Our gathering in the Meeting House on 19 May had both ritual and theological elements.
We do not encourage our service leaders (whom we refer to as 'presidents for the day') to spend a lot of time describing or defining theological ideas in our gatherings. We rather like the quote attributed to the first English Queen Elizabeth, when she said that she “had no appetite for opening windows on men’s souls.” She didn't want to know what each of her people believed; she wanted only that they could all worship together.
Generally, we prefer to spend our time together engaging in a practice; or at the very least, reflecting on a narratives from our common cultural religious background that inform our living.
But, despite our preference for practice rather than theory, the theory of religion cannot be altogether ignored, because people are often curious about what elements of faith go together to make up the Unitarian way of life; also, because we recognise that while practice is important, some of us remain thrilled by concepts and words and how they transform lives through the inner motifs they evoke.
The words that opened our gathering on 19th May represent the theological position that resonates with many of us, although we remember we can never be 100% sure.
“All that there is, is one, and that one is God. It is as if all that there is, is one, and that one is God."
Then there was our normal practice element of reflecting on the past week, examining silently what we might do better another time.
Next there were two readings, looking forward a week to 26th May, which in other churches would be celebrated as Trinity Sunday.
The first reading was from Cyprian Smith. It was an interpretation of the work of Meister Eckhart from the 13th/14th centuries. Eckhart was a Roman Catholic priest, a mystic, who had had experiences of the divine that he tried to communicate to his contemporaries. As with all mystics, he could only speak obliquely about what he had discovered on his spiritual journeying. Naturally, Eckhart’s motif was the Holy Trinity of classical Christianity. He wrote from his lived mystical experience about the relationships within the Trinity and the impact of the Trinity on human spirituality and relatedness to God. Cyprian Smith is a current day Benedictine monk who attempts to clarify Eckhart’s rather difficult sermons and texts. Despite Smith’s efforts, it was, nonetheless, rather mind-mangling.
The second reading was a description from a commentator on particle physics, Diarmuid O’Murchu. The reading was about the discovery by physicists in the 1960s of what they identified as the ultimate building blocks of atoms: particles they named quarks. And how since then, they have never managed to find a quark naturally existing in isolation. Hadrons, which are the particles composed of quarks, have been artificially split using highly sophisticated technology. But the quarks that came out of the splitting of the hadrons decayed in micro-instants.
“The quarks were proving to be highly elusive, making sense only in groupings of two or three, displaying an elegant versatility to manifest their existence only in relationships. Quarks give up their family connections stubbornly, and then decay in a micro-instant, as if they have no way to survive out of relationship. The capacity to relate seems to be at the heart of the quark world......... Across the sciences, there is mounting evidence for the fact that everything is created out of relatedness, sustained through relationships, and thrives on interdependence.”
Thankfully, with two such dense readings, there were plenty of musical interludes to allow us to muse on what we had heard.
There were prayers, and a reflection by the president for the day on what the readings evoked in her.
This was wide ranging, and touched on references from other world faiths. She said, borrowing quite heavily again from Diarmuid O’Murchu,
“The triune nature of God is something that is not unique to Christianity, but an archetypal phenomenon. A way of dealing with the world, a key ingredient of universal life and culture. It seems to me that the doctrine of the Trinity is an attempted expression that the essential nature of God is about relatedness and the capacity to relate....The real issue is not whether God is monotheistic or polytheistic. What science – for so long the perceived enemy of religion – reveals and confirms is what many belief systems have been struggling to articulate: God is first and foremost a relatedness.”
And this was our closing blessing:
Let all we do be done in joy;
May we ever seek abundant living.
Let all we do be done in truth;
May we ever listen to the voice within.
Let all we do be done in love;
May affection for all that lives be the rule of our hearts.
