Not alone - only those in thrall to self-sufficiency will deny this - February 2022 gathering of Unitarians associated with Ringwood

In February 2022, although the end of the local requirements to keep people safe from COVID19 was in sight, we continued to gather using Zoom.

After the usual ritual of lighting the candle in the chalice, the gathering involved the usual mixture of periods of silence, music via YouTube and other open online sources, readings,  prayer/meditation, and some reflective words by the person presiding for the day.

Also, as it was the start of our ninth year of gathering together, we included a discussion about membership, and mutually invited each other into relationship within the group for the next twelve months.  In this way we can make clear to each other and any other body that enquires, just who it is that is involved in making decisions to steer the group during the next twelve months.

In this time of our muster and our roll call,

May we remember that the task of a church is to serve the needs of people. 

The need to feel loved.

The need to connect with people.

The need to connect with ideas that come through people, through being with people.

The need to belong.

In contrast, although we do each need this from time to time, the ultimate aim of going to a church is not to find mending for ourselves, nor a sense of belonging for ourselves, nor to serve ourselves at all.

The aim of going into a church is to come out of church again,

But to come out - and re-enter the world - changed;

And hence to bring change to the world.

The readings were taken from the book of Job in the Bible (Job, chapter 33 verses 12-33), and ‘We Are One - A Manifesto for Humanity’, by Simenon Honoré.

Lucy, who was the gathering’s president, suggested that the first reading is part of a long, multi-sided Jewish theological debate in the Book of Job.  She said, “It’s not clear that the book is offering a single remedy, one answer, to the problems of life. The book overall seems to be like a set of differing possibilities, some of which conflict. 

"The reading we heard is ascribed to a speaker named Elihu, who is in conversation with Job.  Elihu starts out by saying that we all have times, when we have an impulse to do something, but something stops us.  We may have bad dreams about our plans, and fear stops us.  Or something strikes at our pride, hard enough to stop us in our tracks.  Or our plans make us ill.  Or if we acknowledge our bad intent to others, and say sorry, we will be mended.

“We may like to smile at the archaic poetic language of the Bible, but the image sticks:

even as we lie dying as a result of our bad behaviour, if only a single angel, out of the whole multitude of angels that there may be, speaks up for us, speaks up for the good that we have done in our life, then we will certainly be saved.

“The second reading talks about inner light, inner joy, which the writer says is there in everyone.  Not only this writer, but mystics throughout the ages have said the same.  I have heard these terms used too:  clarity, union, awakening, awareness, bliss, oblivion, enlightenment.

“What the writer is saying is that there is a state — a 'no thing' — that we might all find given to us if we make the right preparation; a state that transforms us interiorly, and also changes the way we relate to the world.

“Very importantly, all the mystics and prophets are clear on this: this indescribable state exists more fundamentally than our normal mode of being."

“So this state is not affected by any of our good luck or bad luck along the way; nor by any of the good deeds we do to connect ourselves with others and serve others; nor by our alienating deeds that disconnect us from others, and even from ourself.  This state is not, and cannot ever be, earned.  On the other side of the coin, no one can ever be dispossessed of this state (though we can be in our own personal desert, blocking our own way to reach it).

“This state is not under our control in any way, not in the sense that we can use the word ‘our’ in any usual way.  We did not make the universe, we did not set this way of being in place: we are inside this paradigm.

“We did not make the indescribable state of awakening, and we cannot be certain of attaining or experiencing this state in this life, though there are certain preparations that might make to help.  This state is unaffected by our lives in the world, though remaining accessible to us.  This is beyond our normal comprehension.

“Though our first reading sets it in some very different words, the essence of this concept runs the same through both readings:

“There is something — a ‘no thing’, a state — that is beyond.

“A joy, a light, a clarity that, using common language, we can only say is somehow ‘bigger’ than we are.  It is not to be bidden by us.  Not at our behest.  The writers of both our readings are certain: there is something beyond us that we simply cannot control.  

“Only a person deluded by the idea of self-sufficiency will deny this.  And the only thing to do, when we have recognized that, is to resign ourselves to it, or as Muslims say, to surrender ourselves to it.”

The #Unitarian demand for personal responsibility in matters of spirit requires maturity - the Ringwood gathering in March 2018 looked at Letting Go

Familiar faces were gathered there together on 11th March when we met to focus on the topic of “When I was a Child” – Letting Go.

We are vulnerable when young, when inexperienced, and in many other circumstances when we are reliant on the guidance and words from others, rather than on what we have found for ourselves.

We each have a ragged journey towards maturity.  We progress slower in some aspects than in others, and it is common for us to go to our graves immature in some way or other, with friends posthumously describing us as having had an incurable blind spot (or two) that were part of our unique charm.

For the most part we aim to become adult across the broad sweep of human activity, and to keep growing up throughout our life, but we forget that some ideas or rules that we take for granted are those we inherited as a child.  Unexamined, these can cause problems instead.

It is particularly important that we mature in our spiritual life, which is to say in those values and beliefs that, though hidden, drive our deepest and most instinctive behaviour. 

Instructions meant to help us in our early years need to be let go when we have moved on from the help they can give.  The choice and challenge are our own.  We have to take responsibility for our own becoming, our own knowing, our own doing, and our own relating to the world.

If we don’t let leftover, irrelevant knowings diffuse away, or transform into something more appropriate, we are the authors of our own continued knottedness.  It’s not always easy to do, especially since – inevitably – those instructions were given to us when young by people whose authority we trusted, often within the family or placeholders for family.

The readings we heard were by the apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 13), William Shakespeare (Romeo & Juliet, Act 2 Scene 2) and Dennis Lee/Jim Henson/Terry Jones (Sarah’s closing speech from the film Labyrinth).  We also enjoyed learning some new chants, some trickier than others.

Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered,

I have fought my way here

To the castle beyond the Goblin City,

To take back the child that you have stolen,

For my will is as strong as yours,

And my kingdom is as great.

You have no power over me.

August meeting for reverence

We started our meeting by holding silence, so that we could each do the equivalent of (silently) reciting our personal creed.  And we followed that with our usual ritual of passing fire, bread, water, and – a new tool for us in the form of a fan of ravens’ and pigeons’ feathers – air, around our circle of fellowship.  After partaking, these four signifiers are placed on the table between us.

The theme of meeting for reverence was “wholeness”, and it pivoted around some words by the American author Oriah Mountain Dreamer: “When we surrender, when we do not fight with life when she calls upon us, we are lifted, and the strength to do what needs to be done finds us, because we have remembered that we can choose to serve the only cause that matters: life herself.”

We had some prayers and meditations including a meditation by Richard S. Gilbert on our chalice of being, and we heard readings from Taoism (from the Tao Teh Ching) and Christianity (a story from the Desert Fathers and Mothers).  We heard that the Buddha’s original message seems to have been cast in positive form – as common sense would expect, his teaching was a call to the “more” of life, not to the ending of it, and not to the running away from an imperfect world.

We sang two hymns from our green hymn books, which focused on the Life that makes all things new and the “human becoming” in oneness and sharing.  We also heard a contemporary take on revivalist music – very uplifting after our candles of joys and concerns which turned out to be focused on the darker side of living.