Prelude Melodia Africana I by Ludovico Einaudi
Opening Words by David Usher
Bring your hopes and anticipations.
Bring your joys and celebrations.
Bring your sorrows and lamentations.
Bring your faith and adorations.
Bring to this hour of worship, all that makes your life real and meaningful, that it may be blessed by communion with the lives of others.
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.
We light our chalice in gratitude
For the grace of mystery
For all the times we have stood
In awe and wonder
At the depths of our inner lives and
The beauty of our outer lives
Made One
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,
Suffering in any way,
Amen
Reading The Facts of Life by Padraig O’Tuama
That you were born
and you will die.
That you will sometimes love enough
and sometimes not.
That you will lie,
if only to yourself.
That you will get tired.
That you will learn most from the situations
you did not choose.
That there will be some things that move you
more than you can say.
That you will live,
That you must be loved.
That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of your attention.
That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg
of two people who once were strangers, and may well still be.
That life isn’t fair.
That life is sometimes good
and sometimes better than good.
That life is often not so good.
That you will learn to live with regret.
That you will learn to live with respect.
That the structures that constrict you
may not be permanently constraining.
That you will probably be okay.
That you must accept change
before you die,
but you will die anyway.
So you might as well live
and you might as well love.
You might as well love.
You might as well love.
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 The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
I also came up with a… list: my Secrets of Adulthood. These were the lessons I’d learned with some difficulty as I’d grown up….
Secrets of Adulthood:
People don’t notice your mistakes as much as you think.
It’s okay to ask for help.
Most decisions don’t require extensive research.
Do good, feel good.
It’s important to be nice to everyone.
Bring a sweater.
By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished.
Soap and water remove most stains.
Turning the computer on and off a few times often fixes a glitch.
If you can’t find something, clean up.
You can choose what you do; you can’t choose what you like to do.
Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy.
What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.
You don’t have to be good at everything.
If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough.
Over-the-counter medicines are very effective.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
What’s fun for other people may not be fun for you – and vice versa.
You can’t profoundly change your children’s natures by nagging them or signing
them up for classes.
No deposit, no return.
Prayer by Sheena Gabriel (adapted)
Spirit of Love that abides in all things,
We give thanks for beauty and grace unnoticed,
which lie like un-opened love letters *
strewn throughout our days…
awaiting a response.
May we be mindful of the prodigious gifts
that come our way.
Grant us the insight to see with fresh vision
beneath the surface of things;
awake to the miracle of the lit bush,
and the gentle cadence of healing
which whispers beneath the chatter of our lives.
Help us to remember that despite
the pain and suffering that haunts our world,
amidst the fractured busyness and distractions of our days,
beauty, goodness, and human-kindness
are always unfolding – around and within us;
Scattered like seeds – growing silently
without fanfare, waiting to be discovered
as we still our minds and open our hearts…
May it be so, Amen
*Inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Song of Myself 48’: … I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then… I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name….”
Reading Learning from Life by Sarah Tinker, from With Heart and Mind
What have we learned in our lives so far, and where did we learn it? Did we learn in the meadow path or on the mountain stair, as the hymn suggests; did we learn in school, did we learn as we lived our everyday lives?
Some friends and I spent an evening together a while back, talking about our school days. The conversation ranged from the teachers we remembered, to trying to recall what we had actually learnt in school, in those long years that we spent sitting at desks, busily taking notes. What had we learnt and what could we now remember?
The one and seemingly only fact that had imprinted itself in all of our minds was from a geography lesson and it was an explanation of how ox bow lakes are formed – not, perhaps, a vital piece of information for life today, though fascinating nonetheless!
What surprised us was how little knowledge we had consciously retained from those long years of compulsory education. What we had remembered instead were the people and the skills – how to get on with groups of people, how to find books in a library, how to make your homework look as though it had taken you hours to complete when you had only spent ten minutes on it.
Some of my most profound times of learning have occurred far away from the school gates, in adult life, and often these have been the difficult times of sadness, illness, challenge, loss – life experiences that taught me something about myself, about others, about humanity, about life itself. I wonder where you have learned some of the most useful lessons of your life?
Time of Stillness and Reflection words by Sarah Tinker
As we enter a time of stillness and silence together, I invite you to turn your attention inwards, to let your awareness of the outside world retreat for a while, as you focus perhaps on the gentle movement of your breath, in and out, in and out, the steady rhythm of your breath and the stillness of your body, sitting quietly for a while, with your eyes gently closed if that feels comfortable and with your feet resting gently on the ground.
And in this time of stillness, you might wish to ask yourself, what are some of the things you have learnt from life? [short pause]
Who or what have been your greatest teachers? [short pause]
As we sit in silence together now for a couple of minutes, ask yourself, What is the most valuable lesson life has taught you so far? How might you explain what you have learned to someone else?
[silence]
May we be people who continue to learn and grow in life, ever open to new ideas and possibilities, for the greater good of all.
Amen
Musical Interlude Melodia Africana III by Ludovico Einaudi
Address Our Own Facts of Life
This week’s service was inspired by a wonderful workshop I attended at last week’s GA meetings, about worship beyond words. The workshop leader, UU minister Erika Hewitt, handed out the beautiful poem by Padraig O’Tuama, which I shared as our first reading, and asked us to consider two questions:
- What fact of life have you discovered, in all the days that have led up to this day?
- What is a beautiful truth, or a difficult truth, or both, that your life has taught you?
Which made me think it might be salutary to ponder on what each of us has learned during the course of our individual lives. But because each of us is an individual, with unique life experiences, the truths we choose to live by, our own “facts of life”, if you like, will also be unique to each of us.
[hand out 5 x 3 record cards and invite people to answer the two questions, then to share them if they wish to]
I also remembered Gretchen Rubin’s Secrets of Adulthood, which we heard as our second reading, are similar in nature. Although some of them are more mundane, yet wise in their way (“Bring a sweater”, “Soap and water will remove most stains” and “Turning the computer on and off a few times often fixes a glitch”), others are deeper truths which she has learned as her own facts of life. The ones which resonated most with me included, “It’s okay to ask for help”, “By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished”, “You can choose what you do; you cannot choose what you like to do” and “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
What I find really fascinating about all this, is that so much of what we believe and how we behave, is conditioned by these disparate facts of life, many of which may lie deep in our unconscious minds, rarely examined. And yet, they have the power to strongly influence our responses to new experiences and people in our lives. As Sarah Tinker wisely remarks in our final reading, “Some of my most profound times of learning have occurred far away from the school gates, in adult life, and often these have been the difficult times of sadness, illness, challenge, loss – life experiences that taught me something about myself, about others, about humanity, about life itself.”
But it is only if we are awake to and conscious of this fact, that we will be able to learn and grow as people, as Unitarians.
And I believe that in order to learn these life lessons, in order to bring our unremarked facts of life into clearer focus, it is necessary to remain open and curious during the experiences we undergo. I count myself fortunate that it doesn’t take much to awaken my curiosity. I’m like a cat, fascinated by anything that moves, even if it does sometimes mean chasing after rainbows. Or like a dog, nose down, hot on the trail of something new and exciting, my tail wagging. My curiosity, my thirst for learning has led me in many directions. I have continued to learn whenever a subject has sparked my interest. Sometimes, it has led me down a rabbit hole into nowhere particular. Yet I have always enjoyed the journey. Whenever I come across something new, which piques my interest, my response has always been to want to find out more.
We are all on a spiritual journey through our lives and the “facts” we choose to steer our exploration by are important, as they will have a profound effect on what we take in from our experiences, how we grow as people. It is a journey of becoming who we actually are at the deepest, soul level; about waking up and becoming aware of what we are doing and where we are going; about the ways in which we need to change and grow; taking responsibility for our own life choices and values; and working out what is important to us, and then living it. All of which is not something we can achieve in a short time. On the contrary, it is the work of a lifetime.
Luckily, there are many tools and wise ones to help us on our journeys. The tools may include attending workshops or conferences, led by inspired facilitators who encourage us to go deep, rather than skating along on the surface of our lives. Summer School has always had this effect on me. And sometimes, like Archimedes in his bath, we may experience ‘Eureka’ moments, which change forever how we see the world, how we understand it. We might be moving along on our life journey, placidly admiring the landscape, when suddenly, something presents itself to our senses and understanding and… our world is changed. How we live in it is changed. How we perceive it is changed.
This may be a positive experience, or it may, as Sarah Tinker said, be a negative one. But it is never, ever neutral. Whatever it is, it matters to us sufficiently to change how we live and love and move in the world. These luminous moments come in all shapes and guises. They may come when we are out in nature, and suddenly appreciate its beauty and complexity like never before. Or they may come in conversation with others.
Most of my luminous moments, the moments that have changed my life, made me re-frame my own “facts of life”, have come through reading or hearing the words of others. I consider myself so blessed, that books have been my companions, my teachers, my inspiration, and my guides, as I have journeyed through life to where I am now. Few things give me greater delight than the discovery of a new book that makes me think: that makes me see the world and everything in it in a new light.
In his introduction to Mister God, This is Anna, Vernon Sproxton speaks of Ah! Books, “those which induce a fundamental change in the reader’s consciousness. They widen [their] sensibility in such a way that [they are] able to look upon familiar things as though [they are] seeing and understanding them for the first time… Ah! Books give you sentences which you can roll around in the mind, throw in the air, catch, tease out, analyse. But in whatever way you handle them, they widen your vision.”
I believe that this also applies to our individual life experiences, which can have a profound impact on us as people. Sometimes, the change in our perceptions of our lives may be abrupt and life-changing. The stand-out one for me happened in 2010, when I attended an Enneagram workshop as part of my ministry training, and discovered that I was an almost archetypal Three. I didn’t know it then, but it was an afternoon which was to change my life.
My first response was to reject the whole idea and the second was to be persuaded, kicking and screaming every step of the way, that actually, it was probably (all right, definitely) true. Before the session, the facilitator had e-mailed a short document (one side of A4) to each of us, which summarised each of the nine Enneagram types, asking us to read these carefully, and decide which one (or two) was or were closest to our own personalities. I swithered between Three, The Achiever and Eight, The Protector. But during the session, it became totally clear that I was, like I said, an almost archetypal Three, much though I hated to admit it. Threes are driven by their desire to succeed, so that others will approve of them. They believe that effort is all, because people are rewarded for what they do.
On the plus side, this has made me someone who is enthusiastic, good at motivating others, competent, with great organisational skills. I can inspire others to work and have good attention to detail. On the down side, I used to think I had to keep driving myself to achieve, because unless I could show others how well I was doing, and could bask in their approval, I couldn’t be happy. I would do almost anything to garner praise and approval. Being a Three also meant I was intolerant of people I perceived to be disorganised, inefficient, unpunctual, or indecisive.
This has changed, is still changing, I am thankful to say. But it has been an uphill journey, and it is not over yet. After the workshop, the facilitator lent me a book about the Enneagram, which summed up the qualities of each Enneagram type. With each paragraph I read about the Three, my cheeks burned with mortification as I recognised myself in every line. I began to understand that I concentrated on working well and efficiently, so that I could receive recognition and credit for my accomplishments; that I would do anything I could to avoid losing face, or failing in any way; that I would ignore anything which distracted me from achieving these goals – even my emotions.
We also did some more general work on the Enneagram types, and I learned that each has a vice and a virtue. To my horror, the vice of a Three is Deceit, which upset me enormously, as I had always prided myself on my honesty. But in the years since, I have come to understand that the person I was then was deceiving not only herself by refusing to look at her flaws, but also the world, by presenting only her best side, so as to win all that so-necessary praise and approval. Openness and vulnerability were complete no-nos. It has taken years of shadow work and prayer to begin to get through this, and to appreciate that actually, love is not dependent on what we do. True love is always unconditional, and is given to us for who we are, “warts and all”. The warts in my case being failure to achieve my goals, losing face, being an approval junkie, and not coping well with criticism.
I now both understand and accept that all human beings come from God and are worthy of love. That I need to have compassion for all human beings, for all living beings, which includes compassion for myself. I have integrated these new facts of life into my life and do my best to live by them.
I hope that listening to this has inspired you to think about your own “facts of life” and the impact they have on the way you live and move in the world.
May it be so, Amen
Closing Words
Spirit of Life and Love,
May we learn to discern
what our own facts of life are,
and to pay attention to the impact they have
as we live and love and move in the world.
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 Stella del mattino by Ludovico Einaudi