July 2014 meeting

The July worship meeting of Didymus (Ringwood Unitarians) was on Sunday 13 July.  Darren led the meeting and took the theme 'No Bystanders'.

Life happens whatever the choices we make.  And the greatest danger to the ethical life is thinking that we can 'sit this one out.'

We can choose to do nothing; we can have good reasons to do nothing; we may even be right to do nothing; but we are never not involved because of that.

 

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.

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?