A personal view of Maundy Thursday

 

Bear in mind, dear reader, that this post, like all the posts on this blog, has been supplied by one of the Ringwood Unitarians - and not necessarily always the same one.  It should not be assumed that any other Ringwood Unitarian, or any Unitarian from anywhere, thinks or feels the same as this. Or that the rest of our Ringwood group are even interested in this train of thought.  That’s the beauty of any Unitarian community – we worship and we connect, but we don’t expect each other to think about the same things or to think or feel in the same way.

It’s Maundy Thursday today.  That’s the day of the Jewish Passover.  The rabbi Jesus and his friends had gone to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, for the celebratory worship of the just and merciful God, who allowed the Hebrew slaves in Egypt to escape the deaths overnight of the first-born, which God inflicted on the then unresponsive and cruel slave masters, the Egyptians.  It is the festival that recognises that God, or Life, will act kindly towards people who act in accordance with the edicts that God, or Life, demands.  This recognition is portable from Judaism right through all the faiths, right across the spectrum of faiths, even to an oriental belief system that shies a long way away from the Jewish idea of a “personal God”, by which I mean Taoism.  Passover, or pesach, is a festival for all those who have had a good experience of their faith.

So Jesus and his friends and family sat down to the Passover meal, the seder meal, to quietly await the arrival of the next day, the commemoration of the day when Hebrews woke up to find that God’s word had been carried out – so the Egyptians were shocked and frightened to find their first-borns had died and the Hebrews now had to get out of Egypt very quickly.

And over that seder meal Jesus seemed to be very sure that his time was coming to an end.  Perhaps he too was shocked and frightened; or perhaps he thought that within a day or two it would be his followers who would be shocked and frightened.  You see, he had been in Jerusalem since the previous Sunday and he was aware that all sorts of people had all sorts of expectations of him that he would not necessarily fulfil. Some people wanted him to renounce some of the things he had said about his relationship to God.  Others wanted him to lead a zealous and possibly armed rebellion against the Roman occupying forces.  A few others seemed to think he was bigging up his part as a wise man with a following, at the cost of wasting money that could better have been spent on supporting the poor.  Jesus got the vibes.  He knew the show-down was coming.  So he spent some time that evening over the meal reflecting back to his followers what it was that he stood for, and asking them to remember his words always – by tying them inextricably with the bread and wine of the seder meal, which he knew they would celebrate year after year, so they would have no excuse to forget them.

And in my reading of it, the message of Jesus was this.  We are in a covenant with God – which was an old Jewish message.  We are in a relationship, said Jesus, a relationship we cannot own or control – it’s a connection we can enter.  We are loved into being, we are all sustained by love throughout our lives, and we are received in love at our ending.  Jesus lived as if it were both task and gift to strive to echo that love, right up until his life's end. 

The kingdom of God, said Jesus, this relationship, the way to lasting life lived true to our best selves, lies within; and it is accessible to all.  But to find that kingdom, to enter into that ultimate relationship with the just and loving God, you have to be prepared to let go of yourself and act in all humility.  As though you and your wants and desires were all just by-the-bye, scarcely relevant at all.  Jesus demonstrated that he thought everyone, including the most acclaimed ones amongst us, need to see ourselves as fit for the most unpleasant and menial jobs; like taking off the sandals and washing the dusty, smelly feet of our companions after a day on the Galilean plains; like taking without comment an unwarranted slap across the face; like carrying the load of someone who chose to press us into service against our plans and expectations – and not just the mile they demand of us, but an extra mile too.

My message, said Jesus, is that we have to try to mirror God – who is in all people, including the most disadvantaged and disregarded, the ones cast out by the establishment, and the ones who self-injure by getting knotted up in their pain and difficulty.  The kingdom really is there to be experienced, but you have to work very hard to put yourself last, to put yourself gracefully out of everyone else’s way, and to be prepared – despite your fear – to relinquish your own comfort and control over what is happening to you.  Look, said Jesus, I mean we have to relinquish our own safety and comfort right up to the most painful and bitter end.  Right when it hurts most, right when we don’t think we can go on, we have to stand quietly in trust, and surrender ourselves in all humility to Life, to God – both in his direct presence as we feel it, and as we feel it coming to us through other people.  Love the very people who cause you grief and pain because God is in them too – it’s the only way to be fully human.

I can’t imagine the power of the inspiration Jesus had experienced.  But I can see what a strong man he was.  What serenity and peace and fulfilment he found in his love for God and others.  How disregarding he was of himself.  And, though at the end even Jesus felt abandoned, I can see that that didn’t prevent him from offering himself to God.  What a model.

So this Maundy Thursday I celebrate the life and message of the rabbi Jesus with the unleavened bread and the wine of the thanksgiving seder meal.

March 2015 meeting

Our March meeting for reverence and worship took the theme TRANSFORMING OURSELVES IN FAITH THAT BY DOING SO THE WORLD IS CHANGED TOO

We lit the chalice today with the words:

At any moment I could choose to be a better person.

But which moment should I choose?

We had our usual ritual of sharing bread, water, light, and fire.  Our only formal prayer for the day came from the Nadder Valley Inclusive Worship Service http://www.lulu.com/shop/lucy-harris/the-nadder-valley-inclusive-worship-service/ebook/product-17386813.html

Unseen Power and Pattern,

We live this life through You.

By Your laws and Your grace we meet in You here today

With our hearts, our minds, our bodies.

May this holy inspiration keep us in awareness of You in all times and all places.

We then carried out an exercise in which we set down on paper, privately, a list of people who had angered or irritated us recently.  At various stages in the service we came back to this list and reviewed it in the light of the readings we had been listening to.

Our scriptural reading today was not actually from sacred texts but was an accessible form of Buddhist instruction on evoking compassion, including words by the Dalai Lama.  This came from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche  http://www.bookdepository.com/Tibetan-Book-Living-Dying-Sogyal-Rinpoche/9781846041051  .  Our secular reading was from a book by Dan Millman, The Laws of Spirit  http://www.bookdepository.com/Laws-Spirit-Dan-Millman/9780915811939 and it focused on choosing the perspective we wish to take - and how that affects how we see ourselves as either separate or as part of a unified, one consciousness.

Both the readings we heard were about changing the way we look at people; about transforming the way we look at people.  This is primarily to help ourselves to be happier; because if we change the way we look at people we are able to let go of many destructive attachments we have.  We begin to learn to let go of hate, revulsion, anger and violence, all of which destroy our own balance, clarity of vision, and well-being. 

 We also heard these sayings:

 By an unknown Tibetan Buddhist master :

“Give all profit and gain to others.

Take all loss and defeat on yourself.”

And by the Jewish teacher Jesus who, like all his people, was steeped in the Jewish tradition that there can be no justice without love, and no love without justice:

“Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.”

It was suggested that if we properly followed either this Buddhist or this Jewish teaching, we as persons would be radically transformed.

We lit candles of joys and concerns and had our habitual 7 minutes’ of silence for prayer or meditation, according to personal practice.

We closed with these words by the internationally renowned physicist, David Bohm:

 “A change of meaning is necessary to change this world politically, economically and socially.  But that change must begin with the individual; it must change for him or her .... If meaning is a key part of reality, then once society, the individual and relationships are seen to mean something different, then a fundamental change has taken place.”

In the service we also sang hymns 172 and 35 from the green hymn book, in which we welcomed all people and remembered that there are many paths to God.

In the conscience

Is there a Unitarian faith, and if there is, is it a religion in its own right, or does it just borrow from other faiths?”

What hard questions to answer.  The starting answer is that there is no single faith for all Unitarians, so it would be meaningless to ask, “What is THE Unitarian faith?”   But it would be meaningful to ask, “What is the faith of Unitarians?” despite the fact that there will be many answers.

So here you will find just one Unitarian’s answer to: “Is there a Unitarian faith, and if there is, is it a religion in its own right, or does it just borrow from other faiths?”

~~~~

Many Unitarians would agree that a person is a unique meeting point within the universe.  A meeting point in time and space of the universal laws, the randomness of chance, the biologically inherited characteristics, the cultural upbringing, the body and its skills, the senses and emotions, the memory and  intellect, and the conscience.

Most of all, the conscience.

For each meeting point that we call a person, there is what might be described as a “calling”.  I guess it would be common for Unitarians to accept that each different person has a different calling.

As a result of that, Unitarians long ago rejected the idea that there should be one statement of belief, called a creed, for everyone who is in search of a fulfilled inner life to sign up to, either freely or under coercion.  In more recent centuries Unitarians have also rejected the idea that any single philosophy or religion framework is supreme over all others.  Many Unitarians investigate the frameworks of faith of a number of world religions, and find much of value in them, that speaks to their current position.

Unitarians do not declare any of the traditional faith systems to trump any other.  We do not accept the assertion from any adherents of the traditional world faiths that it has to be “all, or nothing”; we do not agree that a successful spiritual search depends on adoption of a single religion, to the exclusion of others.  We agree with many, however, that the search has to be disciplined and on-going over a whole lifetime if it is to yield fruit.

Many Unitarians would assert that the prime point where Essential Truths operate, the place within which the “bigger than daily life” Pure Life is lived, experienced and acted upon, is the conscience of each person.  We assert that, whilst it is possible to get glimpses of God or the Ultimate through relentless and dedicated application of a range of faith practices (and also secular practices), the Redeeming Truth – which everyone seeks as a remedy for restlessness – transcends ALL religions.

So let us say that for a while I soak myself in the learned wisdom of traditional Christianity, and I gain much.  And then, while I am struggling to understand how to apply Christianity in my life, say I am impacted upon by the Tibetan form of Buddhism: then, I may suffer the breaking of my mental models, my expectations, my sense of direction.   I may experience confusion as the icons I was becoming used to, my windows on the divine, are called into question, or wrenched from me.  A modern therapist might call this a “cognitive dissonance”.

Would that mean that my Christianity had somehow been “wrong”?  That the set of ideas new to me, Tibetan Buddhism, should be rejected as “wrong”?  Or that Buddhism is “right” or “better” and I should reject my attempt at Christianity?  Have I been “doing it wrong”?

The answer is “none of the above”.  A genuine Unitarian calling might, in fact, provide the strength and motivation to struggle through this cognitive dissonance and come out the other side, stronger.  A Unitarian view might be that there is no competition between well developed faith systems.  Unitarians might say that for many people, the well-developed faith systems are perfect callings, and those people would do well to adhere to them.  For instance, it is conceivable that a Unitarian would advise a wavering Muslim to go back to Islam and study Islam further; or suggest to a lapsed Catholic that they go and have a chat with their priest and see if they can uncover what has caused them to drift away from their faith and faith community – with a view to returning to it.  Whereas, for themselves, Unitarians may have a different calling altogether.

The thing about the Unitarian calling is that it also tends to be universalist in outlook.  By which I mean that, at heart, Unitarians may feel it to be true that what applies to ONE human being applies in some way at some level to ALL human beings, without exception – just like gravity, or the tides, the rise of the sun, or the fact that we all breathe oxygen.  So we are curious about what different faiths say that can be applied everywhere, to everyone.

People who – it turns out – are genuinely called to be Unitarians may study a wide range of world faiths and may notice that in some places there are not necessarily direct “translations” from (say) traditional Christianity into Buddhism; or Hinduism into Judaism; or Classical Greek Stoicism into Sikhism or Islam.  There are GAPS between the frameworks.  Something is missing from the universalist point of view.   Yet a Unitarian outlook would assert that Universal Laws and Unassailable Truth must nonetheless exist in those gaps.  For the Ultimate to be the Ultimate it must apply NOT ONLY in all frameworks and knowledge systems, in all pictures and metaphors we are able to imagine, BUT ALSO in the gaps between and beyond all these human-made constructs.  For the Ultimate to be the Ultimate, it must actually be Ultimate; it must transcend all human experience of religion.

The place where we meet the Ultimate is in our conscience.  And that is where the Ultimate meets us, too.   The Ultimate, aka “The Way Life (And Everything Beyond It) Is Turning Out”, experiences for Itself new combinations in each person that It brings into existence.  We see that it is in the conscience of each person that the exact and unique experience is felt, which we were brought into being expressly to manifest.  So if one day I am led along a wisdom path derived from one faith and the next day out of the blue I am fed a new wisdom: well, that is because the exact juxtaposition of these two wisdoms is what I was required to experience at this point in the universe, with who I am, right now.  Neither faith system is wrong (or less true), and neither is right (or more true).  Neither is supreme and neither is final.  What is right, and wanted, is the nexus of the two at that point in me as I am at that moment, all things considered.

This sort of view can be pooh-poohed by more traditional religions, as a half-hearted “pick and mix” approach to faith.  But I’m telling you, it’s not a barrel of laughs to be caught by these cognitive dissonances – they rock your whole being and it can take a long period of trust and re-learning to recover from them.  But if you have experienced one, and found it thrilling, and haunting – if you have followed me in this – perhaps your calling is to be Unitarian.