Learning How to Live

Reflection #98 (9th February 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

There’s a saying that used to be used a lot in Unitarian and Universalist churches, as a kind-of covenant, and it starts with the phrase: ‘Love is the doctrine of this church.’ And I don’t think it would be controversial to say that love is what we think we’re about as a community – it pops up on a regular basis in our hymns and prayers – it’s right at the centre of who we are and what we do (or at least what we aspire to do). But, strangely, we don’t often make it the particular focus of a service – possibly because it’s just too big a topic to get a handle on – or too slippery a concept.

Reflection #97 (14th January 2025 for OneLight Gathering at Essex Church)

Thanks for inviting me to join you tonight – from the moment when Alison invited me to share on Universal Themes there was one thought that I couldn’t get out of my mind – and I’m ever-so-slightly hesitant to share it as it perhaps seems a bit heavy but the fact that it’s been such an insistent thought feels like a sign that it’s what I’m meant to speak about tonight.

Reflection #96 (12th January 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

On the front of this morning’s order of service there’s a picture of one of the greatest Olympic moments of my lifetime – that’s how I remember it, anyway, though I suppose it came along at a formative age for me – I was only eight years old when Torvill and Dean went to the Sarajevo Winter Olympics and performed their famous ice dancing routine to Ravel’s Bolero. Maybe if you didn’t grow up in Britain in the 80s this won’t mean as much to you – though Torvill and Dean are still somewhat revered in this country – I believe they’re now judges on ITV’s ‘Dancing on Ice’.

Mini-Reflection #95 (29th December 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Just a few thoughts from me on this business of making change in our lives – something that we can do any day, as we heard in one of the earlier readings, but it’s something which many of us particularly focus on at the turn of the calendar year, when New Year’s Resolutions come to mind. I want to preface my remarks by saying – this is one of those ‘both-and’ topics – it’s so often the case that I seem to be saying two apparently contradictory things at once when I stand up here. At least two! Sometimes more. There are two contrary messages that are both true, I reckon, but inevitably they’re in tension with each other: one is a message of self-acceptance, that you are good and worthy and loved just as you are; the other is a message of self-improvement, that there are always things we could pay attention to, do a bit of work on, to change our ways and change our life for the better (perhaps with the hope that any changes we make will have a positive impact on those around us and ripple outwards for the benefit of the wider world).

Mini-Reflection #94 (8th December 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I don’t know about you – but when I think about life and how I want to go about living it – my basic (really basic) starting point is that I want to be a good person and I want to live a good life. I know that might sound ridiculously basic but for all the sophisticated philosophising I might have tried to do over the years, for all that this basic intention comes up against the world’s troubles and complexities, that’s a significant part of the background music of my brain, a part that has always had some sort of influence on my life choices: I want to be good and do good. And I’m pretty confident that I’m not alone in this – it’s part of why you show up at church, right?

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).