Prelude Romance No. 1 by John Brunning
Opening Words by Martin Gienke
We come together in this chapel from many directions, following a myriad of routes and roads of life, to get to this point.
From here we will go our different ways, in different directions.
May our time together for this hour, strengthen us, and our resolve, to travel the right road, on the trail of Truth.
As we speed on let us not forget our fellow travellers –
To stop and help if they’re fallen,
To guide them wisely if they’re lost,
To encourage them in their own journey.
May our onward journey, be as challenging and exciting as that so far.
Chalice Lighting (you may wish to light a candle in your own home at this point. I will be lighting my chalice for worship at 11.00 am on Sunday morning) (words by Laura Dobson)
As Unitarians we are people seeking
Truth, meaning, love, and deep connection,
As we seek to discern our path.
May we follow the guidance of our hearts,
May our hearts be open to unexpected truths,
May our chalice flame remind us
To welcome all the truth of our lives
To welcome each other
Into the beloved community
Of love and compassion.
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 and climate change overshadow us.
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 Truth by Laura Dobson
I grew up in the Anglican Church, but the ‘sin and salvation’ side of Christianity never resonated with me. At school I became fascinated by the different approaches of world religions to ‘the big questions’ and decided to study Theology and Religious Studies at university. The more I studied world religions, the more I understood them as human constructs, which left me disillusioned with the idea of finding the ‘truth’.
I now realise that trying to discern the ‘truth’ of one religion from another is a false endeavour, truth is subjective. What is important is thinking about what is true for us and living in accordance with that truth. My truth, ‘appreciation of the interconnected web of being,’ leads me to tread lightly on the earth by trying to live as sustainably as possible and to follow the ‘golden rule’, treating others with respect and compassion.
My understanding of Unitarian spirituality is the search for what gives our lives truth and meaning, in loving relationship with each other, and the fostering of deep connection – to each other and to the divine, which is in everything.
What is your truth?
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 Quaker faith and Practice: 26.20 by Jean West
The advice to be open to new light from wherever it may come is one of the reasons why the Quakers have continued to answer that of God in everyone. The trust they showed in the living Christ was their strength 300 years ago, as it is today, though we do not all use the same words. A living truth, if it is to stay alive, must speak to the conditions of the times. Once it is tied up in concise terms, bound by the words used and thought to be the last word, it is already on the decline.
Life means growth – and death. We should not cling to words that have lost their life. We cannot force ourselves to believe something which does not ring true for us. Christianity used to survive because of the empty tomb; now Christianity survives in spite of the empty tomb. Great truths survive throughout history, clad in the clothes that are right for the times. A change of garb is inevitable if the truth is to be acceptable. But it is only in the trappings – the bare naked truth remains for all to feel, to acknowledge and express.
Prayer A Prayer for Lent by Margaret Kirk (adapted)
Spirit of Life and Love,
Here in this meeting place where many others have been before us,
we surrender ourselves to a stillness of Spirit – a stillness of mind and body
that connects us to the Eternal Spirit of God.
Even though it is beyond our complete understanding, there are many things which speak to us:
In times of stillness we hear it like a distant song;
There is something in the sky in the early morning and evening time,
something in the spirit of the wild untouched wood and mountain,
something in the faces of men and women and children,
that lingers in our heart and speaks to us.
Sometimes we can feel that round our incompleteness, flows a greatness,
and round our restlessness, a peace,
and in the brevity of our mortal life,
a sense of the Eternal.
We pray, that those broken in spirit discover glimpses of these moments and that they bring interludes of repose and comfort.
Help us to remember the power we each have to relieve one another of some of the burdens, sorrows and troubles of this life.
And we pray that like rain falling on a thirsty land,
this meeting place and its community uplifts our own spirits.
In its ministry of consecration, meditation and reflected thought,
may we find help.
In its companionship and fellowship, may we find encouragement and strength.
In its quest for truth – find our truth.
And in its worship find inspiration.
May our hearts be warmed within as we talk with one another on the way.
And may such knowledge as we may gain of life`s deeper meaning enrich our lives giving us beauty for ashes and hope for all our tomorrows.
Amen
Reading from Quaker faith and Practice: 26.24 by eleven Quaker scientists.
It is often supposed that science and religious belief are incompatible. Indeed, a dichotomy does exist between some traditional views of God’s interaction with the universe and science’s perception of natural laws. If we only use God to fill the gaps wherever a rational explanation has not been found, God’s role must diminish as scientific understanding grows. A ‘God of the gaps’ is inevitably a rather small God…. [However] the growing body of scientific knowledge demands a continuous rethinking of what is meant by ‘Creator’ but our greater understanding magnifies rather than diminishes our appreciation of God.
Science and religion have much in common. They are communal activities and involve a search for some greater truth. The sharing of ideas is fundamental to both. The discipline of science can make a valuable contribution to religious thought; critical honesty, the willingness to abandon old ideas and modes of thought when fresh insight demands it and the centrality of experience as an arbiter of truth are as important in one as in the other. In both the scientific and religious searches for truth, the implications of current beliefs are explored to see where they lead. Beliefs are not just safe ledges in an uncertain reality, but rather handholds from which further heights can be reached.
Time of Stillness and Reflection These are the times – a meditation on truth by Margaret Kirk (adapted)
`Beauty is truth, truth beauty,- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.`
(from Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats)
Truth is unblemished and clean,
like a snowdrop piercing the hard earth,
or a slender branch or leaf,
or a curlew`s call across the dark moor.
Truth arrests rottenness,
announcing what is green and good.
Freshly, – the air tingles with its purity,
The spores of malice are cleansed,
False words reveal their tarnished emptiness,
The disfigured faces of ignorance crumple in shame.
Truth comes in moments of quiet reflection,
bringing shafts of light to our burdened minds,
Truth can bring peace after heavy hurt and harm has drained the spirit.
And somewhere in the midst of grief it shines and sparkles
with a deeper knowing.
[silence]
But these are the times – the times we yearn for,
when its boldness might blast a carapace of lies,
shake the servile crowd,
scour the hollow rhetoric,
and justly and mercifully and humbly,
re–assemble what is beautiful and true:
the ravaged pieces of decency and compassion to a fragmented world.
Musical Interlude Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel
Address The Nature of Truth
Edith Stein was a German Jewish philosopher who later converted to Catholicism, and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She died in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942, and was canonised by the Church as a saint and martyr, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She once wrote, “But this is the essence of all human philosophising: truth is only one, but it is divided for us into truths that we must conquer, step by step.”
Somewhat ironically, perhaps, truth is a slippery word, with various shades of meaning. As the playwright Oscar Wilde wrote in The Importance of Being Earnest, “the truth is rarely pure and never simple.” I Googled “truth” and amongst all the conflicting explanations, came up with these three definitions:
- The quality of being true.
- That which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.
- A fact or belief that is accepted as true.
So there is legal truth (“I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”; scientific truth (proved by objective evidence, but open to revision in the light of new knowledge or discoveries); and spiritual or mystical truth (a fact or belief that is accepted as true).
As we have seen in our readings, even the first two, legal truth and scientific truth, may not be such immoveable bastions as they seem at first sight. For the first is dependent on the memory and subjective thinking and beliefs of the person telling it and the second is only true so long as further evidence is not revealed, which turns that particular scientific “truth” upside down.
The one I’m most interested in, both as a writer and as a minister, is the third. “A fact or belief that is accepted as true.” Because I believe that most of us live out our lives in accordance with what we believe to be the highest truth known to us. “A fact or belief that is accepted as true” can also describe the stories we tell ourselves in an attempt to make sense of our world. Which may not be “true” in the strictest legal or scientific sense. And yet, those things we accept as true define how we live our lives – how we act, whom we associate with, who we trust, and on and on.
So I think I’d like to qualify my definition of truth with the caveat, “so far as I know at this moment in time.” I simply cannot accept a once-proved (or accepted) fact as immutable, as many religious believers do. Which is why I am a Unitarian, why last week’s service was “in praise of doubt”. We are open to discovering new truths, which may (indeed, should) influence our beliefs and hence, our behaviour. Which is why there is a Unitarian Universalist “bumper sticker” which reads, “Come to us if you want your answers questioned.”
It can be incredibly difficult to let go of truths we have held onto since childhood, even when the evidence that they are false is clear. This has always been the case, and is perhaps why scientific truth and religious truth are often seen as being antithetical.
To take just two examples: Nicolas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei, who published revolutionary books about the earth orbiting the sun, in the face of the “accepted truth” that it was the other way round. Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) was published in 1543, and Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger) in 1610. In the latter, Galileo championed the heliocentric theories of Copernicus. The two of them were persecuted by both the Catholic and Protestant Churches for daring to challenge the Bible’s teaching that the sun revolved around the earth. Indeed, Galileo was found guilty of being under “vehement suspicion of heresy” in 1633 and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life… When I spent a year working at the library of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, I had the privilege of handling and cataloguing both those books.
Today, at least in the more civilised parts of the world, scientists need not work in fear for their lives. I found the reflection by the eleven Quaker scientists, which I shared as our final reading, fascinating. Especially when they said, “the growing body of scientific knowledge demands a continuous rethinking of what is meant by ‘Creator’ but our greater understanding magnifies rather than diminishes our appreciation of God.”
“Our greater understanding magnifies rather than diminishes our appreciation of God.” Particularly in the field of physics, today’s scientists have to be willing to work with possibilities, uncertainties, as they push back the boundaries of human knowledge on both the micro- and macro- levels. I love the idea that some of them find that the more they discover, the more they appreciate the wonder of God / a divine being. Which I share.
When I was quite young – I’m guessing six or seven years old – my father sometimes took me out into our back garden on clear winter nights and told me to look up at the night sky. He owned a small, hand-held telescope and we took turns to look through it at the moon and the stars. I learned how to identify certain constellations – the Plough, the Pleiades, Cassiopeia, and Orion. And had my first intimation of the vastness of the universe and the smallness of our lives in comparison.
At the other end of the scale, one of my earliest memories of being aware of the sacred in nature was Dad showing me a flower and asking me to really look at it, to become aware of its intricate and complex design, having petals, sepals, stamens, carpels, each element working together to form that flower and enabling it to reproduce. He asked me, “How can we look at the design of that flower, and not believe in a creator God?” And I felt an inner jolt, which has always accompanied my understanding of a revelation of the truth – that word again.
I believe it is dangerous to hang on to old beliefs, old ways of doing things, just because “that’s how they’ve always been done.” It takes a certain amount of bravery to discard old beliefs, old habits – they are so darn comfortable! But if we are to grow into the best people we can be, living in harmony with the rest of creation, we need to discard some dangerous myths. Including the old Unitarian tenet, “Onwards and upwards forever.” Because if we only apply this to human wellbeing, the time will come (and sooner than many would like to believe) when our planet can no longer support our profligate ways, as we use and abuse its natural resources to the points of extinction and climate crisis.
As I said a couple of weeks ago, change can be frightening. But I believe we are doing ourselves a great disservice if we close our minds to change, strangling the shoots of new ideas, new knowledge, which will keep cropping up, however often we try to ignore them, or weed them out. Could this be because they are true? We don’t want to believe this, but it is often the case. It takes a lot of gumption to be brave, to choose to keep our minds open, rather than fencing them in behind certainties, (such as the false belief that humankind is superior to the rest of creation). Yet if we are brave enough, we may come to understand that the world and the universe really are quite marvellous places in which to live. And this appreciation may in turn lead to a desire to look after our world, because every living thing is as important as any human being. We are all parts of the interdependent web of life, and we cannot afford to squander the bounties of our world by polluting the air and the seas, destroying the forests, and otherwise showing a cavalier disregard for the other living beings who share it with us.
I believe we have a duty of care to the wider world. Shouldn’t we be doing what we can to try to understand how we might save the planet from climate crisis, save the innumerable species of animals, insects, plants and other living beings from imminent extinction? Like I said, it’s not just people who matter (although we in the affluent West do poorly enough even by our human brothers and sisters in the developing world). I believe we also have a duty to understand how our world works (or perhaps, more accurately, fails to work, at least on a human level) in the context of the great interdependence of all life. Because if we don’t bother trying to understand the truth of how our actions as part of the world impact that same world, how can we minimise our negative impacts and maximise our positive ones? And then, put what we learn into practice.
Our whole lives should be a quest for truth, which we must uncover / discover, step by step, as Edith Stein advises. All we can do is our best.
Closing Words (inspired by Martin Gienke)
Spirit of Life and Love,
May we learn to walk bravely,
Facing the truth,
With goodness in our hearts
And beauty in our actions.
May we return to our everyday world refreshed,
may we share the love we feel,
may we look out for each other, and our world,
and may we keep up our hearts,
now and in the days to come, Amen
Postlude Benedictus from The Armed Man by Karl Jenkins