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). words by Mark Hutchinson
We gather as Unitarians,
old and new friends
seeking truth love meaning
and deep connection.
We respect the integrity of our individual selves
even as we are shown the inter-connectedness of all that is;
we light this chalice
the symbol of our open creedless faith
for holding
and being held.
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.
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 from The Cosmic Egg: My Story and Our Story by Richard Rohr
If we are going to be the rebuilders of society, we need to be rebuilt ourselves. A healthy psyche lives within at least four containers of meaning. Imagine four nested domes. The first is called my story, the second is our story, the third is other stories, and the fourth is the story. This is what I call the cosmic egg.
The smallest dome of meaning is my story. The modern world is the first period of history where a large number of people have been allowed to take their private lives and identities seriously. There is a wonderful movement into individuation here, but there’s also a diminishment and fragility if that’s all we have. This first dome contains my private life. “I” and my feelings and opinions are the reference point for everything. This dome is the little stage where I do my dance and where the questions are usually, “How do I feel? What do I believe? What makes me unique?”
My story isn’t big enough or true enough to create large or meaningful patterns by itself, but many people live their whole lives at this level of anecdote and nurtured self-image, without ever connecting with the larger domes of meaning.
The second dome of meaning is our story. This is the dome of our group, our community, our country, our church—perhaps our nationality or ethnic group. We seem to need this to contain our identity and security as social beings. It’s the good and necessary training ground for belonging, attaching, trusting, and loving. If we don’t have a supportive family, group or community with which we can bond, we create people who struggle to bond. Fortunately, most of us have multiple memberships: family, neighborhood, religious affiliation, country. These are schools for relationship, connection, and almost all virtue as we know it.
This second dome of meaning gives us myth, cultural heroes, group symbols, flags, special foods, ethnicity, and patriotism. These tell us that we’re not alone; we’re also connected to a larger story.
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 Cosmic Egg: Other Stories and The Story by Richard Rohr
The third dome of meaning is what I call other stories. The term “other stories” illustrates the significant but sometimes painful recognition that our story is not the only frame, not likely the most important frame, and maybe even a frame with a lot of shadow and bias. This is the great advantage of studying history, literature beyond our own language, anthropology, world cultures and religions, and experiencing some world travel, whether by opportunity or necessity. This is also the invitation modeled by Jesus to move beyond my story and our story, and to stand in friendship and solidarity with other stories.
As we encounter more and more of the world’s other stories, many people are broadening their wisdom, while others are broadening their fear. There is only one thing more dangerous than the individual ego or my story and that’s the group ego that insists that our story is the measure of all things and so seeks to label other stories as ignorant, dangerous, or inferior. It looks like it will take us some time, perhaps centuries, to resolve the human drive to exclude, to scapegoat, to judge, and to dismiss other peoples’ stories. Only nondual thinkers, mystics, and some saints seem capable of such universal capacity.
The fourth dome of meaning, which encloses and regulates the three smaller ones, is called the story. By this, I mean the patterns that are always true. This is much larger and more shared than any one religion or denomination. All healthy religions would, on some levels, be telling the story, as the Roman Catholic Second Vatican Council authoritatively taught. For example, forgiveness always heals; it does not matter whether we are Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, or Jewish. Forgiveness is one of the patterns that is always true, although it reveals its wisdom in countless ways. It is part of the story. Also, there is no specifically Christian way to feed the hungry or to steward the earth. Love is love, even if the motivation might be different.
Prayer by Mark Hutchinson (adapted)
Spirit of Life and Love,
May we be willing to have no opinion sometimes,
may we be open to other opinions at all times.
May we challenge and be challenged.
May we fall into our infinite selves,
may we bless others as they fall too.
May we experience all of this house our world,
may we bless others as they experience too.
May we be transformed and allow transformation from and in others.
A Blessing of Openness so the air of infinity breathes throughout All That Is
Amen
Reading from The Uncarven Image by Philip Hewett
Sectarianism is another inevitable consequence of our over-dependence upon words as symbols. Words may properly be used to describe certain broad theories to which many people may more or less (often with many reservations) subscribe. That some people should fanatically attach themselves to every detail of a verbal system is a part of the disease. But that labels should interpose themselves between individuals, so that they see each other only as examples of a supposedly homogeneous class – the saved, the heathen, capitalists, communists, Arabs, Chinese, the wealthy, the workers and so on – this is the real tragedy of our predicament….
Religious liberals are certainly not immune to this disease. In fact, it may be that our fondness for words makes us particularly prone to it. How often have we heard remarks which suggest that just as a democratic country functions by means of a party system, so also does a democratic church! The labels are brought out and the lines are drawn. The caricatures which result are no less ludicrous or pernicious than those which emerge from the wider world picture. We need to remember more often the great voices in our own tradition which have bidden us shun the spirit of sectarianism as though it were indeed the work of the devil.
Time of Stillness and Reflection Trust by Matthew Smith (adapted)
Spirit of Life and Love,
In this moment let us be conscious
of the free gifts of air to breathe
and solid ground beneath our feet.
Conscious of these natural realities,
Let us likewise recall the importance
of interpersonal trust in our lives.
While being open to others
Carries its risk,
We know our hearts will shrink and wizen
If we live mainly by suspicion.
As persons of inherent worth and dignity –
Each and every one of us –
Let us claim the right to demand
Justice and accountability
From those in positions of power.
Let us also be willing to open ourselves
To love and trust –
For our own dear sakes.
There is good in the world,
And there is good in people.
Sometimes we need to look deeply –
But it is there.
We know there are tens of millions of hearts
Yearning for the same things that we do –
Fairness, love, care for the earth, compassion.
[silence]
As we reach out
Let us have resolute faith
That we will connect with those
True hearts – the companions
We really need for life’s journey.
So it is that we recognise and celebrate
This hard but invaluable work
Of trusting and reaching out –
In our own personal lives,
And in the practise of spiritual community.
May it ever be so.
Amen
Musical Interlude I giorni by Ludovico Einaudi
Address The Cosmic Egg
Each morning, I receive an e-mail from the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico. They are called Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, and the text within is generally written by Fr. Richard, a Franciscan theologian whose wisdom and insight may be known to some of you. The Meditations for 16th and 17th February have given me the theme for this week’s service.
Rohr speaks about the Cosmic Egg, explaining, “A healthy psyche lives within at least four containers of meaning. Imagine four nested domes. The first is called my story, the second is our story, the third is other stories, and the fourth is the story.” ‘My story’ is all about us as individuals, which he describes as “the little stage where I do my dance and where the questions are usually, ‘How do I feel? What do I believe? What makes me unique?’”
Which is a perfectly natural and perfectly valid developmental stage, which we all go through. But it is a small, isolated place to live out our entire lives. And so there is the second dome, ‘our story’, which Rohr describes like this: “This is the dome of our group, our community, our country, our church—perhaps our nationality or ethnic group. We seem to need this to contain our identity and security as social beings. It’s the good and necessary training ground for belonging, attaching, trusting, and loving.”
And that is as far as many of us ever get. Yet it, too, has its dangers, its shortcomings, its limitations. As Philip Hewett points out in our final reading, when we live out of “our story”, we are (perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not) ascribing the label of “other” to anyone who is not a part of our group, our community. Hewett comments, “labels… interpose themselves between individuals, so that they see each other only as examples of a supposedly homogeneous class – the saved, the heathen, capitalists, communists, Arabs, Chinese, the wealthy, the workers and so on – this is the real tragedy of our predicament.” He has a harsh name for this practice: “sectarianism”.
As Rohr explains, “our story is not the only frame, not likely the most important frame, and maybe even a frame with a lot of shadow and bias.” But oh my goodness! It can be so tempting to live there. It allows us to belong, to love (certain trusted) others, and to be part of a small community, or communities. Yet Rohr warns us of the limitations of this standpoint: “As we encounter more and more of the world’s other stories, many people are broadening their wisdom, while others are broadening their fear. There is only one thing more dangerous than the individual ego or my story and that’s the group ego that insists that our story is the measure of all things and so seeks to label other stories as ignorant, dangerous, or inferior.”
We Unitarians pride ourselves on being open and inclusive. Here is what we ought to aspire to, in my opinion. John Buehrens and Forrest Church quote the late 19th century American Vice President Adlai Stevenson, in their book, A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism: “I think that one of our most important tasks is to convince others that there is nothing to fear in difference; that difference, in fact, is one of the healthiest and most invigorating of human characteristics, without which life would become meaningless. Here lies the power of the liberal way: not in making the whole world Unitarian, but in helping ourselves and others to see some of the possibilities inherent in viewpoints other than one’s own; in encouraging the free interchange of ideas; in welcoming fresh approaches to the problems of life; in urging the fullest, most vigorous use of critical self-examination.”
“Here lies the power of the liberal way: not in making the whole world Unitarian, but in helping ourselves and others to see some of the possibilities inherent in viewpoints other than one’s own.” This is so important, particularly at the moment, when, as Rohr comments, so many people are “broadening their fear”. Whenever we read or listen to the news, there are current examples of this – whole communities and nations curling in on themselves, excluding the other, “othering” whole tranches of people who are human, just like them.
There used to be a meme which did the rounds on Facebook, which consisted of a line of skeletons, each with a label beneath it: ‘Male’, ‘Female’, ‘Black’, ‘White’, ‘Gay’, ‘Straight’, ‘Religious’, ‘Atheist’, ‘You’. Of course, they all looked identical, which is rather the point.
Every time we judge a group of people, every time we make a group of people our scapegoats, we are “othering” them, choosing to think of them as different from, less than, ourselves. And that applies whether they are superficially like us, or superficially different (in their skin colour, race, gender, sexuality, gender identity and so on). We Are All Human Beings. I cannot emphasise that enough. We are all human beings. And so are all worthy of being treated with inherent dignity and respect.
But there is a better way of looking at things, a better way of living our lives, which Rohr explains as the fourth dome of meaning, the story. This “encloses and regulates the three smaller ones,” and consists of “the patterns that are always true. This is much larger and more shared than any one religion or denomination. All healthy religions would, on some levels, be telling the story, … For example, forgiveness always heals; it does not matter whether we are Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, or Jewish. Forgiveness is one of the patterns that is always true, although it reveals its wisdom in countless ways. It is part of the story. Also, there is no specifically Christian way to feed the hungry or to steward the earth. Love is love, even if the motivation might be different.”
What might it mean, if we chose to embrace the story, and to live our lives in a spirit of love and compassion? It would undoubtedly be uncomfortable – it’s far easier, far less challenging, to live out of my story or our story, rather than choosing to try to understand the world’s other stories, and to reach out with empathy and compassion, rather than armouring up, self-protecting.
Yet the universal values of Love, Compassion, Forgiveness do exist – they are with us, embraceable by us. We simply need to choose to let go of their opposites: Hatred, Judgement, Fear, Resentment. Did I say simply? Of course it is far from simple to choose this better way. It is hard and difficult and challenging. Yet each and every one of us can at least attempt to make a positive difference in the world, by keeping our minds open to the stories of others, by staying out of judgement, by being brave enough to overcome our fears, which make us small and inward-looking.
I will finish by sharing the words of the Charter for Compassion, which tells us clearly how we might achieve this:
“The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.
It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.
We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.
We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.”
May it be so, Amen
Closing Words
Spirit of Life and Love,
Our time together is drawing to a close.
May we choose to embrace the story,
and to live lives of love, compassion, and forgiveness.
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