the Meeting House for this.  We would need a catchy name for it, though – albeit utterly honest, “After Work Candles, Coffee and Conversation” might be just a bit too cumbersome !  We will be thinking about this new initiative over the next few months.

After the meeting we set up a collection point for Christian Aid to boost the Ringwood awareness of Christian Aid Week, and to build on our involvement with the sponsored swim that started on the evening of Saturday 9 May  https://www.justgiving.com/CTIR/   It was good to collect some more donations for this amazing effort organized by Churches Together in Ringwood, which went on right into the small hours of Sunday morning, and by the end was the equivalent of a cross-Channel relay swim.

May 2014 meeting

Our May meeting took place at the very start of Christian Aid Week.  The two readings that were chosen reflected a theme that is common to both ancient religion and modern science – the interdependency of humankind and the survival need to give mutual aid.  The first reading was from Isaiah 58 and the second was derived from material available on the world wide web on the influence of Peter Kropotkin.  Despite considerable difference in language of the two readings, both perspectives asserted it to be a truth that health, well-being, and the satisfaction of a meaningful place in the world are bound up in helping each other and seeking justice through breaking down of oppression and social barriers.

We looked forward, to working with other churches in Ringwood in the coming week, as part of the Christian Aid Week campaign to deal with the impact and aftermath of war in South Sudan and Colombia.  And also, to giving thanks in joint worship on 18 May in Poulner Baptist Chapel.

The invitation was extended to all the participants to choose readings for future meetings.  We also agreed that we now have a working core to our congregation and discussed our next initiative for growth, which is likely to take a different, drop-in format, early on Saturday mornings.