Getting a soaking in oneness and what's the point in going to church - #Unitarians gather in Ringwood on 10 February at the start of their sixth year

Today the president for the day used Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, along with some contemporary non-aligned thoughts, as the readings for the gathering.   This was to counterbalance the decidedly Christian sources that had been used in the past couple of gatherings during the Christmas season.

We lit the chalice with words which are being used worldwide by Unitarians during February:

Words written by Jean-Claude Barbier of the Assemblée Fraternelle des Chrétiens Unitariens (AFCU) Hallelujah for the chalice which contains the wine, which contains our lives; Hallelujah for the flame which rises with our prayers, with our hopes; Let us give thanks to God, to the divine Breath, to the Matrix that is the source of the life. Let us give thanks for this Creation given and received. Thanks to rabbi and teacher Jesus of Nazareth and all the wise ones of our Humanity, of all the religions, all wisdoms, all philosophies. Thanks to all the people of our History who built this world, That we are present, by mutual agreement, together at the meeting-point of our worship. That we are present, listening to each other, helping each other, at the meeting-point of our worship.

After our usual ritual to welcome our circle, we had our first reading from the Taittiriya Upanishad, part III, being the story of Bhrigu and Varuna.  The translation chosen is by Eknath Easwaran.

https://www.bookdepository.com/The-Upanishads/9781586380212

Bhrigu repeatedly asks his father for instruction on the nature of the Brahman, and by following the instruction to meditate, Bhrigu discovers that Brahman includes all the following:  food, life, mind, wisdom, joy.  In short, whatever it is that creatures come from, whatever it is that they seek, whatever it is that they live by, and whatever it is that they return to:  that is Brahman.  

https://www.spiritoftherainbow.org/shop/we-are-one-book

For our second reading we heard an extract from We Are One: a manifesto for humanity by Simenon Honoré, pub 2010, Spirit of the Rainbow.  In the extract chosen, the writer says: “If we go yet more deeply into our own being we will discover our natural state of joy…..In awakening to this inner truth we take an important step in setting our hearts free to create a new world, within and without.”

The president mused on these two readings in the light of other assertions recently made at Unitarian and Anglican services she had been in.  Summing up, she suggested that:

1. the task of a church is to serve the needs of people: the need to feel loved, the need
   
   to connect with people, the need to connect with ideas that come through people and through being with people, the need to find purpose through belonging.
2. for herself, the ultimate aim of going to church is not to find mending on a personal level, welcome though that may be.  The ultimate aim of going into a church is to come out of church again, to re-enter the world changed, and hence to bring change to the world.  This grandiose idea is actually very humble and is rooted in what we heard in the readings: that there is connected spiritual oneness in all existence, so, by changing personally, one also changes the world.
3. there is a state of joy, clarity, bliss, enlightenment, awakening, oblivion, awareness, union; a state that we cannot in any way earn, but neither can we be dispossessed of it; a state that - as the Buddha said - “lies behind the desires and worldly passions which the mind entertains” (from The Teaching of Buddha, pub 1966, Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai)

We also had our candles of concern and as we start out on our sixth year together, we heard the Buddha’s advice for a successful fellowship (or Sangha).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Teaching-Buddha-Bukkyo-Dendo-Kyokai/dp/4892372145/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1549820547&sr=1-5

Ringwood #Unitarians use a motto discarded by the United States of America - what we did at our February gathering for reverence

Our theme on 11th February 2018 used the first motto taken by the United States of America – e pluribus unum, meaning “out of the many, one.”

We lit the chalice with the words of the ICUU Global Chalice Lighting for February 2018 and then spent time in silence, each remembering their personal creed.  Despite what you may sometimes hear said of the Unitarian church, it is not a creedless church.  Rather, it is a church where every person is invited, and indeed challenged, to find their own creed, the creed demanded of them by their own experience, study, and insight regarding the divine.  Many people, many creeds.  Yet, one church.

We prayed some prayers written by people known to us, including a former Unitarian Minister from Edmund Kell Unitarian Church in Southampton, and then we sang a couple of hymns and carried out our usual ritual of building our circle.  We do this by passing between us a flame, bread, water and a musical device representing air, then placing them in the centre of our circle next to our chalice.  It’s a simple ritual and no spoken interpretation is given.  In silence we each seek and find our own purpose and meaning in it.  The conversations we have later about our ritual are often surprising!

We had three readings today, rather than two.  The first by John Andrew Storey included the words, “We cannot all think the same way.  No words can be found which adequately express the true depth and range of what each one of us believes.”

The second, by Rowan Williams, reminded us that whereas we may imagine we can deal with our spiritual life as if it were a separate compartment, in fact it is bound up completely with our relations with the people around us.

And the third reading, from Christopher Jamison, included these words: “Community is sacramental – that is to say, the material realities of community are the means by which hidden grace is given to the members.  There are qualities that we experience through faithfully persevering in community life.  That is what a community is for: to foster the experience of these qualities through its very structures.”

After a rousing but profound song from The Fisherman’s Friends – The Union of Different Kinds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JMuEE_Zd7Q&ab_channel=SueHendriks

we spent some quiet time pondering some questions about our community and our place within it.

How should persons behave in a community?

What do our responses to otherness tell us about ourselves?

What is different about us, as a result of our coming here and sitting with others?

Would another person recognise a difference in us because we come?

What does it mean to be a community of diverse persons?

What does it demand of us, when we commit to meeting and engaging with people whose views and paths we already know are different from our own?

What does it mean to make a safe space for each other?

Is a community more than the sum of its parts?

What is the relationship between the community and the members who comprise it?

How are the needs of the community and the persons within it balanced?

When we sit together, do we look at each other or do we look at something that lies beyond us all?  Or both?  How do we do that?

Is there a centre of gravity, a pulling force at the heart of our group, which energises and refreshes us?

 After a period of silent meditation we carried out our muster, our annual roll call, in which those who wished were able to declare themselves as members of the group for the coming year, our fifth year together.

We finished with some more prayers, including a Buddhist litany invoking wellness in ourselves, in the person next to us, and in all humanity.

January 2017 meeting for reverence speaks about grace #unitarians

Once again we remembered absent friends going through a difficult set of circumstances. 

The service theme was “Making space for grace.”

The president for the day had chosen poetry for the set pieces for the meeting.  Having come across a poet by the name of Leopard at the Spirit Festival last summer, the president's first reading was a poem from Leopard’s publication Leaves for the Trees.

The second reading was a longer poem called Sometimes a Wild God by Tom Hirons.

We carried out our usual silent sharing of four elements, passing them round the circle of those present so that each person had touched and held each element, and connected with the others by doing so.  After that the elements were placed on the table at our centre, next to our Unitarian chalice.
 

The elements today were bread, water, incense and flame (a candle).  The water had been brought deliberately from Glastonbury.

We always include this ritual and it is always slow and silent, which allows each person present to interpret, revere and sanctify the ritual in a private way, aligned with their own current faith and beliefs.

Hard won personal struggles over the years have convinced us that a sure way to divide people from each other is to try to insist that particular rituals and sensations must hold a particular  meaning (with the tacit and sinister sub-text of “or else you don’t belong”).   We have found that, without words, together we can carry out an activity that holds a different meaning for each of us, and those meanings can change over time.  What holds us together is the unified carrying out of the ritual.  Just like going to a wedding or a funeral: everyone at those ceremonies takes away with them something different, but they all know that they were there, at the same event.

So although you may see references to Unitarians as “creedless faith groups”, this is inaccurate.  We each have our own creed.  But emphatically, we do not wish or expect that the person next to us in our worship holds to the same faith or belief as we do.  It is enough that they show up and join in, however that makes sense to them.

This is because we consider life to be more than humdrum.  We have glimpsed different perspectives, perhaps in rare and expanded moments; perspectives that lead us to hunt for the spiritual refreshment we know exists, if only we can find the way to it.  The refreshment that brings calm unearned; or an unexpected detachment, like pearls on silk, during the bruising torrents of uncontrollable life; or which – paradoxically – demands not a “giving up” and asking for help, but a “giving up of self” meaning the need for help diffuses into the abyss, the dance.  The abyss, the dance, the voice that can be heard by everyone, says Gandhi: “Every one who wills can hear the Voice.  It is within every one.  But like everything else, it requires pre­vious and definite preparation.”

Our heritage is the Christian tradition and so we use the Christian label for this spiritual refreshment, that is to say: “grace”.  And so as part of our meeting for reverence we reflected on making opportunities in our lives for grace to break in undeserved and unearned; and also on our unhelpful tendency to behave so as to keep grace out.

April 2016 meeting for reverence

Not Ringwood! - but a large gathering of Unitarians in 2012

Our meeting built on the theme of Community, which was last aired in January.  Once again it was noted that one of the richest sources of advice about how to form, live in and sustain communities is the Christian tradition.  Moreover, the Christian tradition explores why communities are essential to our wellbeing and are crucial to spiritual growth.  It seems to be necessary for us to reconcile our deep need to be true to ourselves (which seems like a very self-contained function) with our other needs to love and be loved; to be seen; to be listened to; to be accepted at face value on our own terms (all of which require us to have people around us whom we connect with).

We had two readings from contemporary Christian writers (Esther de Waal and Ian Adams) examining togetherness, solitariness, loneliness, and the repeating habit of religious people to first come home to themselves and then go out to connect with others.  We also heard about some of the key factors that will sustain communities in the longer term, especially the relationship between the life of the community and the lives of the members within it.

And bearing in mind the pivotal role of communities in keeping us balanced and whole, we asked why it seems to be so hard for us, living in the 21st century, to prioritise participating in community life - why we so resist joining groups and making commitments.

We had the same hymns as in January, partly so that we begin to get to know them better, and we also included a guided meditation after we had lit our candles of concern.

Southern Unitarian Association

Newport Unitarian Church, 9a High St, Newport, Isle of Wight

Ringwood Unitarians count as a group in contact with the General Assembly of Free Christian and Unitarian Churches of UK, but as yet we are too new for any official status.

We are headed in a direction that will allow us to affiliate in time - we just need to grow a little more before we can join.

But unity and oneness is important to us - in our view, to take a separative stance in the spiritual life is to limit your spiritual life - so we are acting in the supposition that we belong in GA right now.  So we take to heart all that is asked of us by GA, as well as all the opportunities offered to us by GA.

One of the most important offers is to form relationships with the constituent congregations nearby, who meet together as a district association - the Southern Unitarian Association.  We're glad to have done this, and over the past year or so we have participated in the quarterly meetings and indeed have hosted one of them.

We cannot be at the next couple of meetings, but we wish all our SUA friends well, as they meet on 19 September, in Newport, Isle of Wight.

Study Course on Spiritual Health starting in January

Join us, starting early in January on an open course of exploration titled “Twelve Steps to Spiritual Health”.  Over twelve weeks we are going to work our way through the book by David Usher, as shown on the "books" tab on this website.  The course will take the form of individual book study supported by group discussion.  We’ll meet as a group at the Ringwood Meeting House and History Centre, Meeting House Lane, on Wednesday lunchtimes.

The course does not assume you hold any formal belief system or religious affiliation, although it does draw inspiration from a wide range of world faiths.

The author of the book, David Usher, is a Unitarian minister who after some years serving UK congregations is now serving in the USA.  David has said that spiritual life is about being fully alive, and his book is a practical manual for anyone seeking life measured by quality and intensity, not quantity.

If you are interested, you should be willing to be led out of your familiar comfort zone at some point, in order to become open to life’s possibilities and to become able to withstand its disappointments.

You will need to buy your own copy of the book and to pay the usual admission to the Meeting House for each one of the group meetings you are able to come to.  Although it is encouraged, you might not have to commit to the full twelve week course.

For further details and to register an interest in the course, telephone Lucy on 07899 730181 (answerphone available).

 

 

June meeting

The Unitarian meeting in Ringwood on 8 June was centred on the theme "one world".  We heard readings from the Bible (Genesis Chp1) and from Wordsworth.  There were some lovely prayers seeking lessons from the Earth for our daily living.  We mused on the smallness of the Earth in space as we listened to music from "The Blue Planet" and we sang hymns that reflected the interconnectedness of humans and the Earth.  We welcomed a new participant and we marked the passing of one of our number who was with us as recently as our May meeting.  There was a calm still feeling to the service which had lots of silence and time for meditation.

"Didymus" February 2014 Meeting

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.

Although this may look like we have a choice about what we believe, if acted on properly, it’s not.

Unitarians in Ringwood do it large

"Alain de Botton makes the point that ALL of us struggle with life.  And religion dispels the huge myth that ‘everyone else is coping, I’m the only one who’s not managing to hold my life together’.  This is one of the most wonderful consolations and encouragements that I have gained from being a Christian - realising that we ALL have problems, struggle, make mistakes and suffer.  This is so different from the modern religion of consumerism, which pretends that life is easy, and that if we are struggling there is something wrong with us!  Thanks so much Alain!"
By a Spiritual Atheist, attending the Unitarian Church in Bristol

This rather neatly describes some of what it is that people get from being part of any spiritual or religious community.  Consolation and encouragement.  These are wonderful things, and those of us who find them in our Unitarian communities get