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.

Ringwood acknowledges difficulties in the glitter of Christmas - Blue Christmas service led by #Unitarians

The idea of the Blue Christmas service is to acknowledge the darkness, and let it be dark.  We do not pretend that we can suddenly, magically, make it light. So we just let it be dark.  And see if we can sit with that, for a while.

We started by acknowledging some of the reasons for Christmas not necessarily being a fun and jolly time.  It might bring painful memories.  It might force us into situations we wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves.  Events elsewhere in our lives, to do with health, work, or relationships, might mean we are struggling.  And it’s always worse if everyone around us seems to be having a wonderfully time.

So there was a space for people to recognise what is troubling them, and to begin to let it go, before we moved onto the Christmas story.

We heard the traditional story again, but stripped of all its glitz, and re-humanised.  We started with a stripped down version of John, Chapter 1, in a translation not from traditional Church authorities, but by an independent translator, Andy Gaus, in The Unvarnished Gospels.  The story continued via two poems: Bethlehem, by Frances Thompson, and The Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot.  The first tells the story of the birth of Jesus from the point of view of the innkeeper’s wife.  The second tells the story of the travels of the Wise Men, in a retrospective by one of them, many years later.

We considered what Christmas might signify to people for whom Jesus is not the traditional Messiah or Saviour worshipped by other Churches.  We heard it suggested, through some words by Rowan Williams, that "perhaps it’s not guidance about how to greet everything with spiritual joy and excitement that we need.  Perhaps it’s more like guidance on how to preserve our motivation when the going gets tough and all we feel like doing is lying down and sleeping."

There were thoughts on hope, and renewal, and the divine as appearing in the innocence of every child.  In particular, in the words of Rev Cliff Reed:

“I believe that we must seek the heart of Christmas - 

its joyous love, its star-lit mystery, its peaceful

pleasures.  Find these and we find its power.

I believe this power can redeem us - open the

heart’s doors to divine innocence.”

Echoing Frances Thompson, we remembered that, whether we are feeling strong and at peace at the moment or not, it is within our power to give a blessing, in our own fashion.  And so there were prayers, including Psalm 30, and prayer poems, that made space for us to do that, as we sat together.

The readings, poems and prayers were interspersed with Christmas music not heard quite so often, and certainly not in the supermarkets: Vigilate by Byrd; God With Us Proclamation by John Tavener; Coventry Carol (a traditional carol about the slaughter of the innocents); and we also sang a very Unitarian hymn: It Came Upon the Midnight Clear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Came_Upon_the_Midnight_Clear.  And not a Christmas song, but a song of hope: we finished with a Paul McCartney track, One of These Days.

Abiding messages from a period of lectio divina focused on life, death and neighbours

I have just completed over two years reading the words written by Rowan Williams in Silence and Honey Cakes, using the ancient discipline known as lectio divina – ‘Divine Reading’.

What is lectio divina?

What we read is divine – we encounter a passage of scripture to see in it God’s word for us – and

How we read is divine – we read prayerfully, moved by Spirit – we let the text come to us, un-queried, unedited – seeking  to be addressed by what we read, and to respond to that interrogation.

There are four movements to lectio divina:

• We  read – slowly and unedited
• We meditate – we enter deeply into the meaning of the text
• We pray – we respond to God in the light of this meaning
• We contemplate – we simply rest in the presence of God without further words

Looking back over this long exercise, these rather random and not very coherent snippets (slightly adapted in places) will be the abiding messages for me:

“…. a person who is wholly self-consistent, whose identity is completely bound up with the calling to live in God…..”

“…..because of our baptism into life, we are bound to the patient, long-term discovery of what grace, life, will do with us…..”

“Do not take short cuts around the processes of real personal exchange.”

“Intimacy with God is both the fruit and the course of living together.”

“The goal is reconciliation with God by way of truth and mercy.”

“At the moment when we reveal a sibling’s fault, God reveals our own.”

“Withdraw from everything that helps imprison the neighbour.”

“The problem of myself will not just go away or solve itself or get solved by a new environment.”

“….. the temptation to think that going somewhere else will make things easier….”

“Becoming vulnerable before God is the heart of transformation, which we are by no means sure we want, if that is what it costs.”

“Without silence we shan’t get any closer to knowing who we are before God.”

The unique persons we are, as we gather for reverence - January 2018 Ringwood #Unitarians

January 2018 marks the end of our fourth year and in February we will be four years old.  So this service was one of a couplet, and dealt with what we as unique persons bring with us when we come to the gathering.  The service in February will consider how we weave our personal, individual spiritual lives, like threads, together into one overall fabric of our spiritual community, as we start out on our fifth year together.  So January was about the personal and February will be about the corporate.

We started with a participative prayer, heavily adapted from a prayer from the Iona Community, reminding us of some of the many names and faces of the divine, and ending with the words:

 “Overarching power of bestowing, healing, uniting:

in these and all your many other names, in all your many faces,

in your many-ness which yet vibrates as one,

may these your characteristics be a pattern to us of community;

           hence may we bestow, heal and unite in our many-ness,

           while operating as one.”

We carried out our usual ritual of making the circle with flame, bread, water and a fourth element to represent air or spirit or nature (dependent on one’s point of view).  We lit candles of joy and concern.  We sang two hymns from the green hymn book and we also had a recorded song by Hayley Westenra “The Heart Worships”.

Our first reading was from the Hindu faith via Mohandas K. Gandhi, and the second from the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).  They both declared a firm trust that each person has direct access without mediation to spirit, inner voice, dictates of reason.  And both were clear that we each have a responsibility to do the work to listen carefully within, so as to discern truth and light.

Gandhi in particular suggested that there is no danger at all to the world if very many people find and give voice to what they find within, so we should be prepared to put up with doubtful claimants, for the sake of hearing from as many insightful people as possible.

The Quaker reading gave some practical advice for how one can go about laying oneself open to the leadings of spirit.

Our president for the day reiterated the Quaker instruction by referring to the founder of the Quakers, whose biography can be found here:  http://bcw-project.org/biography/george-fox

The president brought forward the famous George Fox challenge from the 1690s:  “You will say, ‘Christ said this, and the apostles say this;’ but what canst thou say?” and then asserted that we must, first and foremost, understand our own being.

The following questions and assertions were thrown out to the gathering:

·         What is the pattern of your life?

·         What qualities sing out from your life to any spectator who cared to watch?

·         What are the things that you didn’t seemingly choose but were just natural to you; repeated actions that you found yourself doing wherever you were?

·         What are the things you had to set in place when you arrived somewhere, in order for you to feel at home?

·         For these are the things of your personhood, your own unique, individuated way of living; your personal way of living and loving and believing and trusting.

·         These are the things that “thou canst say”.

·         We are prompted by wise teachings to make fewer decisions, to take less time in selecting one path over another, to make less fuss over being human.  We are prompted to observe “me”, rather than to create “me”.

We were reminded that the Unitarian cause includes a challenge:  the challenge to find – and live up to – what we are capable of believing, rather than what someone else says we should believe.

And having found what must be true for us, we are challenged to live up to it.  We are challenged as Unitarians to witness to what we believe and trust, challenged to not remain silent in the face of an unappreciative and unwelcoming world.  

We are challenged to be brave, and self-consistent, and focused on what really matters to us.

We are challenged, in short, to integrity; to a kind of one-through-ness; in which there are no compartments in our lives; in which our thoughts and words and actions all marry up with the beliefs that lie at the heart of our lives.

The Unitarian challenge involves both candles and debate!

What Unitarians are saying in 2013 in Ringwood coffee houses

So if you have stayed with this blog so far, what's first then?  Well, let's do what humans always want to do when there's something to be talked about - sit down and have tea or coffee together.

We need, probably, to have some start point for our conversation.  What is the Unitarian message?