Wisdom and Difficult Decisions — Lent, Ukraine, COVID19 and a cable passing through the eye of a needle #Unitarians in Ringwood 12 March 2023

No that's not a typo in the title.  Only some versions of the Bible have (in the book of Matthew, chapter 19 v 24) a camel passing through the eye of a needle.  At least one version has a cable passing through the eye of a needle.  It's worth researching different versions.  Jubilee Bible 2000, Matthew 19:24 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew 19:24&version=JUB  

It’s just worth noting that the reports on this blog run the risk of misrepresenting what it feels like at one of our gatherings.  There’s not just a wordy ‘sermon’ by the president for the day.  But in order to feel the experience — of the prayer words, the mutual silences, the recorded music (dramatic incidental music as well as hymns), the heartfelt expressions of joys and concerns as we mark the movements in our lives with careful listening to each other as well as with candles — you have to be there.

It’s just that the bits that most lend themselves to a written record are the readings and the reflection on the readings by the president for the day. 

We are part of a tradition that used to centre aspirations for spiritual and societal development exclusively on the narratives inherited from the Christian Bible.  Friends of ours in sibling Unitarian congregations and broader networks may not look so much to those roots; but we in Ringwood have chosen to have a look at them as often as we can.  We are not traditional Christians, but culturally we feel more at home with wisdom from Christianity than we do with wisdom from other faiths.  We feel our tradition provides a homing ground, and something we can point at that holds us together.  So when we meet as a group we gravitate to stories from Christianity to help us with our lives, even if personally, individually, none of us necessarily goes to Christian writings as our first resort for inspiration. 

This month we were reminded that this is the Christian season of Lent, that it’s a year since Russia started the war on Ukraine, and three years since the first lockdown in UK as a result of COVID19.

During Lent we remember that the teacher Jesus is depicted as being strenuously tempted, during a long period in the wilderness out of contact with society and all the usual nourishments of home. The story of Jesus has it that he passes every test, by making decisions that put reverence and humility at the heart of his spiritual practice. He sets aside his own ‘will to power’ for the sake of ‘will to mutuality’ — in the story, Jesus is seeking a mutual relationship with the Creator. 

Regarding the failed, despicable, vanity project of invading Ukraine, aimed at satisfying the greed for continued power, largely on the part of one man, we remain shocked and dismayed as the war staggers on.  The temptation of the ‘will to power’ is there for everyone.  But let us remember that not all lunges for power are so obvious, lest we imagine that we ourselves are above them. 

On 26 March 2020, three years ago, the UK went into the first lockdown of the COVID19 pandemic. There are direct comparisons that can be drawn between Jesus’ time in the wilderness and our nation’s confinement, in which we too, all of us, were subject to temptation. We know only too well the stories of those who were unable to contain themselves, to restrain themselves to act in mutuality. The pandemic was a time when people were being asked to make important and difficult decisions, with scant information. A time when wisdom was called for, and was sometimes in short supply. 

Lent is associated with renunciation, self-discipline, resisting temptation.  It’s sort-of a ‘No pain? No gain!’ period in the calendar.  It’s a time when we get to know ourselves better by finding out just how hard it is to choose a way through when, in reality, there’s no one to police our choices but ourselves.

So our president for the day brought to our attention those times when personally we are facing really tough decisions, when we are trying to decide which path to take, whether we really know ourselves at all, and what sources of advice there might be available to us as we agonise over what to do.

With this as a backdrop there were two readings.  The first was about the rich young man who asks Jesus for advice about the next step he must take to assure his pathway to the kingdom of heaven. And the second was simply a hotchpotch of snippets from the Christian Bible regarding taking decisions, or sources of advice. It thus included words from Proverbs, Sirach, Matthew, James and Paul.

We heard the following from our president for the day.

In the first reading, the middle class, nouveau riche, or aristocratic and moneyed, young man is yet mature enough to see that a committed, personal, spiritual practice is essential for an authentic aspiration to find the kingdom of heaven. And he sees that here’s a teacher who has attracted many people. So the young man thinks Jesus might provide the key he has been looking for, over and above the faithful practice he already commits to. 

But instead of getting an answer he can handle, the young man is told to look at his outward context — there is no mention of principles, philosophies or of his inner landscape. ‘Sell all your possessions, give the money away to those who are in want of the basics, and that act of giving will generate in you lasting riches — and then come along and live with me; live like I do.’ 

The young man feels bereft and in a quandary. His preconceived complacency around the next piece of advice, his next stage of learning, has been both pinpointed and stripped from him. He is torn by the choice placed before him. He has been told he lacks only one thing. This thing. This giving away of his comfort based on worldly possessions. This shedding of his self-image as a man of consequence, in exchange for a strengthened mutuality with those who hadn’t the basics. 

The young man is a devout Jew, engaged in a robust spiritual practice. He presumably has had access to all the usual sources of advice — the Hebrew Bible, the learned men of the day (the Pharisees), the poetry and folk wisdom of the land he lives in, and the voice he hears when he is quiet enough inside. Apparently none of those sources of advice have shocked him in the way that that simple advice from Jesus shocks him.  It is as if the idea Jesus gives him was completely new to him. Yet it resonates sufficiently within him that he is unable to dismiss it. Had he known it was not for him, he could have dismissed it at once.  But he doesn’t dismiss it.  He can’t.  He hadn’t registered this idea before, and yet, now he hears it, it sounds a bell inside him. Something about this advice registers with him as true; he doesn't like it, but he can’t turn away from it. Oh! the agony. 

We are not told what he chooses to do. This story isn’t about answers.

And with that ‘unanswering’ ringing in our ears, pretty much all of what we heard afterwards was a series of questions:

Do we make decisions in a vacuum? 

What is there around about us that we could use, to help us make these sort of difficult decisions? 

What sources of advice do we have? 

Which sources can we trust? 

Quakers talk about “the leadings of God” — where are these to be found, or heard? In the natural world? In traditional narratives and writings? In face to face discussions with trusted counsellors, friends, advisers, sages? In the still small voice encountered after long inner struggle or hours of quietude? 

When there is a decision before us that is agonizing, what weight can we give to advice? Does the answer simply have to come, in the end, from inside?

Is conscience the leadings or promptings of what lies outside time and space and human imagination, or do we build it for ourselves, different in every age, based on habit and culture? A socially-constructed code of behaviour?

Or even more drastically, is conscience a genetic trick set up by our selfish DNA to exploit every opportunity towards survival? Ethics and morals nowhere in sight? 

How do we know the will of God? How would we recognise it, if it were revealed to us? How do we know the truth? How do we know God? How do we know the will of God? How do we know the nature of God?    [Spoiler: We don’t! ]

So when we are presented with advice in the face of a decision, how do we decide which advice is true? How do we decide whether advice received is relevant or useful or misleading? 

The Bible is full of advice about decisions, and their contexts.  Which angles out of all the angles offered in it might we dwell upon, as we face hard decisions? 

Setting down the Bible again, does it all come down to experience? Have we lived a life where, through chance, things went well for us after taking advice from groups of people we knew? Was something in a book we read, which we decided to act upon, instrumental in our success? Or did luck come into it when we trusted our own judgment alone?  Or have we had the other experience, of taking wise advice and making ostensibly sound judgments, and nonetheless finding life bitter and treacherous?

Why don’t I sell all my possessions and give the money to the poor? 

Are we really here for this? - to seek paradise? Ringwood #Unitarians sit and listen in Feb 2023

At our February gathering for reverence we were privileged to welcome the District Minister for the London District, Rev Jim Corrigall, as our president for the day.  At a prayerful and heartfelt gathering we noticed, not for the first time, that as we gather in the Meeting House at the centre of the town, it can feel as though we are at the quiet centre of an ever turning world.  We sing, we read, we turn to prayer and we sit in quiet contemplation or meditation, all while the sounds carry on around us of chatting people moving past the Meeting House, shopping trolleys being collected, buses stopping and starting, and the bells from the parish church nearby.  Another sense of privilege: it can feel like we are anchoring the town in silence, for the benefit of all.

The Bible reading for the day came from the Book of Luke, chapter 17, and it reminded us that Jesus said that many would search here and there to find the kingdom of God, whereas the kingdom of God is to be found within us, among us.

Our president drew our attention to several readings from the book Seeking Paradise - A Unitarian Mission for Our Times, by Stephen Lingwood.  This is a book that several of us have read, and which is now on the list of ‘must reads’ for others of us.

It was a delight to hear Rev Jim read from and comment on Stephen Lingwood’s book — such a relevant theme for a small fellowship as we gathered on our ninth anniversary.  What are we here for?

My own take home messages from the book were slightly different from Rev Jim’s, and the rest of this blogpost reflect my own take on the book.

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This book is one which, by looking at the history of our tradition, particularly with regard to its mission in times past, suggests that our tradition needs to be clearer about what its mission, its purpose, might be today.  Lingwood is quite clear that he is putting forward a proposition, and welcomes other contrasting propositions, so that the tradition can hold a debate, and move understanding along a little.  

The basic question Lingwood is trying to address is: what does it matter if our church exists or not, or whether our church grows or not, if truth and salvation do not depend on it?  He says, “I believe it is only by answering the question of our purpose that we can begin to answer the question of our growth.”

In a book that covers a wide span, Stephen Lingwood arrives at his answer, which is that the Unitarian mission is both to discover and create 'paradise'.  He explores what this spirituality of paradise might mean, and how it might provide a sense of vision and mission. 

The word paradise is a word that almost everyone is familiar with, and uses in their own way.  It’s a word that instantly conveys a sense of well-being, peace, opportunity, richness, colour, beauty, laughter, contentment, happiness.  The symbol of paradise has a very long history.  It appears first in the Christian Bible in the image of Adam and Eve walking in the garden of Eden with God, in innocence, plenty, and peace.

Lingwood draws on other writers from our tradition, notably Rebecca Ann Parker, who have argued that in the church there is a persistent and rich symbol of paradise for salvation.  He reports their findings that “Paradise is the biblical image of a state of joy and abundance.  It is the garden of delights where there is no war, no disconnection, no suffering.....Paradise does not just mean a mythical time in the past when all was well.....a Christian spirituality that sees paradise as existing here and now, within us and all around us...both in the world and in the worshipping community...”

“The good news of paradise is that the world is beautiful, good, and overflowing with the love and grace of God.  But we have to open our eyes to paradise in order to make its full presence realised in the world.”

Moreover, says Lingwood, “Paradise points to a deep sense of beauty and love in this world, but this is not the same thing as saying, ‘The world is just lovely and fine as it is.’... I have seen evidence from people resisting extreme evil ....[and] I am provisionally hopeful that faith in paradise is not destroyed by the reality of suffering.”

Perhaps the punchline from the book, although it does not come at the end of the book, is this:

“What is our message? Our good news? That you live in paradise, and that the powers of Empire have lied to you.  In some circumstances, if we are bold enough, perhaps the message could even be that God loves you; that the fundamental reality of the world is relationship, and not isolation — but we each have to discover this for ourselves.”

Being open to new things and moving into a new world — Unitarians in Ringwood gather in Jan 2023

Our reader will not be surprised to read that in the last gathering of the ninth year of our fellowship, all the usual elements of our normal gatherings — prayers, a period of silence, some hymns and some readings — were all enacted as usual.

In a nod to New Year’s Resolutions, our president for the day had chosen a topic about new starts, changes of direction, crises.

The two readings were from the Christian Bible.  The first story was in the Book of Genesis and was about Cain and Abel, the two sons of Adam and Eve (Genesis Chapter 4, verses 1 to 17); and the second was about a blind beggar known as Bartimaeus, as told in the Book of Mark (Mark Chapter 10 verses 46 to 52).

The thoughts our president had about these two readings follow.

“Cain felt ignored by God, and not being fully grounded, he didn’t pay attention to the warning that he got.  He was told that he should see ‘lack of approval’ merely as feedback — on how well (or not) he had done.  He was told that if he didn’t do   what it took to get approval, the temptation would always be there for him to flounce away in disappointment, to divert from his best self, making things worse.  He was to master that in himself.

“In his resentment and disappointment, Cain did not heed the warning.  His form of making things worse was to kill his brother.  He then realised what he had done and tried to cover it up.  The punishment announced was that he was to always be a wanderer, a fugitive, having to hide from himself and society, and to struggle to support himself.  Loved and protected by God, for sure, but outside society.

“But honouring this punishment was something Cain couldn’t cope with, couldn’t take on.  He couldn’t shoulder the hardship and discipline.  He couldn’t honour the God of his parents.  He couldn’t bring himself to live as a wanderer, a fugitive.  Instead, he rejected everything in Eden and went elsewhere to build a citadel; he went somewhere to make roots — a little enclave that he could be head of, could be in charge of, where things would happen according to his own will.  And Cain even justified this to himself by naming the citadel after his son; yes, that was it, he had done all this for the sake of his son.  This was a kind of life imprisonment. And he chose it for himself.  And potentially imposed it on his wife and son as well.

"Bartimaeus was already imprisoned, by his blindness.  Probably not a self-imposed constraint.  He could hear a buzz going on about a teacher who spoke of freedom from bonds that tie, of finding the realm of God no matter your worldly circumstances; of experiencing a life of abundance and blessedness. ‘They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.’  Bartimaeus liked the sound of that so he cried out.

“And in return he heard not the teacher, but the teacher’s followers’ reply: ‘Have courage! The teacher is calling you!’ So he stood up and went to him.  That took strength of heart, and faith.  Such faith, that his life changed and he was healed — we are told he gained his sight.

“Two characters. Two responses.  Two different outcomes. The cost to one, loss of self-esteem, and permanent estrangement.  The cost to the other, having to look inside himself for the courage, the grit, the strength of will, to stand up and make his way forward towards an uncertain future, following the teacher.

“There’s a Jewish joke about a castaway mariner who builds a synagogue, then builds another.  When rescued, he explains that the second is the synagogue he never goes to.  We have all experienced this from time to time.  We make a change in our life and start something new, only to find the same problems pop up in our new situation.  It’s not the external circumstances that do this to us.  Problems don’t actually follow us: we carry our problems with us.  We have to look inside to sort out the wrinkles.  Cain wasn’t prepared to do that.  Bartimaeus was.

“One of the biggest challenges for many people is being able to hear good news when their senses and consciousness are constantly bombarded with bad news. The name ‘Bartimaeus’ is derived from two Aramaic words - “bar” (בַּר) meaning “son (of)” and “tame” (טָמֵא) meaning ‘unclean, defiled’.  So this chap is labelled “son of the unclean”, simply because he can’t see. ‘Bartimaeus’ may not even have been his name, but a nickname given him by the city folk as they cruelly judged his disability as the product of defilement or uncleanness. Bartimaeus has to decide whether to sit in his familiar place, derided and insulted by society, or to get up and take his place in the community of Jesus, with Jesus’ followers, seeking a different way of life.

“There are anecdotes about long-term prison inmates who, when their term is up, don’t want to walk through the door to freedom, because the present pain or misery is more comfortable and less threatening than the uncertainties and obligations that lie beyond.  To walk out takes courage.

“We say we like fresh starts.  Hence the popularity of New Year’s Resolutions.  But every day we have the choice faced by both Cain and Bartimaeus — either to be open to hearing new, very likely uncomfortable, things and moving eventually into a new world;  or to be more comfortable where we are, doing the same-old same-old, hugging the selfsame problems to our chests, like children and their comfort blankets.

“Maybe we need someone to keep pointing us towards a different possibility – speaking a language of hope and love and colour when we are used to words of criticism, blindness or the closing down of potential.  Maybe we need to hear the whisper within the emergency, within the discomfort; the whispered promise that, alongside and as part of new chaos, change can come — change will come.  Not because nothing is permanent, but actually because there is something, something that really is permanent.  Newness is permanent, and it comes along with change.

Video from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope

“That is our dilemma. ‘We are “atoms with consciousness,” who know that one day we shall become “one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust” but wish it to be otherwise with every atomic fibre of our being.  And  “God” is the name we give to our longing for permanence in a universe of change.’  But what we continually fail to do, is recognize that it is newness that is always there for us.  Our ability to see permanence, and hence find peace, is, by and large, dependent on our being able to imagine the mystery that is ‘permanent newness'.

“The Bible narratives we heard today are about people encountering the divine most vividly at their decision points, their crossroads, their crises.  Change, decisions, and relatedness are frequently what mark the divine mystery, the mystery of dynamism and mutual invitation, truth and uncertainty, permanent newness.  May we note our decision points well.”