Prelude Melodia Africana I by Ludovico Einaudi
Opening Words Each new morning by Penny Quest, from The Unitarian Life
Each new morning, two choices are open to every one of us:
The choice to live that day in the joyfulness of Love,
Or in the darkness of Fear.
Each new day, as the sun rises,
We have another opportunity to make that choice.
The symbolism of the sunrise is the removal of shadow
And the return of Light.
Each new morning we have another chance
To rid ourselves of the burdens, sorrows and fears of the past,
To rejoice in the joy of the present,
And to look forward to a future of fulfilment
On every level of our being.
Each sunrise is a fresh opportunity to release fear,
To choose a different life-path,
To commit ourselves to joyful, light living,
To trust in Ourselves and in the Universe,
To trust in the forces of Nature and in Mother Earth,
To trust in God, the Creator, the All-That-Is.
Chalice Lighting (you may wish to light a candle in your own home at this point). words by Cliff Reed
We kindle the light of our liberal faith: may it be
the light of knowledge to dispel ignorance,
the light of reason to dispel superstition,
the light of love to dispel bigotry and inhumanity,
no matter what their guise.
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 Ultimate Cheatsheet for Critical Thinking, Part 1, by Global Digital Citizen Foundation
Who:
- benefits from this? – have you also heard discuss this?
- is this harmful to? – would be the best person to consult?
- makes decisions about this? – will be the key people in this?
- is most directly affected? – deserves recognition for this?
What:
- are the strengths / weaknesses? – is the best / worst case scenario?
- is another perspective? – is most / least important?
- is another alternative? – can we do to make a positive change?
- would be a counter-argument? – is getting in the way of our action?
Where:
- would we see this in real world? – can we get more information?
- are there similar concepts / – do we go for help with this?
situations? – will this idea take us?
- is there the most need for this? – are the areas for improvement?
- in the world would this be a problem?
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 Ultimate Cheatsheet for Critical Thinking, Part 1, by Global Digital Citizen Foundation
When:
- is this acceptable / unacceptable? – will we know we’ve succeeded?
- would this benefit our society? – has this played a part in our history?
- would this cause a problem? – can we expect this to change?
- is the best time to take action? – should we ask for help with this?
Why:
- is this a problem / challenge? – should people know about this?
- is this relevant to me / others? – has it been this way for so long?
- is this the best / worst scenario? – have we allowed this to happen?
- are people influenced by this? – is there a need for this today?
How:
- is this similar to…? – does this benefit us / others?
- does this disrupt things? – does this harm us / others?
- do we know the truth about this? – do we see this in the future?
- will we approach this safely? – can we change this for our good?
Prayer by John H. Robinson Jr.
Thou who are the heart of being, we come together but often feel alone. We come for fellowship but we hold back.
We are certain — in our uncertainty. We are sure of ourselves — in our utter doubt. We are full of answers, but not to our real questions.
We are wounded but afraid of the health that is in us, frightened of what we must do to become healthy. We come too broken, too hurt, and too masked even to know our own hurt and fear.
We come as landlords who do not want to pay for the upkeep, as tenants who do not want to pay the rent, as heirs who do not want to be grateful.
Take all our contradictions and weave of us a whole, even despite ourselves. Thou creative power, whom we know but deny, whose we always are, even in our denial, Thou. Amen.
Reading from Challenge of A Liberal Faith by George Marshall. Words by Edith Hunter
Many of us religious liberals have not given sufficient thought to what we believe. We recite no dogmatic creed. We have no finished faith, once revealed and now neatly packaged and sealed.
Are we in danger then of going to the opposite extreme – of being hopelessly vague about what we believe?
Perhaps we should realise that our need is not to “find something to believe” – but rather to discover what our lives indicate that we believe right now. This is the place to start.
What did we enjoy most in the day just past? How did we spend our time? How do we wish we might have spent it? How do we feel about ourselves at the end of the day? Do we like the kind of person we are? What do we worry about? What are we afraid of? What do we hope for? Whose lives did our lives touch during the day? Was it for better or for worse? How do we feel about our parents, partner, children, neighbours, the school, the town? Are we aware of the natural universe? Do the arts influence us and feed our spirits?
To bring our attitudes, our convictions, our practices, out into the open and to look at them systematically, is to find out what we actually believe.
Time of Stillness and Reflection (words by Tony McNeile, adapted)
Let our prayer be a path of discovery towards knowledge of that which we cannot see.
Let our prayer be a question to the something which is in everything and is everywhere around us.
What is it, who is it, that touches the heart when the sun rises in the morning, or splashes the sky with colours as the sun goes down?
What force, what mind created the scenes so splendid, so calm, so serene?
Whose touch, what touch added beauty to the mechanical process of growth, that notified the trees of their seasons, when the bud should open and when the leaf should fall, that roused the slumbering seed and set it to grow?
How was the picture of decay engraved?
What hand painted the delicate shades of each species to distinguish them unique, that gave the fox its tail and the kingfisher its colours?
Something from within, something from without, touches each of us in the highs and lows of life.
When the spirit soars it is lifted by unfelt wings; when life collapses into a heap of worry, the soul is caressed by the gentle touch of hope.
What name can we give to this life that fills our life and reveals itself unseen?
[silence]
The prayer that seeks to know will find the answer in the still moments, as well as in the storm.
May our prayer unite us with the unknown that is within everything, and seems to come from the deep unknown of human life. Amen
Musical Interlude I due fiumi by Ludovico Einaudi
Address Keep Asking Questions
I know from browsing on Facebook during the past week how many Unitarians have been gobsmacked by the response of US President Donald Trump to the heartfelt address given by the Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde at his inauguration. Her simple message of the importance of being kind and compassionate and inclusive was met with an angry rant…. not a good augury of things to come.
We live in a very strange world. Bertrand Russell once wrote, “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” I wholeheartedly agree. But in our world today, in both politics, and mainstream religion, it seems to be certainty that is prized. To doubt or question is seen as somehow bad, or incorrect. I find this quite ironic, particularly in the religious sphere. Many mainstream religions, in both Christianity and (for example) Islam, insist that their followers believe X, Y, and Z, otherwise they are not deemed to be “proper” Christians / Muslims / fill in the blank yourself.
The reason why I find it odd, is that the classic definition of faith is, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”, to quote the Epistle to the Hebrews. Frederick Buechner writes: “Faith is not being sure where you’re going, but going anyway. A journey without maps. [And Paul] Tillich said that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.”
We can never prove that God exists (or doesn’t exist), but we can have faith that He (or She or It) does. And live our lives as though we believed it. Which includes a healthy dollop of doubt – not taking anything for granted, not accepting anything without questioning it first. So today I’m going to advocate that we should cherish our doubts, keep asking questions, for this is how we grow and mature in faith, and as people.
For our first two readings, I shared a brilliant “cheatsheet” issued by the Global Digital Citizen Foundation, which has also been doing the rounds on Facebook. The forty-eight questions listed on it are ones we all need to be asking, at every opportunity. Not only in our day to day lives, but also in our lives as members of a faith community.
We Unitarians do not claim to have all the answers – every Unitarian I’ve ever known has been a spiritual seeker, just like me. We are all on the same journey, “seekers and sharers, fellow pilgrims on the path” (to quote Cliff Reed).
Outsiders may find it difficult to understand how the denomination holds together, placing, as it does, so much importance on the freedom of individual belief based on reason and conscience. Cliff Reed explains this in Unitarian? What’s That?: “The Unitarian answer is that shared values and a shared religious approach are a surer basis for unity than theological propositions. Because no human being and no human institution can have a monopoly on truth, it is safer to admit that from the outset. … The values underpinning the Unitarian movement have to do with mutual caring and mutual respect. They involve a readiness to extend to each other a positive, involved and constructive tolerance. … They are the values of a community that is open to truth from many sources; a community of the spirit that cherishes reason and acknowledges honest doubt; a community where the only theological test is that required by one’s own conscience.”…
But we should still keep asking questions, if it appears that we are deviating from these values at any point.
Another way of putting it is to say that we all have the same attitude to religion and spirituality. All of us believe profoundly in the necessity of personal freedom of religious belief – the freedom to grow, and to act in accordance with our beliefs, to work out our own answers, to be able to share our doubts and questions. Forrest Church, late minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City, summarises it very neatly in his book, Born Again Unitarian Universalism: “We value one another’s thinking. We respect one another’s search. We honour it even when it differs from our own. We resist imposing our perception of truth upon one another. Embracing a kind of theological pluralism, we affirm the human importance of our joint quest for meaning in life without insisting upon the ultimacy of any single set of theological criteria … At our best, we move … to a fundamental trust in our own and one another’s inherent ability to make life meaningful.”
We share a devotion to spiritual freedom and find that the insights of others can enrich our own beliefs. What could be better?
We Unitarians have always been in the habit of questioning beliefs and cherishing doubts. I would guess that many of us came to Unitarianism exactly by that path – by starting to question some of the beliefs that we grew up with. In my case, I realised that I could not accept the divinity of Jesus as the unique Son of God, and also struggled with the idea that his death on the cross somehow put me back into right relationship with God. When my father gave me Alfred Hall’s Beliefs of a Unitarian to read, it was such a relief to learn about a denomination that “holds faith and doubt in reverent balance”, to quote Jan Carlsson-Bull.
What does holding faith and doubt in reverent balance mean? I believe that it is a very delicate balancing act, which certainly needs to be undertaken with reverence. It means actively searching for and working out what gives your life meaning, putting your whole heart and mind and soul into it, and yet at the same time totally respecting the right of every other member of your Unitarian community to disagree with you. It can be a very tough call sometimes.
Because it is only human nature to feel passionately about religious and spiritual matters, about things that touch us deeply. And when we feel passionately about something, it can be difficult to remember that our fellow Unitarians are absolutely free to disagree with us. And that it is our job as Unitarians, as folk who are aiming to “live Unitarianly”, to use Michael Dadson’s wonderful phrase, to not only tolerate their different views but also to wholeheartedly accept and cherish them. And to not feel aggrieved because Reverend X or Mrs. Y has written something on Facebook with which we disagree. Some of the recent posts in Unitarian groups on Facebook have grieved me enormously, because post-ers have not respected each other’s right to seek truth and meaning for themselves. And that is sad.
Holding faith and doubt in reverent balance also means being open to new ideas, from wherever they come. Unitarianism at its best is a wonderfully open way of approaching life and religion, based on an appeal to reason, conscience and your own life experience. And it is an ongoing process – you don’t just experience a one-off conversion, and then rest on those fixed beliefs for the rest of your life; every Unitarian has a duty to approach all new ideas and concepts reverently and critically (whether they have anything to do with our faith or not), and take from them what speaks to our own reason and conscience, and what makes sense in the context of our own life experience, in order to live out our lives in the best and truest way we can.
The interplay of individuals’ beliefs should be one of the great strengths of a Unitarian congregation – the bouncing of ideas off each other means that we can never be complacent about what we believe. It is stimulating to belong to such a congregation, but it can be very hard work. Nothing is set in stone, and each individual is responsible for keeping their mind open to new ideas, so that our faith can grow. As Robert T. Weston wrote, “Doubt is the key to the door of knowledge; it is the servant of discovery. … Doubt is the testing of belief.”
One of the most oft-quoted Unitarian aphorisms is, “We need not think alike to love alike”, often mistakenly attributed to our Transylvanian founding father Francis David. Our fierce defence of freedom of belief, within the denomination, and in the wider world, boils down to our belief in this one phrase, “We need not think alike to love alike.” And this inevitably includes holding space for doubts and questions.
For us, being Unitarian means having the freedom to believe what we will (so long as it is consonant with our reason and conscience, and doesn’t harm anyone else) whilst simultaneously being a member of a religious / spiritual community, whose members share the attitude that we are all on a spiritual journey together. We come together in community, providing a sacred space in which all can explore what gives our lives depth and meaning. For some this may involve a belief in a divine presence, which they may call God; for some it may be more of an internal process; or a faith in humankind; or a reverence for the natural world.
What matters is that we continue to ask questions, to take nothing for granted. And then, when we have answers which satisfy our reason and conscience, to take action. Because that is what will make a positive difference 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 keep asking critical questions,
not only about our faith,
but also about our lives.
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 Melodia Africana II by Ludovico Einaudi