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.

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…”

'The Last Shall Be First: The Women and the Resurrection' by Rvd. Cliff Reed

One of the most notable aspects of the Easter accounts in the four canonical gospels is the presence of women at the crucial moments. And one woman in particular is named as being present at virtually all of them, namely Mary of Magdala or Mary Magdalen. Matthew places her at the Crucifixion as do Mark and John, and although Luke only mentions “the women who had accompanied him from Galilee”, we may safely include Mary Magdalen in that group. Only John’s gospel mentions the mother of Jesus as being present at the crucifixion, along with her unnamed sister and Mary of Clopas. And only John’s gospel places a male disciple, John, at the crucifixion.  In Matthew and Mark we have a different set of names at this point in the story Both name another Mary, identified as the mother of James and Joses (or Joseph), while Matthew mentions the unnamed “mother of the sons of Zebedee” and a mysterious “other Mary”. Mark names Salome. 

The next crucial event is the burial of Jesus, and Mary Magdalen is named as being there by Matthew and Mark. Luke sticks with his “women who accompanied him from Galilee” formula. Who else was there? Matthew adds his otherwise unidentified “the other Mary” while Mark mentions Mary, the mother of Joses. John has no women present at the burial, only Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus.    

And then come the events of Easter morning. All four gospels have Mary Magdalen as first to arrive at the empty tomb, and in John she goes alone. The others differ slightly in saying who accompanied her. Matthew adds “the other Mary”. Mark names “Mary the mother of James, and Salome”, while Luke mentions “Joanna and Mary the mother of James”, and he adds “the other women” without naming them.

What is significant about all this is that it shows the importance of women in the community of disciples that surrounded Jesus. The way some people talk you would think that there were only twelve disciples, all of them men, but this was clearly not the case. Even though the later church ignored,  fetishised or otherwise diminished the women around Jesus, in the early church women had a far more central and honoured place as the successors of Mary Magdalen and her sisters. One of the most important aspects of the first Christian communities was their reversal of the old order of things and the affirmation that those who were last shall be first (Matthew 19: 30), and that certainly included women. Only in John’s gospel does a male disciple stand by Jesus on the cross, otherwise they are scattered and in hiding while the women are there at his death and burial. They are also the first witnesses of the Resurrection, with Mary Magdalen foremost among them.

I don’t intend to get into one of those “what really happened?” discussions. All we can say is that something really happened and that women were at the heart of it. The Resurrection ushered in a new order and a new humanity in which the fixed and oppressive relationships of old were dissolved. In the new community, the new Body of Christ, the distinctions of gender, class, nationality and ethnicity were replaced by oneness, equality and love of neighbour – whoever she or he might be. When we look at the events of Easter as described in the New Testament we see women moving centre-stage, and none more so than Mary Magdalen. She was clearly the leading woman disciple and arguably the primary apostle, for it is she who first experiences and announces the Resurrection. She is the apostle to the doubting, sceptical male apostles. Luke writes that when Mary and “the other women” tell the men what they have witnessed “the story appeared to them to be nonsense and they would not believe them” (Luke 24: 11). This attitude has too often characterised ecclesiastical attitudes to women and their experience in subsequent centuries.

Perhaps the most powerful, the most moving and the most lyrical of all the Resurrection stories is that of Mary Magdalen meeting the risen Christ in the garden on Easter morning. It makes clear the very special bond that existed between Jesus and Mary, and which she still felt even after his death. Mary went on to have a leading roll in the early church, although you will find no evidence for this in the New Testament outside the gospels. What happened?  Perhaps, as the church itself sought acceptance in the male-dominated world around it, it lost its initial radicalism with regard to women. They were relegated to a subordinate role with an exclusively male hierarchy ruling the roost for two millennia, as it still does in much of the Church and in the minds of all too many Christians. The quite unjustified relegation of Mary Magdalen from leading apostle to guilt-ridden, half-witted prostitute has been part of this, and it would surely make Jesus weep.

It was not always so. It may be significant that the wonderful scene in the garden on Easter morning appears in John’s gospel. Although beloved of conservative, orthodox Christians today, this gospel was once viewed with suspicion because of its Gnostic overtones. In particular, Mary Magdalen, although effectively written out of Christianity except as a dubious marginal bit-part player, was of immense and central importance in forms of the faith that once flourished but which were then suppressed as heretical. Documents such as the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip reflect a situation in which she is the close confidante of Jesus and is recognised as an authority by the other disciples. We may not know exactly what went on but we do know that Mary Magdalen was a key figure in Gnostic Christianity, a situation which probably had its roots in the place that Mary occupied in the original Jesus community. And her displacement from a truly honoured place in Christianity is witness to the way that a growing “orthodoxy” sought to eradicate its rivals. Forms of Christianity that honoured women, which practised a radical equality that eliminated the distinctions of gender, were downgraded, even when they had the support of the teachings of Paul. And branches of the faith which recognised women as celebrants, priests and bishops, as true successors of Mary Magdalen, were persecuted and exterminated. Thus one of the achievements of the Resurrection – the overturning of the old unjust order as regards gender – was greatly weakened, something not without its continuing malign consequences today.

We sometimes get obsessed with arguing about whether the Resurrection is “true” or not, whether we should try to explain it or explain it away, whether we should see it as physical or spiritual, or whether we should dismiss it out of hand. But rather we should see it as a radical revision of what it means to be human, what it means to live in a community moulded by a fundamental respect for each other, and by a truly reverent love. What matters is not whether a dead man came to life again two thousand years ago. What matters is that the love preached by Jesus and both given and received by Mary Magdalen should suffuse our own lives and, through us, make this troubled world a happier and more equal place for women and men of all kinds. This is the promised land and although it may be forever out of reach in its perfection, in the attempt to achieve it we can make things a whole lot better and our fellow human beings a whole lot happier. This is what we do as a community of the Resurrection, both a physical and a spiritual reality, offering life where the human spirit all too often lies in the darkness of the tomb.

(CMR260321)

***

'Famous Last Words' by Rvd. Cliff Reed

The last words of Jesus on the cross will be much read and much reflected upon today, but what were they? In fact the gospel accounts differ on this, and the most agonising and the most challenging version of those last words appears in only two of the gospels, Mark and Matthew. It has been suggested that Luke and John omitted them because a despairing and desolate Jesus did not really fit with the triumphant Christ that the early Church was preaching.

So what were those words? As translated from the Aramaic into Greek and from Greek into the 16th-century English of William Tyndale they are, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And these were, in turn, ‘borrowed’ by the committee which produced the Authorised, or King James, Version of the Bible in 1611. And it is those words which continue to puzzle and perplex us today. Did Jesus really say them? If he did, what did he mean by them? If they are authentic, what do they tell us about him?

Given the situation in which Jesus found himself: in terminal agony on the cross, deserted by his closest disciples – the male ones, at least – with his hopes dashed and apparently abandoned to his fate, I would say that those words sound perfectly plausible. It must indeed have seemed that God had forsaken him. It can be argued that their very desolation not only testifies to their truth, but also to the truth of the crucifixion itself. If, in the early days of Christianity in the Roman Empire, you were trying to prove that Jesus was the Son of God, a figure of supernatural power and status, the Saviour of the world, you would hardly make up a story in which he is executed in disgrace for sedition and rebellion against Rome and dies as broken in spirit as he was in body. Which is why, perhaps, Luke and John soften things up a bit and omit the words of desolation, substituting others that seemed to them more suitable for the Anointed One of God.

So even if there were not some independent evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus by the Roman authorities, the last known words of Jesus in Mark and Matthew would seem to support it. But what are we to make of them: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Do we take them as the very understandable cry of someone dying in the most appalling circumstances – both physical and spiritual? They are certainly credible when seen in that light, and maybe we should be content with this most obvious explanation.

However, there is another way of understanding that cry. Those exact words open Psalm 22 and it has been suggested that Jesus was quite deliberately quoting them, intending his Jewish hearers to find his meaning in the Psalm as a whole. The Psalmist writes as one who is indeed in the depths of misery, humiliation and even self-loathing – “I am a worm and no man” (v. 6).  He is at the mercy of his enemies and his words seem to be a prophecy of what happened to Jesus: “They pierced my hands and my feet” (v. 17); “They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture” (v. 18) They have been used by Christians, along with other Old Testament sources, to ‘prove’, as they see it, that the life of Jesus was the fulfilment of prophecy. Others, more sceptically, have argued that the whole story of Jesus was concocted by the gospel-writers out of a hotch-potch of Old Testament verses and prophecies.

But there is a third possibility. That when they contemplated the story of Jesus and came to write it down, they found in it echoes of Old Testament passages, like Psalm 22, and moulded their accounts accordingly. Those words of desolation may indeed have been spoken by Jesus on the cross, as remembered by the faithful women disciples mentioned later, but it was the gospel-writers Mark and Matthew who used them to reference the whole of Psalm 22. Why? Because after describing the despair and suffering of the Psalm’s unidentified subject it closes with an affirmation of faith in God’s deliverance. The psalmist’s life is restored and his powers of preaching and prophecy are renewed: “I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee” (v. 22). Interpreted in this light, those words on the cross become more positive and, for some, a promise of the Resurrection.

Without this, though, the words of desolation pose a problem for those wanting to present Jesus as God and as a supernatural divine being. For God to lament his desertion by God; for an omnipotent divine being not to know about his own Resurrection – these seem nonsensical. For the crucifixion to have any relevance for us it must involve the death of a real human being as weak and as subject to pain and despair as any other. The hope lies in his humanity, in his courage, in his integrity, in his witness for what he believed was saving truth for the human spirit. By putting his own self aside, by accepting death rather than deny the Way that he taught and lived, he revealed divine truth in a way that no magic or miracle ever could. It is in humanity in all its weakness and fallibility that the Divine Mystery is to be found. Without these there is no courage, no resilience, no faith, no love.

This is something that Jesus exemplified but we have seen it too in the response to the current pandemic at its best. Waiting around for divine intervention does no good, nor does denial, brittle bravado or a belief that one is too holy to catch the virus. It is frail, fallible human beings working selflessly with whatever gifts they have who have carried us through, and who continue to do so. Those despairing words of Jesus must have been on many lips this past year, and for some – as for him – they will have been their last words. But for many a deeper and unsought determination has been kindled – determination to serve, to nurse, to heal and to restore; determination to understand the deadly virus, to counter it and to protect us from it. And, not to be forgotten, there has been the simple determination to be a good neighbour. Yes, these are all human qualities but they are also what we really mean by divine. It is in humanity’s strength in weakness that we find God. Maybe this is what that Roman centurion meant when, at the very moment of Jesus’ death, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15: 39).

(CMR240321)

***

'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.