Re-orientating towards abundance – Unitarians in Ringwood muse on letting go of scarcity 15 September 2024

The challenge set before us today was to look behind our thought processes and see whether we are generally operating with a mindset of scarcity.  The mindset of scarcity lies at the heart of many fears to do with survival, and is a root cause of animosity, xenophobia and conflict, even war.  For, if we believe we only have just about enough to get by, we guard our resources jealously and are reluctant to share them with others.  We begin to make judgments about whom we are prepared to share with, and put up barriers to protect our resources from others who mean less to us than those we view as our own — in other words, we begin to ‘other’ certain people.  This is where tribalism begins.

The first reading in today’s gathering was from the book Seeking Paradise by Stephen Lingwood.  Having suggested that alienation from the Earth, our bodies, our neighbours, and the source of life itself, are all, in essence, the same problem, Stephen highlighted that early Christian teaching was that evil can only be resisted by becoming deeply attuned to the divine presence within and all around.  As an example, we then heard some ecstatic poetry written by Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306-373 CE).

The second reading was from the Bible Book of Mark chapter 8.  This is the story of Jesus feeding a large crowd with a very small amount of food, for the second time, and Jesus’ frustration afterwards with his students, who didn’t seem to understand what had just happened and what they were supposed to learn from it.

While we were chewing these readings over we had some hymns and songs about giving thanks, the harvest, rejoicing in the truth, counting our blessings etc and then we heard the president for the day present thoughts on the two readings.

Pointing out that we need to understand what abundance is and how we can enjoy abundance in a world affected by climate overheat and biodiversity crash, and the population flows that will naturally follow, she said, 

“Abundance is not defined by having more stuff........nor is it about being able to access more and more data, information, music and moving images at the click of a carbon-expensive button.......Abundance is about connection.  Connection between people, certainly, but also connection with our environment, connection with what makes and gives life...... A greater sense of connection comes first and foremost from stronger communal living........We need to re-orientate ourselves, so that a sense of abundance becomes the whole context of our lives, the grounding on which we then go about the other more usual activities.”

 

She explained that her understanding of the Bible reading was that Jesus was teaching exactly about this act of re-orientation towards a mindset of abundance:

“Traditional churches use the miracle stories about Jesus as evidence or proof that Jesus is actually God.  Unitarians have the luxury of skipping that entirely, treating it as not a matter of interest.  Unitarians can look at what is actually going on in the story.

“When Jesus rebukes his students he is frustrated with them.  They are not paying attention to what he’s trying to teach them at that moment.  Jesus and his friends live as Jews under the yoke of Rome and under the religious authorities intent on appeasing Rome.  The Jewish people live under a socio-economic and political yoke that makes it hard to find the still, quiet, clarity at heart that Jesus is entirely orientated towards and teaching about.  Jesus calls it the kingdom of God.

“In the boat he is trying to warn them about the insidious nature of the power of the religious authorities and of the king who is a vassal of the Roman imperial oppressors. But his students aren’t listening. 

“It’s not even that the students are distracted by trying to think through and understand the miracle that Jesus has just performed.  It’s rather that all they are worrying about is that they only have in their possession a single loaf of bread.  They are in a mindset of scarcity.  Scarcity is once again worrying them, and putting everything else out of their minds.

 

“Jesus can see they haven’t absorbed the teaching about the miracles of the feeding of the many. The four thousand people that had gathered to listen to Jesus seemed to be in a state of scarcity.  And there was only a little bit of food to be found between the students, and this food was presented to Jesus.  ‘Hey, Jesus, here’s the problem!’

“Before doing anything with the food, Jesus blessed it.  He gave thanks.  By doing this he brought to attention what wonder and a marvel it was to have this food at all.  Then he broke the food up.  He split it into even smaller pieces, and gave it away.  He told others to give it away too, to share it with everyone.  It was distributed widely.  And somehow, in seeing it as a gift, a wonder, a measure of abundance, and giving it away, it actually became an abundance.  

“And this was the second time Jesus had done this.  So Jesus is disappointed and cross that having done this — and not just once but twice — his students now on the boat still haven’t understood.  Those closest to him, those who claim allegiance to him and his teaching about living in the kingdom, are not even listening to him.

“He rebukes them, but even now he doesn’t explain it for them.  He leaves it for them to work out for themselves;  and so it is left for us to work out for ourselves, as well.  

“I think the story about the rebuke by Jesus holds this message :  Look, you live in paradise, a place of abundance.  You think you have almost nothing, just enough to maybe get by, and you worry about the future.  Whereas with gratefulness and wonder and thanksgiving and sharing you have everything you need, and much much more than you need.  All it takes is a re-orientation.  All it takes is a mindset of abundance.”

 

#Unitarians encouraged to challenge and speak out during a heart-warming gathering in Ringwood

On 11th August we gathered as Unitarians and friends in the Meeting House in Ringwood, built in 1727, as we usually do on the second Sunday of each month.

Unitarians together in 2014 - in a setting similar to our gatherings

As we don’t have a Minister, all our services are led by one of us, who takes the lead without having had any special training.  We have found it very helpful to adopt a framework for our gatherings that originated at the Kensington congregation, and it is known as the “heart & soul” style service.

There’s a format provided - and with about an hour’s preparation, searching on the www for suitable prayers and words, and some more time with our green hymn book, finding hymns that we can sing because we know them, our leaders manage to curate very satisfactory experiences when we meet.  There’s an emphasis on collaborative engagement and participation to make the gathering work, so the format works well for small congregations that don’t have Ministers.

The theme on Sunday was the presenting of Unitarianism as the challenging of the accepted narrative and the daring to speak out when that narrative is found wanting.

The research by our president for the day had brought to light the story of St Oran, who was a follower of St Columba.  Oran had volunteered to be buried alive under the foundations of a new church being built by Columba, because it seemed that some form of sacrifice was required to stabilise the ground (the new building kept tumbling down while under construction).  But for some reason - perhaps this sacrifice was too much for Columba’s conscience - some days later, Columba ordered that Oran should be uncovered again.  And when he was uncovered, Oran shocked everyone by speaking, saying that there is no such great wonder in death, and that the descriptions of Heaven and Hell did not measure up.  He finished with a whisper to Columba, “The way you think it is may not be the way it is at all.”  At which point, Columba backtracked yet again and ordered Oran to be re-buried.  There’s still a saying in the Gaelic-speaking world which is used to silence uncomfortable subjects of conversation: “Throw mud in the mouth of St Oran.”

The children’s story that was read as the second reading was The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson.

The words of our second hymn included the words, “From honest doubt we shall not flee / Nor fetter the inquiring mind / For where the hearts of all are free / A truer faith we there shall find,” written by John Andrew Storey.

We had a secondary emphasis in our gathering of being committed to each other in community.  This was developed through a combination of music and words.  The music included our first hymn, which said, “ O let us live with humankind / As sisters, brothers, true / We’ll share our joys, our sorrows share / Becoming as we do,” written by Doris Jeanine Stevens. And there was a wonderfully relevant musical interlude in the form of a song by Ben Platt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDeNQNtW1f8  Grow As We Go

On the same theme of growing and committing in community, and sourced from the www, were the opening words from Rev Dr Linda Hart and chalice lighting words from Rev David Usher.

Everyone is welcome for the next gathering, which is on 8th September at 10 a.m.

(Early notice: there will be no gathering in November).

Community Carols at the Meeting House 2014

As a Unitarian I am delighted that yesterday the Meeting House committee in Ringwood held a community carols session co-sponsored by the Unitarians in Ringwood.  We had carols marking Christmas and other festivals, some more familiar than others.  The words weren’t necessarily quite what people expected, and some were very taken by that.  And the children loved it.

In Great Britain our history is a fusion of many people’s histories, and our faiths are fusions of many different faiths.   Christmas is a festival set against a Jewish cultural background, brought to these islands by Romans and grafted onto the original pre-Christian earth-spirit beliefs.

In these islands it was a pre-Christian practice to hold a festival in the middle of winter to mark the turning of the year, the lengthening of the days, and hope for the future; called Solstice.  It is Solstice today, and people gathered at Stonehenge to see the rising sun at the start of the new solar year.  Near the Solstice, pre-Christian people here celebrated their ancestors in a festival called Yule.  We still talk of Yule logs, though today these tend to be chocolate cakes rather than a smouldering log on the fire.

And brought to Britain from the Middle East, there is a Jewish miracle story from 2000 BCE of an oil-lamp, low on oil, burning continuously for eight days on no more than a drop of oil in the besieged temple of Jerusalem, though it should have gone out long before.  Coming in the dead of winter, Hanukkah celebrates the triumph of light over darkness, of purity over contamination, of spirituality over materialism.  Jewish people the world over have just celebrated Hanukkah on 16 December.

And of course some of the later Romans to arrive here told of the Jewish baby whose mother was turned away from the inn and who laid him in a manger: the baby who as an adult went on to teach that we are loved into being, we are supported throughout our lives by love, and at our ending we are received in love.  Jesus’ good news was that each of us and all of us are loved, and we must pass that love on.  The birth of the baby Jesus is what we celebrate at Christmas.

So all these festivals, and others such as Diwali from Hinduism and Eid from Islam, which also sometimes fall in winter,  are what have fused into our British cultural celebration at this time of year.