January 2015 meeting

http://www.contemplativemind.org/practices/tree

Our January meeting for reverence and worship was led by Lucy, and focused on why the words practice and discipline keep popping up in religion.

We started out by noticing that there is no single Unitarian faith, and that every Unitarian service is an interfaith service, since – although we can never know – we can imagine that every person has a different faith.

In the light of the recent Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, we also agreed that it is important for people of faith to practice their own belief system long enough and seriously enough that they no longer harbour the fear that another belief can insult or affect their own.  Losing fear of other beliefs is one way to work towards peace. 

After the lighting of the chalice and our normal opening ritual there were readings from Hinduism and the Jesus tradition.  The Hindu reading came from the sacred book of the Upanishads, and it was the story of Indra and Prajapati.  Indra spent one hundred and one years as a disciple of his teacher Prajapati before he gained the mystical knowledge he sought.

The second reading was by a contemporary writer explaining some of the teachings of the Christian hermits, men and women, who lived in the deserts of 5th century Egypt.  These hermits are known collectively as the Desert Fathers and Mothers and the teachings they gave were one of the inspirations for monastic life through the centuries.  These wise people have emphasised to us that it takes a very long time to fully become the human being we have the potential to become. 

So these two traditions both advise that application and repeated tries are the only way to develop and grow in a spiritual sense.  The view was offered that the words discipline and practice can more or less be interchanged, and that having a regular practice to hang onto can prevent us from becoming completely derailed when crises and shocks occur.

We spent some time in silent contemplation of the practices that have emerged for us in our personal lives, that allow us to grow in faith or spirit, and we sang some hymns in gratefulness for the project of spiritual growth and the chance to keep on trying.

We finished with the International Prayer for Peace.  The words of this prayer, adapted from the Hindu Upanishads, were used by Mother Teresa in 1981. She urged everyone of all faiths to use the peace prayer daily at noon. 

 

Lead me from death to life,

from falsehood to truth.

Lead me from despair to hope,

from fear to trust.

Lead me from hate to love,

from war to peace.

Let peace fill our heart, our world, our universe.

Community Carols at the Meeting House 2014

As a Unitarian I am delighted that yesterday the Meeting House committee in Ringwood held a community carols session co-sponsored by the Unitarians in Ringwood.  We had carols marking Christmas and other festivals, some more familiar than others.  The words weren’t necessarily quite what people expected, and some were very taken by that.  And the children loved it.

In Great Britain our history is a fusion of many people’s histories, and our faiths are fusions of many different faiths.   Christmas is a festival set against a Jewish cultural background, brought to these islands by Romans and grafted onto the original pre-Christian earth-spirit beliefs.

In these islands it was a pre-Christian practice to hold a festival in the middle of winter to mark the turning of the year, the lengthening of the days, and hope for the future; called Solstice.  It is Solstice today, and people gathered at Stonehenge to see the rising sun at the start of the new solar year.  Near the Solstice, pre-Christian people here celebrated their ancestors in a festival called Yule.  We still talk of Yule logs, though today these tend to be chocolate cakes rather than a smouldering log on the fire.

And brought to Britain from the Middle East, there is a Jewish miracle story from 2000 BCE of an oil-lamp, low on oil, burning continuously for eight days on no more than a drop of oil in the besieged temple of Jerusalem, though it should have gone out long before.  Coming in the dead of winter, Hanukkah celebrates the triumph of light over darkness, of purity over contamination, of spirituality over materialism.  Jewish people the world over have just celebrated Hanukkah on 16 December.

And of course some of the later Romans to arrive here told of the Jewish baby whose mother was turned away from the inn and who laid him in a manger: the baby who as an adult went on to teach that we are loved into being, we are supported throughout our lives by love, and at our ending we are received in love.  Jesus’ good news was that each of us and all of us are loved, and we must pass that love on.  The birth of the baby Jesus is what we celebrate at Christmas.

So all these festivals, and others such as Diwali from Hinduism and Eid from Islam, which also sometimes fall in winter,  are what have fused into our British cultural celebration at this time of year. 

December meeting

Our December worship took the form of readings about Advent and Christmas, and how these festivals can be seen from a Unitarian perspective – as preparation and waiting for a growing light, which may or may not be named Christ depending on one’s theology, to break through the darkness.  We had some moving music and periods of silence.  We also included our usual ritual of sharing light, bread, water, and earth/air elements.  We always do this wordlessly because people attach different yet heartfelt meanings to the ritual, and we respect each other’s private relationship with the divine.

We also lit candles as part of expressing those joys and concerns dear to us, so to help our reconciliation with the events of our lives.

We were moved by a prayer we have come across from the World Community for Christian Meditation in the UK : part of which is adapted below:

May this group be a true spiritual home for the seeker, a friend for the lonely, a companion for the confused.  In the silence of this room may all the suffering, violence and confusion of the world encounter the power that will console, renew and uplift the human spirit.

May this silence be a power to open the hearts of people to the vision of God, and so to each other, in love and peace, justice and human dignity.  May the beauty of the Divine Life fill this group and the hearts of all who pray here with joyful hope.

May all who come here, weighed down by the problems of humanity, leave giving thanks for the wonder of human life and whatever lies beyond it.