Holding anger and letting it go — Unitarians in Ringwood gathering for reverence 11 September 2022

On Thursday 8 September 2022, Queen Elizabeth II died.

On Sunday 11 September 2022, we gathered in that light of that event, but also recognising that 21 years had passed since the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York.

These were both events that drew many people closer together, in recognition of the many more things that we hold in common, as compared to the smaller number of things that separate us.

Thus it was good to meet.  To pray, and sing, and keep silence together, as well as to hear readings and some thoughts on them.

Unitarians are never shy of using scissors and paste on texts, to make them relevant and useful.  Both the readings were compilations, firstly from the book of Ecclesiasticus (also known as Sirach after its author, Jesus ben Sirach) (2:12-18, 3:26-31, 4:2-10) and secondly from the books of Mark (3:1-5) and Luke (18:9-14), in the Christian Bible (Roman Catholic version).

The Sirach reading evidenced the Graeco-Jewish wisdom tradition in the centuries BCE, in which the people of the region we now know as Israel/Palestine would have been soaked.  Sirach enjoined the wise to keep the law, with humble and prepared hearts; to pay attention to those in poverty; to support the needy; to be courteous to the destitute; to give alms; "Save the oppressed from the hand of the oppressor, and do not be mean-spirited in your judgments."

We remembered that Jesus of Nazareth came after this time, during a period in which Rome was an oppressive and brutal overlord.  That second Jesus would have known the sort of texts exemplified by those of Jesus ben Sirach, and so would have the people who heard him speak.

The second reading brought to our attention the anger that Jesus of Nazareth felt when he saw hard-hearted people showing reluctance to restore someone's health and well-being on the Sabbath day.  And that his instruction regarding prayer and standing aright with God went far beyond the sort of advice given centuries before, by ben Sirach.  In the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, Jesus of Nazareth criticised the very people who thought they were living and praying in the best way, according to all the old texts.

Our president for the day gave us her reflections on the readings.

"The course of this winter is looking quite bleak for people in UK, with households and small businesses quite frightened by the prospects of rising fuel costs.

There's an unimaginable catastrophe pending, owing to the re-setting of the climate and its weather systems into a highly energetic state, by our continued abuse of the planet through our use of fossil fuels.  People in Pakistan are the latest to suffer with the extreme and widespread floods, but we will go down like dominoes, one land mass after another, and all eventually be affected  — even those nations that are currently in denial.

We see people pulling up the barricades against other people who are simply enterprising people trying to make new lives for themselves.  Fear or dislike of the person viewed as 'other' is rife.

We see the effects of pay systems that have traditionally relied on artificially cheap labour now rippling through the whole of the economy.  Even our lawyers now cannot make ends meet, meaning there is a loss of legal aid for those victims who had thought that our justice system would see them right.

We see our loved ones being nursed by people who are made to feel unwelcome through their skin colour, and we hear of medics at all levels being faced with constant stress, and at risk of catching COVID again and again and again.  COVID is by no means over.

We see the loss of honesty and transparency converted into a breakdown of trust between the electorate and those who have offered themselves as representatives.

Not all of us may feel directly affected, at present, by all or indeed any of these.  But sooner or later, we will be, whether directly or indirectly.  And already, those of us feeling untouched ourselves may be seeing the difficulties facing our families and friends; and we may rail at the injustices they face.

We need to do that — we need to rail against injustice — because society cannot afford for everyone to not look at how our country works, ‘under the bonnet’.  Those who can need to be part of tackling root causes; or if not tackling root causes then those who can must be part of the action that locally relieves pain and struggle.  If we don’t then who is there who will come and save society?"

She went on to suggest that we need to notice the gap between how the two authors 'Jesus' gave advice, advice which in both cases was aimed at making community life better.

"Our first reading from Jesus ben Sirach shows that the Hebrew Bible contained layer upon layer of wisdom and advice on how to behave in community together.  This advice went into some detail and encouraged minute examination of circumstances, in order to decide exactly what to do. Men (in particular) made a real study of these texts, and one can imagine the style of advice in those books suffusing the whole public space and flavouring the dealings between people.  All with the aim of trying to make life better.  Nonetheless, in this world of community and layers of wisdom, many people were neglected and abused.  

Jesus of Nazareth lived later, in a turbulent, brutal, oppressive and restive time.  He by turns (1) got angry about it and (2) did something else quite remarkable: he learned how to achieve peace within himself in the face of his anger.  This is a lesson we could all do with learning.

In Mark, we heard how Jesus was angry with those concerned about the finer points of Sabbath behaviour while a fellow was suffering in front of them.  And in Luke, we heard him dismiss the educated, genteel way of praying.  In essence, Jesus said: “Don’t be complacent and taken up with yourself like the Pharisee, the lettered man striving in his silent prayer to follow the details of the Law.  Life’s too short and change is so crucial.  Cut instead to the chase.  Recognise your fundamental woundedness and incompleteness.  We are all wounded and incomplete. Pray by confessing that, simply and single-pointedly: keep that focus, like the tax collector.  Ask to receive the healing mercy that is there for you. Then from that focus, love your enemies, people just like you.  Pray for those who persecute you.” "

Our president suggested that Jesus' way of praying was a way of getting back to wholeness, or, if you like, getting into wholeness.  Remarking that Jesus was unconventional in his use of metaphors to reveal something of God, she listed some other metaphors she has come across or found useful: 

~ Source

~ Eternal Realm

~ Life

~ Underlying Order

~ The Great Unfolding

~ Overall Dance

~ The Silent Whisper

~ Truth

~ Field of being

And then she said:

"But also this: Complete Entirety. 

Everything all together is God

God is everything all together

All that there is

Complete Entirety

Complete Entirety means 'all of us together, all that we live in together, all that underpins the universe that we live in together, and all that lies beyond those underpinnings, all together and more than we can imagine'; all of that together can be pointed at by the word ‘God’.

That places us all in the same essential spot, the same spot as each other.  Much though we would all like to distance ourselves from some people, there can, in essence, be no ‘othering’ between us.

Each of us taken as a person is an incompleteness  —  we are the universe experiencing the woundedness of incompleteness. 

Erazim Kohák (1933-2020), a philosopher has said: "Our pains and woes are not so much removed from us as we are reconciled to them as we suddenly see them as if from under the perspective of the whole.” (A)

So what Jesus’ instruction about prayer turns into is this:

“Pray like this:

Lord have mercy on me, someone who misses the mark by the very nature of my humanity, my essential woundedness

Lord have mercy.

And have mercy also on all my fellows, on every other human, being in the same essential spot as I am

Lord, have mercy.”

Jesus’ way of praying is a way of bringing interior peace, even in the face of exterior suffering."

The gathering closed with recent words by Rev Philip Waldron, currently Minister with Unitarians in Merseyside, who said:

“It is time to work on our fragmented inner world; if we don’t our external world will be broken, fractured and in pain.  When our inner world is unbroken, our external world is healing for those we meet, and in our presence, we become a blessing to those who travel with us on our journey.”

(A)  Erazim Kohák (1933-2020) The Embers and the Stars, University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 42-46, via 'Caute' blog

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.

Remembering #Unitarians in Ringwood on Armistice Day 11th Nov 2018

We gathered under the Unitarian banner on Sunday 11th November for coffee shop church, and after we had had our contemplative time we fitted in a short business meeting and a social.

One of the freedoms of being a Unitarian group is that we can hallow all that we do, without having to feature a fixed structure or fixed elements into our gatherings, rites and rituals.  So today we included poetry and wordlessness, despite what was a rather noisy environment.  We started, though,  with a short poem by Mark Nepo  http://www.marknepo.com  that we had picked up from the blog of Danny Crosby, the Unitarian Minister serving Altrincham & Urmston in Cheshire   http://danny-crosby.blogspot.com/  And then we sat in wordless togetherness for some minutes, absorbing what the poem had meant to us.

I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from water and birds learn from sky.

If you want to learn about the sea, it helps to be at sea.

If you want to learn about compassion, it helps to be in love.

If you want to learn about healing, it helps to know of suffering.

The strong live in the storm without worshipping the storm.

Mark Nepo

On this special day that marked one hundred years since the ceasefire on Armistice Day, 1918, we also read out and remembered the names of the six Ringwood Unitarians who had died in the First World War.  Their names are painted onto the board still carefully looked after by the Ringwood Meeting House Association, which can be seen in the public exhibition at the Meeting House for the season of remembrance.  The first Unitarian congregation in Ringwood sold the Meeting House in 1976 but we are the second congregation and their natural successors, so it is very fitting that we should remember their fallen.

It seems that one name on the Meeting House board does not currently appear on the town War Memorial and there is research afoot with the relatives to understand why.  If a missing name has now been uncovered then it would be good to rectify that.  How sad that one hundred years has passed since the start of that war yet still we are finding people who had partially been forgotten.

It was moving, too, to be able to observe the two minutes’ silence together, and with everyone else in the coffee shop, the people in the arcade outside, and in the supermarket opposite.  We feel that it is not enough to remember the people who sacrificed everything for us.  We also need to spot any early danger signs of a new slide into world conflict, and to do our part by calling them out and challenging people and nations to live in peace together.

We are now looking forward to our regular gathering in December on 9th December at our new time of 10 a.m. in the Ringwood Meeting House.  After that we will next meet for a social after the Blue Christmas service we will be leading.

The Blue Christmas service will be a quiet contemplative service to make a safe space for those who do not find Christmas an easy time, for whatever reason.  It is open to all, on Sunday 16th December at 4 p.m., also in the Meeting House.

#Unitarians in Ringwood consider what shalom might mean in the rush of living in the world

We do our best with the reports of our gatherings, but the personal emotion and engagement during our time together has to be experienced to be believed.

At our gathering on 10 June we felt again the benefits of having a clear, familiar structure to our service.  Introducing the theme, the president for the day freely admitted that the thoughts that she had had in advance, which she was going to deliver, seemed to her to be rather random and unconnected.  But she was confident that everyone present would connect with them, in their own way.  And then, because the ritual is familiar, and open to everyone equally, the random ramblings were framed within a coherent whole, and their randomness did not detract from the experience.

There were the usual openers of the chalice-lighting words and a meditation, followed by a hymn.  We may not produce a good quality sound but we do like to sing!

Next there was our connection ritual in which we silently pass between us a candle (a flame perhaps representing light or love or truth), oat cakes (perhaps for food or bread or earth or body), water (perhaps for spirit or life flow or healing), and a fourth element (perhaps for air or breath or essence or connection).  In the silence each person present has the freedom to determine (or pray) the meaning of the elements for themselves.

Then we had two readings.

The first was by the person known as St John of the Cross.  It was a poem reflecting obliquely on the rich relationship between the author and the primal source of being, hidden by darkness of night.

The second reading was some words by Rowan Williams, culminating with the sentence: “And this is where the desert monastics have an uncompromising message for us: a relationship with eternal truth and love simply doesn’t happen unless we mend our relations with Tom, Dick and Harriet.”

The president then spoke about the swirling thoughts featuring these two ideas - the intimate, one-to-one relationship between a person and the source; and the contrasting need to live and stay living with the people around us, in perhaps grubby and difficult circumstances, if we are to make any spiritual progress.

But the third, random idea that had also occurred was the  concept of shalom/salaam.  A couple of scholarly insights into the word shalom were offered (see boxes).  It was suggested that only a peace that included living with, and in amongst, other people was a useful idea.  Also, that constantly seeking change and change of company, as a solution to spiritual ills, would not in the end be satisfying.

We then continued with the last usual parts of our gathering: lighting candles of joys and concerns, in which we begin to know each other better.  We ended our gathering after another hymn and a prayer.

Feb 2017 meeting for reverence on 'Church in today's world' #unitarians

Our meeting for reverence on 12 February 2017 reflected on the way faiths might relate and react to recent worldly affairs, looking especially at some recent Unitarian perspectives.

The opening words had been supplied by the International Council of Unitarian Universalists for use at February meetings and services, and included the words: “May the light of this flame remind us of the path of peace and wisdom.” 

A meditation from Aberdeen Unitarian Church then asked us to contemplate world peace, as measured in terms of the safety of children and those who are vulnerable.

We had a reading from the Unitarian minister Gabor Kereki, who wrote in 1968 that Churches are empty because they have lost contact with the real and living world.  His view was that religion without involvement in society is not effective religion; and also that action and involvement in society without a spiritual basis is dangerous, as shown by European history in the first half of the 20th century.  He said that Churches are “to combine pure religion with applied religion – to bring the values of the spirit into human life.”

This led to a reflection on what might be meant by “pure” and “applied” religion, and how those words are not simply placeholders for the words 'interior' and 'exterior' religion.  It was proposed that what might count as “applied” religion can be common to a range of world faiths, whereas what might be thought of as “pure” religion for each of them is quite different.

 

“Applied” religion is religion at work in the world as compassion, involvement, engagement, humility in relationships.

But “pure” religion is distinctive and could be thought of as what differentiates one faith from another.

So what might a “pure” religion be for a Unitarian?  This is quite tricky to answer as the faith and beliefs of Unitarians differ widely.

The second reading came from Fran Pickering, who is thought to be a Unitarian in the north-west of England.  Fran suggested that a favourite Unitarian perspective is to look at existence as an interdependent web of consciousness, both metaphorically and metaphysically.

At the electromagnetic level, that web is a web of power, and its energy can be characterised in terms of frequency. 

“Only as we, collectively, change the energy frequency of that web, by our own energetic acts of love and compassion, and by our own emanations of love into the frequency field, will the overall level of ‘consciousness awareness’ change for the better....... Peace will come when our love vibration is so strong, when our intent that the Earth be a garden of joy is so powerful, so clear, so uncompromising that the consciousness of all beings will be touched and changed.”

Our meeting included some hymns reminding us that Churches are not temples or shrines but fellowships, and that "the seekers of the light are one in the freedom of the truth" (Longfellow).  Towards the end of the gathering we heard from Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)on our mutual dependence as we progress towards our god-self – everyone playing their part, with no room for inattention, detachment or smugness.

And we carried out our annual Muster at the end of the meeting, so that we now know who wants to be fully involved with decision-making for our Didymus society in 2017-18.  That is our local way of being involved in our little society, based on our spiritual explorations and leanings.

January 2015 meeting

http://www.contemplativemind.org/practices/tree

Our January meeting for reverence and worship was led by Lucy, and focused on why the words practice and discipline keep popping up in religion.

We started out by noticing that there is no single Unitarian faith, and that every Unitarian service is an interfaith service, since – although we can never know – we can imagine that every person has a different faith.

In the light of the recent Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, we also agreed that it is important for people of faith to practice their own belief system long enough and seriously enough that they no longer harbour the fear that another belief can insult or affect their own.  Losing fear of other beliefs is one way to work towards peace. 

After the lighting of the chalice and our normal opening ritual there were readings from Hinduism and the Jesus tradition.  The Hindu reading came from the sacred book of the Upanishads, and it was the story of Indra and Prajapati.  Indra spent one hundred and one years as a disciple of his teacher Prajapati before he gained the mystical knowledge he sought.

The second reading was by a contemporary writer explaining some of the teachings of the Christian hermits, men and women, who lived in the deserts of 5th century Egypt.  These hermits are known collectively as the Desert Fathers and Mothers and the teachings they gave were one of the inspirations for monastic life through the centuries.  These wise people have emphasised to us that it takes a very long time to fully become the human being we have the potential to become. 

So these two traditions both advise that application and repeated tries are the only way to develop and grow in a spiritual sense.  The view was offered that the words discipline and practice can more or less be interchanged, and that having a regular practice to hang onto can prevent us from becoming completely derailed when crises and shocks occur.

We spent some time in silent contemplation of the practices that have emerged for us in our personal lives, that allow us to grow in faith or spirit, and we sang some hymns in gratefulness for the project of spiritual growth and the chance to keep on trying.

We finished with the International Prayer for Peace.  The words of this prayer, adapted from the Hindu Upanishads, were used by Mother Teresa in 1981. She urged everyone of all faiths to use the peace prayer daily at noon. 

 

Lead me from death to life,

from falsehood to truth.

Lead me from despair to hope,

from fear to trust.

Lead me from hate to love,

from war to peace.

Let peace fill our heart, our world, our universe.

October meeting

Our October meeting supported the intent for all UK Unitarian congregations to hold a service for peace on or near the 3rd Sunday in October, as an interfaith service.

We also noted that the "Hunger for Justice" campaign led by Christian Aid is being marked on the third weekend in October this year.  UK Unitarians sponsor Christian Aid as our strategic partner for delivery of aid towards justice.

 

 

 

Peace and justice were seen as being inextricable, peace not even being possible unless first there is justice.  We had a reading from the old Chinese tradition of Taoism, suggesting that personal and disciplined acts of peace within each life are necessary for peace to become a reality for nations.  We had a reading from the Jesus tradition where Jesus said that before you can have peace you must have justice, and that justice hurts, and breaks both things and assumptions, and stirs things up.  How working for peace will break relationships that we might not want broken, and how it will cost us personally if we get serious in our search for peace.  There is nothing easy about it and we are in danger of turning away from the task.

Our prayers were taken from the Pagan, Anglican, Hindu and Jewish traditions.  And we heard a vivid poem about how the clearing up really gets done after a war – and after the media circus has left town.  We heard and joined in with some wonderful pre-recorded hymns sung by the Unitarian Music Society, and discussed the deeply thoughtful lyrics.

We lit candles for our own concerns about peace.  We meditated on our own confusion about how our own actions can really make a difference, and what we can do if we want peace but the person we are dealing with just doesn’t want peace but revels in discord and power struggles.

Of course, we found no simple answers; but we each went away feeling the time together had been precious.