Prelude Melodia Africana I by Ludovico Einaudi
Opening Words Hope Rises by John A. Buehrens and Rebecca Parker
Hope rises.
It rises from the heart of life, here and now, beating with joy and sorrow.
Hope longs.
It longs for good to be affirmed, for justice and love to prevail, for suffering to be alleviated, and for life to flourish in peace.
Hope remembers.
It remembers the dreams of those who have gone before and reaches for connection with them across the boundary of death.
Hope acts.
It acts to bless, to protest, and to repair.
Chalice Lighting (you may wish to light a candle in your own home at this point). Words by Laura Dobson
We light our chalice, symbol of our free Unitarian faith
Sign of the spark of life in all living beings
Fire of commitment to love and justice.
As the chalice cup embraces the flame
May we hold one another in loving community
Sharing our gratitude, our pain and our hopes for our world,
For we are co-weavers of the story of the universe
A web of intimate connections and infinite possibilities.
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 be grateful for the freedoms we have
and 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 Inherent Wholeness of Every Being, Part 1 by Erika Hewitt (adapted)
We who are Unitarian Universalist not only affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person; we also affirm the inherent wholeness of every being — despite apparent brokenness.
No one reading (or hearing) these words is a stranger to pain, or the knowledge that things break, or break down: promises, friendship, sobriety, hope, communication…. this breaking happens because our human hearts and our very institutions are frail and imperfect. We make mistakes. Life is messy. Brokenness happens.
We’re intimately acquainted with brokenness, then, even as we believe that no matter how fractured we are or once were, we can make whole people of ourselves. We are whole at our core, because of the great, unnameable, sometimes inconceivable Love in which we live.
As UUs, we believe that paying attention to something is an act of love; witnessing and naming brokenness is how we begin to heal it. Some sorrows demand to be named out loud:
My sister died.
My body is fragile.
I’m scared that I won’t be able to pay my rent this month.
The streets in my city are filled with violence.
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 The Inherent Wholeness of Every Being, Part 2 by Erika Hewitt (adapted)
Healing begins when we examine what’s in pain, wonder how it occurred, and allow it to teach us.
In fact, sometimes the brokenness is immense and the only grasp, the only power we have over that large and complicated pain looming over us is to bear witness, to tell its story, and to seek out companions and helpers who are willing to agree that yes, there is something breaking or messy in front of us, and we will not leave or even look away until repair has begun.
If love begins with attention, repair takes the form of compassion, bearing witness, speaking out. Repair looks like connection, justice, or even revolution. It looks like after-school tutoring programs, community meals, and holding signs in front of City Hall.
And it begins by placing full trust and faith that there is inherent wholeness in every broken situation.
Prayer by Cliff Reed
God of our hearts,
whose Oneness makes us one,
in an unquiet world, let us be quiet.
In an unpeaceful world, let us be peace;
in an unkind world, let us be kind;
in an unjust world, let us be just;
in an unloving world, let us be love.
Make of our speaking the things you want us to say;
make of our deeds the things you want us to do;
make of us what the world needs us to be.
So may our lives be a blessing to all,
and our spirits the channels of your Spirit.
May it be so, Amen
Reading from The Repair Shop: Life in the Barn by Jayne Dowle and Elizabeth Wilhide
Just as you could never put a price tag on a beloved old doll that has seen better days, or on a seized-up go-kart someone’s grandad cobbled together from whatever was lying around in his shed, the magic of the barn lies in the power of memories. A side-saddle that takes a woman back to her younger days and her Wild West adventures, an Omani chest studded with brass nails that stands for a vanished life in a different country, a 1950s radiogram that once provided the soundtrack to family Sundays – such objects not only bring the past into sharp focus, they are held in the deepest affection, which has nothing to do with their financial value.
If their owners understand this instinctively, so do the experts. They know that when they repair one of these humble treasures, it goes far beyond the cosmetic or the merely functional. Each restoration is like putting a missing piece of a family jigsaw back into place and, when it’s time for handover, they are often as moved as the delighted recipients…
A great repair starts with listening… Judging how far to go is an important part of the process, which means being sensitive to the object’s past and the signs of wear that are part of its story… Finally, great repairs take time. What viewers see is often the tip of the iceberg… [repairs] demand patience and meticulous attention to detail, which may take many hours, if not days.
Time of Stillness and Reflection (words by Lyn Cox, adapted)
Spirit of Life, ancestor of the stars and the sun, you who embrace the vastness of space and us along with it, be with us today. Hold us in our worry, our exhaustion, our grief. Keep us close as we sit with our truth, whatever that may be. Lead us to rest in the quiet, to find solace and renewal in this time of shifting light and dark.
You whose arms open with the spinning galaxies, help us to make room, as you do, for all that is. Open our hearts to our loved ones, our neighbours, the beings with whom we share this planet. Lead us to reach out to others in compassion. Turn us toward one another in mercy, right relationship, and reconciliation.
You who have seen the rising and setting of suns, of seasons, of civilizations, remind us of all that we have learned from the history of the world and from our own histories. Give us the courage to face our mistakes, and to repair them whenever possible. Help us understand our interdependence, our gravitational relatedness with all of the other spinning lives around us, and lead us to treat those relationships with care.
[silence]
In this space, filled with the people among us who shine like stars, this space filled with the sparkle of love and care, we give thanks for this moment to be together. May our senses be open to the beauty of this day, this season, this world. We continue our contemplation in silence.
Blessed be.
Musical Interlude I Giorni by Ludovico Einaudi
Address Repairing into Wholeness
There are so many broken things, places, situations, people and other living beings in our world, that we can be left scratching our heads, wondering where on earth to begin…
Perhaps the only place we can begin is with the simple recognition that something or someone is broken, rather than looking away, papering over the cracks and pretending they don’t exist.
Physical objects are perhaps the easiest (by which I mean the least complex) things we can repair. I’m sure that many of you share my love of the BBC programme, The Repair Shop, in which battered but much-loved objects are lovingly restored to their former glory, while care is also taken to keep the evidence of their life and history. I could watch it all day; partly from the sheer pleasure of observing the experts at work – and my goodness me, aren’t some of them a treat to see in action? But the thing which makes it compelling watching for me is the underlying ethos of the programme, which we heard about in our final reading. The team listen carefully to the owners, first to find out the story behind the object, then paying careful attention to what the owners want done. Rather than riding rough-shod into a old-to-new repair, which could destroy all the object’s history.
I believe that the approach of the Repair Shop team is one we could all learn from, in our daily lives. First, and most importantly, not to write something or (worse) someone off as “broken”, just because life has battered it or them around the edges. Second, to pay deep attention to what is needed by that person, in that situation, in that moment, and not galloping on our white chargers to “make it all better”. Then third, to approach the process of repair and restoration with patience, compassion and hope.
I want to address each of these points in turn. We live in a highly consumerist society, whose ethos seems to be that only the newest, the glitziest, the most recent things have any value. The old, the worn, the battered, are no longer valued – “Chuck it out, buy a new one.” This seems to be a product of the last half century – even when I was a child, if something broke, you took it to be repaired or tried to do it yourself. Even in the 1980s, it was possible to take electrical items such as video recorders (which broke down regularly, then, infuriatingly, worked perfectly as soon as you took them in for repair!) to a little shop in a back street. Where someone with skill and patience would be able to repair it.
Cars are a case in point. When I first owned a car (again in the 1980s) many minor repairs could be done on the front drive by the owner. These days, all newer cars are run by complicated electronic systems which need the skills of a trained mechanic to repair…. But at least we still repair them, perhaps because they cost so much in the first place.
Yet we throw far too many things away when they break down, because it’s cheaper and easier to buy a new one, than to try to find someone to repair it. I think that is so sad. And don’t get me started on the inbuilt obsolescence of much IT equipment, including mobile phones. My current mobile is nearly four years old and working absolutely fine. Yet I know that soon, Apple will stop supporting its hardware and I will be forced to replace it. I find this infuriating. The same thing applies to my writing laptop, whose operating system is Windows 10, which Microsoft is inconsiderately declaring obsolete sometime next year. Gah.
Worse, it can be only too easy to write people off as “broken”, stuff them full of medication to damp down their symptoms and call it done. I know that the NHS is under incredible pressure at the moment, but I find it so sad that GPs no longer have time to simply talk to people, to find out what the story behind the symptoms they are presenting with might be. I am absolutely not blaming the hardworking practitioners on the ground, but the systemic lack of time and funding to do the job of repairing our bodies and minds properly, with sensitivity to the whole person.
Yet, God bless the NHS, it does still happen. This time last year, I was preparing to go into hospital for an operation to correct some deformities in my left foot. And the whole process of repair and restoration was undertaken with exactly the time, care and attention I am taking about. I had more than one consultation appointment, as well as an x-ray. On the day, the surgeon concerned, to whom I will be forever grateful, took meticulous care to do a proper job. The operation took more than two hours, and I was awake for all of it. I can remember thinking, “Surely he must have finished by now?” Then he popped his head around the sheet dividing us, and said, “Right, that’s the big toe done, now I’ll start on the others.” The after-care was of the same high standard and, nearly a year on, I have a straight foot and a neat scar as souvenirs.
Second, true repair is seldom about the “quick fix”. So many of us are feeling overwhelmed at the moment, by the sheer scale of the problems in the world, in our lives. We feel tired and anxious and over-faced, reluctant to deal with any new issue that comes up, but uneasily aware that we need to do something. If only for the very natural (but less than laudable) reason that if we can fix whatever it is, it will go away, not be our problem any more. Maybe then we will be able to rest, relax, wind down.
Unfortunately, this is absolutely the worst mind-set in which to approach repairing anything broken. Broken things, broken people need time, care, attention, and gentleness, all of which can seem to be in very short supply, just now. It can be so tempting to come up with a hasty, unthought through solution, and slap it over the wound, like a sticking plaster. Then on to the next thing.
Problem is, this rarely, if ever, works. Good solutions, good repairs, need time and patience and dedication. There is the old story of a harassed young monk who confessed to his abbot that he was struggling to find time to sit still in prayerful silence. “How long do you spend in silence?” the young monk asked. “At least an hour a day,” the abbot replied. “But what if you’re too busy?” the young monk said. “On those days,” the abbot said with a twinkle in his eyes, “I spend two hours.”
This may sound desperately counter-intuitive to us, but I have come to believe that it is true: when we give something the time and dedication it deserves, the outcome is almost always better, more positive, and will last longer. Cultivating this kind of long-term, slow, patient mind-set can be difficult in our society, but it is so very worth it.
My husband and I have recently been watching Asia, the most recent documentary series narrated by David Attenborough. And it has offered example after example of this long, slow, patient process in action, by conservationists all over the world. Who spend years attempting to repair, redress, the damage that humankind has done to the natural world. That such people exist gives me hope for the future.
So how can we approach the process of repair and restoration with kindness, compassion, gentleness and hope? The first step is to follow the example of the Repair Shop experts, and simply listen. Listen with an open heart and open mind, without judgement. Which is easier said than done. As Erika Hewitt said in our first reading, “Paying attention to something is an act of love; witnessing and naming brokenness is how we begin to heal it.”
The vital thing to remember, I believe, is what she told us, “We’re intimately acquainted with brokenness, then, even as we believe that no matter how fractured we are or once were, we can make whole people of ourselves. We are whole at our core, because of the great, unnameable, sometimes inconceivable Love in which we live.”
“We are whole at our core, because of the great, unnameable, sometimes inconceivable Love in which we live.” I do believe this: at our core, in our deepest selves, there is a place where we were never broken, never hurt, never wounded. This core may be very deeply buried under a lifetime of sad experiences, but it is there, nonetheless.
So the process of repair is one of coming back to, rediscovering (or discovering for the first time) our deepest, most precious, unwounded selves. And then trying to live out of that place, so that we are able to help others repair themselves into wholeness. As spiritual communities, we can offer safe and sacred spaces in which this deep work of repair and restoration can be done. In engagement groups, in spiritual direction (which should more properly be called spiritual accompaniment, as it is about walking alongside the directee on their spiritual journey) the gentle process of soul repair can take place.
I leave you with the thought that the word ‘repair’ can be divided into ‘re-pair’. In other words, to bring back the divided parts of something or someone into wholeness. All objects, all people, all situations, have the potential of being whole, of having deep integrity. The trick is choosing to spend the time and attention to love that wholeness into being. It is the most important work in the world.
May it be so, Amen
Closing Words
Spirit of Life and Love,
Our time together is drawing to a close.
May we find the time, care and attention
within ourselves to repair our world,
our communities, and ourselves into wholeness.
May we share the love we feel,
may we look out for each other,
and may we keep up our hearts,
being grateful for the many blessings in our lives,
now and in the days to come, Amen
Postlude Stella del mattino by Ludovico Einaudi