The clock is ticking - everything counts but nothing matters

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/645392

 

It has been known for some time that the end for Earth will come when the sun flares up prior to its final collapse.  All will end.  And yet, despite that knowledge, we have seen worth in living generous, virtuous lives along our way - or the way of humankind - towards this final collapse.

It's not that we haven't believed that the world will end in the way Professor Brian Cox and others on the mainstream media have clearly explained to us.  It's that we nonetheless think we can live while we walk towards dying, rather than just sit in the gutter bewailing the final fate of the globe and everything on it.

Faith systems enjoin us to recognise we have an end coming, yet we can and should - for our own well-being during our brief stay here - strive to live good lives: bringing into our connected thinking everyone and all creatures; governing justly; and relieving all forms of poverty.

I admit that, until some years back, I thought I would not see the end of the great human experience and experiment in my lifetime.  I was embarked on the path of 'striving to live in good faith' while here but seeing it as being far over the horizon.  Millions of years away.

Well: I now see a strong likelihood that human life as I know it will disappear only shortly after what I had been content to consider my natural span (which may turn out to be shorter than I had thought).  But does that change anything?

Does it change my thinking, my believing, my behaviour?  Why should it?  Nothing has actually changed, except the timespan.

The clock is ticking.  Everything we do now counts.  

Ultimately, nothing matters.  The Earth is destined for utter destruction.  But let us be the best us we can be, doing the best we can for other creatures and for ourselves, for as long as we can.  Because that would be a good thing to do.

Pentecost and church-building : Three necessary elements for a sustainable Unitarian congregation June 2022

(Postscript dated 9 Jun 2022:  This crosses over very neatly with a blogpost from last year by Francis Elliot Wright, which challenges us to think about what being "a successful Church" means.  You can find it here

https://unitarianchristianark.blogspot.com/2021/09/why-are-we-here.html?fbclid=IwAR2BZnIKuUldg7WKup2NKfSv1MlfCrM7ZuqnnuWN0_qxqVYsd7QqarG5k1s  )

On 5th June 2022, after a super online UCA service about Pentecost by Rev Sheena Gabriel, there was also a rich conversation.

I was asked by others to record a contribution I made, which is my personal assessment regarding the arc that may be experienced by someone coming to Unitarianism, and its link with securing the ongoing life of a congregation.  So, with thanks to Sheena, Ruth and Rob who were in the conversation with me, here goes.

It seems to me that it will be a very rare thing indeed for someone who has not in some prior way experienced a life of wondering about faith, someone who has not already been infused with some style of self-awareness or moral living or both, someone who has not had at least a little exposure to formal faith practice through their upbringing, to try out any kind of spiritual or church movement from scratch.  I know the marketing industry works on the basis that you can make people want something they previously didn’t know existed, merely through clever advertising — that a demand can be constructed from scratch — but we know how much money is involved in the marketing industry.  So let’s set aside the idea of trying to reach people who never previously considered spiritual or religious exploration.

Thus, in my view, a person trying out the Unitarian setting is initially looking for a new setting for their past experience of faith and spirituality — they are looking for something for themself.  A safer space.  A more welcoming space.  Perhaps a place to heal or even mend.

And what the congregation must offer them at that stage is just that : a something for themself.   A place where they can, perhaps for the first time, be openly honest.  A place where they don’t have to define themself in terms of specific doctrines.  A place where they can try out different versions of themself at different times.  A place where they are heard and seen but on their own terms.  A place where they can ground themself again.  Rest.  Space.  Air.  Light.  Warmth.  Time.  As Rob put it yesterday, a place where they can find the holiness of their own person.

The arc progresses.  After the time of healing and grounding, some (if not many or even most) will then find they reach a stage where that motion begins to reverse — where instead of absolutely needing something for themself, they have sufficient resources to want to start to give back.  This is where — perhaps for the first time, or for the first time in a long time — the community as a body assumes importance for our ‘newcomer’.  The co-creation starts.  The holiness of community begins.  The exploration about humility, about service to the community itself and to the neighbours in which the community sits, assumes importance.  The personal needs are met, now what’s next ? — the needs of the group.  At this point the congregation must offer someone a way to be integrated into the life of the community — but again, as on first arrival, it must be on their own terms.  And the community must show that the contribution of the ‘new’ person immediately changes the group : the group is now different and may need to look afresh at how it operates, and respond positively to queries about its aims and activities.  “Ohh!  Now we need a new plan!” should be a happy commonplace, not a negative shock to the system.  To use very old language, if we are to see the spark of the divine, the Christ, in each person, then the opportunity is there to “become new in Christ” each time someone new integrates*.

Then the arc matures.  The ‘newcomer’ may no longer feel that instinctive, emotional giving back is enough.  In my experience, most will want to understand the motives of the group for being a group at all.  What is this congregation actually about?  This is the bit where in my experience congregations can fail, and failure can be most drastic.  The Unitarian movement is not about peak experiences, whether that be in art, music, literature, intellectual study, science, logic and rationalism, meditation, prayer, humility, one-ness, social service, justice making, or self sacrifice.  It’s not about diversity for diversity’s sake.  It’s not even about inclusivity for inclusivity’s sake.  All of these things are essential, are absolutely necessary, but are not sufficient. What are they all for?  Why are we doing this?  Why are we doing what we do?

For me, the only satisfactory answer I have found lies in the book by Stephen Lingwood: Seeking Paradise - A Unitarian Mission For Our Times.  After long and careful thought, Stephen argues (and I agree) that we are seeking to build paradise on earth.  The word ‘paradise' wraps up all those necessary things previously mentioned, and more, but in itself is much bigger; too big to be contained in our minds.  We are looking beyond ourselves, beyond our concepts, beyond our self-image, beyond our own terms of explaining ourselves, indeed, beyond what we are capable of imagining.  We are not worrying about achieving results or about realism.  We are seeking to build regardless of our chances of success.  We are not worried about whether we survive the attempt.  We are seeking to build paradise because that is the only clean motive that makes sense to us.  We are here because of the holiness of the beyond.

And because we are Unitarians, and not inheritors of tradition from the Indian sub-continent or the Arabian peninsula, not direct inheritors of land-based, spirit-filled cosmology (Africa, North America, Australia and other places) nor of political philosophies and wisdom (China); because we are Unitarians, our myths and narratives in common come out of Christianity and sit in the context of western law and culture infused with the demands of the Jewish Ten Commandments and the directive attributed to the teacher Jesus — to love God and our neighbour as we love ourselves.  Because we are Unitarians, the paradise stories and images we come back to again and again are related to the wisdom that we inherit in the Bible.  Spiced up, of course, by fusion with other thought streams : we are truly people of our global times.

To be able to show that line of thought, that anchoring, to someone asking why we do what we do; to be able to point at that, our history; in my view that is the third necessary element that a congregation must be able to provide, for a satisfactory arc of growth of both a person approaching a Unitarian group, and that Unitarian group itself.

~~~~

So, if you ask me, the three elements that a sustainable congregation needs to provide are a safe space for healing (holiness of the person); a living, growing community working together (the holiness of community); and the ‘paradise-building’ purpose beyond itself, anchored in history (the holiness of the beyond).

* 2 Corinthians 5:17 (NRS) So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

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