For much of the 20th century, the watchwords of
Unitarians were “Freedom, Reason, Tolerance.”
We opened our meeting on 14 May with a striking revamp of these words –
which now become “Liberation, Inspiration, Compassion”, thus avoiding some of
the sub-texts that the words ‘freedom’ and ‘tolerance’ now come freighted with;
and ‘inspiration’ now integrating intuition and spirit with the logic of reason.
(Our thanks to Jo James of Mill Hill Chapel, Leeds).
It is sometimes said of Unitarians that we are a church
without creed. But that’s not so – we
are a church that does not state a SOLE creed.
Instead, we challenge ourselves to uncover our own underpinning belief
system, a model that we ourselves are unable to deny, a personal idea of what
is the most important in life. We each
are to believe what we CAN believe, rather than what someone else asserts we
ought to believe. So in Ringwood, after our chalice
lighting, we privately spend a minute or two remembering our personal creed,
whereas in another church we might be asked to recite out loud a set of words
that may or may not hold meaning for us.
We then had the following prayer, written by Tony McNeile:
After this, our meeting for reverence included all our usual ingredients
of ritual, silence and singing. But as
always, there was a linking theme.
We spent the meeting looking at different ways of doing religion. We listened to a song about John Ball, who
was an English Lollard
priest who took a prominent part in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. John Ball’s concept was that God had set us
all to be equal in Christian love – no room in religion for the for power hierarchies
of church and noblemen , and that
“All shall be ruled
By fellowship I say,
All shall be ruled
By the love of one another,
All shall be ruled
By fellowship I say,
In the light that is coming
In the morning.”
Our first
reading came from the Sikh tradition. In
contrast to John Ball’s prescription, this reading suggested that “God has created the creations in
countless ways and of countless kinds, colours, and sorts,”
and it prescribed continuous meditation on the Name of God as the way to
salvation. “The Name of God resides within all hearts, but the true saints
actually see Him residing within them.
All kinds of gifts will be bestowed by God, if we continuously repeat
with affection the Name of God. God, who
pervades everywhere and owns all powers, must be ever remembered. This will give complete protection and
salvation,” (a translation of part of the Sukhmani Sahib).
Paul McCartney helped us out next, with a song he
wrote after he had had long discussions with George Harrison, whom I believe to
have been a devotee of Krishna, in the Hindu tradition. Paul’s song is called One of These Days, and it is a sort of hymn to mindfulness.
And then we took a reading from our own tradition,
from recent essays by our own Rev Bill Darlison, from The Penultimate Truth and Other Incitements. Bill argued against “seek[ing] to hear the
voice of God either in the words of some guru, in the teachings of a church or
in the scriptures. Some people will
follow all three. All three are, in my
opinion, problematic and, increasingly anachronistic. .... Where, then, can we hope to hear the voice of
God in all its freshness in this contemporary world? – In that very source
which is itself the source of all bibles, religions, gurus and deities – the
human soul, the creative human mind, the genius of the human spirit.....
Dogma divides us, stories unite us. When people ask, ‘You Unitarians, what is
your ideology? What is your theology?’ I
would like us to say: “We don’t have an ideology. We don’t have a theology. We tell our stories to one another.”
In our meetings, instead of a sermon we invite
the president of the meeting to speak in a personal capacity. Our president for the day spoke of the
trap in religion to do with DOING religion.
She said that we forget that what suits “me” and teaches “me” is not
appropriate to people in other life situations or with different
experience. Scripturally-based as he
was, and looking for Christian salvation of society, John Ball conveniently
forgot that even having a king, under God and above the people, was a hierarchy
not mentioned in the Bible (the Peasants’ Revolt was not about getting rid of
the king; it was about releasing the king from the power of the establishment
and returning to the level playing field of the Garden of Eden). So being ruled by fellowship alone was never
going to be a successful prescription.
We were reminded that in human history, every time a
mystic teacher gives some gift to the world, their students try to systematise
the teaching and turn it into a practice that will allow the rest of us to have
the same experience as the original mystic.
But it doesn’t work that way.
The Sikh advice to keep repeating the thought “God” was
offered as a help for focus and humility.
But much of the day we are in conversation with other people or
animals. And when in conversation,
repeating the word “God” interiorly can make one rather inattentive to the
other person. Yet the other person also
lives steeped in divinity, so our president suggested that not attending to the
other person for the sake of saying “God” is rather missing the point.
The contemporary view we were given from Bill’s writings
is a humanist view. His idea is that the
sharing of stories is just as holy as focusing on a rule, no matter who the
rule-maker was, nor how insightful they were.
Bill says the holy is between PEOPLE, too. Apparently, Rowan Williams says the same
thing albeit slightly differently: he says we cannot have a satisfactory
relationship with the divine unless AND UNTIL we have a satisfactory
relationship with Tom, Dick and Harriet.
Summing up, the president called to mind a model from
the Jewish tradition: we humans are holy by being linked together by our neighbourly
relations, like people standing shoulder to shoulder in a ring; noting that a
ring, a circle, necessarily has a centre.
Nothing is SEEN at the centre of a ring of people – we
can only see the people in the circle; those next to us, those opposite us,
those across from us. But the circle
only exists because there IS a centre; something we are all facing, whether we
see it or not. And we each have our own
tie, our own relationship, linking us to the unseen, silent, empty centre.
So finally it was suggested that that ‘remembering we are
a ring of people, linked together, tied to an unseen centre’, is a contemporary
model of how we might best DO religion.
