White Sunday 2013

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Pentecost, Whitsun, White Sunday. The Book of Acts tells a story of the Holy Spirit descending on the early Church leaders, enabling them to both speak and listen in languages they didn't previously know. For Unitarians, this provides an opportunity to reflect on the importance of listening to other voices, to enrich our spiritual lives and understandings through greater engagement.  The text of this morning's sermon on this topic is set below.  Or you can hear a SoundCloud recording of it by clicking the link at the top of this post.

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Whitsun.

If we were Pentecostal Christians, this is the big day.  This is the day we might reflect and celebrate the possibility of being visited by the Holy Spirit; being filled with the voice of God and speaking a truth from deep within.  Speaking in tongues is the phrase used, but the underlying idea is that an unknown and unexpected force, or Spirit, takes you over and you are able to speak the words of God.

Millions of people find this a valuable part of their spiritual lives.  Yet, for most Unitarians, it isn’t a regular part of our Services.  Indeed, I’m not sure I’ve ever been aware of such a thing happening. 

But does that mean we are less filled with the Spirit?  Does it mean that we are in some way better, or even in some way lesser, than the Pentecostal Christians.  I hope not.  I think it is a false action to try and suggest that any one religion or path is necessarily better or worse in pure form.  Perhaps in application things may change, but that grappling with religion, that attempt to make some sense from our crazy world and the forever on-going pressures upon us, that is where I hope we are all of a common purpose.

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Whitsun.  White Sunday.  The fiftieth day after Easter – should perhaps be known as Gold Sunday.  But it’s not.  It’s White Sunday. The reasons for this are lost in time, but it is known that it was traditional for people to wear white this day.  In celebration.  Whitsun.

This idea of wearing white leads me to think, perhaps, that this is a day of reflecting light.  The ‘tongues, as of fire’ that we heard about from the Book of Acts might also be pictured perhaps as tongues of light the light of the Spirit, the light of God, coming in to that room with early Church leaders and inspiring them to be able to speak with one voice.  To be able to articulate in their own language, but for their message to be heard and understood by all who listened.

And we had a further image within that first reading.  The idea that,

“suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting”

This idea that the Spirit came down as a violent wind is not new.  And was not new then.  In the opening lines of the Bible – that literary attempt to describe how the world might have been created – we have the following:

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”

That piece of course goes on to describe the apparent creation in six days – seven if you count the Sabbath.  We may not accept it to be a literal or scientific account, but it remains a beautiful piece of literature.

And it was of course a key text for the Jewish people.  Still is.  The first words of the first book of the Hebrew Bible, the first words of the Torah.  This idea of God coming to the earth in the form of a wind would be well known.   The breath of God.

It appears in several early Bible stories, not just the Creation in Genesis. 

Wind is of course a great metaphor for God.  You can’t see it, you can’t hear it – not the actual wind itself that is – you can’t touch it.  Yet it exists.  You can feel it and be affected by it.  You can hear it when it touches other things and other people, or when it is rushing past your ears.  It is powerful and, ultimately, uncontrollable.  You cannot see from where it starts, nor where it ends. 

So of course those early theologians would see the winds as that most perfect way to describe the presence of God.  Of the Spirit.

And then, in a book that is attempting to record the history of a group of Jews who are to form the nucleus of the future Christian church

“suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting”

But unlike the spirit that hovered over the waters, on this occasion, at Pentecost, the spirit is touching and into each of the people gathered.

It’s like a cinema ad.

“God is back.  And this time it’s personal.

However, it is not only personal, it is also positive. 

The story claims that the Spirit not only touched each of those present, but it also enabled them to hear and understand each other.

Something we might want a little bit more of in the world today.  An ability for more people to listen, to hear, to understand, and to respond in delighted amazement.

We need more understanding.

Religious fundamentalism remains a real threat to peace in the world.  The great religions – almost universally intended to be paths of peace and love – often have these pockets of followers who will use their religion as a way to divide, rather than bring together, as a way to impose and dominate, rather than to be open and welcoming.

There are very high profile groups within Christianity and Islam who will use religion to justify violent conduct against others.  Sects within Hinduism and Sikhism have also had their moments.  And, astonishingly or at least surprisingly, I read of some extreme violence, and murder, being carried out in Burma, I think, by an extremist Buddhist sect.

This is not a new phenomenon, a point made clear by the Unitarian Universalist Forrest Church in one of his contributions to the book 'A Chosen Faith'.  He says:

“Each generation has its terrorists for Truth and God, hard bitten zealots for whom the world is large enough for only one true faith.  They have been taught to worship at one window, and then to prove their faith by throwing rocks at other peoples’ windows.”

These may not be a new phenomenon, but they are unwelcome nonetheless.

One of the problems this raises however is the risk that we begin to overlook the goodness that can be found in all religion, and we start to see the negative alone.

The recent bombings in Boston were headlined by some as another example of possible extremist Islam taking a form of revenge on the United States.  Now, the truth of what was truly going on in the lives and minds of those two brothers is still being pieced together, and tragically, we will never know the full story.  A terrible and murderous crime was committed, and the full force of the law should be used to seek justice.  But the risk of making this into a trail of a religion will remain under the surface, always threatening to emerge.

People do bad things.  People do bad things in the name of religion, and under cover of religion.  But this does not in itself make the religion bad.

And Unitarians, as perfect as we are, are not immune to these reactions against certain religions at certain times.

Many arriving within the Unitarian fold come from another religion.  Often, but not exclusively, Christian.  We are, as Darwin’s father-in-law put it so well, ‘a feather-bed for falling Christians’.  A leaving a previous path and finding a new one can sometimes lead us to look at our past spiritual journeys with some concern – and begin to consider it as false, whereas our new path – that wonder that is Unitarianism – is true.

I do not believe it is quite that simple.

Unitarians are named so since they traditionally believe that ‘God in One’.  The early Unitarians were called that since they were Christian but not Trinitarian.  No Father, Son and Holy Spirit for them.  God is One.

And that idea continues.  Yet, as an evolving faith, we have brought the idea with us as the context in which we live as community, as individuals and as a congregation has changed.

We still have links to our Christian past, but we are not a Christian denomination. 

We still believe that God is One.  But our notion of God may be different.  Indeed, there may be as many ideas of God in this Meeting House this morning as there are people.  Perhaps more.

When we say that God is One, perhaps we are also suggesting that there is only one God.  That all people of faith, of religion, are looking at the same God.  It is the same Divine Presence that we seek to connect with, no matter what our path.  Religious paths the world over may be a personal choice or, more likely are dictated by geographical context rather than deliberate rational judgement.

Yet we do, perhaps, all point towards the same God.  To use the metaphorical approach of Forrest Church from earlier, we are all looking at our own windows yet we need to recognise that the light that floods through it is the same light.  We are all inspired by the same higher connection.  Be that named as God, the Eternal Spirit, the Universe or simply the human web of existence.

By taking this approach, we start to see that we might learn from others, not just ourselves.

In our second reading, from the Dasam Granth of Guru Gobind Singh, we heard the most wonderful example of interfaith understanding:

“Let it be known that mankind is one, that all belong to a single humanity.  So too with God, whom Hindu and Muslim distinguish with differing names.  Let none be misled, for God is but one; he who denies this is duped and deluded….

….There is no difference between a temple and a mosque, nor between the prayers of a Hindu or a Muslim.  Though differences seem to mark and distinguish, all are in reality the same.”

These writings, from 17^th Century India tell a wonderful story of how and why people should live together in harmony.

The notion that differences may be put aside in common pursuit of goodness and love is a timeless message.  One that surely resonates deeply within.

And this is not just the notion that we can overcome our differences.  There is a subtle line, early in the story of Pentecost, where it is suggested that, after the arrival of the Holy Spirit, meaning perhaps, after the recognition of this greater, transcending presence, that people began to speak in other languages.

Not therefore a simple claim that we can understand others.  Pentecost, Whitsun tells us of the great feeling of new beginnings, this coming together of people, is achieved in part by speaking in the way of others.  Not making ourselves understood, but actually understanding from another’s perspective.

It all sounds so simple doesn’t it?  Just accept the idea of God, or goodness into your lives.  Or, more likely, recommit to goodness, to living a good life in peace and love with our neighbours.  A life in which we try to understand, to listen, to learn.

Listening to others stories.  But not just listening, also by putting ourselves in others places.  By speaking the language of others, not just claiming to understand it.

I think we all know it is not always so straightforward.  Despite our best efforts and intentions, we can sometimes find ourselves guilty of misunderstandings, and of an unwillingness to devote much time to the stories, hopes and aims of others.

For Unitarians, I see Whitsun as the reminder that our paths, and our truths, are never straightforward nor, necessarily complete.  We need to remain open to others, to listen and not to judge.

And Whitsun provides also the chance to become re-energised, to listen and to learn.  The chance is for us all to be touched by the Spirit, like those in that room, in the Book of Acts.  We can all make our connections to the intangible, to that which we can never truly understand. 

And that connection can bring us closer together.  With our loved ones, with our community, with all who strive for peace, love and understanding.

Let us be touched by the Spirit, and let us learn to understand and to listen. 

Everything's Gone Green

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Spring has sprung.  Meg Barnhouse describes 'the Greening Breath' as a force of life, a force we might learn to surrender to, a force that brings new life. The same 'air for the soul' that Hildegard of Bingen refers to, and the actuating force of life that fascinated Sir Francis Younghusband, the founder of the World Council Of Faiths. Now, as the world turns green before the summer, we might reflect on how we too are governed by the mystical natural life force. Or is it God? 

Text of our reflection below, or click the link at the top of this post to hear a SoundCloud recording of it.

  

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Old Meeting Houses such as this one do not have stained glass windows.  We have plain glass.  It is, apparently, as much to do with the need to keep the place looking like a house as it is to allow the ‘clear light of reason’ to flood upon us.

Well, as I mentioned at the start of our Service today.  And as you will have noticed over recent days.  And as you can tell from the light pouring through these clear, unstained, windows, it almost feels as if we have jumped from winter to summer in around 6 weeks.  There was snow on the ground on 24 March.  Now look at it.

It may be a clear light of reason, but it can also allows is to see whatever is going on out there – snow, rain and sunshine.  At the time it happens – never because this is the time it should happen, just when it does happen.

Because my head, all too often, revolves around 1980s pop music, I have had a song by the band New Order in my head most of the week.  One of their more rowdy tunes, they released a piece called ‘Everthing’s Gone Green’ .   

Everything's Gone Green

It has stuck in my head because those words sum up this week so clearly.

From the kitchen window I look out towards the road.  And something has changed.  And it really did take me a few moments to work out what it was.  The hawthorn hedge has gone green.  It has been brown and bare for so long that the burst of life has caught me by surprise.  There doesn’t seem to have been any transition this year.  No slow appearance of the buds, the moment of unfurling.  No, it really does seem that the hedge has gone from nothing to full leaf overnight.

Perhaps it was.

As you may have noticed, we are having the roof of the Lych Gate repaired this week.  And the roofer who is leading the work also remarked, unprompted by me, that spring has sprung with amazing speed this year.  Having been forced to hide in the cold and under snow for so long, life is not prepared to wait any longer.

It is all systems go.

And it affects me.  And perhaps you too.

I feel I have been helped to become alive once more.  I am emerging from the ‘winter’ me.  My winter coat – which was new this year – has been worn far more than I would normally have expected.  And yet this week it stayed on the hook.  The first time for months I haven’t worn it at least once a day.

The world around me has come into life and so have I.  And this makes me see my world anew.

It was Pablo Casals who said:

“In music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness……I see what people call God in all these things.”

And this is the call many see in the natural world right now.

The magic, the mystery, the complexity, the uncontrollable, the ever-present, the all-consuming, within us, without us, part of us, us part of it, separate and not separate. 

God, or nature.  You decide.

Maybe both.

And we want this.  We crave it.

There is that wonderful phrase, ‘The Grass is always Greener’. 

A phrase to suggest we spend our time disappointed, and always feeling we have, or we are, the second-best.  Yet the focus of the phrase is telling.  The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.  We yearn for the greener world, not the scrubby one we sometimes feel we currently inhabit.

In our first reading, Meg Barnhouse talks of the ‘Greening Breath’ that appears to support the rose, and all plants, throughout their life. 

For Meg, the Greening Breath is a natural force over which the plant has not option but to receive.  The rose cannot decide not to open its buds into flowers – so long as the plant is alive, this is something that will always happen.

Yet the Greening Breath is, perhaps, something to which the plant ultimately surrenders.  It recognises the deep call that this breath, this other phenomenon, is giving to the plant.  And the plant responds.  It allows this breath, this breath of life, this greening breath, to bring life to it.

And, for Meg and perhaps for many more, me included, there is a lesson here to allow this other force its space to act, to bring new life.

In that reading, I loved the reference to Hildegarde of Bingen.  Hildegard, or Saint Hildegard for the last year since she was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI, was a German mystic.  She lived mostly in the 12^th Century, and was a composer, writer, philosopher, Benedictine Abbess and all round polymath.

 

Hildegard of Bingen

A great writer on both science and religion.

As Unitarians who see both religion and science as complementary and necessary ways of exploring our world this is surely a good thing.

There was a wonderful quote in the reading:

“The breath of air makes the earth fruitful.  Thus the air is the soul of the earth, moistening it, greening it.”

And for 12^th Century science, I think that’s quite well stated.  Hildegard would have observed the importance of the air, of the natural surroundings, to sustain and strengthen plants.  Perhaps, although I cannot speak for her, Hildegard could have been suggesting that God moves through the earth with the air.  She speaks of the air as the soul – the carrier of divinity.

The natural world is a place in which we can witness the mystery of life itself.  The magic is there, if only we look for it.

Our second reading was from a very different source.  Sir Francis Younghusband was an explorer and military officer, who was active as a campaign leader in Tibet in 1904.  We cannot claim his early life was exemplary, and he was involved in some fairly terrible actions and beliefs of Empire in South Asia and Kashmir.

Sir Francis Younghusband

It was however during the retreat from Tibet that Sir Francis had a mystical experience.  He deserted his evangelical Christian upbringing and became, as his biographer describes, a premature-hippy.  He initially devised a new religion, which involved the power of cosmic rays. 

However, he then began to devote much more time to spiritual matters, and ultimately, whilst living along the road in Westerham, was involved in the establishment of the World Congress of Faiths, to bring together different faiths, to spread peace and form alliances.  The World Congress of Faiths is an organisation much beloved of Unitarians and a former Minister here, Richard Boeke, in particular. Sir Francis eventually became what may be described as a religious atheist – and a strong supporter of the notion that all faiths are generally searching for the same things.

In our reading by Sir Francis, he expands on this idea of connectivity. 

Like Hildegard of Bingen, Francis brings together scientific understanding and religious belief as a way to help explain the ways of the world.

He talks of the sheer, awesome scale of the universe, of the total size of everything.  A claim there may be as many stars in the universe as there are grains of sand in the desert, and the millions upon millions of cells, and then atoms, that make up each and every one of us.

The natural world is the most complex and harmonious system we could ever contemplate.  And we will probably never grasp the totality of it.

Sir Francis suggests that this giant machine of a Universe indicates that the actuating power of life is in fact the motive power of everything.  This force that acts in each component part and therefore in each of us and, importantly, in everything else around us.

He finishes with the following:

“We are the creatures through whom the creative power of the universe carries forward the evolutionary process and creates the world of tomorrow and of millions of years hence.”

We are not, for Sir Francis, the creative power itself.  Rather it acts through us.

For me, this creative power – God, if you like – is the same as the Greening Breath of Meg Barnhouse, and the soul of the earth as described by Hildegard of Bingen.

This notion of an intangible force that brings life and new creation to each and every one of us is I think a good one.

That this force is natural, is just about uncontrollable, is nourishing and, sort of, demonstrated in all we see around us gives us hope that it may be real.  However, the notion of such a force is a notion that supports the very Unitarian notion that God, or the Life Spirit, or the Universe itself does not exist for one faith alone. 

Instead, this is a spirit, a breath of life, that knows no borders, has no preference in the people it nourishes, and is available to all.  Everywhere.  All the time.

I hope everyone has the opportunity at some point this week to sit outside and celebrate the revival of the natural world. 

If you didn’t, I strongly recommend you find some time to do so this week.  Even if you did, I would again urge you to do the same again.

As you sit, take the opportunity to feel the presence of the spirit upon you in this greening world.  You might feel this presence as God.  You might just find yourself connecting to the natural world.  You may feel a connection to the whole world.  You may feel all these things.

As Meg Barnhouse suggests, surrender to the presence.  Allow the greening to seep into your soul.

Watching the greening of our hawthorn hedge this week was a great reminder of the unstoppable power of nature.  The breath of life that the plants make their surrender to is perhaps the same breath of life, the same greening spirit that might be available to us too if only we can surrender our souls to it.

The grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence.  The grass is greener when you allow the spirit to refresh it.  To bring the greening spirit upon us.

We are but a temple of the spirit.  The spirit will last forever.

Endings & Beginnings - Easter Everyday

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The Sunday after Easter is known as Low Sunday - the Sunday after the party of Easter. Yet it is perhaps instead the case that we might use Low Sunday to remember that Easter, renewal, endings and beginnings are instead matters of the everyday, not just a once a year remembrance. Using the text of Colm Tóibín's novella 'The Testament of Mary', the reflection below considers how birth and death, endings and beginnings, are a deeper part of our everyday lives.  A SoundCloud recording of the words can be heard by clicking the link at the top of this post.

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Last week was Easter, and our service focused on the need for Resurrection.  New Beginnings.  As we heard in our Second reading, from Tom Owen-Towle, this Sunday, known as Low Sunday, can often be the time we feel we’ve passed beyond the messages of renewal we reflected on last week.  Spring, Passover, Easter.  All done now, over and away.  What’s next.

I’m not so sure it’s that straight-forward.  It rarely is. 

Taking Easter as our start point, to suggest the event, its effect on all, and its relevance to our lives today, just seven days on, has now finished is of course nonsense.  However we interpret the events and meanings of last weekend, we cannot begin to suggest this was a single, one day (or perhaps three-day) event.

However, it remains true of course that life must go on. And it does.

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Last year, Colm Tóibín published his book, ‘The Testament of Mary’.  The book is written in the voice of Mary, mother of Jesus, and is set in the days, months and years after the crucifixion.  Although of course fictional, the book attempts to tell the story of the crucifixion of Jesus from a mother’s perspective, the build up to the event, the story of the days around the crucifixion, and also the story of what comes next.

But by next, I do not mean the Resurrection.  Mary is whisked away from Jerusalem immediately after she helps to bury Jesus.  She travels to Ephesus – then in Greece, now in modern Turkey – where she attempts to live her life away from those events.

The book is stunning.  Only a hundred or so pages, and a harrowing but heartfelt book.  Interestingly, whilst Mary is aware of the miracles, and the supposed resurrection, she does not witness them herself.  Nor, it appears, does she necessarily believe them.

Throughout the story, which takes place around 20 years after the crucifixion, Mary refers to two men who come to look after her in Ephesus.  They are not named, but if you know your Bible stories, it is quite clear these men are supposed to be the Gospel writer John, and the early church leader Paul.  In likely historical fact, the chances of these two men ever meeting, let alone being of similar age, is very unlikely.  But fiction overrides this.

But these men are determined to know every little detail of the story of Jesus.  However, it soon becomes clear that they have already decided the story themselves, and they are simply trying to persuade Mary, willing her really, to tell her own story in a way that will support their own.  She is puzzled over their story of the Virgin Birth.  She cannot understand why they refer to his father as God. She did not see the Resurrection.  She is furious when they suggest there was a reason for Jesus’ death – they claim it was to provide all with eternal life.  She cannot quite reconcile this idea.  And makes the men admit this story will only be known by all as a result of their writings.  Stories they are desperately trying to get Mary to agree to.

But, according to the author Colm Toibin.  Mary is not persuaded that the event of her son’s ending - his death on the Cross – is really of such spiritual importance.  Instead, Mary records the humanity of her Son, and the dreadful impact of the event on her life.

 There are pieces in the book that are quite harrowing.  There are others of gentle humour and real grace.  You come away with a very powerful, and believable image of Mary, whether fictional or not.

The reflection, and story of Mary's life, does not stop at Easter.  Nor should it.

  

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Interestingly, when Mary is talking about her life in Ephesus, there is much about the new beginning she had to make.  Stories of how her neighbour, Farina, had from the start begun to leave things – fruit, bread, eggs, for Mary.  Farina provided care and support to a stranger.  A stranger who was clearly from another country. A stranger who looked scared, exhausted, emotionally bereft.

Slowly, although Mary’s early protectors are wary of these strangers, Mary begins to talk with Farina.  They share stories.  Farina supports her invalid husband; her sons have left for the city and never return.

Mary and Farina become good friends, and Mary begins to attend the Temple of Artemis with Farina.  Seeking solace from religion.  Not the Jewish religion of her upbringing and home town.  But the Greek religion of the area.  Artemis was the Goddess of the hunt, but also of childbirth, of virginity, and was the protector of women.  Mary spends some of her own money buying a small statue of Artemis for her house.

Mary is making a new beginning.  Some things need to continue – she needs to eat, she needs to sleep, she shops.  But there are new friends to make, a new spiritual approach to consider and adapt to.

The death of her son has led to her own new life.  Rightly, Mary cannot see it as anything but a cruel, painful and unnecessary act, and is very straight with John and Paul that they are clearly making their own story.  So many new beginnings.  But for Mary, the recovery of her own life is the crucial part.  Her own renewal and, if you like, resurrection is clear.

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Personal renewal.  Spring, Passover, Easter.  Renewal and new beginning is not for one day or, at best, one week.  Renewal is instead a life changing process, one that is continuous and progressive.

This is where religion can always play its part in our lives.  It’s a little like the difference between church and religion.  We can happily trot along to the Meeting House on a Sunday, and we can have a helpful and heart-strengthening experience in the pews.  We can feel refreshed, lightened, filled with the spirit.

Or just revived by coffee and conversation.  There are many ways to enjoy this time.

But, if this lasts just an hour or so, and does not go on to filter into our daily lives away from the Meeting House, away from the congregation, then it is perhaps only having half the desired effect.  Like Mary and her statue of Artemis, it may be that we need to take our religion home with us if it is to have that lasting effect. 

Taking religion home, taking our spiritual reflection and being outside of here, is a way of aligning our lives and experiences and hopes.

We don’t have to of course.  But if we are to sit here and talk of renewal, to reflect on the importance of updating our spiritual lives, then I hope we might also take that refreshment into our everyday existence. 

Rather than a single Easter Sunday moment, perhaps  Easter Everyday would become the opportunity to reflect on the continual process of renewal and change that takes place in our lives.

In our first reading, David Blanchard spoke of those moments of transition and transformation. Those moments in life where we are caught between endings and beginnings.  The magic and mystery of these encounters with these real and vital dimensions of life.

We share with others in these moments.  We each of us share a new-birth hope with the arrival of a baby.  We each of us lose a little at the parting with a loved one.  These are profoundly spiritual moments.  These are the lifelines that will affect our deepest beings.  These are the lifelines on which our souls communicate.

Yet they are not ‘church’ moments.  These are instead the everyday moments and times of life.  Both inside and outside the congregation and Sunday morning.  Yet, in that confusing and impossible to describe way, they are both religious and not religious.

Our spiritual lives are far more complex and long-lasting than an hour on Sunday.  Our sense of spiritual renewal should be felt more often than Easter. 

One of my favourite quotations, and one I’ve shared before, is from the UU Minister Sarah York.  She said:

“We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight.  Let us gather them up for the precious gifts that they are and, renewed by their grace, move boldly into the unknown.”

We receive fragments of holiness.  Let us be renewed by their grace.  Let them help us move boldly into the unknown.

 

Sounds easy doesn’t it? 

Of course it is not.  Sometimes these events, these moments of ending are not immediately clear as moments of beginning.  They are hard to take in.  Hard to accept.  And never welcome. 

Yet they are the seasons of life as we know them. 

Beginnings will always follow endings.  And beginnings are as much a part of everyday life as they are of anything of greater significance.  In fact, they are far more likely to be part of the everyday.

In our second reading, Tom Owen-Towle remarks that our lives are really mosaics of the everyday. Of dish-washing, of baking, of answering phone calls.  It is in these moments that the true impact of endings and beginnings will have their effect.

And it is the way we are prepared for these moments of the everyday that will help us to make them moments of renewal and change.

In between our beginnings and our endings we move through the seasons of life, and step back and forth through memory and imagination.  By allowing our deeper spiritual selves to play a part in these steps, by allowing ourselves the chance to reflect on the everyday, we can bring our everyday being into contact with our spiritual depths.  With our souls.

As Mary told John and Paul in Colm Toibin’s story, history can never be changed.  It is instead how you ensure your souls safe passage in the days that follow history that will truly determine your path and strength ahead.

Today is traditionally known as Low Sunday.  Yet, as Tom Owen-Towle acknowledges, it is instead more important to extend Easter into our daily lives.  And, one week on, Low Sunday is as good a day as any to remember that everyday will witness an end and a beginning in some way.

Same. But Different.

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There's no-one in the world like me. There's no-one in the world like you. We are each unique, yet we hold similarities. Together, we combine to make this world. We all play a part in life.  Our celebration of Youth Sunday today reflected on these ideas of individuality and the unique.

The text of the sermon is below, or a 'live' recording is available by simply clicking the SoundCloud link at the top of this post.

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I am unique.  And so are you. 

We are similar in some ways.  In looks, we might resemble people in our families.  In political thought, we will share ideas with others.  In religion, we might agree with some others, or not.

We are, each of us, unique.  There is only one of me in the world.  There is only one of each of us.

As the children taught us earlier, there is no-one in the world like me.

There is no-one in the world like you. 

We are unique

We each of us have our own stories, and our own personalities.  We know what we like, and those things we do not like.  Most people do not look the same. 

Even identical twins are not truly identical. 

So what makes us ‘us’?  What makes you ‘you’?

  

The stock answer of course is a bit of nature, and a bit of nurture.  Mix it together with your looks and personality, and out comes the unique individual.  It works of course, but we are left with the reality that you cannot predict or determine how those things will mix.  And what the result will be.

We are unique.

Our spiritual paths are also very different, yet we each claim to be Unitarians – or at least interested in what the Unitarians might have to say on things.  Why should that be?

From a movement that began in a challenge to the prevailing Christian belief in the Trinity – are forebears believed instead in the Unity of God.  One God.  And the humanity of Jesus.

Dreadful heresy.  We were the heretics.  And we remain so.

Heretics are so called because they choose.  It comes from the Greek language, and links to ‘choice’.  We are the heretics because we choose our religion.

We believe – we all believe – that we have a choice in what we believe.  If that makes sense.  We each follow our own paths, testing new ideas, rejecting the pieces that don’t work for us, building the elements that do.

And we do that in community.  Not because we all believe the same thing.  But because we seek to be allowed to not believe the same thing. 

So we are different.  And we believe different things.  And we are happy that others believe different things to us as well.

All is good.

Yet this isn’t really what religion often tries to teach.  Even Unitarianism. 

There is a story at the very beginning of the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Genesis – Chapter 1 verse 26 if you really need to know, that says God created humankind in God’s image.   This is the story of the Creation of the world in seven days.  When, at the end of it all, just before the day of rest, God creates humans.  And he created them, so the story says, in the image of God.

We all look like God.

Now I don’t for one minute believe the book of Genesis tells a true story about the Creation.  And like many others I’m not sure it was ever intended to.

The story of Creation is just that.  A story.  The words of an ancient Hebrew scribe trying to grapple with the complexity and majesty of the natural world and our place in it.  Someone trying to make sense of all he, or she, could see around them.  Surely God must have played a part in it.  And, in a pre-scientific world, it seems a fairly good story to explain what was happening.

Yet the beauty of the words gives us more to think about.

This story that has been carried and accepted as ‘useful’ for thousands of years, suggests that God made us in God’s image.

Yet we know we all look different to one another.  And everyone would have looked different to one another thousands of years ago too.

So, perhaps a message we might start to draw from this – if only to reflect on its possibility – is that God should not be seen as being an absolute thing either. 

God looks like everyone.

Everyone looks like God.

One way we might interpret this line, for reflection, is the notion that God does not look the same to everyone looking at God.

And for Unitarians, that works.  Some will speak of God, others will speak of the Eternal Spirit.  The Spirit of Life.  The All that Is.  The Great Indescribable Something.  All different.  Yet perhaps in part all the same thing.

There as many ideas and experiences of God, of that ‘something’ as there are people on this Earth.  And the people before them too.

Now, like all the people on the Earth, there is something that is similar between them all.  They are all different.  Each unique even.  Yet we know there is something that makes them similar.  Many, most, maybe all religions, have at their centre a spiritual element that is not possible to define.  It is recognisable from one religion to the next, but always subtly different.

But lets spin it the other way around too.  We are all made in the image of God.  So we each of us represent God.  We each of us represent this indescribable ‘something’ that seems to bind us together in life.

So, perhaps, we can see something of God in each face we look at.  At each person we encounter, there is something of God.

James Martineau

And this is very Unitarian. James Martineau, the great Unitarian theologian of the 19^th Century, infuriated the Christian establishment of the day by, at first appearing to agree with them that God was present in Jesus of Nazareth.  All well and good.  But then he went on to stress his belief that God was and is present in each and every one of us.  For Martineau, we are all incarnations of God – just as Jesus was – we are each of us a representative of that greater reality.

In every other person we meet, perhaps we might remind ourselves that we are looking into the face of God. 

Every time.    

Not just the people you like, but all of them.

For me, on a personal level, this is where it gets tricky.  Perhaps I am alone in this, but sometimes, very rarely obviously, I will find it very hard to imagine I am looking into the face of the Eternal Spirit.  Because that person has just annoyed me.  They haven’t agreed with me, and therefore they are wrong. 

There can be no question.

Surely.

Thomas Merton OCSO

Thomas Merton, a Benedictine monk, had something to say on this.   Something I know to be true, but often hard to follow.

Merton said:

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

I’ll say it again:

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

And this takes us back perhaps to the song we heard from the children this morning.  There’s only one me.  And there’s only one you.  We are all different.

And what Thomas Merton is saying, I think, is that we need to recognise and celebrate that difference.  We need to welcome and we need to love people for who they are.  Not for who we would like them to be.  And certainly not to love only those people who are like ourselves.

No, instead, Merton encourages us to love all.  Regardless of whether they are like us or not.  In fact, he appears to activiely encourage the opposite.  Love people for who they are, not just the reflection of ourselves we see in them.

One of the great pressures upon us in this world, certainly in this country, is the pressure to conform.  To be like everybody else.  To make us all like one another.

And there is a sense here perhaps that we will always find it more comfortable if we are surrounded by the same things, with the same people, with the same ideas. 

People are very good at telling you, or at least letting you know, how you are expected to think.  The things you are expected to agree with.  Because everyone else does.

You see this in politics all the time.  We are encouraged to see all benefit claimants are scroungers, or that all benefit claimants are the oppressed hard workers.  We are encouraged to believe that cutting pubic borrowing will provide the golden key to economic recovery.  And by others we are encouraged to believe the opposite. 

In all these cases, is either one right?  Are they both right?  Are they both wrong?

You’ll never know if you don’t listen, consider the facts, and make your own decision.  You may still be wrong.  But it is your choice by then, informed by your own heart, your own head, your own judgement.

But to do that, you must be prepared to listen to all sides.  Not just the ones you want to hear.

And this is the story for religious explorers, as we as Unitarians like to see ourselves.  We must be prepared to listen, and then come to our own conclusions.

John O'Donohue

In our second reading, John O'Donohue spoke of the similarities and differences between and amongst us.  He made the great comment:

Each individual carries a totally separate world in their heart.  When you think of how differently you feel and think about life, it is a wonder that we can talk to each other at all.

Yet we can talk to each other.  We do talk to each other.

There is no-one in the world like me.  And there is no-one in the world like you.  Yet we are each of us an integral and essential part of the world in which we live.

Collectively, we are the spirit of the world, and within us all lie the millions of different components that complete the story of life.

We are the lucky ones.  We are able to make choices about the way we live our lives.  We are also able to make choices on how we welcome and listen to others.  If we follow the lessons of the early Jewish writers, the lessons of Thomas Merton, the lessons of James Martineau, then we can see perhaps that by looking into each other’s worlds, we have the opportunity to learn so much.  By allowing those worlds to stay unique to that other person, we are preserving those creative differences.

I am, and I’m me.  You are, and you’re you. 

Yet we are, together, something far greater.