The unique persons we are, as we gather for reverence - January 2018 Ringwood #Unitarians

January 2018 marks the end of our fourth year and in February we will be four years old.  So this service was one of a couplet, and dealt with what we as unique persons bring with us when we come to the gathering.  The service in February will consider how we weave our personal, individual spiritual lives, like threads, together into one overall fabric of our spiritual community, as we start out on our fifth year together.  So January was about the personal and February will be about the corporate.

We started with a participative prayer, heavily adapted from a prayer from the Iona Community, reminding us of some of the many names and faces of the divine, and ending with the words:

 “Overarching power of bestowing, healing, uniting:

in these and all your many other names, in all your many faces,

in your many-ness which yet vibrates as one,

may these your characteristics be a pattern to us of community;

           hence may we bestow, heal and unite in our many-ness,

           while operating as one.”

We carried out our usual ritual of making the circle with flame, bread, water and a fourth element to represent air or spirit or nature (dependent on one’s point of view).  We lit candles of joy and concern.  We sang two hymns from the green hymn book and we also had a recorded song by Hayley Westenra “The Heart Worships”.

Our first reading was from the Hindu faith via Mohandas K. Gandhi, and the second from the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).  They both declared a firm trust that each person has direct access without mediation to spirit, inner voice, dictates of reason.  And both were clear that we each have a responsibility to do the work to listen carefully within, so as to discern truth and light.

Gandhi in particular suggested that there is no danger at all to the world if very many people find and give voice to what they find within, so we should be prepared to put up with doubtful claimants, for the sake of hearing from as many insightful people as possible.

The Quaker reading gave some practical advice for how one can go about laying oneself open to the leadings of spirit.

Our president for the day reiterated the Quaker instruction by referring to the founder of the Quakers, whose biography can be found here:  http://bcw-project.org/biography/george-fox

The president brought forward the famous George Fox challenge from the 1690s:  “You will say, ‘Christ said this, and the apostles say this;’ but what canst thou say?” and then asserted that we must, first and foremost, understand our own being.

The following questions and assertions were thrown out to the gathering:

·         What is the pattern of your life?

·         What qualities sing out from your life to any spectator who cared to watch?

·         What are the things that you didn’t seemingly choose but were just natural to you; repeated actions that you found yourself doing wherever you were?

·         What are the things you had to set in place when you arrived somewhere, in order for you to feel at home?

·         For these are the things of your personhood, your own unique, individuated way of living; your personal way of living and loving and believing and trusting.

·         These are the things that “thou canst say”.

·         We are prompted by wise teachings to make fewer decisions, to take less time in selecting one path over another, to make less fuss over being human.  We are prompted to observe “me”, rather than to create “me”.

We were reminded that 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.

And having found what must be true for us, we are challenged to live up to it.  We are challenged as Unitarians to witness to what we believe and trust, challenged to not remain silent in the face of an unappreciative and unwelcoming world.  

We are challenged to be brave, and self-consistent, and focused on what really matters to us.

We are challenged, in short, to integrity; to a kind of one-through-ness; in which there are no compartments in our lives; in which our thoughts and words and actions all marry up with the beliefs that lie at the heart of our lives.

The Unitarian challenge involves both candles and debate!

Looking for action 2015

We have been reading various posts on social media about how younger people today with a religious outlook firstly won't commit long-term to anything and secondly are looking for signs that churches and religious groups are doing something meaningful to change the world, rather than just voicing their concerns.

When you are a very small group it is hard to discern the actions to take that will make a difference around you.  In Ringwood we think we have spotted one.  We are forming a group of all sorts of people who next January will do something new for Ringwood.  This group will be standing up in the street on a cold winter's day saying that we here in Ringwood remember the millions of people killed in the Holocaust, Nazi Persecution and in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.  We honour the survivors of these regimes of hatred and challenge ourselves to use the lessons of their experience to inform our lives today.

27 January marks the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, and is now designated as Holocaust Memorial Day.  HMD is a time when we seek to learn the lessons of the past and to recognise that genocide does not just take place on its own.  Genocide is a steady process which can begin if discrimination, racism and hatred are not checked and prevented. We’re fortunate here in the UK; we are not at risk of genocide. However, discrimination has not ended, nor has the use of the language of hatred or exclusion. There is still much to do to create a safer future.

Perhaps the group of people in Ringwood who will stand together on 27 January will succeed only in reminding others about the ghastly possibilities in humanity - let's face it, we won't be able to mend it.  But the biblical story in the book of Genesis - the story of Adam, Eve and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil - though a legend, reminds us that once you know about right and wrong, it changes everything for you.  We know now about the Holocaust, and others may be reminded about it through us.  So that will change something in the world.

If you want to join us in Ringwood in January email us at lucyunbox.ringwood@btinternet.com

Holocaust Memorial Day Wednesday 27 January 2016

http://hmd.org.uk/genocides/nazi-persecution

We have started the early planning work to hold a witness event in Ringwood to mark International Holocaust Memorial Day on Wednesday 27th January 2016.  The Assistant Priest at the parish church has agreed to be involved and we hope other churches and the Quakers will, too.  But this will not be a religious event and there are many more groups of people, and individuals, who would want to show their commitment to this event so we will be seeking other participants from all sectors of Ringwood.

Being frightened by difference

Unitarians, with people the world over who take a liberal, inclusive, generous view of religious faith and belief, look back and remember Jan Hus on 6 July.  Jan Hus was born around 1369 and he was a  Czech priest, philosopher, reformer and master at Charles University in Prague. After John Wycliffe, the theorist of ecclesiastical Reformation, Hus is considered the first Church reformer, as he lived before Luther, Calvin and Zwingli.

Jan Hus was tortured and executed in 1415 because, as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, one of the things he did wrong was to offer his congregants both bread and wine, known as “communion in both kinds”.  This mattered to the authorities because in doing so he disobeyed their rules – and they felt that their power and their communities were threatened by his actions.

Jan Hus had read the Bible for himself and had noticed that, at the Last Supper, celebrating the Jewish Passover, Jesus had invited his followers both to take and eat the seder bread and to take and drink the wine, and to continue to do that in his name until he returned in glory.  At Mass, therefore, Jan Hus fed his congregants both bread and wine, in defiance of the Catholic instruction of the time, which was that only the priests should drink the wine at the Mass.

Such things may seem trivial to us but – as Dean Jonathan Swift pointed out in his satire about the big-endians and the small-endians, who fought over which end of a boiled egg should be broken into with a spoon – every culture has its blind spots and taboos, over which the most terrible wars can be fought.  Optional approaches, that come to be seen as “right” or “wrong,” are often bound up in our own sense of who we are and who we include in our tribe.

In remembering Jan Hus and the ultimate price he paid for thinking for himself about religion, and making his stand in witness to what he believed to be right, let us look at ourselves a bit more closely.  What are the arbitrary habits and assumptions that we hold so dear, that are so much part of ourselves and our identity, that we feel frightened when someone does them differently?  How realistic is our fright?  How likely is it, that what is being done will damage our identity or the conditions under which we live our lives?  And how do we express our fear?  Finally, how do we behave towards the person who is doing things differently?