Prelude Melodia Africana I by Ludovico Einaudi
Opening Words by David Usher
Open your hearts to the wonder of worship.
Open your minds to the eternal quest for meaning and truth.
Open your eyes to the miracle of creation.
Open your arms to the embrace of your fellow men and women.
Open your souls, and let the divine sweep in.
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 Cliff Reed (adapted)
Bubbles in the river we may seem to some –
transient, insubstantial, empty;
but we are here to effervesce with loving worship,
to reflect the divine rainbow in our fragile souls,
to treasure within us, for a moment, the breath of life.
Yes, it matters that we are here – virtually, together.
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 Language by Phil Silk, from With Heart and Mind
This reading is actually a prayer, but I think it does just as well as a reading…
Let us rejoice in the history of human communication.
We are grateful for all the individuals who have shared their experiences and interpretations of life with us.
Let us also appreciate the efforts of those who continue to help us understand the multitude of tongues they use and have used.
Let us recognise the importance of being careful communicators ourselves,
Careful to think and feel clearly what we want to say,
Careful to convey messages in ways appropriate to the intended audience,
Careful to be honest but not hurtful,
Wise enough to know when to be silent and when to speak.
Let us learn to be good listeners: attentive, sensitive, patient, responsive.
There are many ways to explore life and to share the results.
May we be alive to the possibilities, recognising how connected we are
To all human beings, dead, alive and to be born.
May we also appreciate how connected we are to the rest of the universe, living or not.
Language is the medium, and the message. Long live language.
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 Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
This irresistible attraction to screens is leading people to feel as though they’re ceding more and more of their autonomy when it comes to deciding how they direct their attention. No one, of course, signed up for this loss of control. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, with grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the first place: they joined Facebook to stay in touch with friends across the country, and then ended up unable to maintain an uninterrupted conversation with the friend sitting across the table…
[Our] culture’s relationship with these tools is complicated by the fact that they mix harm with benefits. Smartphones, ubiquitous wireless internet, digital platforms that connect billions of people – these are triumphant innovations!… But at the same time, people are tired of feeling like they’ve become a slave to their devices….
We cannot passively allow the wild tangle of tools, entertainments, and distractions provided by the internet age to dictate how we spend our time or how we feel. We must instead take steps to extract the good from these technologies while sidestepping what’s bad. We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience.
Prayer by Cliff Reed (adapted)
Spirit of Life and Love,
In the quietness of this place and the peace of this hour,
may we come close to our deeper selves.
Fantasies and daydreams too often cloud our minds,
and we use our time and energy pursuing empty goals.
In busy-ness we lose our way.
Let us listen to the deep insistent call within us.
May we learn to love our poor fragmented selves
that they may be healed.
And may we turn that love outwards,
that it might heal the wounds which hate and fear have made.
Let us not be deceived about ourselves or about our world,
so that we neither crash in disillusion nor be twisted by cynicism.
If truth and clear vision be granted us, then let us give thanks.
May arrogance never trap us into thinking that truth has but one aspect.
May we stand face to face with ourselves,
recognising that which is truly ours,
and that which is the imposition of others.
And as we do, may we feel the love which unites us all in the depths of our being.
Amen
Reading A challenge for the new year: blogpost, 31st December 2017 (adapted)
I have subscribed to liberal Catholic theologian, Richard Rohr’s daily meditations for some years now. They usually give me a life-affirming, spiritual start to my day.
At the end of 2017, I came across this passage, from The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness: Preparing to Practice, by Rabbi Rami Shapiro, which Rohr quoted, and which really resonated with me, as a challenge for the coming year:
Shapiro wrote, “Will you engage this moment with kindness or with cruelty, with love or with fear, with generosity or scarcity, with a joyous heart or an embittered one? This is your choice, and no-one can make it for you. If you choose kindness, love, generosity, and joy, then you will discover in that choice the Kingdom of God, heaven, nirvana, this-worldly salvation. If you choose cruelty, fear, scarcity, and bitterness, then you will discover in that choice the hellish states of which so many religions speak. These are not ontological realities tucked away somewhere in space – these are existential realities playing out in your own mind. Heaven and hell are both inside of you. It is your choice that determines just where you will reside.”
“Heaven and hell are both inside you. It is your choice that determines just where you will reside.” Wow. Ever since, I have resolved to try to engage with the world, with each moment, with kindness, love, generosity and joy.
Time of Stillness and Reflection by Kate Brady-McKenna (adapted)
Please join with me, now, in a time of prayer, and reflection. Call it what you feel the most comfortable to call it. This time is for drawing closer to the eternal. For communicating with that which you may call divine.
Be comfortable. Be calm. Be wholly within your own being.
Let us think, for a moment, of the glories of the ordinary.
Of the minute, invisible, unthinking miracles that take place a million times even on this most mundane of days.
Let us think of the birthing, and the growing, and the flourishing and the developing and the showing.
And let us think of the love, and the companionship, and the community and the caring, and the praying.
And let us think of the air, and the light, and the breeze and the rain and the warmth.
Let us think of the talking, and the laughing, and the hugging, and also of the weeping and the mourning.
Let us think of the seeing, and the touching, and the hearing and the tasting and the smelling.
Let us think of the reading, and the learning, and the debating and the meditating and the thinking.
Let us think of these ordinary, commonplace glories, and the blessing that comes to us from ‘normal’.
And let us, too, think of those for whom these days are not ordinary. For those who long for ordinary, as a break from heartache, and sickness, and misery, and imprisonment.
And let us think, now, our own thoughts, and pray our own prayers, together, in the quiet of this sacred space and in the company of our beloved virtual community.
[silence]
Let us count our blessings as we celebrate the glories of the ordinary.
Amen.
Musical Interlude Melodia Africana III by Ludovico Einaudi
Address Social Media and Us
When did you last check your phone for e-mails? Or Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / TikTok / name your social feed of choice for updates? I’d like to bet that, if you are like me, it wasn’t so long ago – sometime today at the longest, if not a few minutes ago. Living in the 21st century is a complicated business. Never before have we been bombarded with so much information or had so many possibilities as to how we spend our leisure time. Smartphones are amazing: we carry around in our pockets and handbags gadgets which can take photos, show films, play games and access millions of websites from around the world, all at the touch of a screen. I do sometimes wonder whether we have lost anything among all this bounty. And whether we might not actually be better off without some of it. Whether we should just let some of it go.
And it has all happened so quickly! Facebook only came into existence just over 20 years ago (it was launched in February 2004), but now it (and its successors) offer us multiple opportunities to engage with the virtual world. Facebook was the first social media tool I signed up with, and remains the only one I engage with on a regular basis. I know that among some of my children’s generation, it is considered passé, mainly used by the older generation. Nevertheless, I do find it a lovely way to keep in touch with Unitarian and other friends around the country. And it is a joy to receive daily photos of my grandsons via FB Messenger. It makes me feel far more connected with my son’s young family.
And during the recent Covid lockdowns, when churches and other social venues were closed, virtual communities became vital ways of keeping in touch, offering connection and support. This very online service is the result of a practice I began at the beginning of the first Covid lockdown, and Zoom gatherings have become a way to include those who are unable to visit churches, chapels and meeting houses in person. Not to mention saving many hours of travelling to in person meetings.
So the digital revolution has not been all bad. Far from it. Yet has it come at a price? Cal Newport, in his seminal book, Digital Minimalism, argues that it has. I only bought in, in April 2022, on a whim, because it was on offer as a Kindle daily deal for 99p. But I have found it to be a fascinating and challenging read, which caused me to reflect seriously about how much time I was spending mindlessly browsing on my smartphone – usually either on Facebook or Pinterest – or playing time-consuming games like Match 3D. When I first read the book, I was shocked to realise that the time I was spending on social media or playing games was not far short of the ten hours a week Newport mentioned as the typical time spend feeding a Twitter habit. I agree with him that “this cost is almost certainly way too high for the limited benefit it returns.”
I also believe that the more visual social media apps, such as Instagram and TikTok, have contributed hugely to feelings of inadequacy and low self-worth among regular users, particularly teenagers. A while ago, I watched a documentary about the effects of Instagram and found it horrifying to see how much time some spent on it, and the effects of the curated, airbrushed images had on their lives, when compared with their own messy realities. In his book, Newport speaks of “Young people born between 1995 and 2012… iGen.” And he reports that rates of teen depression and suicide have sky-rocketed, much of it “seemingly due to a massive increase in anxiety disorders.” He shares the findings of a university mental health administrator: “these shifts in mental health correspond ‘exactly’ to the moment when American smartphone ownership became ubiquitous. The defining traits of iGen, she explains, is that they grew up with [smartphones] and social media, and don’t remember a time before constant access to the internet.”
Although I am not of the generation which grew up with smartphones (those born in the nineties and later) I, like many people of my age, have embraced the possibilities that a smartphone offers – staying in touch with people at a distance on Facebook, or finding wonderful new crochet patterns or writing tips on Pinterest, for example. And I appreciate hugely the ability to text my family and close friends whenever. And I find the alarm, notes, reminders and weather forecast functions very useful. And have four prayer or meditation apps, which I use during my morning sit (not simultaneously!)
My phone and I are not inseparable – when I am out walking, I only pull it out of my pocket to take a photo of something beautiful, that fills me with wonder. And it spends quite a bit of time sitting silently in my handbag. Unlike some people, who seem to have their phones in their hands all the time, and seem to prioritise connecting with the digital world almost more than connecting with the people they are sharing a real space with. It makes me quite cross when I see people allegedly out for a meal together, who spend more time texting absent friends or scrolling through their feeds than in talking with their dinner partner. Or someone walking with a child, who is trying to engage their attention, but they are too busy looking at their phone to notice.
Yet who am I to judge? If I had grown up with a smartphone, as the younger generation has, I would quite possibly have done the same. Newport’s book made me uneasily conscious that my relationship with my smartphone was not an entirely healthy one. It was not simply my servant, enabling me to do things I could not otherwise have done, like letting my husband know I’d arrived somewhere, or staying in touch with my adult children. Slowly, insidiously, it had become my go-to method of filling odd moments of time. I found myself checking Facebook or scrolling through Pinterest in the evenings, when we were watching something together on TV.
Reading Digital Minimalism made me conscious of this, made me ask why I was doing it. It made me understand that I was not living in consonance with my values (particularly simplicity), that I had allowed the ever-present convenience of my smartphone to distract me from being fully present to those I was in the same room with. It made me appreciate that I had been allowing it to invade my life and to hijack my time. When I should be enjoying space and silence and being in real (not virtual) community with my loved ones.
So two years ago, I very consciously did a re-set. I deleted several apps from my phone and silenced all notifications except for phone calls and texts. I try to check Facebook only once or twice a day (although I’ve slipped a bit since my grandson was born last November – the temptation to check FB Messenger to see whether there are any new photos of him is irresistible!), and try to only respond to calls or texts during the evenings, when I’m supposed to be spending quality time with my husband.
Because I want to live my life well, to be completely present to my family, my friends and what I am experiencing in the present moment, to make sure that each of my todays is “well-lived”. I have relegated my phone to a back seat and only bring it out when using it adds some real value to my life.
In short, as Newport comments, “humans are not wired to be constantly wired.” I hope that my experience of realising that I too was spending too much time in the virtual world and not enough being fully present to the real people, the real experiences of my life, may strike a chord, and help you to reflect about how much time you spend on your phone.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not advocating forsaking social media altogether, and throwing our phones in the nearest skip. Far from it – the digital revolution has been truly that – a revolution. And one which has benefitted our lives in many ways. But I believe that balance is all – we (I) need to find a healthy balance between interacting with our social media accounts and being present to our friends and families, and the real world all around us. Because real life is so much more important, so much more soul-nourishing, than the virtual world could ever be.
Closing Words
Spirit of Life and Love,
May we appreciate our real world,
our in-person relationships,
more than we do our digital lives.
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