Another creed

 It is often passed off as the case that the Unitarians have no creed.

As we have often remarked here, that is not the case.  Every Unitarian has a creed (in fact, we would argue that every person has a creed - a philosophy or set of values that they live by, whether they recognise them in that way, or not).

We have recently published here, in serial form, a take on the Apostles' Creed by one of our members.

This has set another one of our members thinking, about their own personal creed. And they are now happy to publish it here.  It's a photograph of the front page of their daily office (service) book and journal, ready and waiting to be seen and reiterated every morning, as a measuring stick for the previous day and a goal for the day to come.

....and in the community that is the Church.... concluding our look at the Apostles' Creed

That all might be one (John 17:21)

‘… the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting..’

That movement of the Spirit, that flow of call and answer where the God we cannot see breaks into the world we can, like breath upon the waters. That God, which cannot be approached as a thing to be held in the mind, any more than in the hands.  That God we can look towards, but not at.  That God we can tell of, where God broke through and how that God promises to break through again but that God we can never pin down in any given moment, always just beyond, always just outside.  It is of that, which this final part of the Apostles’ Creed speaks, as surely as the Creed speaks in every other part.

The Church, or Gathering, or Community, is holy because it is a place where the Spirit moves, and it is ‘catholic’, meaning ‘universal’, because it encompasses everyone.  It is the community of all people. Each and every one of us that place where the water ripples.  What we experience as our congregations, or our families, or our neighbourhoods, is just one part of that wider Community that we can never wholly encompass, not because others are deep down ‘the same’ as us but rather because in all our diversity we are nevertheless united as the place where the waters ripple. That which we experience in the name of God is experienced within this Community.

The communion of saints and the forgiveness of sins are flipsides of the same dynamic.  We rise and fall together; our choices are made within the warp and weft of the choices of others.  We build each other up and we tear each other down; no single heroic act or act of villainy is the final word in this tale we tell together.  As the ripples on the water spread out and mingle with other ripples just as new movements begin and others fade, there is always God’s Might, Maybe, Perhaps, that opens the space for a new beginning, a new better. 

The resurrection of the body and the life everlasting reaffirm that ripple on the waters, that movement of the Spirit.  Just as there is no knowing anything of any one of us apart from through our physicality, through what we do in a physical world, so there is no knowing anything of that which we call God save through the divine breaking through into our actual everyday reality.  The body, the flesh and blood and bone, is not lost in our discovery and celebration of God.  No, it is raised up, exalted as the essential element or condition of that discovery and celebration.  I do not make claims about special knowledge of what lies beyond the horizon of the life that we know.  But as the God we have explored through this reflection on the Apostles’ Creed is that which is beyond the horizon; that call that we move towards; that More, which opens up a space for different and other; that Might which could be, which may be; then I dare to say “Perhaps.”  And while there could be nothing, I will embrace the risk, and live like the ripples on the water of a pool I cannot see the end of.

I believe.  I believe.  Not because I hold certain ideas, and not because I hope for certain things.  I believe because I live a life in Community, striving to listen to that call to let the Might (the Maybe, ‘may be’) of God break into the ‘is here now’ of our everyday life.

13 May 2020 - In the Beginning, I believe 

16 June 2020 - We believe

28 June 2020 - In God

7 August 2020 - The Father

11 December 2020 - The Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth

27 March 2021 - And in Jesus Christ

28 March 2021 - In the Holy Spirit

28 March 2021 (this post) - the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting

I began looking at the Apostles’ Creed as a loving, excited dialogue that brings out but never encompasses the whole of what is going on.  And that is where I have come back to, and I’m grateful you stayed with me for the journey.

God the ruler of everything - continuing the review of the Apostles' Creed

((Blog editor's note:) Another in the series from one member of our group, looking at the Apostles' Creed in segments.) 

Pantocrator - The ruler of everything

[ From Latin pantocrator, from Hellenistic Ancient Greek παντοκράτωρ (pantokrátōr). ]

‘I believe in God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth’, and I’m not going to lie: that hasn’t always been easy.  With so much suffering in the world, so much wrong, so much pain and hunger, and sheer incomprehensible darkness, this doesn’t just come across as hard to swallow — it comes across as downright offensive.  I have wrestled with the triad of all-knowing, all-powerful, and all good, and am very aware that that is a circle that cannot be squared no matter how much freewill you apply.  I have clung to the mystery writ large by the Book of Job and felt my fingertips slipping.  I have denied a Creator and braced myself against the cold winds that blew through my life thereafter; and then somehow, without even realising it, I have come to see that I was wrong.

In the West, we have culturally spent so much time proving God’s existence via tried and tested arguments from the world around us, that we have lost track of where our stories about God have come from.  I could not accept a Watchmaker who set things in motion then watched and washed their hands.  I could not respect a Creator who set us up to fail, or an abusive figure who doled out arbitrary rules, which were always going to get broken, and who seemed to relish in an overkill of retribution and punishment.  That God I had to hate, or I had to believe didn’t exist.

Well: that God doesn’t exist, yet tragically the tradition that talks God up is so mixed in with our Western cultural tradition (witness the classical terms I have used in this piece) that we don’t recall that that is not the God that we experience, nor is it the God revealed in the persona of Jesus.

To answer questions, of where the world has come from and why this or that happens, we have built up logical arguments and extrapolations that seek to make the world, and to make God, more intelligible — but in so doing we have lessened them.  Our tradition is rooted in the Bible, rather than the Upanishads, the Pāli Canon or the Qu'ran.  As, over time, we have treated the Bible like a book of information, not inspiration, in so doing we have set pitfalls for our own faith.

The Bible isn’t given us to answer our questions of natural science, geography, or history.  We have other stores of experience, sources of evidence, and the wonder of the questioning mind, to deal with such things. The Bible is a store of spiritual experience, a treasury of moments and characters that have inspired countless generations.  It is a tapestry and mosaic that brings together countless people over time and space.  It is something living, something amazing; we look to it for signs and clues, not simple facts — it is inspired and inspiring. 

When God creates in the Bible we do not see God at the ex nihilo [Latin for “creation out of nothing”] moment of bringing forth from nothing. The ‘beginning’ in the Bible is a beginning point from which to tell the tale. En Arche [the ancient Greek words at the start of Genesis, and the Gospel of John, with the primary senses of “beginning", "origin" or "source of action”] bears resemblance to our fabled  ‘Once upon a time’: it tells you this is where the story starts, what has gone before doesn’t matter, you don’t need an exact date to place it, its relevance isn’t limited to a single instance.  There are multiple ‘beginnings’ in the Bible; that isn’t a problem, as they are all places to begin telling the tale, the greatest Tale, the story of God and humankind. 

The Bible doesn’t say anything about how God made the world, but it tells us again and again that God is what makes the world possible.  God is what sustains everything, everything we see in flux, no single thing constant and remaining, all things distinct yet somehow united: God is what makes the many and the one possible.  The God that we cannot see in God’s many and oneness, yet revealed in the world.  We do not know God apart from the world; we cannot talk of a time where God sat and planned, before the world came into being.  It is in and through the world around us, the world we live in, the body’s world, that we know God, the God ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). 

We do not encounter the world as a question, no matter how much we may question the many things in it and that happen here.  We are accustomed to try to ask ‘who made the world?’ because we have permitted ourselves a sense that this will validate our belief in God and all that comes from that.  It won’t and it doesn’t.  Trying to separate our experience of God from our experience of the world digs a chasm we cannot cross.  When we ask about 'why the world’ we are asking about some certain part of it, something we can imagine or point to, and in every instance, we do not need ‘God’ as the answer to that question.  The question about ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ answers itself: because there is. 

Left to ourselves the world would present itself as a fact, a reality to be got on with, in the way other animals do; but the Bible, when it tells us about Creation, presents the world as something else.  The world becomes a sign, not just a fact.  The Bible is inspired by that God revealed in the world, and the Bible inspires us to see God there.  Those first two chapters of Genesis tell a tale that will be referred back to again and again throughout the Bible: God walking in the garden with humankind, God looking for us, us hiding from God, choices and consequences, change but ever the same. 

I believe in God the Almighty, omnipotent, the source of all potential, all that might be.  God is not a wizard or an Olympic lifter; the bearded guy in the clouds is too little, the Watchmaker too mean.  I could not believe in those puppets and shadows, but I can embrace a certainty that everything comes from something, that everything is held together and somehow in all its multiplicity is one.  I can believe in God as all that might be, more than all that is and ever was but the foundation of it all the same.

I believe in God the Maker of Heaven and Earth.  I do not know the how of things but I do know that the world, as the Bible tells it, was made for God to walk in with humankind, and I know that that has never changed nor ever will, no matter how often we hide, or how often the plan seems to go wrong. 

I can find answers with my reason for all manner of things that happened in the world, choices and consequences, both foreseeable and not so.  I know that understanding why something happened doesn’t make it ok — we can learn from it but that doesn’t change it or expunge it.  But that’s consistent, because we don’t encounter in the Bible a God who makes everything ok, a God who protects all the righteous and deals out comeuppance to the wicked, quickly and easily. We do not find a God in the Bible who has a store of good things if you just ask nicely enough, if you just believe strongly enough.  We do not encounter such a God there, just as we do not encounter such a God anywhere.  If we struggle to believe in God as the Almighty and the Maker of Heaven and Earth, perhaps the question we should be asking is not ‘have we been betrayed by God’ but ‘have we betrayed ourselves and others by preaching a deity who never was’.  The God of the Bible is ever present not separate from the world.  The God of the Bible is seen in the world acting through those who answer God’s call.  God is shown looking for us, walking with us, talking to us. 

If you struggle to believe in God the Almighty, perhaps it’s time to ditch ‘God of the-ATM-in-the-sky and get-what-you-deserved-on-earth’.

I believe in God the Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.

That word 'God'

In God

Do not be afraid.  

This is not the name used to coerce compliance to a set of rules, or used to open wallets for personal profit.  It is not the name behind which people doing bad things have hidden, or the name in which truly awful things have been done.  Some people have always tried to coerce compliance, to prey on the finances of others.  Some people have always sought to get away with doing bad things.  And history is full of people being truly awful.  There will always be people using anything that works to do these things; and we must not be blind to it no matter where or when it happens. ‘God’ didn’t make them do it, no matter how much our cultures and societies may have enabled it.  Those people need to answer for their crimes, and alongside that, other people need to recognise the abuses of systems and to change the systems.

God is not a name.

God is a no-name.

And I believe in God.

I believe in God the way I believe in Justice, in Truth, in Beauty, in Good.  When I say I believe in all these things I am not opening up a debate about their existence, as if I can point at them — or as if anyone would settle anything by pointing to a place where they were not.  I am not using the phrase to ward off responsibility for my words and actions, and I am not using it to give me an authority or power over others, though that can be done with any of those other things I believe in too.  When I say I believe in God I am sharing my experience of the world, and of something important to me about how I live in that world.  

When I say I believe in God I am witnessing to God’s insistence, not God’s existence (John Caputo, The Weakness of God).

Personally or in my community, I have never experienced God as a rare creature found only in particularly unusual habitats, of which tall tales are told and dubious sightings are shared in hushed tones.  My belief in God isn’t a scientific fact to be verified or falsified; it’s my witness to a lived experience of more.  The experience of an insistence that I try to be a better person, that I try to understand the world around me and my place in it better.  An insistence not limited to the will and wants of the people around me, not limited to my ease or preference, not limited to current success or bound by past failures.  An unlimited insistence that is neither without me nor within me (John Henry Newman, A Proof of God).  The experience of an insistence that there is something else just over the horizon, just behind that cloud, or around that bend.  The insistence that things go on, wherever I look.  This experience is subjective, in the sense I can’t ever separate myself from it; but it is objective in the sense that I do not choose it, it does not stem from me alone, and — more yet — it is at the core of everything I do or say. 

That which we call God is always more (Anselm of Canterbury, Monologion). Every time we alight on something and would call it God we are disappointed because it falls short (Plato, Phaedrus).  God is more: we experience God in the difference between how things are and how we feel they ought to be; between what we know and what we feel there is to know. 

God is more, which means for every title we give, for every description we use — however true, however just, however beautiful — there is always more, which it does not convey, than it conveys.  For every new insight that comparison reveals to us about God, it turns out that God is always more NOT like that, than God IS like that.  God is always more NOT as we imagine or intuit, than anything we fixate on God being. 

Not this.

Not this.

Not even this.

That very urge that makes you feel uncomfortable with the word ‘God’, that makes you want to shy away from using it, is your own witness to knowing that God is more than what ‘God’ is said to be.  I, too, do not assert an old man with a long beard on a cloud; I, too, do not assert an angry, joyless dictator.  I, too, can all too often see the human behind the curtain when ‘God the great and powerful’ is proclaimed, and am angry, and sad, at the abuse and the greed and the power-mad, wanton cruelty.  None of this will I call God.

God is the insistence that I cannot deny that these things are wrong, that we can do better, that things can be better, that there is always more.  God is not ‘this being the case because I want it to be’: God is more, and I believe in God.

In the beginning was the experience of Truth — How to say “We believe….” as recognition of community

We Believe

Often we read or hear something and our first thought is “I wouldn’t say that” or “I’m not comfortable with that language”.  We pore over the words of hymns or dissect the latest sermon or blog, and all the while we draw lines and dig trenches.  Creedal Tests have been used for centuries to do the same — as if Truth were a sword to separate the Sheep from the Goats, or the wheat from the chaff. 

Pause. 

Breathe. 

Don’t ask yourself if you agree with me; just take a moment to see if you can hear what I’m saying.  No one requires you to do anything or take any stance for the moment; and when that time comes you can, and you will.  But this isn’t that time, not yet.

I believe Truth isn’t a sword: it’s that in which “we live and move and have our being” (Act 17:28, Cretica by Epimenides).  It’s not something to use to divide and hold apart; rather, it is the very thing that makes us one.  It isn’t something to use to conquer others; it is the very foundation that allows us to be free. 

EPIMENIDES OF CNOSSOS a semi-mythical 7th or 6th century BC
 Greek seer and philosopher-poet.

When I say “I believe”, I am not telling you what you ought to think, or requiring you to confirm my view.  I am sharing with you something about how I experience the world, offering a glimpse into why I say and do the things I do.  I am speaking my Truth.  That is to say, I am voicing that Truth open to all, shared by all, lived in by all but as experienced by me in all my limitations, with all my back-story, and in the language I have learned throughout my life.  

Expanding that idea, it is a beautiful thing to be able to say: “We believe…”.  It is an acknowledgement of a shared experience, a shared language, and shared hopes.  It is never the fruit of a simple debate over concepts and words: it is, at heart, a recognition of community rather than a tool for forging it.  The words of a Creed can inspire the conversation, the prayer, and the actions that bring about the “We believe …” moment, but they themselves neither create it nor constitute it. 

The Apostolic Creed, one of the most widely used and oldest of the creedal statements in Christianity, has to be understood in the context of a shared community, a shared set of stories and rituals, a shared experience of life.  It was spoken believer to believer, and is deeply embedded in the ritual of Baptism — where the dialogue isn’t one of Gatekeeper to Supplicant but, rather, the excited back and forth between friends or new partners.  The “Do you..” and “I do ..” is not one of uncertainty but of already knowing the answer and delighting in hearing it out loud.  Think of the wedding ceremony where each partner is asked if they take the other: there is no uncertainty at this point, and yet the saying of it out loud is still so much more than formality: it is a joyful expression of their relationship to each other and the community around them. 

The excitement of retrieving the football - which will
 become a shared story, a shared experience of life

The Apostolic Creed is not the Creedal Test that has rightfully been recognised in terms of power dynamics and control.  It is not accompanied by the cudgel of “say this, think that, or else”.  It is the joyful celebration of a shared experience of the divine, in a community of shared stories, shared rituals, shared prayer, and shared hopes.  This Creed is a shape not arrived at by carving into, or by cutting away, according to a precise, planned view of the end result, but rather a shape grown organically according to the nature of the living material and the conditions over time it finds itself in.  It is a shape that shows its history in every twist and knot, but is always growing, never knowing what the future will bring for it — yet unafraid because growth is not deviation from a plan, it is not failure, it is the success of ongoing life and vitality.

knotted, gnarled, organic growth - this is an apple tree
 but it may as well be a creed from the 4th century CE

“We believe …” can be beautiful, it can be joyful, and I think — if we are honest with ourselves — it is something we all long for.  Though we may all fall into the pride of wanting to push our views and our expressions on others, and though we have all seen too clearly how easily Creedal Tests have been used to exert influence and put pressure on individuals and groups, our longing is not for the set of words.  The shared experience of the Divine, the communal life of shared stories and prayer, the excited back and forth of connecting with others at the profoundest level: that is what we thirst for.

We long to be one, not by giving up our personhood, not by rejecting the quality of individuality, not by capitulating to the will of others, but by embracing the community, by shared living in Truth.  I haven’t lost hope for that “We believe…” moment, that Creed ‘in spirit and in truth’ (John 4:23) and I believe the surest start towards it is acknowledging the culture and the stories that have shaped me and which I already share with others.  Despite the name that the tale is more commonly known by, there were two sons in the tale of the Forgiving Father (Luke 15: 11-32): together we can write an ending where no one is left sat outside.

Unitarians and friends in Ringwood consider personal faith and collective worship - the genie was out of the bottle from the Edict of Torda, 1568 #WeAreUnitarians

Page from the Munich Codex of the first Hungarian translation of the Bible

We gathered again for reverence under the Unitarian umbrella at the gathering on 13 January 2019.  At the start of our gathering we noted that Unitarians widely commemorate in January the Edict of Torda, Jan 1568. This was the first piece of legislation in a European kingdom (Transylvania and Eastern Hungary) to allow people the freedom to choose the pastor of their church, and allowing pastors the freedom to interpret the Christian Gospels according to their conscience.

As usual we started with a period of quiet in which to remember our own private creed followed by a simple ritual in silence, to which each participant attaches their own meaning and from which each derives their own insights.

We then heard readings from John Dominic Crossan and Tony McNeile, which respectively showed that Jesus’ own faith changed in the light of his experience; and that whilst we can worship collectively, we each have our own experience and hence our own understanding of faith.  These readings were largely centred on Jesus and the historical Christianity from which the Unitarian movement has evolved.  So to balance them we heard a poem by Walt Whitman with his humanist, transcendentalist stance, and from Islam we heard the philosophy of Ibn al-Arabi (via an interpretation by Karen Armstrong).  As Karen Armstrong understands this 16th century scholar to mean:  “…. human beings, who became logoi, [God’s exhaled] words that express God to Godself……each human being is a unique epiphany of the Hidden God, manifesting God in a particular and unrepeatable manner…….the revelation that God has made in each one of us is unique, different from the one from the God known by the innumerable men and women who are also his logoi.  We will only know our own ‘God’ since we cannot experience God objectively; it is impossible to know God in the same way as other people.”

We prayed a prayer from the 1932 Unitarian prayer book published by The Lindsey Press; and also the “Naming God” prayer we have published on our website; and we sang three songs from the “Hymns for Living” hymnbook.  We continued our practice of sitting in complete quiet for seven minutes, which we each use for our own purposes. 

After our candles for joys and concerns, we looked forward to our fifth birthday which comes around at our next gathering.  At that gathering we will open our "muster" conversation, for people to decide the relationship they want with the Didymus group during the coming year.

Ringwood #Unitarians use a motto discarded by the United States of America - what we did at our February gathering for reverence

Our theme on 11th February 2018 used the first motto taken by the United States of America – e pluribus unum, meaning “out of the many, one.”

We lit the chalice with the words of the ICUU Global Chalice Lighting for February 2018 and then spent time in silence, each remembering their personal creed.  Despite what you may sometimes hear said of the Unitarian church, it is not a creedless church.  Rather, it is a church where every person is invited, and indeed challenged, to find their own creed, the creed demanded of them by their own experience, study, and insight regarding the divine.  Many people, many creeds.  Yet, one church.

We prayed some prayers written by people known to us, including a former Unitarian Minister from Edmund Kell Unitarian Church in Southampton, and then we sang a couple of hymns and carried out our usual ritual of building our circle.  We do this by passing between us a flame, bread, water and a musical device representing air, then placing them in the centre of our circle next to our chalice.  It’s a simple ritual and no spoken interpretation is given.  In silence we each seek and find our own purpose and meaning in it.  The conversations we have later about our ritual are often surprising!

We had three readings today, rather than two.  The first by John Andrew Storey included the words, “We cannot all think the same way.  No words can be found which adequately express the true depth and range of what each one of us believes.”

The second, by Rowan Williams, reminded us that whereas we may imagine we can deal with our spiritual life as if it were a separate compartment, in fact it is bound up completely with our relations with the people around us.

And the third reading, from Christopher Jamison, included these words: “Community is sacramental – that is to say, the material realities of community are the means by which hidden grace is given to the members.  There are qualities that we experience through faithfully persevering in community life.  That is what a community is for: to foster the experience of these qualities through its very structures.”

After a rousing but profound song from The Fisherman’s Friends – The Union of Different Kinds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JMuEE_Zd7Q&ab_channel=SueHendriks

we spent some quiet time pondering some questions about our community and our place within it.

How should persons behave in a community?

What do our responses to otherness tell us about ourselves?

What is different about us, as a result of our coming here and sitting with others?

Would another person recognise a difference in us because we come?

What does it mean to be a community of diverse persons?

What does it demand of us, when we commit to meeting and engaging with people whose views and paths we already know are different from our own?

What does it mean to make a safe space for each other?

Is a community more than the sum of its parts?

What is the relationship between the community and the members who comprise it?

How are the needs of the community and the persons within it balanced?

When we sit together, do we look at each other or do we look at something that lies beyond us all?  Or both?  How do we do that?

Is there a centre of gravity, a pulling force at the heart of our group, which energises and refreshes us?

 After a period of silent meditation we carried out our muster, our annual roll call, in which those who wished were able to declare themselves as members of the group for the coming year, our fifth year together.

We finished with some more prayers, including a Buddhist litany invoking wellness in ourselves, in the person next to us, and in all humanity.

January 2017 meeting for reverence speaks about grace #unitarians

Once again we remembered absent friends going through a difficult set of circumstances. 

The service theme was “Making space for grace.”

The president for the day had chosen poetry for the set pieces for the meeting.  Having come across a poet by the name of Leopard at the Spirit Festival last summer, the president's first reading was a poem from Leopard’s publication Leaves for the Trees.

The second reading was a longer poem called Sometimes a Wild God by Tom Hirons.

We carried out our usual silent sharing of four elements, passing them round the circle of those present so that each person had touched and held each element, and connected with the others by doing so.  After that the elements were placed on the table at our centre, next to our Unitarian chalice.
 

The elements today were bread, water, incense and flame (a candle).  The water had been brought deliberately from Glastonbury.

We always include this ritual and it is always slow and silent, which allows each person present to interpret, revere and sanctify the ritual in a private way, aligned with their own current faith and beliefs.

Hard won personal struggles over the years have convinced us that a sure way to divide people from each other is to try to insist that particular rituals and sensations must hold a particular  meaning (with the tacit and sinister sub-text of “or else you don’t belong”).   We have found that, without words, together we can carry out an activity that holds a different meaning for each of us, and those meanings can change over time.  What holds us together is the unified carrying out of the ritual.  Just like going to a wedding or a funeral: everyone at those ceremonies takes away with them something different, but they all know that they were there, at the same event.

So although you may see references to Unitarians as “creedless faith groups”, this is inaccurate.  We each have our own creed.  But emphatically, we do not wish or expect that the person next to us in our worship holds to the same faith or belief as we do.  It is enough that they show up and join in, however that makes sense to them.

This is because we consider life to be more than humdrum.  We have glimpsed different perspectives, perhaps in rare and expanded moments; perspectives that lead us to hunt for the spiritual refreshment we know exists, if only we can find the way to it.  The refreshment that brings calm unearned; or an unexpected detachment, like pearls on silk, during the bruising torrents of uncontrollable life; or which – paradoxically – demands not a “giving up” and asking for help, but a “giving up of self” meaning the need for help diffuses into the abyss, the dance.  The abyss, the dance, the voice that can be heard by everyone, says Gandhi: “Every one who wills can hear the Voice.  It is within every one.  But like everything else, it requires pre­vious and definite preparation.”

Our heritage is the Christian tradition and so we use the Christian label for this spiritual refreshment, that is to say: “grace”.  And so as part of our meeting for reverence we reflected on making opportunities in our lives for grace to break in undeserved and unearned; and also on our unhelpful tendency to behave so as to keep grace out.

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.