PrideTide celebrated by #Unitarians in Ringwood 16 June 2024

 

This gathering had all the usual elements one might imagine of something that looks remarkably like a church service:  

– an initial phase of self-critique, unknotting and letting go; 

– an activity (singing a hymn) to draw everyone together; 

– a period of prayer, allowing the recognition of the littleness of humanity when placed against the vista of the cosmos; 

– a couple of contrasting readings to stretch the intellect, and perhaps to open doors to new landscapes; 

– atmospheric musical interludes to allow us to make sense beyond words of what we were hearing; 

– a reflection by the leader on the two readings, leading to a suggestion for future action;

– a period of active listening in which those matters weighing heavily or joyfully upon us could be declared and shared;

– prayer of self-dedication, helping us to listening for what is being asked of us in the day ahead and more generally;

– more group activity in reciting together some favoured words, and singing another hymn; and

– some closing words.

So that’s that, then. What remains to be said?  Well, how about what was actually said?

This gathering was celebrating PrideTide, the month of June specifically and the summer months in general, when, widely, queer people celebrate who they are and what life means to them.  

For some, Pride means celebrating their survival in a hostile environment, perhaps against the odds.  For others, it might feel freer and more joyful, a chance to truly express who they are.  The support of families and allies can be acknowledged, too.  The period of Pride is also a time when perhaps everyone, queer or not, can recognise the contribution of queer perspectives to every field of life.

Didymus is a group gathering in the name of religious faith and spirituality, so this gathering in PrideTide looked at queer theology — how queer perspectives can shed new insights on our inheritance (which is the bundle of stories regarding Jesus, and how those stories can shape our daily living).

So how about the readings?  Well, the first was from the Gospel of Thomas (verses 22 and 106) in which Jesus says, When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the Kingdom.

The second reading was from a book by a priest in the Episcopalian Church (an Anglican Church based in the USA), Rev Elizabeth Edman. Title: Queer Virtue. Edman suggests that Jesus breaks down simplistic dualisms all the time, which resonates very strongly with queer people, who have had to do the same thing in their own lives, simply to make a space in which they can live.  And that looking at the stories in Christianity from a queer perspective may cascade a whole new set of insights, about those Christian stories, that in the end would help everyone claiming a life within Christianity to act more aligned with the espoused spirit of the faith.

And when it came to reflecting on those readings, the president of the day included a review of recent statistics from England and Wales regarding hate crime against queer people, and reports about global campaigning against oppression of queer people, from the campaigning group All Out.

She said, “It’s always worth looking at statistics and reports like these.  We are so lucky in western Europe, where many countries have legislated for marriages of same-sex partners, that we can imagine that the fight has been won.  But it hasn’t. Not even here.  Not even in legal terms.  Equal marriage in UK does not extend to marriage for non-binary people.  The law specifies marriage as a contract between a man and a woman; between two men; or between two women.  At present, as I understand it, unless they perjure themselves and say they are something that they are not — unless they shoehorn themselves into one binary category or other as defined by the law — non-binary people in the UK cannot marry anyone at all. They have to pretend to be something they are not.”

Our president looked for ways that queer theology can help us in our lives of faith, and three examples she came up with all boiled down to helping us become more open than we currently are, and more humble.

She reminded us that there are ways and ways of welcoming people.  We can do it patronisingly, implicitly demanding that new people from minority groups conform to our existing ways before 'welcoming' them in; or we can recognise that our inherited way of worshipping, of thinking and talking about God and spirituality, is derived from white, male, middle class, colonial, intellectual and analytical thinking and judging and speaking, that stretches continuously back, way beyond the eighteenth century, in England and the broader UK.  And that we should be braver and invite new people in, not to help them, but to help us.  To help us see our failings and help us break down our narrow-minded ways, and the assumed hierarchies that lie buried behind our behaviour.  She suggested that there can be no hierarchies when it comes to children of God.

For ongoing action, she asked us to use this PrideTide to take a good hard look at ourselves, and humbly see how much we contribute to continuing problems today — and also to celebrate with queer communities everywhere !

Colonizing or synthesizing? Accommodation or appropriation? Ways to form a #Unitarian community of practice - June 2021 gathering for reverence in Ringwood

The influences on the theme of the gathering for reverence in June 2021 were the season (Midsummer), the traditional Bible reading for the season, and the celebration of Pride that happens globally around this time.  Our leader for the gathering was Darren, and Darren’s reflection drew these strands together into a wider look at how Unitarians build community, not just alliances.  And in so doing, Darren set our movement a profound challenge.

Pride is celebrated in the month of June, as that was the month when the Stonewall riots took place.

The chalice lighting words were by Linda Lee Franson (here) specifically for Pride-tide; and the readings were from Everyman’s Book of English Folk Tales (Seeing is Believing - Reflections of a Sussex Labourer), and the Bible book of Luke (chapter 1 verses 57 to 80).  We also heard a line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a reminder that we were entirely within our rights to dismiss everything we heard during our gathering:

“If we shadows have offended, 

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumbered here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream.”

The first reading was a folk tale, the impact of which hinged around the fact that in Sussex the word Pharisee was synonymous, for generations, with the words faerie or Fae.  It started with:

“They tell me as some folk don’t believe in the little people, as we call Pharisees, no more than they do in dragons. The reason is that they never set eyes on the one nor the other. They believe in the angels, though, and they believe in God, but I don’t suppose any of ‘em ‘as ever seen Him. ‘Ah’, they say, ‘but God and the angels are in the Bible, so they must be true.’ Well, ain’t the Pharisees in the Bible, likewise?” 

It’s clear, almost shockingly, that the speaker has woven together a new understanding of the world from two quite different sources.

Darren said: “What really hit me was discovering that there were people out there who, when they heard the stories of Jesus debating with the Pharisees in the Bible, were hearing not a historical narrative, as some see it, but rather a continuation of the folk tales where the hero has to outsmart the tricksy Fae.  Let that sink in.  After over a thousand years of Christianity on these shores the story being heard was still something older.  And more than that: while this labourer from Sussex was hearing the old story of the Fae which he had grown up with, he also was clearly hearing the ‘new’ (if a thousand years and more can still be called ‘new’).  A new look at what Jesus was doing. The one did not preclude the other.  Both could be heard at the same time.  Not because they are identical, but because each added to the other.” 

The second reading was the Bible story of the birth of John the Baptist, which is traditionally read at Midsummer in the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, and perhaps more widely. There is a line in the Gospel of John that is used as the basis for the seasonal link.  John the Baptist says, regarding Jesus: ‘He must increase; I must diminish’ (John chapter 3 verse 30).  It appears that as the longest day is reached, when the days will grow shorter while the nights grow longer, that this single verse was enough to link this character and this time of year.  Darren chose the reading from Luke because: “The reading, which is used on John the Baptist’s feast day, contains powerful and beautiful imagery of female empowerment, of hope for change, and a message that can unite and enliven communities as disparate as the Jewish and Gentile communities were seen to be at that time.”  Explaining that over the centuries there there was a planned and deliberate adoption of Pagan festivals for the cycle of Christian beliefs, Darren went on: “John and Jesus are often represented as the end of the old and the beginning of the new.  Jesus’ own birth is celebrated at the opposite point of the year, Midwinter.  A clear solar journey is mapped onto these moments in the Bible.  Moreover, the ritual of the communities, who take that text as central, now reflect the practices of pre-Christian people in the Northern Hemisphere, who would never have known about Jesus or John.  But the Bible narratives of Jesus weren’t recorded with the seasons and rituals of Europe and North America in mind.  It took hundreds of years for the celebrations we know today to evolve, long after those first Christians had died. There are multiple stories being told here, multiple voices being heard, and the one should not preclude the other.”

Darren then set out the proposition that it ought to be possible for the Unitarian movement to be more than a collection of separate identities doing the bare minimum to live alongside each other under the single umbrella of the movement.  He declared,

“I firmly believe that we can be more than Earth Spirit and Christian under one roof, more than gay and straight sat side by side.  I believe that our many diverse identities do not preclude a shared one, an identity in common.  I believe we can be one community.  Perhaps this is a dream, but I believe we can.  The question is how?”

Suggesting that the answer to that question lies in accommodation rather than appropriation, in synchronization rather than colonization, we understood what Darren was driving at as he explained what was in his mind about the readings:

“Think about this for a moment: when the stone crosses were carved in the north of England, and the motifs of Loki being bound, or the snake being beaten, were used to show the Devil being overthrown by Christ victorious, Christians were taking the art and literature of a people and using it to tell a different story.  They weren’t translating their message into the local language; rather they were telling the locals what those local symbols now meant.

“But in our first reading, the fairy faith of our Sussex labourer finds a place it can co-exist in the Christian community.  It finds a home; and in so doing sheds a fresh light onto the narratives for the whole community.  How different from a Christian purloining of a tradition of storytelling as a nice style for the telling of the ‘historical’ narratives of the gospels!  I suggest that giving a home to a way of seeing things, and the expressions of such, is Accommodation, whereas taking the outward form or expression of something and using it for one’s own way of seeing is Appropriation.  If Accommodation can be seen as taking in a stranger, Appropriation is just stealing their clothes.

“In the second reading, we saw how wider ways of celebrating and experiencing the divine could coincide.  On the one hand we could try to say that the Christian practices are ‘just’ copies of older Pagan ones — such as Christmas in relation to both Sol Invictus (in Rome) and a northern ritual at the turning of the year — or we could claim that the Pagans ‘really’ mean what the Bible does but don’t understand it yet.  Both claims have been, and continue to be, made.

"And at the very heart of Christianity, those traditions with ritual rely heavily on rituals brought in from Judaism, such as baptism, and a form of shared meal which now forms the heart of the Mass.  But trying to replace the content of something with one’s own interpretation is to Colonize it, to invade and take over, no matter how much is left untouched outwardly.  Whereas, recognizing similarities, points of contact, while respecting the fact that each has its own right to be — well, that opens the way to Synchronize, to align, and ultimately to share and grow together.”

Then we heard Darren’s challenge to the wider UK Unitarian movement: 

“The application of this to the Earth Spirit and the Christian leanings in our UK Unitarian community are apparent, but in this month of Pride I would like to suggest two things.

"We Appropriate, each time that we value talking about inclusivity as a means to grow our numbers over actually making a community in which people with diverse sexual and gender identities are at home.

We Colonize, each time we hold that those with different ways of expressing their love are ‘really’ ‘just’ wanting to do the same thing we are.

"This isn’t about 'just squeezing over to make room for'.  It’s about 'giving a home to'.

Let’s learn to give a home to ways of seeing things differently to maybe the mainstream. 

Let’s find the similarities and points of contact that allow us to share and grow together, making something new to hold in common. 

Let’s not be a tolerant church grumpily sat with each other, waiting for the next argument. We can be more than that, and we can be better than that.

"Let’s Accommodate not Appropriate.

  Let’s Synchronize not Colonize.”

Let's do more than 'squeeze over to make space for'.
Let's 'make a home with'.

 

Bourne Free - Bournemouth's Pride and how we were there

Only one of us was able to make the date for the Bourne Free parade, but it was really good to be able to take part in this, only our second year.
Bourne Free
has been building up over the past thirteen years and it felt like a really exuberant event.  They have placed a video of the parade on the Bourne Free Facebook page 

https://www.facebook.com/playwivjay/posts/868638186524888

 

 The Bourne Free Parade organisers had arranged for Ringwood Unitarians to walk alongside the only other faith group taking part, the Metropolitan Community Church  from Pokesdown (Dorset Humanists, some of whom might also want to be mentioned at this point, were also there in strength).  This was wonderful.  What a welcome MCC gave!  And also all eyes were on them – so as a by-product, also on Ringwood Unitarians – because the MCC had co-opted their friends from Liberty Church  in Blackpool who brought their huge mannequin of Jesus.  The children in particular were mesmerized.  “Big Jesus” certainly captured everyone’s imagination, and there were many smiles at “Big Jesus” and about him, too.  Sadly there were also some jeers and boos when the parade passed one place so it just shows that not everyone is content with the idea that Jesus is there for, and welcomes, everyone. “Big Jesus” was carried on the shoulders of one person continuously from 10.30 a.m. to after 1 p.m., and he danced from one part of the crowd to the next, shaking hands, blowing kisses, and waving his rainbow balloons.  Up till now no photos of the Ringwood Unitarian rep have been sent in but here is a picture of MCC, Liberty Church and “Big Jesus”.

It was great fun and wonderful to make some new friends at MCC who, being in Pokesdown, are almost next door neighbours for Ringwood Unitarians.  We hope to build on this by meeting with them again very soon.