Learning How to Live

Reflection #93 (17th November 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

As I said at the beginning of the service, our focus this morning is on staying in touch with what’s still good in the world – reconnecting with our sources of uplift and joy – even when our personal situation is really tough, or the world seems to be falling apart, or it’s all happening at once. I don’t know if this resonates with you, but at times when I’m feeling all too painfully aware of all the horrors going on around the world – the brutality of war, genocide, and creeping fascism are right up in our faces (not to mention all the more bloodless forms of cruelty like austerity that have been drip, drip, dripping away for years) – and the impact of all this is getting ever closer to home – in these times I do feel some kind of duty to at the very least bear witness to these horrible aspects of our shared reality (and, as far as is possible, make whatever small contribution I can to resist the world’s evils). Sometimes I find myself feeling a kind of pressure, coming both from within and without – a nagging sense that it’s wrong to turn away from it all – almost obscene for me to just go on living my nice life, having a laugh, enjoying myself, while so many others are suffering, and the planet is burning.

Mini-Reflection #92 (27th October 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I called today’s service ‘Meet the Mystics’ thinking that it might be the first of several such reflections in the coming year – so think of today’s service as a brief introduction to an endlessly fascinating line of people down the ages – we’re starting with Zilpha Elaw – but there are many other mystics with intriguing and peculiar life stories we can learn from. And ‘peculiar’ really is the word, isn’t it? The lives of mystics so often turn on these strange experiences.

Reflection #91 (20th October 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

As I mentioned earlier in the service, the words of my first minister, Art Lester, stuck with me for many years. ‘Just a Person’. This phrase has come to be a shorthand in my mind for a whole cluster of ideas about that much-misunderstood virtue that we’re exploring today: humility.

Too often, I think, we tend to think of humility in quite a miserable light. If someone were to suggest that we need to show humility it might be taken as saying that we should think less of ourselves, we shouldn’t get ideas above our station, we should get back in our box. We might feel chastised by it. Imagery around humility often shows humble people literally grovelling or making themselves small.

Reflection #90 (13th October 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Once a year – at least once a year – it’s important to stop and give thanks for the harvest – for everything it takes to get food onto our plates – for the earth, the weather, the pollinators, and many, many human hands – to till the soil, plant the seeds, to weed and water and prune, tend to livestock, to pick and pull up, package and process, transport the goods to market, and stock the supermarket shelves and ring up your basket on the till or at the market stall. It was hinted at in Malcolm Guite’s poem which we heard earlier for our meditation: yes, let’s thank God for the harvest, but let’s also remember that God didn’t just magic it onto our plate. A huge chain of people served as God’s hands along the way, bringing the harvest to our table, feeding us. Meeting our needs for sustenance, nourishment, and the sheer pleasure of eating well.

Mini-Reflection #89 (8th September 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I wanted to include that poem from Brian Bilston (‘Message to the 14-Year-Old Me’) to reflect the ambivalence that many people seem to have when it comes to encouragement – particularly self-encouragement. It plays up to a kind-of British stereotype: a bit self-deprecating, a bit wary of puffing yourself up, perhaps a defence mechanism of not wanting to aim too high or get your hopes up. Looking back at his teenage self, the poet doesn’t wish he could cheer himself on to greater things or build himself up, but instead encourages himself to aspire to a ‘basic level of competence in a limited number of simple, unremarkable things’. And that’s not a bad approach to life! But in today’s service I want to encourage you to be rather more bold in your encouraging (of self and others).

Reflection #88 (4th August 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

This morning’s service is the second of a two-part exploration of ‘Growing Up’. Fear not – if you weren’t here last week for the service of congregational reflections – each of the services does stand alone. We’ve been considering what it means to ‘grow up’ – what it looks and feels like as a lived experience – and how our perspective on that might change over the course of our lives. The choice of topic was in part inspired by this book titled ‘When I Grow Up: Conversations with Adults in Search of Adulthood’ by Moya Sarner.

But the two quotes I’ve put on the front of our order of service today illustrate the angle we’re going to explore in this week’s instalment: firstly the famous line from St Paul (and we’ll hear the expanded version of this later in the service): ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ And secondly a response to this line from C.S. Lewis: ‘When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.’ So we’ll be considering what it could mean to ‘put away childish things’ and the paradoxical feelings we might have about this aspiration…

Mini-Reflection #87 (21st July 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

This morning’s service marks the festival of Dharma Day (otherwise known as Asalha Puja) – particularly associated with the Theravadan Buddhist tradition – a day which marks the Buddha’s first sermon and thus the founding of Buddhism as a religion. There is, of course, much wisdom to glean from the Buddhist tradition (or we could say the Buddhist traditions as there are many different strands), and I could have picked any number of teachings to highlight today, but I’ve long thought that ‘The Three Jewels’ offer some insight which can really speak to us Unitarians, so that’s the teaching which we’re going to focus on in this morning’s service.

If you’re not yet familiar with ‘The Three Jewels’, fear not, as we’ll hear several perspectives on them during the next hour, but as an introduction I’ll just share this quote from the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chagdud Tulku who said: ‘We take refuge in the Three Jewels – the Buddha, the dharma, and sangha. The Buddha is like one who has walked a certain road and, by virtue of having reached the destination, knows the route and can show us the way. The road itself is the dharma. And those with whom we travel, those who offer us support and on whom we rely, comprise the sangha.’

Reflection #86 (7th July 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Over the last few weeks – on those rare days when the weather’s been neither too hot nor too wet – I’ve been engaging in quite a bit of therapeutic gardening. As many of you know, the first half of this year has been quite full-on for me, and as a result my little garden has been sadly neglected – just at the time of year when it’s most important to keep on top of things. Everything was growing away so vigorously in springtime – and I didn’t have the capacity to give it the care and attention it needed – after a winter and spring of unusually wet weather the growth was especially rampant.

So, I found myself standing at the back door a few weeks ago, surveying the scene, and asking myself: where do I begin!? It was a bit of a mess. So many of my favourite plants were smothered in bindweed and looking very sorry for themselves. Others had been lost to frost, or waterlogged through the cold, rainy, winter months. An old hosepipe and a broken ladder had been left laying on the ‘lawn’ (I had to put ‘lawn’ in inverted commas as it has long consisted more of weeds than grass) and the grass had grown right over them. There were snails and slugs as far as the eye could see.

Reflection #85 (14th April 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Some years ago I read a paper written by my ministry colleague Stephen Lingwood, on Unitarian theology, and its opening premise has really stuck with me. It’s pertinent to the anniversary we’re celebrating today so I want to share a little excerpt from it with you now. Stephen Lingwood writes:

‘I am a Unitarian. That label, “Unitarian” was also used by Theophilus Lindsey when he started the first explicitly Unitarian church in Britain in 1774. What does it mean to make the claim that both he and I are Unitarians? What relationship do I have to Lindsey and to this thing called “Unitarian”? What is the relationship any Unitarian has with Unitarians of the past?… The language, practices, and beliefs of Lindsey seem to be radically different to mine… The Unitarian tradition has changed, sometimes quite rapidly. And its self-understanding is that it does change, and that it should do. But this does make the question seem even more pressing: in what sense do we claim religious continuity in a non-creedal tradition that allows the freedom of religious evolution? In what sense is the Unitarianism of the past the same thing as the Unitarianism of the present?’

Reflection #84 (17th March 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Friendship is one of those subjects that I’m endlessly interested in pondering, and one I’ve probably got too much to say about, which is why this is only part one of a two-part service (and next week we’ll be hearing varied perspectives from several members of the congregation).

If you’re at the church in person you may already have noticed that the picture on the front of your order of service today is of – Dave Myers and Si King – otherwise known as the Hairy Bikers. I know that many of you, like me, were very sad to hear of the recent death of Dave Myers – the Sunday after the news broke I lit a candle here not only for Dave and his family but also for Si – and I could see faces round the room nodding in sympathy. It was clear to see that theirs was a great friendship, and this would be a terrible loss to Si, who had written: ‘My best friend is on a journey that for now, I can’t follow. I will miss him every day and the bond and friendship we shared over half a lifetime.’