Prelude Roots and Wings by Elizabeth Harley
Opening Words by David Usher (adapted)
We come together today, seeking a reality beyond our narrow selves; that binds us in compassion, love, and understanding to other human beings, and to the interdependent web of all living things.
May our hearts and minds be opened this hour, to the power and the insight that weaves together the scattered threads of our experience, and helps us remember the Wholeness of which we are part.
We come together to renew our faith in the holiness, the goodness, the beauty of life.
To reaffirm the way of the open mind and the full heart; to rekindle the flame of memory and hope; and to reclaim the vision of an earth more fair, with all her people one.
Chalice Lighting (you may wish to light a candle in your own home at this point).
words by Yvonne Aburrow
The flame of the chalice consumes the candle
The flame of life consumes time
The flame of the spirit feeds on love,
Love that renews itself for ever.
May we give ourselves generously to love,
And open our hearts to receive it.
Opening Prayer
Spirit of Life and Love,
be with us as we gather for worship,
each in our own place.
Help us to feel a sense of community,
even though we are physically apart.
Help us to care for each other,
in this world in which Covid has not yet gone away,
and the clouds of war hover.
May we keep in touch however we can,
and help each other, however we may.
May we remember that
caution is still needed,
that close contact is still unwise.
Help us to be grateful for the freedoms we have
and to respect the wishes of others.
May we hold in our hearts all those
who are grieving, lost, alone,
victims of violence and war,
suffering in any way, Amen
Reading True Religion by Cliff Reed, from Spirit of Time and Place
If a religion is true,
it sets you free to be your true self,
it nurtures loving-kindness in your heart,
it humbles you before the Ultimate – and your neighbour.
If a religion is true,
it challenges your conscience and opens your mind,
it makes you responsible for yourself and your world,
it stirs you to seek the liberty and well-being of others.
If a religion is true,
it deepens your awareness and nourishes your spirit,
it brings you comfort and strength in grief and trial,
it connects you to other people and to the life of the universe.
If a religion is true,
it will care less for dogma and doctrine than it will for love,
it will care less for rules and customs than it will for compassion,
it will care less for the gods we make than for the people we are.
May ours be a true religion!
Alternative Lord’s Prayer
Spirit of Life and Love, here and everywhere,
may we be aware of your presence in our lives.
May our world be blessed.
May our daily needs be met,
and may our shortcomings be forgiven,
as we forgive those of others.
Give us the strength to resist wrong-doing,
the inspiration and guidance to do right,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
We are your hands in the world; help us to grow.
May we have compassion for all living beings,
and receive whatever life brings,
with courage and trust. Amen
Reading from Gandhi – the call to a supernormal life, in The Meaning of Life: Perspectives from the World’s Great Intellectual Traditions by Jay L. Garfield
Gandhi insisted that a meaningful life is a supernormal life… For Gandhi, a normal, ordinary life involves a rejection of autonomy. He believes that we all too often unreflectively adopt social norms, political structures, economic values, and so on. He argues that this abdication of responsibility for our lives is always an acquiescence to and a complicity in violence and oppression, because industrial capitalism and the existence of militaries are themselves inherently violent and oppressive. These entities always involve the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few and the impoverishment of many. Because so much of our lives is structured by capitalism and industrialism, we accept these outcomes as legitimate. For this reason, we live lives of bad faith, lives in which we are alienated from our own values and cannot take responsibility for our actions….
For Gandhi, normality gives others authority over our actions and ideology, allows us to relinquish responsibility for the way we live, and involves a rejection of truth because it requires us to accept ideologies that we know to be false. Further, normality violates the Jain idea of ahimsa, because leading a normal life in the context of a system that is built on the legitimation of harm involves leading a life that itself causes harm, even if we don’t intend to harm directly.
Prayer by Lucy Harris
Creative Spirit, who gives us the power
to set our own meaning to our lives:
Help us to look afresh at our fears and failings
in such a way that we can instead
take the bold step of trusting.
Trusting ourselves to be true to our uniqueness
in a way that is good for us,
and fulfilling of our role in the universe.
Trusting others that there will be that of good and security
that will give our lives clarity and meaning.
Trusting You that there is form and pattern
within which we can move and learn according to our nature.
And all of this, so that we add into the sum
of all inclusion, connection, and love, and hence
oneness in the world. Amen
Reading from Gandhi – the call to a supernormal life, in The Meaning of Life: Perspectives from the World’s Great Intellectual Traditions by Jay L. Garfield
Gandhi’s articulation of satyagraha, an insistence on truth, and of swaraj, self-mastery, place supernormal demands on us: the duty to engage in constant social and political activity and struggle and the obligation to live a life of relentless nonviolence, consistency of values, and austerity. Such a supernormal life is active in alleviating the suffering of others and in achieving political liberation for the oppressed. Any recognition of harm is an obligation to organize our lives in such a way as to avoid it or eliminate it. Finally, the supernormal life is one of local production and consumption, one in which we attempt to minimize our participation in global economic structures.
For Gandhi, anything less than the supernormal life is utterly meaningless. The kind of self-discipline involved in this life is what gives us freedom from unreflective submission to mass values. Such a life is meaningful, because it is the only one that reflects the truth as we know it. Finally, a life led through discipline and service to others connects us to something broader than ourselves: our fellow human beings and genuine sources of values. It’s a life that actually serves the values we endorse: genuine freedom, not the artificial freedom of liberalism; genuine equity, not equality of opportunity to suppress others; and complete nonviolence. This is the kind of life that serves the highest good.
Time of Stillness and Reflection words by Jo James (adapted)
We are here to approach
the authentic,
the substantial
and the truthful,
to follow our inner calling,
to invoke our deepest selves
and more than this:
we are here to encounter the divine
in ourselves,
the sacred in one another
and to find connection with
the holy in all things.
May we be calm,
in action and in thought,
may we find patience and stillness
as we settle back from our individual pace of task and responsibility
and find instead a gentler pace
which emerges from within us
and emerges from this group.
As we enter in to stillness and
in quiet may we find a gentleness
that reassures us
a grace that is familiar
a tenderness that confirms
that hope is coming,
hope is here…
[silence]
May we learn to follow our deepest selves, and
Find connection with the holy in all things.
Amen
Musical Interlude Clouds by Elizabeth Harley
Address A Supernormal Life
For most of this Presidential year, I have been trying to start a conversation about living our values, both as individuals and in our Unitarian communities. And the most common response to my worship service about this has been “thought provoking”. Which is good, as far as it goes. I hope that for some, it will have been “action provoking” too!
In recent weeks, I have been doing a lot of driving in the course of my Presidential duties and, as is my custom, have been listening to CDs to while away the hours of the journeys. I have been working my way through a Great Course called, The Meaning of Life: Perspectives from the World’s Great Intellectual Traditions, which has been taught by Professor Jay L. Garfield of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. And it has been fascinating, covering many varieties of not only philosophical systems, but also religious and spiritual ones. Including ideas contained in Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism and Native American spirituality.
And lectures 30 and 31 were about the beliefs and values espoused by Mohandas Gandhi, who was instrumental in leading India to independence in 1947. The second of these lectures, The Call to a Supernormal Life, really spoke to me. So much so, that I listened to it three times in succession. Because he is speaking about living our lives in consonance with our values. But at a far deeper and more fundamental level than most of us ever manage. Professor Garfield explains that leading such a life is about “the obligation to live a life of relentless nonviolence, consistency of values, and austerity.”
I guess that it spoke to me so deeply, pierced my heart, because my personal core values are simplicity, integrity, compassion and peace, which fit well with Gandhi’s values, as I understand them. Take simplicity, for example. For me, embracing the simple life is about following Brighton Unitarian John Naish’s theory of “enoughness” – in other words, appreciating that we in the West already have everything we could possibly need and that we need to learn to live “post-more”. Being content with what we already have, and refusing to buy into materialist, consumerist values, refusing to be complicit in propping up our decadent, wasteful society.
I appreciate that I will never be as austere as Gandhi was in his life – I love my books, and my crocheting, and find that access to a computer with Wi-Fi is indispensable to my work and leisure. But I can (we can) make the attempt to not buy more “stuff” than I actually need. For example, I have plenty of clothes that fit me, and do not need to buy more. And we can choose to opt out from the seemingly ubiquitous Western hunger for more and more, for the newest, the brightest, the glitziest gadgets we can lay our hands on. For example, I’ve just gone onto a data only contract on my phone, as I have had it for more than two years. I was offered a new one, and turned it down, because the old one is working perfectly well.
I believe that the heart of integrity is being honest, straight and honourable in all our dealings and doings, whether or not anybody knows about it. It is about living our lives in consonance with our deepest held values. The thing that matters is that we know we have done the right thing for the right reason.
But there is more to it than that. As many of you know, I used to be a librarian, so the first thing I do when I want to find out what something means is to turn to a reference book, in this case The Concise Oxford Dictionary. My dictionary defines integrity as “wholeness, entirety, soundness, uprightness, honesty”. It means adopting a whole heart and soul approach to our lives, so that we do not detract from our spiritual wholeness by any mean action or thought. This is a lot harder than it sounds – most people (and I certainly include me in this) often fall short of this ideal and compromise our standards of what we know to be right. Which is exactly what Gandhi is talking about.
I think that integrity means more than this, however. To me, the most important part of that definition is “wholeness”. For example, you can talk about a machine or building having ‘structural integrity’, which means that all the parts of it fit together in the right way and work together. Going back to people, it means striving towards the best we know, acting consistently according to what we believe is right, and not allowing ourselves to deviate from this standard. In this way, our whole selves, body, mind and soul, can have integrity and wholeness. And I believe that this is what Gandhi is getting at.
Compassion is about caring for others, about putting ourselves in their place and striving to not only help them, but also to avoid harming them through our actions. It is deeply linked to Gandhi’s rejection of our modern consumerist society, where we are able to buy absolutely anything. As Professor Garfield explained in our second reading, “[Gandhi] believes that we all too often unreflectively adopt social norms, political structures, economic values, and so on. He argues that this abdication of responsibility for our lives is always an acquiescence to and a complicity in violence and oppression, because industrial capitalism and the existence of militaries are themselves inherently violent and oppressive. These entities always involve the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few and the impoverishment of many. [But] because so much of our lives is structured by capitalism and industrialism, we accept these outcomes as legitimate.”
Which flies in the face of any attempt to be compassionate towards others.
And peace is closely connected to the Jain principle of ahimsa, the literal translation of which is “non-harming” or “non-violence”. As Professor Garfield explains, “Normality violates the Jain idea of ahimsa, because leading a normal life in the context of a system that is built on the legitimation of harm involves leading a life that itself causes harm, even if we don’t intend to harm directly.”
I was so disturbed by Gandhi’s indictment of our materialist, consumerist society that I discussed it with my daughter, when I arrived in the Peak District, for a gorgeous birthday weekend spent in her good company. I explained about the lecture and that I was conscious that I fall short in so many ways of living my values. I try to be aware of them, and act in accordance with them, but I cannot deny that I am a part of our Western society, and so am contributing to the oppression of those less well off than I am. Every time I buy a consumer product, I am buying into the whole structure of capitalism and industrialism, and so am complicit in supporting the values of Western capitalism and consumerism.
And she (as always) had some wise thoughts about it. She pointed out that self-compassion is an important part of compassion, and that we can only do what we can, where we are. And that every little thing we do can make a positive difference to our impact on the world. For example, in recent months, I have switched from cow’s milk to oat milk and am vegetarian during the week. And that the cumulation of many small actions by many different people can turn into good contributions towards living our values where we are.
So this service isn’t about suggesting that we follow Gandhi’s example directly – for most of us, this simply isn’t practical. Nevertheless, I do believe that it is the duty of all of us to consider deeply what our own core values are, and to make sincere attempts to live up to them, as much as we can.
And I believe that this doesn’t only apply to us as individuals, but also to us as Unitarian communities. What small differences can we as Unitarian communities make to the lives of the members of our congregations and to the wider world in which we live and move and have our being? I believe that these questions need to be asked regularly, and addressed to the best of our ability.
We may not be able to lead the “supernormal life” which Gandhi suggests is the only meaningful one, but I do believe that we can strive to lead the best lives we can, doing our best to live in consonance with our core values and forgiving ourselves when we fall short.
Doing our best is the best that any of us can do. So let’s try to do that, today and every day.
Closing Words
Spirit of Life and Love,
May we strive to live
in accordance with our values,
so that we make a positive contribution
to the lives of others.
May we return to our everyday world refreshed,
may we share the love we feel,
may we look out for each other,
and may we keep up our hearts,
now and in the days to come,
Amen
Postlude Lady of Lewesdon Hill by Elizabeth Harley