A personal meditation on #Ukraine - March 2022

One of our group has supplied this personal point of view on the invasion of Ukraine and their personal reaction to it.  It was written as a 'note to self'.

Don’t be angry about Putin (or Johnson, or injustice anywhere) to the point of being miserable. That will just make you difficult to live with. 

We are made for co-operation — to operate with others — and co-operation is facilitated by acting for the other, acting out of compassion. Wiping each other’s tears. Being ‘leaning posts’.  Providing what is most needed in the action of mending.  We are made for the good that we can spread, and we feel fit and well if we act in line with that, our natural nature. 

What makes us well, strong, resilient, courageous, is to be who we really are.  And who we really are is that we are in relationship and we are made for goodness.  

So don’t give in to the shock, the cognitive dissonance, that suggests Putin’s actions break every common human rule.  This act of his is not a change to anything.

Don’t worry that you don’t understand why Putin has done what he’s done.  Don’t even think about his failures as a human being.  Don’t try to understand him as a person.

Don’t look over the garden fence, because you have, as the Desert Fathers and Mothers would say, a corpse already, in your own living room.  Try instead to understand your own person.

There will always be wickedness in the world. There will always be things that are suddenly, irretrievably, lost or broken. There will always be things that tempt you to outrage and smouldering misery. 

There will always be people who break the rules, for reasons you can’t understand; rule-breaking that makes you very angry.  You will never be able to fix that.

You will never be able to fix those people.

You can only fix yourself, by reframing what has happened, and what now lies before you, and by trusting the natural order of things for the rest. 

The only thing to do is to try to spread compassion, even in the face of oppression, violence, greed.  Work on your own compassion, and trust to God for the rest.

This is no appeasement.  And it is no easy task.  Being a light in darkness, or a vulnerable citadel on a hill, demands steadfastness and trust. 

The easier path is to falsely imagine that going in, guns blazing, will eliminate the problem.  It won’t, and it will introduce more problems. 

Seek inside yourself for your own source of natural compassion and act from that. We are meant for goodness.  We are wired for it.  Do not let Putin, or anyone else, move you away from the place in yourself that is the source of compassion.

Find a way to stay in your own natural compassion, and act from there. 

~~~~~~~

If none of that helps, and if you must, then think of things in terms of time, in terms of the long-term.  Things always come round in the end.

Do not go into Ukraine to kill.  Better that fewer people are killed now, fewer holes torn irreversibly in the human fabric; better that the current burden of pain, in all war’s forms, is shouldered by someone — even by those who didn’t deserve to have to shoulder it; better those things, than that you, over and above them, in your own life, and in the ripples coming from your life, increase the burden of anger and hate that the world has to carry. 

In the end, through people’s natural justice and natural compassion, things will be turned around.  No dictatorship can last forever.  Once people have decided to be free, nothing will prevent them from becoming free. 

~~~~~~~

Or if role models help you, there are these.

Gandhi, whose peacefulness freed India from the imperial British.  And Mandela, whose decades of incarceration changed him from a terrorist to a peacemaker. And the Dalai Lama, who under other circumstances would have been a peaceful leader of a small Himalayan nation; but who through the violent theft of his country became one whose compassion and wisdom illumines the entire world. 

You might even think of the figure of Jesus, in the oppression of Roman occupation.  The narrative of his silence and non-violence, in the face of certain and gruesome violence towards his person. The legend of his dying words of forgiveness.  

If persons can do this, can live from their place of compassion, while risking losing everything except their determination against violence, and can make a difference in the world, then so can you. 

An evening prayer for #Ukraine posted by one of the Ringwood Unitarians

"My soul is sorrowful, even unto death, stay awake and keep watch with me." (The Bible, book of Mark, chapter 14 verse 34).

This is the call we answer tonight. 

There are people fearful and we would be with them.

There are people grieving and we would be there.

There are people who must make choices we are currently spared; and while we dare not counsel, we would they know they are not alone tonight. 

In the darkness and the quiet we will be with them,

We will seek strength for and with them,

We will seek comfort for and with them,

And we will hope that each of us may rise, to answer the call we alone can discern in our hearts.

Amen

Rescuers working among the rubble of private houses in Zhytomy

(Ukraine Emergency Ministry press service/AFP)

Not alone - only those in thrall to self-sufficiency will deny this - February 2022 gathering of Unitarians associated with Ringwood

In February 2022, although the end of the local requirements to keep people safe from COVID19 was in sight, we continued to gather using Zoom.

After the usual ritual of lighting the candle in the chalice, the gathering involved the usual mixture of periods of silence, music via YouTube and other open online sources, readings,  prayer/meditation, and some reflective words by the person presiding for the day.

Also, as it was the start of our ninth year of gathering together, we included a discussion about membership, and mutually invited each other into relationship within the group for the next twelve months.  In this way we can make clear to each other and any other body that enquires, just who it is that is involved in making decisions to steer the group during the next twelve months.

In this time of our muster and our roll call,

May we remember that the task of a church is to serve the needs of people. 

The need to feel loved.

The need to connect with people.

The need to connect with ideas that come through people, through being with people.

The need to belong.

In contrast, although we do each need this from time to time, the ultimate aim of going to a church is not to find mending for ourselves, nor a sense of belonging for ourselves, nor to serve ourselves at all.

The aim of going into a church is to come out of church again,

But to come out - and re-enter the world - changed;

And hence to bring change to the world.

The readings were taken from the book of Job in the Bible (Job, chapter 33 verses 12-33), and ‘We Are One - A Manifesto for Humanity’, by Simenon Honoré.

Lucy, who was the gathering’s president, suggested that the first reading is part of a long, multi-sided Jewish theological debate in the Book of Job.  She said, “It’s not clear that the book is offering a single remedy, one answer, to the problems of life. The book overall seems to be like a set of differing possibilities, some of which conflict. 

"The reading we heard is ascribed to a speaker named Elihu, who is in conversation with Job.  Elihu starts out by saying that we all have times, when we have an impulse to do something, but something stops us.  We may have bad dreams about our plans, and fear stops us.  Or something strikes at our pride, hard enough to stop us in our tracks.  Or our plans make us ill.  Or if we acknowledge our bad intent to others, and say sorry, we will be mended.

“We may like to smile at the archaic poetic language of the Bible, but the image sticks:

even as we lie dying as a result of our bad behaviour, if only a single angel, out of the whole multitude of angels that there may be, speaks up for us, speaks up for the good that we have done in our life, then we will certainly be saved.

“The second reading talks about inner light, inner joy, which the writer says is there in everyone.  Not only this writer, but mystics throughout the ages have said the same.  I have heard these terms used too:  clarity, union, awakening, awareness, bliss, oblivion, enlightenment.

“What the writer is saying is that there is a state — a 'no thing' — that we might all find given to us if we make the right preparation; a state that transforms us interiorly, and also changes the way we relate to the world.

“Very importantly, all the mystics and prophets are clear on this: this indescribable state exists more fundamentally than our normal mode of being."

“So this state is not affected by any of our good luck or bad luck along the way; nor by any of the good deeds we do to connect ourselves with others and serve others; nor by our alienating deeds that disconnect us from others, and even from ourself.  This state is not, and cannot ever be, earned.  On the other side of the coin, no one can ever be dispossessed of this state (though we can be in our own personal desert, blocking our own way to reach it).

“This state is not under our control in any way, not in the sense that we can use the word ‘our’ in any usual way.  We did not make the universe, we did not set this way of being in place: we are inside this paradigm.

“We did not make the indescribable state of awakening, and we cannot be certain of attaining or experiencing this state in this life, though there are certain preparations that might make to help.  This state is unaffected by our lives in the world, though remaining accessible to us.  This is beyond our normal comprehension.

“Though our first reading sets it in some very different words, the essence of this concept runs the same through both readings:

“There is something — a ‘no thing’, a state — that is beyond.

“A joy, a light, a clarity that, using common language, we can only say is somehow ‘bigger’ than we are.  It is not to be bidden by us.  Not at our behest.  The writers of both our readings are certain: there is something beyond us that we simply cannot control.  

“Only a person deluded by the idea of self-sufficiency will deny this.  And the only thing to do, when we have recognized that, is to resign ourselves to it, or as Muslims say, to surrender ourselves to it.”