Wisdom and Difficult Decisions — Lent, Ukraine, COVID19 and a cable passing through the eye of a needle #Unitarians in Ringwood 12 March 2023

No that's not a typo in the title.  Only some versions of the Bible have (in the book of Matthew, chapter 19 v 24) a camel passing through the eye of a needle.  At least one version has a cable passing through the eye of a needle.  It's worth researching different versions.  Jubilee Bible 2000, Matthew 19:24 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew 19:24&version=JUB  

It’s just worth noting that the reports on this blog run the risk of misrepresenting what it feels like at one of our gatherings.  There’s not just a wordy ‘sermon’ by the president for the day.  But in order to feel the experience — of the prayer words, the mutual silences, the recorded music (dramatic incidental music as well as hymns), the heartfelt expressions of joys and concerns as we mark the movements in our lives with careful listening to each other as well as with candles — you have to be there.

It’s just that the bits that most lend themselves to a written record are the readings and the reflection on the readings by the president for the day. 

We are part of a tradition that used to centre aspirations for spiritual and societal development exclusively on the narratives inherited from the Christian Bible.  Friends of ours in sibling Unitarian congregations and broader networks may not look so much to those roots; but we in Ringwood have chosen to have a look at them as often as we can.  We are not traditional Christians, but culturally we feel more at home with wisdom from Christianity than we do with wisdom from other faiths.  We feel our tradition provides a homing ground, and something we can point at that holds us together.  So when we meet as a group we gravitate to stories from Christianity to help us with our lives, even if personally, individually, none of us necessarily goes to Christian writings as our first resort for inspiration. 

This month we were reminded that this is the Christian season of Lent, that it’s a year since Russia started the war on Ukraine, and three years since the first lockdown in UK as a result of COVID19.

During Lent we remember that the teacher Jesus is depicted as being strenuously tempted, during a long period in the wilderness out of contact with society and all the usual nourishments of home. The story of Jesus has it that he passes every test, by making decisions that put reverence and humility at the heart of his spiritual practice. He sets aside his own ‘will to power’ for the sake of ‘will to mutuality’ — in the story, Jesus is seeking a mutual relationship with the Creator. 

Regarding the failed, despicable, vanity project of invading Ukraine, aimed at satisfying the greed for continued power, largely on the part of one man, we remain shocked and dismayed as the war staggers on.  The temptation of the ‘will to power’ is there for everyone.  But let us remember that not all lunges for power are so obvious, lest we imagine that we ourselves are above them. 

On 26 March 2020, three years ago, the UK went into the first lockdown of the COVID19 pandemic. There are direct comparisons that can be drawn between Jesus’ time in the wilderness and our nation’s confinement, in which we too, all of us, were subject to temptation. We know only too well the stories of those who were unable to contain themselves, to restrain themselves to act in mutuality. The pandemic was a time when people were being asked to make important and difficult decisions, with scant information. A time when wisdom was called for, and was sometimes in short supply. 

Lent is associated with renunciation, self-discipline, resisting temptation.  It’s sort-of a ‘No pain? No gain!’ period in the calendar.  It’s a time when we get to know ourselves better by finding out just how hard it is to choose a way through when, in reality, there’s no one to police our choices but ourselves.

So our president for the day brought to our attention those times when personally we are facing really tough decisions, when we are trying to decide which path to take, whether we really know ourselves at all, and what sources of advice there might be available to us as we agonise over what to do.

With this as a backdrop there were two readings.  The first was about the rich young man who asks Jesus for advice about the next step he must take to assure his pathway to the kingdom of heaven. And the second was simply a hotchpotch of snippets from the Christian Bible regarding taking decisions, or sources of advice. It thus included words from Proverbs, Sirach, Matthew, James and Paul.

We heard the following from our president for the day.

In the first reading, the middle class, nouveau riche, or aristocratic and moneyed, young man is yet mature enough to see that a committed, personal, spiritual practice is essential for an authentic aspiration to find the kingdom of heaven. And he sees that here’s a teacher who has attracted many people. So the young man thinks Jesus might provide the key he has been looking for, over and above the faithful practice he already commits to. 

But instead of getting an answer he can handle, the young man is told to look at his outward context — there is no mention of principles, philosophies or of his inner landscape. ‘Sell all your possessions, give the money away to those who are in want of the basics, and that act of giving will generate in you lasting riches — and then come along and live with me; live like I do.’ 

The young man feels bereft and in a quandary. His preconceived complacency around the next piece of advice, his next stage of learning, has been both pinpointed and stripped from him. He is torn by the choice placed before him. He has been told he lacks only one thing. This thing. This giving away of his comfort based on worldly possessions. This shedding of his self-image as a man of consequence, in exchange for a strengthened mutuality with those who hadn’t the basics. 

The young man is a devout Jew, engaged in a robust spiritual practice. He presumably has had access to all the usual sources of advice — the Hebrew Bible, the learned men of the day (the Pharisees), the poetry and folk wisdom of the land he lives in, and the voice he hears when he is quiet enough inside. Apparently none of those sources of advice have shocked him in the way that that simple advice from Jesus shocks him.  It is as if the idea Jesus gives him was completely new to him. Yet it resonates sufficiently within him that he is unable to dismiss it. Had he known it was not for him, he could have dismissed it at once.  But he doesn’t dismiss it.  He can’t.  He hadn’t registered this idea before, and yet, now he hears it, it sounds a bell inside him. Something about this advice registers with him as true; he doesn't like it, but he can’t turn away from it. Oh! the agony. 

We are not told what he chooses to do. This story isn’t about answers.

And with that ‘unanswering’ ringing in our ears, pretty much all of what we heard afterwards was a series of questions:

Do we make decisions in a vacuum? 

What is there around about us that we could use, to help us make these sort of difficult decisions? 

What sources of advice do we have? 

Which sources can we trust? 

Quakers talk about “the leadings of God” — where are these to be found, or heard? In the natural world? In traditional narratives and writings? In face to face discussions with trusted counsellors, friends, advisers, sages? In the still small voice encountered after long inner struggle or hours of quietude? 

When there is a decision before us that is agonizing, what weight can we give to advice? Does the answer simply have to come, in the end, from inside?

Is conscience the leadings or promptings of what lies outside time and space and human imagination, or do we build it for ourselves, different in every age, based on habit and culture? A socially-constructed code of behaviour?

Or even more drastically, is conscience a genetic trick set up by our selfish DNA to exploit every opportunity towards survival? Ethics and morals nowhere in sight? 

How do we know the will of God? How would we recognise it, if it were revealed to us? How do we know the truth? How do we know God? How do we know the will of God? How do we know the nature of God?    [Spoiler: We don’t! ]

So when we are presented with advice in the face of a decision, how do we decide which advice is true? How do we decide whether advice received is relevant or useful or misleading? 

The Bible is full of advice about decisions, and their contexts.  Which angles out of all the angles offered in it might we dwell upon, as we face hard decisions? 

Setting down the Bible again, does it all come down to experience? Have we lived a life where, through chance, things went well for us after taking advice from groups of people we knew? Was something in a book we read, which we decided to act upon, instrumental in our success? Or did luck come into it when we trusted our own judgment alone?  Or have we had the other experience, of taking wise advice and making ostensibly sound judgments, and nonetheless finding life bitter and treacherous?

Why don’t I sell all my possessions and give the money to the poor? 

Who do you think you are? Who do you say I am? Two questions whose answers are always shifting - Unitarians in Ringwood gather again in May 2022

It’s such a different experience — being there, compared with being told about what it was like to be there.

Reading a blogpost about our gatherings, whether online or in person, is always likely to leave the impression that our gatherings are like lectures, webinars, study classes.  They are never like that.  In the subtlest ways, everyone in the room participates and changes what transpires, changing it into a woven, group activity.  And as our gatherings take place explicitly to allow a space for reverence to emerge, whether that reverence is in regard to a special circumstance of life, a personal deity, or, as most would probably suggest, the biggest mystery of all (life, in its fullest), the woven, group activity evokes what cannot be conveyed in a written report.

Our gathering on Zoom on 8 May 2022 included singing along to videos, silence for personal reflection, two readings from the Christian Bible, and a period for sharing joys and concerns in our minds at the time.  On Zoom, other rituals are more difficult to arrange, and we will be considering that as we move back to meeting in person, in July.  We have no intention of meeting in person merely to listen to someone’s words about somebody else’s written words that have been read out loud.  There has to be more to the act of gathering, than that.

This is representative - it's a gathering of Unitarians in the
 Ringwood Meeting House, but this is an old picture.

Nonetheless, you’re reading this because you want to know what theme was covered in our gathering, so here goes, as usual.

We opened with a recollection that, though it has to some extent worn off to people in the UK, in Ukraine there is no escaping the continuing shock of the invasion.  We lit our chalice candle while hearing words prompting us to keep watch with those suffering: 

'My soul is sorrowful, even unto death: stay awake and keep watch with me.' (Book of Mark, chapter 14 verse 34)

The first reading was from the Bible, book of Job, chapter 38, verses 4-21.  God confronts Job, saying, 

‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

    Tell me, if you have understanding.’

We heard a second reading from the Bible, book of Mark, chapter 8 verses 27-30.  In this reading, the teacher Jesus is asking his followers who people think he is.  And Peter answered Jesus, ‘You are the Messiah.’

The president of the day reflected on the two readings.

“In our first reading we are given the fictional speech where God turns the tables on Job and all his wise friends.  Job has been asking the hard questions, and his various friends have trotted out the ‘right answers’; but none of it has been satisfying.  Finally, it is God who speaks.

“God unfurls the wonder of the cosmos and the passing of aeons, and in essence poses the question, ‘Just who do you think you are?!’  The wonder is not that Job does not know all the answers, or that he is left with so many questions.  The wonder is that anyone should ever have thought they knew it all !

“Whilst there is a nobility and vitality in wanting to know more and to understand better, it is foolishness and arrogance to think that any of us has ever got it all worked out.  That is not to say our insights, our thoughts, and our experiences are worthless.  It is not to say that there is no difference in value between one way of seeing and doing, and another.   But it is to say that there is always more to know, more to ask, more to do. 

“This confrontation, staged between God and Job and all the wise friends, is a call not to lose heart in the face of questions and doubts, and not to become rigid in our ideas, in our ways of doing and saying.  After all: who do we think we are?

“In our second reading we find a similar question posed.  The main protagonist of the Gospel of Mark is asking his friends and followers who the crowds think he is. They have a mix of answers: maybe John, the fiery preacher who was apparently recently executed.  Maybe Elijah, the returned ancient figure of power from the past. Or maybe, just one of the many insightful people who have something important to say.  There’s conspiracy theories in there, there’s fanaticism, and there’s perhaps more balanced respect and interest, too. 

“Then Jesus asks them who they themselves think he is. You can almost imagine an awkward pause. Would we have a ready made answer to this, if asked by someone important to us? 

“It is Peter who finally breaks the silence, by saying, “You are the Anointed One.” And that’s all the author of Mark has Peter say.  We’re not told what that means, or what that implies. We get that it marks Jesus out as special, but in what way?  Early readers of Mark would have immediately known that priests are anointed, prophets are anointed, kings are anointed, and, of course, the dead are anointed for burial too.  Mark doesn’t have Peter explain himself in his Gospel, and Mark doesn’t give us a narrator’s answer either.  The Jesus we read about in the book of Mark is said to be many things by the different people who meet him.  And, depending on their varying encounters with him, what they say of him and their actions towards him vary too. 

“Mark places Jesus into situations that were recognizable then and, with a bit of imagination, are recognizable now; but then has the man doing and saying the unexpected.  Mark is setting out a protagonist who is challenging to those around him as well as to us the readers: Jesus won’t let things be just as they are.

“If those crowding around Jesus want things to carry on unchanged, as they expected them to go, well then Jesus needs to go.  If, on the other hand, those following him want to keep hold of this figure who intrigues and inspires them, then it is other things that need to change or be jettisoned. 

“We know how this went.  Every character in Mark had to decide for themselves about this Jesus, and every reader of Mark has to as well.

“In a lot of ways, the book of Mark is a Unitarian Gospel. It challenges, and it asks the question, but it is left open to us to rise to it and to answer.  I offer you these two questions today — not as a test and not because I have the answers, but because the questions themselves are at the heart of our shared Unitarian practice.

“Firstly, who do you think you are?!  And secondly, when you think about the story Mark weaves around his strange protagonist Jesus, and the odd things Jesus does and says, who do you say he is?"

We finished with this blessing, based on Repose in The Sun Dances – Prayers and Blessings from the Gaelic, collected and translated by Alexander Carmichael.

Thou of Wonders

Shield us with might

Oh thou of natures laws and all its stars

Compass us this night

Body and soul

Compass us aright

Between earth and sky

Tonight 

Between the allness of thy mystery

And the blindness of our sight

Compass us this night

And every night

Oh thou of Wonders 

Compass us aright.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnlMktJTHTA

April 2017 meeting for reverence – recognising and staying with suffering, showing respect to others Ringwood #unitarians

Our meeting for reverence this month was held on 9th April, celebrated by western Christians as Palm Sunday.  That’s the day when it is remembered that Jesus of Nazareth was celebrated and welcomed as potentially the leader of a new order as he arrived in Jerusalem, prior to the most important feast of the Jewish year, the Passover.  In Judea at the time many were asking questions over the just exercise of power, and the right to self-determination.  Questions which should not go away and which must continue to be asked, as lessons from even recent history are gradually forgotten.  It was thought that Jesus was going to confront ruling interests with these questions.

Over a number of our gatherings recently we have been expressing our concern and dismay at the turmoil caused by dissension, division, disagreement, conflict and war all around the globe at the moment.  And that is on top of what could be thought of as the ordinary sadnesses, chaos and upsets experienced in domestic and family settings.

It would be possible to feel, and act, as if powerless under these circumstances.  Rather, in this meeting, we exercised our option to face it, square on.

We reflected on staying in the discomfort of recognising suffering, showing respect to others by acknowledging it.  Unusually for us, both our readings came from the Christian heritage; specifically, the Gospel of Mark.  The first was the section on the triumphant entry into Jerusalem, and the the second was on the subsequent agony in the garden of Gethsemane. 

"The key to meditation is learning to stay."

After our period of silent meditation, a practice which figures in many world faith traditions, we sang hymns of peaceful resistance (“Kum-ba-yah,” and “We will overcome, some day”). 

Prove it to me

Unitarians are, by nature, people who examine evidence, lines of logic, myths, legends and argument.  They tend to lend greater weight to the evidence of their own lives and experience than to hypotheses handed to them by others.

In the Christian story we notice that the disciple called Thomas was sceptical about the claims of others: the claims that Jesus had been resurrected, and had been seen walking and talking to those who followed him.  "When I can put my finger in the wounds on his hands, feet and side," Thomas is supposed to have said, "then I'll believe."  Doubting Thomas, he became dubbed, and the name has stuck. Well, Unitarians are perhaps the Doubting Thomases of religion.  "Show me how what you are saying matches my experience," Unitarians say.

So it comes as no surprise that the Unitarian congregation of Ringwood, at some point in the 19th century, renamed their Meeting House as "St Thomas' Chapel".  It did revert, and by the time the Unitarians sold it off, it was once again simply the "Meeting House".

Now Unitarians once again use the Meeting House in Ringwood for their worship, and this year to mark the feast day of Thomas on 3 July we presented the Meeting House with a floral arrangement specially commissioned from the Ringwood Floral Decoration Society.  We are grateful to them, and also to Rivendell Designs Photography (also from Ringwood) for the photos on this post.

"Didymus" March Meeting 2014

The March worship meeting of Didymus (Ringwood Unitarians) was on Sunday 9 March.  We had readings and contemplation around the topic, "What is truth?", with reference to the death sentences placed upon Jesus of Nazareth and Socrates by their peers, who apparently found the truth described by each of them too much to bear.

The ruling culture dominating the lives of these two great souls both felt the truth exposed by them, and feared it.