Address by Andrew Benedict

In “Cathedral”, a short story by the American novelist Raymond Carver, the main character tries to describe a cathedral to man who is blind. “They’re really big,” he explains. “Massive. They’re built of stone. Marble, too, and lots of polished wood. In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, [people] wanted to be close to God. “Draw it,” the blind man asked, “Draw it on my hands.” With his finger the narrator sketches out the plan of a cathedral on the palms of the man’s hands. The blind man then says to him, “I think I can see it now but there is something missing.”

For many people, cathedrals, churches and chapels, mosques, gurdwaras, temples and shrines are sacred space - holy ground. Even those who don’t think of themselves as being particularly religious often expect to feel something other or different when they visit a place of worship, particularly, if it has some history attached to it. For people of faith this sense can be amplified still further, irrespective of the creed or particular religion they follow - whether they be papists or pagans!

I have a friend who is a Jain and in May this year we visited his community’s Temple at Potter’s Bar. Constructed out of pink sandstone and set in 80 acres of parkland, and within a formal garden, the temple is a wonder to behold. Even more so when you discover that this incredibly intricate and ornate building was hand carved in India by over 200 traditional stone masons and then shipped to the UK to be assembled on site like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. As is the Jain custom before entering the Temple we removed our shoes as a reminder, that like Moses on Mount Horeb, we were about to step onto holy ground. If I were to describe the interior of the Derasar with its sanctuary and shrine, or even show you a picture, there would be something missing from the experience of being there which, like Raymond Carver’s cathedral, defies description.

“There is something missing”, said the blind man. Then, he has a moment of inspiration. “Put some people in there now,” he shouts. “What’s a cathedral without people?” Equally, one could ask what is this Meeting House without us, whom St Peter refers to as: “The living stones, which are being built into a spiritual house.” 1 Peter 2:5

A year ago, at the rededication of Newcastle Cathedral, following its extensive restoration, the Dean wrote: “Today we are both grateful, proud hosts and at the same time guests, for in what we offer and what we receive, we participate in the radical hospitality of God.” In other words, places of worship come alive when people inhabit them. Only then do their stones resonate and their rafters sing praise. Only then do they buzz and hum with sounds of life and only then can their walls absorb and echo our laughter and our tears, our anxieties and our hopes, our past and our present, our hopes and our dreams.

As luck or providence would have it, Kamal and I arrived at the Potters Bar Temple just as a wedding ceremony was finishing, and as a joyful and colourful throng of family and friends emerged, led by a smiling bride and groom. Once the wedding party had departed and all was silent it felt as if the Temple still resonated with their love and joy.

Even this wealth of human experience only takes us part of the way to understanding what makes a place numinous and sacred. All religions have places of pilgrimage and retreat which were considered holy ground long before there were temples, churches and mosques built on them. As a student I worked as a guide on the Island of Iona which George Macleod, the founder of the Iona Community, described as a: “Thin place, where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual.” Holy or thin places do not originate with the building of great edifices but in encounters with the living God. The composer Anton Bruckner’s motet Locus Iste, which is often sung at church dedication festivals, translates: “This place was made by God, as a sacrament beyond price; it is without reproach.”

A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of The Divine Presence, pointing us towards the God who meets us in myriads of unexpected ways and places. The Book of Genesis speaks of this, not only in the case of Moses and the burning bush, but also in the story of the fugitive Jacob falling asleep and having a dream. Jacob’s vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder suspended between heaven and earth was such an awesome experience that, despite his predicament, gave him courage to carry on. “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it.” Jacob declared: “How awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” Genesis 28:16-17.

This provides us with an insight into why certain places feel so spiritually alive. They are sacred because people have prayed there, there found comfort, discovered hope, been inspired and experienced joy. They provide us with the space for our human struggle to meet divine grace. And that holy ground can be a temple or a cathedral, it can be a great shrine or where lay lines meet such as at Avebury and Stonehenge. And it can, equally, be somewhere very personal and individual – perhaps known to us alone.

I have been fortunate to go on a number of pilgrimages to holy places: to the Holy Land, to Rome and Assisi and to some lesser-known shrines too. I have even been to Nettuno where the statue of Our Lady of Ipswich ended up – having been smuggled out of the country by Italian sailors during the Reformation! Pilgrimages to Holy Places, like that currently being experienced by Muslims taking part in the Hajj, are not ends in themselves - rather, their lasting spiritual value lies in what happens next, when the pilgrim returns home: That having had a heightened awareness of God’s Presence in a particular place they/we might be more sensitive to that same Divine Presence anywhere, indeed everywhere. If you can touch holiness in a religious building or on a sacred site – you are just as able to experience holiness at other times and in other places too. “Tread softly!” urges Christina Rossetti, “All the earth is holy ground.”

I wonder where is holy ground for you? As I have said, it doesn’t have to be somewhere conventionally religious: a place of worship or a shrine. It could be a somewhere associated with certain memories and experiences. It could be a landscape, the view from a mountain, down a valley, by a river, or out to sea. Covehithe Beach does it for me! It could be anywhere. If, that is, we are open and sensitive enough, if we are spiritually aware and prepared to live for the moment.

To sum up, I want to read to you The Bright Field by the priest and poet, R.S. Thomas, in which he speaks of his own experience of Holy Ground:

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Fragments of the Mind of God: Atoms in Search of a Meaning

When you read Ezekiel’s visionary experience of the “four living creatures” appearing out of the tumultuous, flashing sky and the “wheels within wheels” that rise and move with them (chapter 1, vv. 4-21), you could be forgiven for wondering what he had been smoking because that vision bears the hallmarks of an hallucinogenic experience. But some have seen it differently. They have seen in these “wheels within wheels”, with eyes in their rims, evidence of alien spacecraft – flying saucers – visiting the earth in remote antiquity. I’m not saying that I agree with this! Maybe Ezekiel was on some hallucinogenic substance, maybe he just had a very vivid imagination, or maybe he really did have a vision! Who knows? But the ‘flying saucer’ theory raises an issue that has long fascinated many people, namely, are we alone in the universe? In all its infinity of space and time, in all the countless billions of planets, stars and galaxies, is our tiny “blue dot” the only place where life has appeared, the only place where life has evolved to the point where sentient, self-conscious beings like us look up at the night sky and ask if they are alone?

When we do this it can lead to a sense of cosmic loneliness or to a longing to pass beyond Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “green borders of the peopled earth” and “launch into the trackless deeps of space”, there to search among the planets and stars of the “final frontier” and maybe encounter evidence of beings with whom we can communicate, with whom we can find fellowship and kinship, with whom we can compare our ideas of what it all means. As Anna Laetitia Barbauld asks, “is there not / A tongue in every star that talks with man, / And wooes him to be wise?”

And meaning is perhaps the object of this quest, the Holy Grail for which we search like latter-day Knights of the Round Table, itself a symbol of infinity and of our equality before it. To contemplate the unimaginable vastness of space, to realise how utterly insignificant we seem in relation to it, to be aware of how microscopically small we are in the midst of it, how brief and transitory are not only our own lives but also those of our civilization, our species, even our planet - to contemplate these things can be crushing. How can the momentary blips that are human lives mean anything in this universe of infinities upon infinities?

But maybe this is the wrong way to look at things. However insignificant our lives may seem we cannot deny the remarkable fact that they exist, that something quite extraordinary has happened on this planet, something that makes it more special than we can imagine. Not only did life appear – we don’t know how – which is remarkable and near-miraculous in itself, but life evolved into a variety of beings that even now we cannot number or understand – even as, in our folly, we seem intent on exterminating them.

And among all the species that evolved there was at least one which looked up at the night sky and wondered what it was all about. Of course, we can’t say that our species is the only one that has ever done this. There have, for example, been other human species on this planet that are now gone, leaving only their bones and a few artefacts to show that they ever existed. Did they look up at the night sky and wonder what it all meant? Probably they did. And are there other species on other worlds who look up at their night skies and wonder what it all means? Personally, I think there probably are.

However vast the odds against it may seem, there are so many billions of worlds out there that there must be some where something akin to what happened here has happened too. Of course, we may be so distant from even the nearest – in time as well as space – that they might as well not exist, but they are probably there all the same and their inhabitants may ask much the same questions as we do about existence and its meaning. Like us they may live on island-worlds amidst the apparently lifeless wastes, worlds that are blue-green oases among the sterile rocks and gaseous giants that most planets probably are, too hot or too cold for the miracle of life to happen.

But does any of this mean anything? Traditional religion found meaning, but it did so largely on the basis of outmoded and hopelessly inadequate understandings of the universe. To read theology is so often to read the thoughts of people who couldn’t see beyond this planet, whose concepts of God were as limited as their knowledge of the cosmos; who thought it credible that the fate of the universe hinged on a few events that took place on this tiny planet a few short centuries ago. The arguments and obsessions of so many theologians – past and present – pale into utter irrelevance when seen in the context of worlds and galaxies without number spread across fourteen billion years of space- time.

But does that make us all mere meaningless fragments? No, it doesn’t, because we know that our lives have meaning – meaning for us. And as mystics and poets have always known, meaning doesn’t depend on size. The universe is infinitely small as well as infinitely vast. As Mother Julian of Norwich wrote in her ‘Revelations of Divine Love’:

“And he showed me…a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, on the palm of my hand, round like a ball. I looked at it…and wondered, ‘What is this?’ And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made’.”

And similarly, William Blake wrote:

                   “To see a World in a Grain of Sand

                     And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

                     Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

                    And Eternity in an hour”

(from ‘Auguries of Innocence’) 

The scale of the universe isn’t what matters. What matters is how we treat each other in whatever time we’ve got. It matters that we are mostly caring and that we aspire to be kind. It matters that we can experience beauty, treasure it and appreciate it. It matters that we value truth and knowledge. It matters, as we are now realising, that we undo the harm we have done – and are still doing – to our environment, and so save it and ourselves from our own folly. All these things mean something here and now, and so give meaning to our existence. And they matter regardless of the second law of thermodynamics and the ultimate fate of the universe.

And when we look up at the night sky and see those countless stars, so distant in space and time, that means something too. By the very contemplation of infinity, or of the bizarre insights of quantum physics, we not so much see meaning as give meaning. We are the givers of meaning, the makers of meaning. Without us – and those beings like us who probably exist somewhere out there – there is no meaning, only a whole lot of rocks and gas, black holes and dark matter, without a thought, idea or feeling between them. Some would have said – maybe still say – that God gives the universe meaning but that can’t be understood as it was by the theologians of the past. Rather we may say that God is the cosmic process itself, the creative force that has driven everything since the beginning, since the Big Bang. But if we do say that, then how can this universal process perceive meaning or give meaning? It can do so because we, and creatures like us, who are part of it and products of it, can perceive meaning, create meaning and give meaning. We are the universe awake and conscious of itself. We are not only the hands of God and the eyes of God, we are each of us fragments of the mind of God.

We are the potential inherent in the universe made manifest, we are incarnations of the power – the spirit – that has been there all the time, awaiting the opportunity to become flesh, to become the meaning of everything else. And that is so even if it has happened only rarely in this unimaginable universe, even if it has happened only once. When we look out into the vastnesses of space and wonder what it all means, we should remember that we who look out are what it means, that our looking out is what it means. It is what happens in our inner space that gives meaning to all that outer space.

We are not meaningless accumulations of atoms. We are accumulations of atoms which have woken up to live lives rich in meaning; lives that can embody love and compassion and all that we know as vital, good and noble - all that we call divine. And in waking up we have awakened the universe of which we are part, and that means something.  

Queerness, Kinship, and Unitarianism: Reflections for Pride by Liz Constable

One is not born, but becomes straight
(Sara Ahmed paraphrasing Simone de Beauvoir)

When Linda invited me to share some thoughts with you all for our Pride Celebration service, I felt honoured and also a little flummoxed about what I could contribute to a congregation of Unitarians whose collective and individual histories abound in concrete examples of support for the dignity, rights, and full inclusion of LGBTQIA people? And so the project of composing words for you was simultaneously easier and yet also more challenging. As an educator for my entire career, I’m also so very accustomed to the dialogic component of communication so I do invite any and all questions, contestations and objections! 

First, a vignette of my own experiences of Pride at a specific time in history---early 1990s---when Gay Pride events in the US were witnessing the emergence of Queer politics and activism as very positive motors for socio-political transformation. My participation in San Francisco Pride events at this particular historical juncture prompted me to focus today on the positive contributions ‘queer’ness brings to Gay and Lesbian politics and Gay Pride. And then, how do queer theory and activism, on the one hand, and Unitarian values, on the other, speak to each other?’

I hope to show that queer values have a particular affinity with Unitarian values; to show that Unitarianism and queerness can be allies for each other in the ways both challenge dogma and creeds; both stay open to new ways of understanding; both prioritize the underlying connectedness of humanity and develop inter-connections among groups; and finally, both consider that the understanding of the worlds we inhabit is not fixed once and for all, but instead emerges from a process of becoming, an open search where we all make choices.

June early 1990s, Market Street, San Francisco Pride

The roar of the motorcycles of the Dykes on Bikes felt like so many fanfares sounding out the confidence and defiance of the women in the saddles. Exhilaration: theirs and mine. Fierce, fearless, radiant in their exuberant solidarity, resplendent in their leather, revelling in the capacity for joy their eroticism embodied, these dykes were, as tradition has it, leading the SF Pride March. But where was I in my own life journey at this event? In my early 30s, I’d re-oriented a heterosexual life, and embarked on a long-term relationship with an American friend, Sharon, a faculty member at Cal State University, Los Angeles.  Standing in the densely packed crowds on Market Street, the very publicness and visibility of the dykes on bikes---the gathering of minoritized bodies in public space---thrilled me, disoriented me, and transfixed me. What moved me was the transformation of public space into one where dissident sexual minorities had become the majority. These women’s very public performativity of the erotic as a creative energy seemed to intimate a radical socio-political potential. The visibility of their bodies occupying public space seemed to expand the very potential of collective action for social change beyond my own lived experience at that time. Visibility matters.

And then, Queer Nation and Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) were also very powerful presences at Pride that year. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, in efforts to push President Reagan, and then Bush, to support funding for medical research into AIDS, sexual dissidents had reclaimed and re-signified the adjective ‘queer.’ They turned the adjective ‘queer’ away from its history as shaming insult and slur into proud self-identification in Queer Nation (1990). ‘Queer Nation: Get Used to It!,’ ‘Queers Bash Back,’ ‘Warning: Homophobia Can be Dangerous to your Health.’ Queer Nation’s punchy slogans on neon stickers were visible on backpacks and clothing, my own included. The political activism of Queer Nation and Act Up shaped public space that day, building alliances and coalitions across social groups, infusing activism with campy humour, and with justified anger. As African American lesbian writer, Audre Lorde, puts it, ‘Anger [. . .] loaded with information and energy.’ The bristling energy of righteous, or justified anger also mapped out a world of new forms of kinship through coalitional political activism. 

Today, I imagine that when we think of the term ‘queer,’ and the way it circulates in popular culture, it functions for many of us as a rather amorphous umbrella term, or to denote a taste for beauty and style, as in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I also suspect that ‘queerness’ has become detached from its role as a political perspective that is aligned with other social justice struggles to challenge, overhaul and transform dominant social frameworks rather than assimilate into them. In other words, rather anodyne and superficial associations with queer aesthetics rather than queer politics seem to prevail. And yet, queer theory and activism developed in the early 1990s in part to push back against and reject the aspirations of often privileged, white, middle-class gays and lesbians seeking to adapt existing social norms, and to be accepted as ‘normal.’ To take just one example, where gay and lesbian activists worked for the legalization of same-sex marriage, queer activists rejected marriage as the primary institution sanctioning intimacy. Queer activists have focused more on exposing the exclusions and violences perpetuated by social norms grounded in binary oppositions such as masculine/feminine, straight/gay, hetero/homo, private/public, normal/abnormal that prioritize one term over the other. For example, queerness opens up the spaces of both/and, both masculine and feminine, as in the identity of genderqueer. Queer lives are also about the potentialities of lives ‘unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing,’ (Jack Halberstam). In this, queer lives take on the challenge of constructing non-biological kinship, building connections and community, in the absence of models, but to create the conditions of possibility for other ways of dwelling in the world.  And in this respect, queer lives and politics open up understandings of what counts as a life worth living. Or as cultural critic Sara Ahmed puts it, queer values seek to ‘to give support to those whose lives and loves make them appear oblique, strange and out of place.’

In 2021, it might seem that in the UK, we have witnessed the growing and open acceptance of the experiences, desires, lives and loves of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer individuals over recent decades. And perhaps, we might even ask ourselves whether the annual Pride celebrations here have already accomplished the social justice goals they gave themselves, and brought visibility to specific demands for policy changes and structural reforms necessary to enable LGBTQIA individuals to live and work free from discrimination, hatred, shame and stigma?    

A quick review of the situations of LGBTQIA individuals here in the UK and worldwide reminds us that plenty of gender justice work, and struggles for the rights of sexual minorities, still continue in the UK and across the globe. As the Stonewall.org website reports, over 75, 000 young LGBTQIA people are bullied at school in the UK each year; over 100 hate crimes are committed against LGBTQIA people each day in the UK; more than 2 in 5 trans people in the UK have been attacked or threatened with violence; and in over 70 countries, same-sex relationships remain illegal (of course, in the former Commonwealth countries, many of the laws criminalizing same-sex relations originate in British colonial legislation).

The role, significance, and impact of Pride celebrations are, as this indicates, inevitably and necessarily, completely context-dependent. A case in point: just this last month, in Hungary, the right-wing government of Orban, following the example of Russia, passed laws making it illegal for information considered to be promoting same sex relations or gender change to be shared with under-18s. This comes on top of Orban’s acceleration of the pace of anti-LGBTQ legislation this last year, by denying the right of adoption to LGBTQIA people and by voting on a bill to deny trans people legal recognition. In this context, Budapest Pride, that took place yesterday, July 24th, provided a crucially important public and visible experience of kinship and solidarity for all LGBTQIA individuals but particularly for young LGBTQIA people in Hungary.

Let’s return to my title for a moment: ‘One is not born, but becomes straight.’ What is Sara Ahmed, queer feminist philosopher, doing here with her clever re-writing of Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that, ‘One is not born, but rather, becomes woman’? We become heterosexual through the formative influence of institutional practices, from education to religion, from medicine to the criminal justice system and immigration law, that have endorsed and enforced a system of norms, a set of ideals to which people aspire. Ahmed reminds us that ‘becoming straight,’ is simply one possible direction, or orientation, taken towards others and objects. One possible mode of becoming.

Making Kin

In opting not to ‘become straight,’ queers have often developed non-biological kinship networks; they have also done this when their choices have resulted in rejection by their families. And in developing these non-familial kinship networks, they open up new kinds of connection independent of familial lines and genealogies. LGBTQIA communities have always fostered and cherished kinship relations as precious and valid alternatives to biological relations. And in turn, through political activism, queer kinship relations have enlarged the possible meanings of family, connectedness, intimacies, and coalitional politics for everybody.

Caring for an ailing friend may generate queer kinship and intimacy; sharing expertise across generations may generate queer kinship and intimacy; participating in activist social justice projects with others who see things differently, or whose social location is different, may generate queer kinship and intimacy.

As we think about these, we notice that the connotations of intimacy have shifted away from the default definition in heterosexual relations (namely sexual intimacy). Intimacy has become a more capacious and generous mode of sociality in queer thinking.

Furthermore, queer kinship as a non-biological sense of belonging undoes the hierarchy implicit in the binary of human-nonhuman, and as a result kinship is generated across species. What does queer kinship share here with Unitarian values?

‘Making kin’ across binaries (such as human-animal, animate-inanimate) extends the role of kinship to care of the environment and of all the creatures that enrich it. Cross-species kinship values the enhancing of environmental protections that maintain biodiversity in the face of threats from agribusiness; it seeks to minimize the role of the extractive industries that pollute the planet and increase global warming.  Kinship and the making of kin across species (human-animal) has for years animated modes of spirituality in many indigenous peoples in the Americas. And in our Western European context, queer kinship re-invests human-animal connectedness with a similar respect for non-human species, and departs from traditions of man’s dominion over animals. In all of these ways, queer kinship and Unitarianism share a sense of the sacredness of the natural world and are deeply committed to environmental justice and climate justice. For those interested in thinking more about queer kinship across species, the work of Donna Haraway is inspirational.

At their core, queer politics and activism challenge binary oppositions that limit you to either this or that. Queerness questions social norms and belief systems that tell you there are no in-between options, no both/and. And here, queer politics and activism once again dialogues with Unitarian values. As Reverend Roger, at my previous UU church in Sacramento, California, puts it, ‘Nearly every UU congregation exists as a denial and a rejection of a binary understanding of religious community. It’s not this or that—it can be this and that. Since it is based on values and not on a creed, a liberal congregation is a living, breathing, hymn-singing example that there are things in-between the limited choices of this or that when it comes to religious community and religious expression. In these times, we are learning that not everybody fits into the box which is the binary choice of man or woman, of boy or girl, of him or her. There is more variety in our gender identities and our gender expressions than can be contained by two genders. Hence, some folks are asking to be referred to by different pronouns. In particular, many nonbinary folks request being referred to not as he or she, him or her, but by the pronoun they or them. This is a request for respect. What else could show more basic respect than to acknowledge how others identify themselves and how they express that identity?’ May queer politics and activism and Unitarianism continue to dialogue so productively with each other.