No Thought of the Harvest

NO THOUGHT OF THE HARVEST

Rev. Cliff Reed, Minister Emeritus

Service address on Sunday 6th June 2021

I suppose worrying about the future has been one of the features of the pandemic.   Worrying about our future health, worrying about the future of the economy and how it will affect us, worrying about whether planned holidays and visits to family and friends will ever  tak e place.  We worry about the future course of the pandemic – when will it end? Will it ever end? What surprises has it got in store in the form of new variants and third, fourth or however many waves in this country and around the world. And alongside the pandemic, and not unrelated to it, there are worries about climate change, the environmental crisis and the future of human civilization and human life on this wonderful but badly abused planet. It is possible to worry a great deal about the future – but if we do, what good will it do? Does worrying about the future do us any good? Does it have any point? Does it benefit our mental, physical or spiritual health? We don’t want to be irresponsible about the future, but is it possible to be responsible about the future while at the same time not be weighed down by fretting about it? That would be quite a trick if we could manage it! Well, maybe we can. Some have certainly thought so.

Fifty-seven years ago, on an April evening at the Annual Meetings of our General Assembly in  I  be a remarkable and memorable act of worship. It constituted the Youth Meeting and was devised by the then Vice-President of the Unitarian Young People’s League (UYPL), Martin Davies, Six other UYPLers took part in leading it of whom, incidentally, three were later to become ministers who served our movement for many years. Now, I wasn’t there, nor do I have a copy of the service, but I do have a report of it that appeared in UYPL’s newsletter, ‘The Young Unitarian’ (TYU). The title of this act of worship was ‘Take No Thought of the Harvest’, a line from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Choruses from “The Rock”’. The fuller quotation goes:

All men are ready to invest their money

But most expect dividends.

I say to you: Make perfect your will,

I say: take no thought of the harvest,

But only of proper sowing.

Although I can’t tell you what was said at that service I do know that it took the form of a dialogue between a ‘Seeker’ and a ‘Sceptic’, while the other participants presented the attitudes and impressions of the young people of the time on subjects that affected and concerned them. The TYU report – written by another old UYPL friend of mine, Gordon Lowthian – mentioned what some of these were – “violence, money and human relationships.”  They were illustrated with readings and music. The readings included Wilfred Owen’s dark and powerful First World War poem, ‘Strange Meeting’, about two dead soldiers from opposing armies who meet in some dim underworld:

…some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

One says, Strange friend…here is no cause to mourn.

The other replies, None…save the undone years,

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours

Was my life also…

For them there is no future, and the poem ends with the words, Let us sleep now…

This is a poem about the futility and waste of war and violence, and perhaps of the misplaced loyalties and allegiances that drive people to kill: None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

And maybe this is why one of the pieces played in the service came from ‘West Side Story’, Leonard Bernstein’s re-telling of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in the setting of 1950s New York and its rival gangs. In his report Gordon mentions what he calls the “gang theme” from ‘West Side Story’. Maybe this was ‘Rumble’, which accompanies the deadly gang fight between the Jets and the Sharks, or maybe it was ‘Jet Song’. This is about the power of the gang to provide a sense of security and belonging to disaffected youths, but which also creates the obsessive loyalty which leads to volence and death for no good reason:

When you’re a Jet,

You’re a Jet all the way

From your first cigarette

To your last dyin’ day…

You’re never disconnected!

You’re home with your own

When company’s expected

You're well protected

…

When you’re a Jet

You stay  

A  Jet.

This is what gang culture offers – what amounts to a pointless present and an ultimately hopeless future, or no future at all.

Another piece of music in the service was ‘Money’ by the Beatles. Released in November 1963, it is an ironic commentary on a life and a society obsessed with material and financial gain, where the acquisition of money for its own sake pushes everything else aside, an obsession that is destructive of human values and productive of a false and ultimately pointless view of the future. To illustrate points made about human relationships there were readings from Stan Barstow’s novel ‘A Kind of Loving’ (1960), with its bleak portrayal of a man trapped in an ill-considered marriage.

There were original songs in the service, written and sung by Rosemary Goring, but I don’t know what they were or what they said. Perhaps, though, they echoed some of the sentiments being expressed at that time by a young singer-songwriter, who turned 80 recently, named Bob Dylan. In that same year of 1964 he released his seminal album, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, with its title track that protests against the status quo, against the world that the older generation have bequeathed to the young, and looks to the creation of a new and better world. The 1960s were to be a hopeful and optimistic decade for many ung people and maybe ‘Take No Thought of the Harvest’ was part of this. It took issue with  “”values, ambitions and mindsets that were seen as stale and regressive, and instead called for something new, something more humane as well as more human, something more spontaneous to replace the ruts into which people were all too often thrust for the rest of their lives.     

 It was new, it was fresh, it was exciting – but it also had deep roots. It was by no means the first time that people had thought such thoughts, had sought to break restrictive moulds and free the spirit. And nor should it be the last, because we are always in need of being reminded that false and destructive structures – be they physical, political, mental or religious – are always around and always need to be challenged. That is why the ‘Black Lives Matter’ phenomenon has arisen today, even though it is hardly the first time that these issues have arisen in one way or another. Things don’t stay the same. Things do change, albeit slowly and haltingly; sometimes for the better, but by no means always. There are steps back as well as steps forward, and we can’t always tell the difference at the time. The old evils, the old negativities, are always lurking in the dark recesses of the human psyche, ready to crawl out anew, so requiring a new generation of humanity to call them out, to expose them, resist them and show that there is a better and more loving way to go.

And this better way is not about trying to fix or determine the future, trying to control or dictate to future generations what they must do. Rather it is about how we live now, because ‘now’ is the only place we can live. We are called to live lovingly and creatively, we are called to be good stewards of the earth, we are called to treasure the wonders of this incredible planet, we are called to do justly and to walk humbly – and we are called to do these things now. Hopefully, and hope, if it is not obsessive and misdirected, is a part of our spiritual resource – hopefully, by living wisely and well now we will bequeath a better world to those who come after us – but it is the living well now that is our business. That is all we can do.

The author of Ecclesiastes reminds us that the fate of any plans we make is ultimately beyond our control, “since you do not know what disasters are in store for the world” (Eccles. 11:2). We must still conduct our own lives as best we can but we cannot count on the future, “for you do not know whether this or that sowing will be successful, or whether both alike will do as well” (Eccles. 11:6).

For the author of Ecclesiastes this life is full of uncertainties, the only certainty being “the days of darkness” (Eccles. 11:8) at its end, but that is no reason not to live a full life in the present, unclouded by a future which is not ours anyway: “The light of day is sweet, and pleasant to the eye is the sight of the sun, However many years a person may live, he should rejoice in all of them” (Eccles. 11:7-8),

Jesus too rejects an obsession with the future and tells us to live in the now, “Can anxious thought add a single day to your life?” he asks. “Do not ask anxiously ‘What are we to eat? What are we to drink? What shall we wear?”’ Rather we should focus on living in the present with our minds set “on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else” (Matthew 6:33), meaning the rule of love that is “God’s kingdom and his justice.” If we live lovingly, as citizens of God’s kingdom, says Jesus, “all the rest will come to you as well.” His radical conclusion challenges the way in which we so often think, clouding the present with our fear. Jesus says, “So do not be anxious about tomorrow; tomorrow will look after itself. Each day has troubles enough of its own” (Matthew 6:34).

And this, I think, is the message of those lines by T.S. Eliot. “Most expect dividends” when they invest but this is to lock yourself into an uncertain and maybe futile enterprise. “I say to you: Make perfect your will” – which is another way of saying “Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice.” 

“I say: take no thought of the harvest,

But only of proper sowing.”    

The sowing is how we live now, which is within our power. The harvest is beyond our sight and beyond our power. If we sow properly today that is as much as we can do. If we sow well there is a chance of reaping a good harvest, but we cannot count on it, we cannot control all that might affect it or even blight it, so for now take no thought of it. The future is not built by us worrying about it, the future will be the creation of others living in their own time. We can only live in our own time, and how we do that will affect our successors, but we cannot see how. So let’s see to our proper sowing in the here and now, and take no thought of the harvest.

Celebrating Wisdom, May Day and Beltane

CELEBRATING WISDOM, MAY DAY AND BELTANE

Rev. Cliff Reed

Ipswich Unitarian Meeting, 2nd May 2021 

Text: The Song of Songs, chapter 2, verses 10 to 13.

Those lines from the ancient Hebrew love poem that is the Song of Songs contain one of the most beautiful and memorable evocations of spring ever written. They are very appropriate for today, at the beginning of May, when spring reaches the height of its beauty and ebullience.

It is not surprising that May Day has long had a great significance for human beings, although it managed to avoid having a major Christian festival associated with it. It is the feast day of a few saints, notably Joseph, the natural father of Jesus, and two of the Twelve Apostles, James the Less and Philip, but this doesn’t really register in the popular consciousness and probably never did to any great degree. In fact, May Day is, at root, an ancient pagan festival. To the Celts it was Beltane. This marked the time when the flocks and herds of sheep and cattle were put out on to the freshly-grown summer pastures, there to remain until the autumn and the festival of Samain. Beltane was celebrated with the lighting of bonfires and with dancing and feasting. It was the time of transition from spring to summer’s beginning, full of the promise of warmth, long sunny days and the richness of field and pasture on which human life depended – and still depends.

It was a time for the lifting of the human spirit, called to celebration by blue skies, blossom and birdsong, by the return to our skies and our countryside of swifts and swallows, cuckoos and turtle-doves – whose gentle purring is mentioned in the Song of Songs but which is all too rarely heard in our woods and hedgerows today.

We know from the Hebrew scriptures – from the Song of Songs, the Psalms, the book of Ecclesiasticus and so on – that the natural world and its seasons were crucial to the faith of the people who wrote, read, heard or sung them. And we know that the Celts and other ancient peoples celebrated the natural cycle too, and when these traditions met with Christianity the results could be mixed! Ordinary Christians still wanted to celebrate the natural world and its cycles and seasons. They did so either by amalgamating ancient pagan festivals with the newer Christian ones or, as with Beltane, May Day, just carrying on regardless with what they had always done, maybe minus some aspects of the pagan celebrations.

No doubt though there were always churchmen of a more severe type who lamented and disapproved of the pagan survivals, but that did not stop these continuing throughout the Middle Ages, when times of celebration were a welcome relief from lives of toil and, for many, of hardship. The reason why the ancient festivals were closely associated with the seasons was because the production of food was the most important activity that anyone was engaged in. The festivals, which always had their religious or spiritual aspect, not only celebrated nature’s bounty but were seen as central to ensuring its continuance. Failed harvests and animal murrains meant hunger and famine and were signs of divine disfavour or the result of the malicious activities of evil beings, both human and otherwise. Placating the gods and showing due reverence and obedience to them was part and parcel of these festivals as well as celebrating nature’s bounty and beauty with due thanksgiving.

In the 17th century, though, Puritanism became the dominant religious force in some places, of which this country was one. The Puritans set out to purge the Church and society generally of the old pagan survivals and the ancient festivals and their traditions were suppressed. No doubt there were still people who celebrated May Day but this became a more marginal activity, no longer really ‘respectable’ and usually associated with those regarded as the ‘lower orders’ of society, with the ignorant, the superstitious and those inclined to drunkenness and debauchery whenever an excuse presented itself. But May Day was to make a comeback!

In the 19th century there arose a nostalgia for ‘merrie England’, for a somewhat sanitised past, and May Day re-emerged. Ancient practices – real or imagined – made May Day a time of celebration once again, complete with May Queens, Maypoles and children dancing round them, innocently unaware of their phallic origins. The popular Victorian novelist, Harrison Ainsworth, gives us an example of how people in the 19th century imagined the May Days of earlier times to have been in his book ‘The Lancashire Witches’ (Book 1, chapter 1, ‘The May Queen’).

This charming picture may well owe more to Victorian sentimentality than to history, but it is the picture that has moulded our image of May Day ever since. What religious significance it may have retained in the Middle Ages from the paganism of the more remote past was largely lost, at least until more recent, somewhat contrived, attempts to revive it.

But something else happened to May Day in the 19th and 20th centuries, and this was its association with working class identity, with what was called ‘the common man’, with labour, with socialism and communism, with trades unionism and with left-wing causes generally. This was a direct development from the traditional May Day, seen as a time for labouring people to celebrate the work they did and the communities they formed.

May Day is thus a number of things – all of them worth celebrating in their own way. It is a celebration of spring’s climax, of nature’s beauty, bounty and triumphant rebirth after the long weeks of winter. It is a time of great agricultural significance, of new growth in the fields and when summer grazing promises meat and milk and all manner of important animal products. It is a nostalgic enjoyment of our country’s real or imagined past and the traditions we link with it – such as morris-dancing, Maypoles and the re-enactment of old myths and legends. And it is a celebration of ordinary people, their lives and the work they do. As the author of Ecclesiasticus put it over two thousand years ago, describing manual workers and craftsmen of all kinds, “All these rely on their hands, and each is skilful at his own craft…They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. But they maintain the fabric of this world, and their prayers are about their daily work.” (Ecclesiasticus 38: 31, 33b-34)

__________________________

‘THE LANCASHIRE WITCHES’ by William Harrison Ainsworth

Extract from Book 1, chapter 1, ‘THE MAY QUEEN’

“After this came the Maypole, not the tall pole so called , and which was already planted in the green, but a stout staff elevated some six feet above the head of the bearer, with a coronel of flowers atop, and four long garlands hanging down, each held by a morris-dancer.

          Then came the May Queen’s gentleman usher, a fantastic personage in habiliments of blue guarded with white, and holding a long willow wand in his hand. After the usher came the main troop of morris-dancers, the men attired in a graceful costume, which set off their light active figures to advantage…

          Ribands were everywhere in their dresses, ribands and tinsel adorned their caps…In either hand they held a long white handkerchief knotted with ribands.

          The female morris-dancers were habited in white, decorated like the dresses of the men; they had ribands and wreaths of flowers round their heads, bows in their hair, and in their hands long white knotted kerchiefs.

This gay troop having come to a halt before the cottage, the gentleman usher entered it and tapping against the inner door with his wand, took off his cap as soon as it was opened, and bowing deferentially to the ground, said he was come to invite the Queen of May to join the pageant…”

'In Defence of Uncertainty' by Adam Whybray

When I was eight-years-old I was diagnosed with OCD. Some of my symptoms you will be familiar with – I used to wash my hands so much they bled, would get very upset if rules weren’t strictly adhered to (such as staying up later than my assigned bed time of eight o’clock) and would believe that my failure to do or not do certain things would cause terrible calamities to happen. Depictions of OCD in television and film tend to focus upon the most obvious external manifestations of the condition – the parts known as compulsions. Think of the television detective Monk obsessively washing his hands, for instance. However, these external compulsions are – in most cases – just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the suffering is actually hidden away inside the sufferer’s mind. At the root of much of this suffering is, I believe, difficulty coping with the discomfort caused by uncertainty.

An example of this was when, during my second year of university, I was fixated on the belief that I had terminal brain cancer. I had been having bad one-sided headaches and looked this up online. Sites like wrongdiagnosis.com and webmd.com informed me that having headaches on only one side of the head was a very bad sign, indicating some kind of neurological issue, maybe a tumour. Going to the doctor I was informed that, while tension headaches tended to be across the forehead and migraines tended to be felt in both temples, it was highly unlikely to be a brain tumour, but of course they couldn’t be 100%. The headaches continued and I wanted to be sure that it wasn’t anything serious. So, I went back to the doctors. They scheduled me for an MRI scan, which revealed nothing out of the ordinary… but then again, it was an MRI scan without contrast, which the internet usefully informed me was less reliable than one with contrast. Every time my mental goalposts kept changing. It was only when my dentist extracted a wisdom tooth and the pain stopped that I was able to stop worrying and obsessively Googling.

When Jesus instructs his disciples to “[l]ook at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them” and to “[c]onsider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin” (Matthew 6:26-28) it is very easy, I find, to bridle at the suggestion. “All very well…”, we might think… “but I have important duties and responsibilities. It wouldn’t be serious for me to not worry about these things. I’m far more important than a lily or a bird and must stride about the world with constant purpose and certainty”. However, an important distinction here lies. Because worrying about taking action isn’t the same as taking action. Thinking about doing work isn’t the same as doing work. The lines from Matthew here are scary and radical because they ask us to let go, shifting from faith in our individual ego, to faith in the Lord. And, in that faith, to stop with the constant “what ifs”.

Over the last decade I have become marginally better at doing this. Any progress I have made comes down, I believe, to practising meditation and, also, simply getting older and recognising how rarely things seem to go the way you expect. However, ironically, while I think I’ve gotten better at holding ambiguities and not-knowing-ness in suspension, much of Western society seems to have demanded and made claims to greater and greater degrees of certainty. In the so-called culture wars, we are expected to take sides – to know with certainty which statues should be brought down and which deserve to stay; to know with certainty which celebrities deserve to be cancelled and which have the potential to be redeemed; to know with certainty what is good and what is bad.

On one level, this seems justifiable since the stakes seem so very high. With the rising tides of fascism and climate change, uncertainty and inaction look dangerously like choosing the side of complacency or even ignorance and bigotry. None of us want to look stupid or feel like a bigot.

However, it does not necessarily follow that we need to bring certainty to every space and facet of our lives. I suspect that the impulse to do this is symptomatic of how the divisions between online and offline have becomes increasing blurred for many people so that we are always – smartphones in our pockets; Twitter and Facebook notifications set to on – existing as citizens of the internet “in the real world”. And the internet rarely allows for nuance. Charlie Brooker, the creator of Black Mirror, has referred to Twitter as an “echo chamber of nodding heads”, in which people perform their outrage to others who always already agree or disagree with them.

I see this tendency towards black and white thinking in my students. Having been “taught to the test” through much of their secondary school and sixth form education, they are very hesitant to offer symbolic readings of films, getting very caught up wanting to know what a film really means, what it’s exact message is – hoping that I can tell them this. However, what they have no hesitancy about is declaring that a film is good or bad and that a character is a good or bad person. Their almost universal love of superhero and Disney films reflects this. The films my students have struggled with the most are narrative films that end on an uncertain or ambiguous conclusion. Especially disliked has been the films of Chilean director Raúl Ruiz, whose films often veer off at wild tangents, characters are written as deliberately inconsistent and changeable, and stories don’t conclude satisfactorily or sometimes at all. It is this ability of art to produce uncertainty rather than traditional empirical knowledge that Keats champions as “negative capability”. While I would never allow my students to quote from the notoriously unreliable and changeable website Wikipedia, the Wikipedia entry on negative capability with its unknown author or authors puts it brilliantly: “Keats might be seen as providing an antidote to E. M. Forster's mantra of 'Only connect...'. Keats might be seen as saying 'Only disconnect...' from our reassuring certainties, from our hyperconnected world, from our executive control, and from our prefrontal cortex”.

When working on this service I received the email from Tessa regarding the General Assembly AGM Motions. I found that with a couple of the motions I didn’t know if I would or should vote for and against. I stewed over this for two days and ended up instigating a pantomime of the kind of internet argument that I’ve been cautioning against here, for which I am truly sorry. It is essential that we do not reduce people to caricatures of their opinions, but instead respect nuance and not-knowing-ness.

It is okay to not know and to sometimes step back and admit this. This is true on small personal matters, on the topic of aesthetic appreciation, but also on a larger scale with matters like climate change. I see more and more “Doomers” online who confidently announce that it is too late to prevent near-time human extinction and even make claims of the exact year in which this is going to occur. This is the flip side of the former certainty that said climate change was not occurring and was all just a made-up fiction. The fact is, the climate is going to get harder for humans to adapt to, but in terms of how hard and how fast, we don’t know for sure. The future is probabilistic, it hasn’t already happened. That is not to say that we should just throw up our hands and say “Que sera sera, whatever will be, will be” in the face of structural injustices to threats to human existence, but to be more like the birds of the field – worry less; intuit and adapt more.

Having OCD, I’m still not very good at this. It plays havoc in my relationship with my nearest and dearest and brings out the ugliest, most fearful parts of my personality. However, generally speaking, I have improved and the thing that has helped me get better at living with uncertainty is getting off social media. Antonia reflected that this poem by Walt Whitman reads as though he just stepped away from social media and the chorus of angrily conflicting opinions that it brings. If Whitman was alive today, I’d like to think he wouldn’t have a Twitter account.

'The ‘Religion’ of Donald J Trump' by John Midgley

An address delivered at a worship service on Zoom
for Ipswich Unitarians, March 7th 2021 by John Midgley

Love is the doctrine of this church.
The quest for Truth is its sacrament, and service is its prayer.
To dwell together in peace,
To seek knowledge in freedom,
To serve human need,
To the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine -
Thus do we covenant with each other and with God.

Griswold Williams

The last few years of the world’s history have been, to a large extent dominated by the presence of the now
former President of the United States, Donald J Trump.

One way of viewing Donald Trump’s rise to become President, and his subsequent decline and fall and trial in the Senate, is to look at his ‘religion’, which I have put in inverted commas for reasons which will become clear.

The first phase of his religion was based on the preaching of Norman Vincent Peale (1898 - 1993) and his book The Power of Positive Thinking. It is a book that has sold in millions. There may be some among you who have read it and found it helpful.

According to an extremely revealing documentary which I watched some months ago (PBS America: The Choice 2016, Clinton v. Trump. Alas, no longer available), Trump did not simply discover Peale’s book and find it helpful. The book, and the ideas it contained were thrust into him when he was a boy, by his very domineering father Fred, who was intensely ambitious, both for himself and son Donald.

Trump senior held the ‘racehorse theory’ of life and work. “There are winners and losers. Never be a loser.” He dinned this in to Donald: “There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who succeed and those who fail. You, my boy, must NEVER, EVER be a failure!”

Donald’s father took him to the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, in New York, where Rev. Norman Vincent Peale was the highly successful minister, preaching what is usually described as the Gospel of Success. The theology of this claims that God wants people to “be 100% alive! Be a success! You can solve all problems. Be a winner!” Donald Trump’s first marriage and the funerals of both his parents were held at this church, and he has in the past called Norman Vincent Peale his mentor. Was this, then, his religion?

Initially, it seems it was. What we have here is an approach to living that has some truth in it but becomes dangerous if taken to excess. This is what Donald Trump has done. It begins with, ‘Take a positive view of things and you are much more likely to succeed in what you want to do.’ True enough. All the signs are that the approach that Trump, both father and son took was to follow Peale’s method and imprint the idea of success on their minds, absolutely, at every turn.

Next stage: Never allow the thought of failure to enter your mind, only success. Never admit to the possibility of failure; never admit to anything going wrong, which came to mean - never admit to doing wrong.  To the young Trump, this soon began to mean, everything you do is right, because it is what you want to do, in order to succeed.

As an adult, Donald Trump’s business track-record became in fact a mixture, both of successes and situations that failed. For example.  As a property owner, he was sued for racism in selecting tenants, but, with help from a hard-hitting lawyer he denied any wrong doing. After losing a court battle, he settled and paid compensation, then simply denied that he had done wrong, claimed it as a success and walked away. Morality and truth had got lost along the way. Right and wrong did not come into it. All he wanted was success, supposedly God’s will for him, in the name of positive thinking. 

In his time as President, we watched this put into operation. We saw him dismissing any reports that made him look bad, weak, in the wrong or unsuccessful as “fake news”.  Reports of low numbers attending his inauguration, for example, and, in time negative poll ratings were “fake news”. To his mind, they must be fake because they imply failure, and failure is never admissible, only success. And when his November 2020 election campaign failed, we saw how he behaved. He conjured up the fantasy that it had all been rigged and stolen from him and led the insurrection that tried to take it back. He has faced a trial in Congress, albeit in his absence.  The truth will out, we often say. And so it has. The damage, including the deaths of those killed during the insurrection, has been enormous.

I find great difficulty in calling this a religion.  I see it as a state of such unreality as to be something close to a serious personality disorder. But anyone openly critical of him becomes a victim of Trump’s vindictiveness.

This is certainly a long way away from Christian moral teaching or any other moral teaching.  Trump discards any ideas of humility, repentance, asking forgiveness, ‘turning the other cheek’ and being forgiving.  Lost, too, are the words of the apostle Paul, “I say to every man and woman among you, not to think more highly of yourself than you ought to think.” (Rom. 12 v3.)  And it shows a total distain for the concept of Truth. The Washington Post, a highly respected newspaper, kept track of Trump’s lies during his Presidency, and they numbered thousands.

Norman Vincent Peale attracted a massive following in his day, but was in the end condemned by theologians and psychologists as promoting a dangerous form of little more than self-hypnosis. Eminent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr criticised him, as did eminent Unitarian minister Rev. A. Powell Davies of All Souls Unitarian Church, Washington.

  Dipping into politics in the 1950s, Peale took a very right-wing stance and famously clashed with the Unitarian Adlai Stevenson, a 1952 candidate for the Presidency, up against Eisenhower. Peale stated that Adlai Stevenson was not fit to be President because he had been divorced. He later said that John F Kennedy was not fit to be President because he was Roman Catholic.  Adlai Stevenson’s riposte was to say, “I find St. Paul appealing but St. Peale appalling!”

  Yes, I can agree, there is no value in habitual pessimism, always taking a negative view, constantly putting oneself down, imagining the worst, ‘beating yourself up’ as the common phrase has it.  But there is virtue in admitting one’s mistakes and shortcomings (sins, if you like) and coming to terms with them. Not easy, but it is truthful, and in the words of John’s gospel, “the truth shall make you free.”    The philosopher Rousseau called it the search for amour propre, appropriate love, an uplifting self-respect, balanced with realistic self-appraisal.

   But there is more. Once he was in office as President, Trump appointed a chaplain, in fact several of them. They are all on the conservative evangelical wing of the Christian church, and one of them at least, Paula White, is a Pentecostalist preacher. Pentecostalists are those who take a literal view of the bible and believe, not only in the Holy Spirit that appeared to the disciples on the day of Pentecost, but some of them also believe that the world is populated by spirits, lots of them, some good and some evil. During a Presidential election campaign rally, Paula White was filmed calling down the angels to come and attack the evil spirits that were prompting people to vote against Trump. Paula White’s preaching is not really bible based. She believes she has special revelations directly from God. During this near hysterical incantation, she indulged in glossolalia, ‘speaking in tongues’ an outpouring of meaningless words, gobbledegook, that only she understood – or claimed to understand (available via Google – Paula White speaking in tongues. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/11/05/paula-white-trumps-spiritual-adviser-african-south-american-angels/6173576002/  ).

  That is the most recent manifestation of the religion of Donald J Trump.

 There is a sense, I think, in which as Unitarians we could be grateful to Donald Trump. He shows us what a Unitarian is, by showing us the very opposite of a Unitarian. His way of life is devoid of truthfulness, whereas we sing and pray and talk of Truth, a great deal. We do this so often we hardly know we are doing it! It seems so natural and obvious. And we speak of Reason and Tolerance.

  His religion is devoid of Reason. He has no reason to think he won the 2020 election.

   Speaking in tongues is a non-rational form of religion.

   I have never heard the word Tolerance cross his lips.

   He has no notion of the idea that the Truth will set you free.

 I can understand someone reading The Power of Positive Thinking and finding it helpful. But to take it to extremes…? No. 

 Rather, positive thinking balanced with honesty. No-one can quarrel with that.  To repeat the point: Trump has focused on a truth, taken it to excess and killed the Truth.  Hardly a religion.

 For us, Love is the doctrine of this church, and the quest for Truth is its sacrament.

Amen.

'Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May' by Ann Baeppler

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”… This first line from Robert Herrick’s poem may well be familiar to you. I always thought it was its title  - wrongly as I’ve discovered – it’s actually called “To the Virgins, to make much of time”.  The general message of the poem is that we shouldn’t be aimlessly faffing around, but instead need to make the most of our life on this earth, bearing in mind its finiteness.  Old Father Time’s footsteps never let up – brought home to me the other night when I had one of those annoying periods of wakefulness.   All was utterly silent apart from the ticking of my bedside clock which I normally don’t notice, but which this particular night seemed to be extra loud, as it relentlessly marked the progress of the minutes and the hours.  Much more impactful of course are the distressing figures that have been presented to us on the news every day since last March and especially in most recent months, detailing the rising numbers of deaths from the Covid 19 virus, which can’t fail to drive home the fragility of our existence and make clear to us that we’re not going to be here for ever.

Time passes no matter what – and faced with the inescapable, what are our options?  If we have a firm, traditional faith, perhaps any apprehension about dying would be well in the background, as we’d be able to look forward to life everlasting.  But even then, there is still the challenge of dealing with our finiteness.  One possibiIity I suppose, would be to try to imitate the ostrich, bury our head in the sand and go into denial mode.  Another might be to panic, like the rabbit caught in car headlights and be temporarily paralysed and incapable of taking any action at all. I’m not sure how helpful either of those strategies would be in the longer term. 

I don’t think I’ve ever indulged to any great degree in either,  but after the theme of this service presented itself to me almost unbidden, the process of its preparation became a wake up call, evolving into an urgent invitation to face up to my own mortality -  but more importantly to mull over how to make the most of the time still at my disposal – I know of course that I’m a lot older than many of you, but at the end of the day no-one knows the answer to how long their life will last, no matter what their age. But when I reached the proverbial 3 score years and 10 some 9 years ago, one thing was certain – there were fewer days ahead of me than there are behind me.

A few members of the Buddhist group I belong to suggested getting together to look at how we could constructively approach our advancing years, using a book called “Grace in Ageing” by Kathleen Dowling Singh as the springboard for our regular discussions.  One of the basic messages that comes over loud and clear from Dowling Singh’s book is the necessity to accept the fact that our death is inevitable and inescapable and to keep sight of this awareness.  Not something we’re used to doing in this culture I think.  If we were trainee Buddhist monks we’d be sent out to meditate in the charnel grounds, but death & dying are not the most usual topic of conversation over a cuppa, and are for many of us even taboo subjects.  But without being moralistic, Dowling Singh’s recommendations are salutary I think, even though I wouldn’t suggest that facing up to our finiteness is not without its challenges.  Perhaps coming at it intellectually may not be such a problem, but to take it on board with head, heart AND guts, well that may not be so easy.  I’ve already had a bit of practice, in that when I was doing my Interfaith Minister’s training I was asked to compose a funeral service for myself– as you might imagine, this provided food for thought in no uncertain terms. 

I hope all of this doesn’t sound depressing. To counteract any reservations you might be feeling at this stage, my plan is to explore with you the flip side of that coin, because if we’re aware of death, surely this must highlight the significance of life, so here a useful question might be, “How do I want the rest of my life to look?”.  This could then lead us on to thinking about what’s really important. Even identifying this would be a significant first step, but then we’d need to see how we might actively cultivate what matters and then let go of what doesn’t.  A great deal of what we think and do is probably determined by habit and conditioning.  I know for instance that until Covid and lockdown changed everything and forced me to slow down, if not grind to a complete halt, I seemed to have some kind of whip in my head driving me on to fill every moment of the day and to do everything at maximum speed as if the world would come to an end if I didn’t accomplish every task by yesterday or even the day before that and to feel useless and a waste of space if the diary wasn’t filled to overflowing.  I have a good idea where this originated – partly it was the example set by my mother who was always busy as a bee and partly the high expectations of achievement laid down by my father (no slacking permitted!) - but the quality of my life was not enhanced thereby.  I’m sure that you can all think of similar conditionings.  So if we can become increasingly aware of our internal processes, there is a chance we can make a conscious choice to make changes – even the smallest modification can make a difference.

I quite like the idea of doing a life spring clean.  Obviously we can’t re-jig everything, but one helpful question might be, “What unfinished business is lurking at the back of my cupboard?”  Maybe the spring clean could include the forgiveness of felt wrongs inflicted by others which might even go back years and years, but this could  well be about forgiving yourself for unskilful words or actions. I still have a vivid memory of the words of the Anglican general confession dutifully recited in my Church of England days– you may remember them too if the C of E was part of your spiritual journey – where we were asking for forgiveness for the things we had left undone, and the things we had done which we ought not to have done.  So, rather than classifying ourselves as miserable sinners & beating ourselves up, we could exercise forgiveness towards ourselves and release any guilt, offering ourselves up to that self-compassion talked about so beautifully by Gerrie Hawes in her service a couple of weeks ago.

The words “meaning” & “meaningful” seemed to be hovering around in my mind –  could these be a way into identifying the components of what really matters to us?  And once we’re clearer about our priorities, we could then see a route to incorporating more of these meaningful components into our lives, avoiding the weeks sliding past filled with trivia.  I’m far from suggesting ceaseless activity – after all just being quiet and still on a regular basis could be one of the most meaningful parts of each day, giving us the chance to experience what Richard Holloway, the former bishop of Edinburgh, called the “beingness of being”. And in fact Dowling Singh in her book stresses the need to have some meditative practice if we are to move into growing older with equanimity. Those meaningful components will be different for each of us, though I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be overlaps!  Joseph Campbell, the American professor & philosopher who explored comparative mythology & religion, famously advised “following your bliss” – perhaps we don’t do enough of that.  I grant you that could come over as an invitation to be pretty egotistical,  but a bit of bliss-following could be just what the doctor ordered – and if we are feeling more fulfilled, we’re going to be much nicer to live with and have a lot more to offer, and doing so will surely enhance our own sense of worth.  This doesn’t necessarily mean embarking on major philanthropic projects – it could just be about performing more small acts with great kindness, to use the words of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

As an extension of considering the meaningful, around my 70th birthday I thought it was time to compile a bucket list.  Now no-one could say I’d had a deprived life – far from it in fact, but I suppose we all have some pipe dreams.  I think my list was fairly modest – it included seeing puffins, re-visiting Sissinghurst in Kent to be able to sit in the White Garden one more time, and learning to belly dance!  I’ve managed the first two – the last will have to wait for another lifetime I’m afraid.  But I can recommend thinking about your list if you haven’t already done so, even though with things as they are it might be a while before you can fulfil your plans. But I can tell you that my first sighting of a puffin near Bridlington in Yorkshire filled me with huge pleasure - and that the Sissinghurst White Garden didn’t disappoint, especially as I was through the entrance gates the second they opened and so had the luxury of having this glorious space entirely to myself for quite some time. Those minutes in the Sissinghurst garden were a special interval – something approaching what Elizabeth Tarbox talked about in the piece read for us by Dee earlier in the service.

Elizabeth Tarbox also suggested looking at a crocus through a magnifying glass.  If you’ve never done this, I can highly recommend picking up any flower or natural object and trying it.  An undiscovered world of beauty may be revealed to you for your amazement and delight.  In these restricted times, entering this world of beauty might well need to be about getting to know the undiscovered country of the nearby – try it and see!

Now I’m not going to pretend that anyone’s life can be an uninterrupted succession of wonderful moments.  I know myself that it’s easy to fall into what I call a psychological sludge where nothing seems worthwhile and when everything seems too much trouble. Mostly, wretched though these times are, they pass and we return to a more positive frame of mind.  Sometimes these lifts seem to emerge from nowhere.  At other times we can clearly identify their source.  For instance, I know I will be forever grateful to the little two year old son of a neighbour.  Feeling grumpy and dispirited, I’d forced myself out for a walk on a dismally grey and cold afternoon.  On my way home, I encountered Charlie and his dad Tim also out for a breath of air.  Charlie announced to me in tones of utter glee and with the broadest of smiles on his face that he had seen a red tractor, two cars AND a white van.  His enthusiasm was infectious.  No way could I continue gloomy.  Next time I’m feeling down, I hope I’ll be able to re-connect with Charlie’s attitude.  In actual point of fact, just the memory of it makes me smile!

I hope my musings have offered you some food for thought – maybe even a pointer or two, so that each one of us is able to echo the words of Mary Oliver in her poem “When Death Comes” knowing that we haven’t been just visitors to this world.

'Interesting Times' by Rvd. Cliff Reed

In the prayer we just had, Dwight Brown quotes the “ancient Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’” Well, I suppose you could say that we live in “interesting times.” When we say that times are or were   “interesting”, we generally mean that they are “interesting” to look back on from a safe distance. True, some times are both interesting and good to look back on – I can think of some – but more often than not, what makes times “interesting” to look back on was not at all pleasant to live through, hence the Chinese curse. 

Although social historians try to convince us that people’s everyday lives in the past are the most “interesting” aspects of it, in the main those lives appear to us have been as uneventful and unremarkable as ours mostly are. Sadly, therefore they are often neglected and overlooked. But what usually makes history “interesting” – even exciting, fascinating and compelling – are the times when humdrum, everyday life was interrupted by social upheaval, natural disaster, war, revolution, plague and pestilence.  

Of course, it takes time for such things to become “interesting” – often many years, even decades and centuries. While they are happening they are frequently nothing less than disastrous, with great suffering, great misery, even great evil and cruelty. But as all personal involvement with such times fades away then we come to see them as “interesting” – the fit subject for scholarly studies, historical novels, films, plays, “historical” re-enactments and television documentaries – even comedy. Try these things when the human suffering is still fresh, though, and the cry goes up that it’s “too soon.”   

The time of pandemic that we are living through will one day be counted among those “interesting times.” The pandemic is indeed a “curse” and few would use the word “interesting” to describe it now. Hundreds of thousands, even millions, dead is not “interesting”, it is catastrophic – not to mention all the personal suffering it has caused and is causing over and above the stark statistics of the death toll alone. Our response to this may be shock and horror, depression and despair, grief and sorrow, compassion and resilience, courage and resolve, or any number of exceptional responses to exceptional circumstances – but “interest”? Few would rate that as an adequate term to describe their feelings. Today the interest lies in finding ways to halt the pandemic, to alleviate the suffering it brings, and to defeat – or, at least, suppress – the virus that is causing it. 

Much is rightly said about the pandemic’s effects on physical and mental health, but what about our spiritual health? Our sense of purpose, our confidence in who and what we are, our rootedness in something that underpins our lives in all their fragility and vulnerability? By throwing our lives into varying degrees of confusion, by blighting our plans and hopes for the future, by undermining our confidence in the structures on which we thought our lives rested: our society and we, as individuals within it, have been challenged existentially. 

We are not, after all, safe and secure in a bubble of comfortable self-confidence. Our bubble is fragile, perhaps increasingly so, and for all too many people it has burst altogether – or will. And it doesn’t take too much thought to realise how easily this could be true for all of us, even if we haven’t really suffered too much ourselves so far. We have been fortunate that vaccines were developed so fast – imagine what things would be like if they hadn’t been. But can we be sure that future viruses, or even further mutations of the Covid 19 virus, will be so easily contained – not that “easily” is the right word, of course! Even the present virus, in its various versions, is still far from ending its depredations. And this is especially so in poorer countries without the best modern medical facilities and ready access to adequate supplies of vaccine. 

Another disturbing factor is the link being made between the pandemic and the wider – indeed, greater – environmental crisis that we face on many fronts. Our upsetting of nature’s balanced systems, our tearing apart of its web of life, our reckless confusion of things best kept distinct – all this and more will bring manifold new threats to human health and wellbeing, to our ways of life around this one world. 

Of course, humanity has a way of surviving and surmounting challenges, of finding resources – including spiritual resources – with which to survive those “interesting times”, but the combination of threats we now face is unprecedented. There is certainly no guarantee that we can somehow emerge from them unscathed, even emerge from them at all in any state that could be called satisfactory. 

In the far future, historically-minded folk may find these times of ours “interesting”, but the prospect for all too many of those doomed to live through them is anything but. Which is why it is up to the present generation of earthlings to see that our “interesting times” don’t get any more “interesting”, and instead become mercifully uninteresting and humdrum: a normal succession of life and death, of everyday dramas of no great consequence, of events which make for happiness and content but which won’t detain future historians overmuch. We want stability, a future we can have some sense of certainty about, a world of peace and order, sustainability, health and simple pleasures.  Not heaven on earth, perhaps, but at least an earth beautiful, vibrant and pleasant to live on. Is that too much to ask? Not really, but achieving this modest aim requires us all in these “interesting times” to adapt our ways and lifestyles, to change our priorities and technologies, our economic systems and methods of doing business, and so make more secure the basis of our increasingly unstable existence. But, of course there can be no guarantees. 

Lent is a good time to reflect on such things. When Jesus was “driven” into the wilderness after his baptism he was forced to re-assess his life and its purpose – an existential shift portrayed mythologically as his triumph over the temptations of the devil. It was this that set him out on his ministry, and ultimately on the road to Jerusalem and the great crisis that awaited him there. It was that ministry, that crisis and what followed, that set out a new spiritual path for humankind. That path still offers us a world at peace with itself, with nature and with God, the eternal basis of our existence.  

Reject that path, take the ways of greed and destruction, and life gets rather too “interesting”. Follow it and something more important than mere “interest” comes into play.  It is the world where, as the prophet Micah says, “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.” (Micah 4: 3-4) Not very “interesting” to historians but no bad way to live out our human existence. 

In the wilderness Jesus confronted himself and found a new path to follow for the good of humanity. As the model for Lent, that wilderness experience, that time of fasting, bids us to put aside our usual assumptions, to renounce our petty ambitions, and instead seek a deeper understanding of our life’s purpose, rooted in loving kindness and the will to be a saving and healing presence in this wounded world.

I suppose this past year of pandemic has seen us all driven into the wilderness in one way or another, and we are not out of it yet. Some have confronted their interior demons as well as external tribulations, and come through – battered but unbowed. Some, sadly, have not done so well. Others, of course, have not survived at all. We give thanks to those who have borne the brunt of this particular wilderness and its trials and temptations for the sake of us all. And let us resolve to learn from the wilderness ourselves, finding there a deeper assurance, a clearer path and a better way to be human in these troubled and all too “interesting times.”

'Happiness' by Gerrie Hudson

Reflections 

Will you be YOUR valentine? Will you give yourself love, kindness and compassion?

Before I knew there was the opportunity to lead this service on 14th Feb, I already had the idea of focussing on the ‘as yourself’ part of ‘Love your Neighbour as Yourself’.

My Grandma was a committed and humble Christian, her faith was clearly important to her and it guided her. 

The impression she gave me was that she did her utmost to love her neighbour. And my memories of her are that she would have been quite comfortable to stop there. The ‘As yourself’ bit carried no weight.

What does it mean if you love your neighbour as yourself, if you are self -critical and unkind to yourself? Would you be more comfortable if it were changed to ‘Love your neighbour MORE than yourself?’

We started the service with the African Children’s Choir performing at the opening of a Community Centre in Walsall. ‘This Little Light of Mine’ is a simple reminder that our inner contentment, joy and happiness is infectious when we let it shine. Yes - sometimes infections are good.

I chose Ken Dodd’s famous song ‘Happiness’ for the first reading today not just because the lyrics are simply lovely – but also because there is a common misconception that happiness is about the silliness of a tickling stick or about fun and joking around. As an usher at Ipswich Regent Theatre about 30 years ago, I witnessed a 65 year old Ken Dodd perform to a packed auditorium for 3 hours solid. It was joke after joke, laugh after laugh. But the song he nailed his colours to is about a deeper, lasting happiness. Happiness is deeper than a quick fix - whether that’s a side-splitting joke, a tickle from a feather duster, or whatever your indulgence is – even an extra slice of cake or bag of crisps. These are momentary treats - and are not about self-compassion or long term contentment. 

This leads me on to the reading Maggie shared on self-compassion. As a core of Tibetan Buddhist teaching, including the Dalai Lama’s  ‘The Art of Happiness’, there is a direct connection of self-compassion, with compassion towards others. In the excerpt, scholar Thupten Jinpa goes on to explain the importance of working on our inner contentment. Why?  So that this little inner light of ours shines brightly and each of us shares that light outwards on others.

Happiness is not just the concern of the religious. It is now a macros trend in my work as a Business Psychologist. Happiness is big in Business Leadership. Scholars at leading Universities - Yale, Harvard and Oxford - are researching happiness and finding that people who are deeply happy tend to make better decisions, are more productive and handle stress better. They lead others better too.

So what can we do to work on our self-compassion and build our happiness?

Giving yourself a moment to take deep breaths is a good starting point -getting some oxygen into the nooks and crannies of our bodies. You may have heard that singing helps this too. So I’ve included a some hymns and songs that I deliberately hope that you might find get stuck in your head for a while even after the service has ended. I hope you find yourself humming or singing, to yourself, or preferably out loud.

Mindfulness is finding something that enables you to be in the present moment. A place where you can just BE. Accepting how you are feeling – without judgement, without overreaction.

I know meditation can bring comfort and contentment. If Meditation/prayer or quiet contemplation is not your thing, you can still Be Your Own Valentine by gifting yourself some time to do something that means you lose thoughts of yesterday – and tomorrow. Whether it be yoga, watching cricket, knitting, gardening, watching garden birds at the feeder, reading a novel, baking or tinkering with your motorbike – they are important kindnesses to yourself.

This leads me into the next piece of music - my choice of REM’s ‘Everybody Hurts’. This is a reminder that central to self-compassion is accepting suffering. Everybody hurts - sometimes.

Sometimes, some days – some weeks or longer we have to handle hurt, which leads into the next element of self-compassion.

Self-Kindness – We need to be aware of when we are being self-critical, especially when we’re having a hard time. You know, going though things like navigating through a global pandemic ...

Jinpa’s suggestion in the reading is to imagine ourselves as a small child. Would we be so hard on that child? You might also find it helpful to give yourself time to write down the noise in your head (or journaling as some call it) then to read back the inner thoughts. This can make it easier to notice just how self-critical we can be. I tend to call it my inner sock puppet – a grouch who tries to protect me from moving on. It may be trying to keep me safe, but in my case it’s just a sock.  In short – self kindness is about cutting ourselves some slack.

And finally

Common Humanity - this could be called counting our blessings. We are not alone in our suffering and to help this, a daily/weekly practice of ‘gratitudes’ can help.  In our little family - we now take turns to share three things, our three Highlights of the Week, which helps each of us recognise the good things - some big, many small, that can get lost in the noise of daily ‘stuff’. It has moved on from ‘something annoying Mum makes us do’ – to something my daughter prompts us to do.

So today - Will you be your own Valentine?

Self-compassion leads to compassion for others, helping us love our neighbours in healthy, positive, constructive, kind ways – as we love ourselves.

Thank you for giving me your time to invite you to consider your happiness.

'The Colour of Magic' by Ali Mercer

The Colour of Magic

Part 1

When Lucy pushed her way through the coats hanging in an old wardrobe, she could never have imagined what she would find. Instead of a simple hiding place in a game of Hide and Seek, she steps into a whole new world, a world full of strange and magical things: a lamp in the middle of a frozen forest, a faun, a witch and a talking lion. She crossed a threshold from her mundane world into the magical kingdom of Narnia and she and her brothers lived alternative lives there.

Like many stories, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe has many layers: a simple children’s tale of adventure and escapism, but full of metaphors and deeper meaning for those who wish to see them.

Magic doesn’t have to be supernatural though. We will all have seen things like the ‘top 10 most magical places to go on holiday’ or ‘the most magical classical music’. We may describe events in our lives as magical, such as wedding days and births of children. These things have that mysterious and enchanting quality we describe as magical. They are often things which we struggle to find other words to describe; places or events which have an ephemeral quality; moments in time which leave feelings traced on our hearts which cannot be contained in words.

In contrast to the land of Narnia, the story of The Secret Garden is set in our world, within the confines of an old house and its gardens. There are no witches, fauns or talking lions, but there is mystery and magic all the same.

When the twelve year old orphan Mary arrived from India at the cold, lonely and unwelcoming Yorkshire moorland home of an unknown uncle, she had no idea what awaited her. When a series of serendipitous events lead to her discovery of an enclosed and forgotten garden, she began to encounter what she would later talk about as ‘magic’: the magic of a beautiful place and growing things; of discovery and purpose as she begins to tend the garden; the magic of friendship when she meets Dickon, a boy who is friends with all the wild things of the moor and gardens; then the magic of restoration as the garden comes to life around them and feeds her spirit.

Later in the book, she meets an unheard of cousin, a ten year old hypochondriac, invalid boy, virtually disowned by his father, living in fear of turning into a hunchback and certain he would die before too long. As she slowly shares with him the discoveries she has made and the wonder of the world outside, Colin, the orator in our reading, begins to recover his health and throughout a summer in the secret garden he becomes more and more aware of this strange sense of ‘something’ working around and inside him.

The three friends spend time noticing the small things and the wider world around them: Colin lies in the grass to watch things grow and feels himself grow as he exercises his limbs; Dickon tends the roses and talks with his tame animals, sensible to all the life around him ; Mary notices how she starts to care about things other than herself and how the garden brings them all together.

She came to believe that something ‘magic’ had led her to discover the garden: not something supernatural, but rather something else, something impossible to describe exactly, but a bit like an unseen power which felt good and right. Perhaps the garden itself needed to be discovered, needed the children to observe and become a part of it. Colin certainly believed so and came to see and feel a magic in everything about him: he learnt to feel its power and it nourished them all as they tended their little sheltered world. They revelled in the wonder and beauty of their surroundings, of their friendships and in the joy of being young, healthy and optimistic again.

It’s no wonder that as adults, people so often look for those places and moments of ‘magic’; chasing those feelings which do so much to nourish us. They are so often fleeting and can be difficult to find in the challenges of daily life, especially under current conditions. Separated from the places and people we would usually share a close connection with, we are suffering from a kind of malnourishment of the heart and mind, hungry for the magic moments of peace, contentment, sharing, growth, wonder and so much more. 

But magic can appear in all sorts of places…

Part 2

The majesty and wonder of a starlit sky could truly be described as magical: it is mysterious and enchanting, as it is awe-inspiring. It is one of those things which reminds us not only of eternity and of our place in it, but of something else, something impossible to describe exactly. I can’t imagine that anyone would be moved by the sight of the night sky and not left with a sense of ‘something’ magical.

Other things, like a spectacular sunset, the crash of waves or our favourite view may remind us too of that ‘magical something’ we feel in and around us at those moments. I can imagine astronauts having similar feelings when seeing the earth below them for the first time. It’s often these big, ‘colourful’ moments in life which serve as reminders to us of an extra dimension to our lives, but there are other, more subtle colours too.

We watched a carriage full of people gradually, if a little reluctantly, come together to sing a song which brought smiles and laughter to what would usually be a group of individuals trying their best to pretend no-one else exists around them. Believe me, as a former London commuter myself, I can say this is close to a miracle and I’m absolutely sure everyone who was there has never forgotten it or the way it made them feel. They shared a simple joy, not just in the singing itself, but in the warmth of connection with fellow human beings. Being able to do this in a space in which other people are usually an obstacle and an annoyance is really a magical occurrence!

I wouldn’t be surprised if for the rest of that day and possibly longer, those people who had sung or just listened would have been readier with a smile or a kind word than usual and perhaps a little more open to seeing and feeling the small things which make big differences in our lives. Maybe they became more aware of their own thoughts and feelings and of how they were affecting others. Maybe they took time to appreciate things they might have otherwise dismissed as unimportant. Maybe they called someone they’d been meaning to contact for a while and change their whole day too. Who knows how far the ripple effect may have gone?

While the big, colourful moments when we are reminded of the magic of the universe and our incredible planet can be overwhelming, the smaller things can be no less effective. Taking a moment to wonder at green shoots pushing from the earth; to feel the warmth of giving and receiving a smile with someone; to give thanks for a vaccine going into our arms, is just as important as being transported by a breathtaking sunset. Like Colin, we can give ourselves time to feel the drawing in and out of that magic, in ourselves, in each other, in the smallest and the biggest of things.

Later on in his story, as he was tending the garden, Colin experiences a moment in which he felt so filled with simple joy that he wanted to “jump up and shout out something to anything that would listen”. He couldn’t find a way to express what he was feeling, so Dickon sang a song: 

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow,
Praise Him all creatures here below,
Praise Him above ye heavenly host,
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” 

The beauty of the song transported them all and helped them express their inner joy. Dickon’s mother explained to Colin, “Th’ Magic listened when tha’ sung. It would ha’ listened to anything tha’d sung. It was th’joy that mattered. Eh! Lad, lad - what’s names to th’ Joy Maker?” 

She was so right: what are names to the Joy Maker? There are hundreds of names we might use, not one of them can encompass that magic, that power, the spirit and essence we experience. We call might it the Divine, God, Chi or Tao. None of the labels do it justice. Perhaps it really doesn’t matter what we call it: what matters most is that we recognise and feel it at work in ourselves, in others, in the world around us.  

What Dickon’s mum calls the Big, Good Thing, the Joygiver, is in the roots and the shoots, in the rain and the sun, in the smile and the song, in the kind word and the loving touch. It is everywhere, drawing in and out: from the tiniest snowflake to the biggest wave; from the dormant acorn to the squalling newborn baby; from the quiet moment of contemplation to the song or shout of joy which just can’t be held in. We can, as Colin said, try an experiment and keep thinking about it and calling it. Alongside our own efforts it will nourish and energise us, just as he discovered. 

So let us open our minds and our hearts to all the colours of magic, from the bright to the subtle. Let us be danced by the dance and let the spirit move.

May it be so.

'Future of the Past' by Ali Mercer

The Future of the Past

Part One

We are the living products of our past; walking, talking bits of history. Our bodies contain the elements blasted into being at The Big Bang; they carry the signatures of all the food we’ve eaten and the water water we’ve drunk. We have been shaped by our environment and as humans have evolved, we’ve shaped that environment in our turn, creating a different world for the next generation to grow up in.

Our homes, schools, workplaces; the streets, villages, towns and cities; the countryside we value as natural but which is 99% man-made; it all shapes us every day. We walk in the past.

It’s not just the physical realm which shapes us. By accident of birth, we are born into a human body of some shape and colour, into a family which may be stable or not, which is itself part of a wider society with all its attendant requirements and expectations. In our bid to survive, we learn to conform to the patterns of that society, but there will be many challenges.

Depending on where that baby is born, it will grow up very differently. A female child in some parts of the world can be so unwanted, she is left to die. In many places, she will grow up under the strict control of a male dominated society, never realising her potential. If she is lucky to be born into a fairer society, she may succeed in some field, despite the obstacles in her way. To be homosexual may mean living with anything from personal and institutional discrimination, to being in daily fear for your life because of the beliefs and traditions of the society you live in.

A child of colour may grow up never seeing a white person, or forever be the second-class citizen in a country where they are a minority. Other children may not even have a home to call their own, often unwelcome strangers in a world where artificial borders divide up the earth. The Roma, Kurds, Uighur and Rohingya are peoples whose names we know because of the struggles they face in trying to survive in a present shaped by a history which excludes or persecutes them for who they were.

As more people are forced to leave their homelands to find safe refuge in other parts of the world, they face the discrimination brought about by lessons others grew up with: that foreigners are stupid, unclean, untrustworthy, lazy, frightening and unwelcome. The propaganda of two World Wars, vilifying Jews, Roma and Africans amongst others, lingers long in cultural memory. The echoes of Empire keep some in a false sense of superiority over others.

In religious matters too, we live in the past. For some, religious affiliation is a given: they will grow up within the dominant religion of their country. Others may be born into a family whose traditions see them as a religious minority, such as Christians in a Muslim dominated country. Which tradition is dominant in the present day is a direct consequence of the past: who conquered who, which faction seized power when. The advent of Protestantism in Europe centuries ago, made the creation of the Church of England a possibility when Henry VIII and his cronies wanted to wrestle power and money away from the powerful established church.

As Unitarians, our traditions are part of a long history of religious dissent against past forms of religion dominant at different times. Some of that dissent was based on fundamental disagreements about theology or practice: some of the fissures which fragmented the Christian church changed the very substance of people’s beliefs. Others were ‘fake fights’ over petty subjects, perhaps a cover for personal power struggles. Disagreements and fragmentation seem inescapable where human beings are concerned!

It’s interesting to note that the words we heard from Rev. McDonald Ladd were spoken in 2016, and yet today they seem as relevant as ever: we still hear the same responses to Black Lives Matter, still hear the same tired old excuses of “They were different times” or “You can’t judge historical figures by modern standards” or “But look at all the good things these people did”. Or the best one of all: “You can’t rewrite history”, which is ridiculous as ‘history’ has always been and will continue to be rewritten. The trope that ‘history is written by the victors’ makes the history of the downtrodden no less valid or important.

Part Two

Who knows where the time goes indeed. Time is a funny thing, sometimes stretching out interminably, while at other times it seems to go winging by ever faster! We simplify it in our minds as a single line, past at one end, present in the middle, future at the other end. But I get the feeling it’s more complex than that, as if our place on that line jumps about, or perhaps the line itself gets twisted and we live in this strange kind of past-present. What seems certain is that the tie to our past is unbreakable and that examining that past is important to our future. 

But examining history can be painful. It can dig up uncomfortable truths which rock the foundations of our present days lives. And so it should. The pain experienced by people today is a direct consequence of past decisions taken. We think of progress as a never ending trajectory towards improvement, but it’s not. It’s just change, some of it is beneficial, some is not. 

Take for instance our way of living. There’s no doubt that the Industrial Revolution, technical innovation and medical advances have given many of us us access to homes, work, transport and a longer, more healthy lifespan. But they have also brought about a decrease in environmental cleanliness, over-use of resources, a disconnect between human beings and the world they inhabit and a still-widening gap between the richest and the poorest.

In recent times, we have as a society been faced with the anger and demands for justice from those who have been wronged or believe themselves to be. When we hear of investigations into ‘historical child sex abuse’ we have to acknowledge both that it happened then and still happens now. When a terrorist commits an atrocity as their way of being heard, we are forced to examine where that level of hatred derives from and our part in creating it. When people of colour and their allies pull down statues of slavers, we have to look at the society which chose to put that statue up and the society which chose to leave it here for generations.

Admitting faults strikes at the heart of who we are, personally and at the level of wider society and national identity. How can we sing of Britannia proudly ruling the waves at the same time as acknowledging that our supremacy allowed us to profit from the use and abuse of so many others? How do we celebrate our heroes while admitting that they were terribly racist or sexist? How do we challenge the order of the society we live in without making ourselves unwanted outsiders? I’m not sure the answers are simple, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask the questions and explore the possibilities.

When we hear the voices of the oppressed rise up, we must listen. We have as individuals chosen to put ourselves under the Unitarian name at a time when we are free to practice our faith as full members of society. It wasn’t always so. Unitarians and others have known the bitterness of being outsiders, of being restricted and even persecuted. Perhaps that should make us more keenly aware of the importance of examining the past and the way it shapes our present.

We have at various times made changes which were not always comfortable for everyone: even the lighting of the chalice, so central to our services and identity now, is a recent addition which some saw as a part of other religions’ traditions, not ours. We are faced with questions about what we want to bring with us to give to those who come after and what we think we should leave behind.

As a faith group we also have to recognise where we stand, where we have done well and not so well. We helped shape the changes to laws on same-sex marriage, but perhaps we haven’t always been as welcoming to strangers as we like to think we are. We pride ourselves on our liberal, inclusive values, but if our churches and meeting houses are largely full of white, middle class, heterosexual people, we perhaps need to check that we aren’t just talking the talk.

As members of a wider society too, we should take a look at ourselves, personally and as a group. Are we prepared to stand by our principles, even if it makes life hard for ourselves? Will we challenge the status quo, call out the people and structures which continue to treat people unfairly? Jesus became the enemy of the establishment, both political and religious, unwilling to change his standards even if that might have out him in a position to make positive changes. We have found ourselves a home in a liberal religious tradition which has a tradition of standing up and questioning what it sees as wrong: members have been arrested, jailed, beaten and even died as they have joined their voices with others to call for justice and change.

I don’t know in which year the Rev. Nick Teape wrote his words. I do know it was before I was born. I find it a little sad that those words are still such a challenge today, but also it gives me hope: hope that the world is still full of decent people who will Stand on the Side of Love, who will be brave enough to try answering the big questions and look to make a new, happier, more peaceful and fair history for those who come next.

May it be so.