Then sings my soul

O Universe! When I in awe-struck wonder
Consider all the beauty of the earth,
I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder,
The nebulae where stars are come to birth;

Refrain:
Then sings my soul, o Universe, to Thee,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, o wondrous mystery,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!

When through the woods and forest glades I wander
and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees;
when I look down from lofty mountain grandeur,
and hear the brook, and feel the gentle breeze;

[Refrain]

When I behold the wondrous evolution
Of diverse forms, adapted to their place
And know that life, arisen from the ocean
Can love and laugh, and move with fluid grace

[Refrain]

And when I die, and pass into a memory
I know that all my molecules shall be
Part of some life, some bird or flower or tree
For life is change, and death's a mystery.

[Refrain]

And life goes on, in all its splendid rhythm
And love is all the grace we'll ever know
Death yields to birth, and so the wheel turns always:
Love turns the wheel, and makes the dancers go.

[Refrain]

(pantheist version by Yvonne Aburrow)

(tune and original words)

Spring Equinox

(An address given at Notte Street Unitarian Church, Plymouth, 21 March 2010)

Many cultures celebrate the Spring Equinox.  In the Jewish tradition, it is the moment when the presence of God, the Shekhinah, entered into creation.  The Shekhinah is traditionally represented as feminine. According to the feminist Rabbi, Jill Hammer:

In the Jewish calendar, the first of the month of Nisan is the beginning to spring, and falls close to the spring equinox. It comes halfway between the playful holiday of Purim and the festival of Passover, when birds are beginning to sing and warmth and growth are beginning to take hold. The first of Nisan is one of the four new years of the Jewish calendar, marking the “first of the months” (rosh chadashim), or the beginning of time itself. Nisan is also the date when the Shekhinah first appeared within the mishkan (Divine dwelling-place. It is the moment of the descent of the Divine into the world—the budding of divinity within creation. If Tu B’Shevat represents the Divine sap flowing within the world, the 1st of Nisan is the moment when that sap bursts forth in new buds. The new revelation of the Divine is paired with the new life and beauty that appears in the spring. Within two weeks, the full moon festival of freedom, Passover, will arrive.

An important aspect of Shekhinah theology is the idea that the Shekhinah is separated from the Godhead, and it is human effort that will bring about their reunion. The human effort to reunite them involves all Jewish couples making love on the Sabbath eve, and the practice of Tikkun Olam, or repairing the world, and other mitzvot (commandments).  The idea behind Tikkun Olam is that the world is damaged and must be repaired, and it is the exercise of human love (in all its forms) that will bring about this restoration, and the reunion of the immanent and transcendent aspects of the Divine.  It is also about the restoration of harmony and balance.

Both Taoism and Paganism emphasise the dynamic balance in Nature between growth and decay, darkness and light, yin and yang, male and female, expansion and contraction.  Balance is not just a steady-state, but a dynamic equilibrium. New birth is balanced by death; growth is balanced by decay, light and activity is balanced by darkness and rest. If everything grew and expanded all the time, there would eventually be no space in the world for new growth - the old growth would block out the light.  So death and decay and darkness are not evil, but necessary components of the natural processes of life and change. The darkness is necessary for rest, growth, and regeneration. Death is not evil, but a necessary adjunct to life. If there was no death and dissolution, there could be no change or growth. The cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth is part of the dance. Suffering is also part of the process of growth; just as a tree is shaped by the wind, we are shaped by our experiences. It is only by experiencing suffering that we acquire sufficient depth to know the fullness of joy. It is then that the full light of consciousness dawns in us, and we achieve mystical communion with the divine.  But we cannot connect with the divine by stressing about it, but rather by relaxing and finding the inner stillness and space that is already there. All we have to do is to remember who we really are; to reconnect with the ebb and flow of the cycles of life.  Everything is cyclical – the seasons, the tides, the orbits of the planets – why not human life?  But it is not just a ceaseless round of the same old things, repeated ad nauseam.  Everything changes; everything is always becoming something else; nothing is ever lost.

With all this talk of balance being a natural thing, it might be easy to conclude that we can just go with the flow and all will be well. But what if the flow is out of balance?  Then we might have to go against the flow.  Andrew Pakula recently wrote:

There is also a big problem with going with the flow. The flow is all too often in the wrong direction. The flow may be away from our vision of how the world could and should be and against what is best for each of us. The flow is leading us toward selfishness. The flow is leading us toward a lonely detached kind of fierce individualism. The flow is leading us toward environmental catastrophe. The flow is leading us toward an increasing separation between the rich and the poor.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said "...there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted." He was reminding us that we can get accustomed to injustice and inequality. We can contribute to the negative things in our world just by 'going with the flow'. 

Because human society is somewhat divorced from nature, we cannot assume that it functions in the same way as nature. Human society is constantly being tinkered with by people who do not necessarily have the best interests of people or the ecosystem at heart; they may be motivated by corporate greed, a desire for self-aggrandisement, or other murky motives.  So the flow that is created by actions motivated by greed does not seem likely to create a just and humane society, or a society where everyone's rights are respected and diversity is celebrated.

Another aspect of balance is being able to see others' points of view.  This is the Unitarian practice of tolerance: to try to enter into others' perspectives on life, even when we disagree with them. As Cliff Reed writes:

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 liberal religious community that honours individuality without idolising it; of a community that finds spiritual stimulation in the unique contribution of each person while feeling itself united by a bond too deep for words.

So here we have a balance between community and individuality; a way of understanding ourselves as part of a community without sacrificing our individuality. But what does tolerance mean?  Does it mean putting up with other people's views, without challenging those we disagree with? Or does it mean entering into dialogue with them, and trying to understand where they are coming from? Real tolerance cannot mean just putting up with or ignoring someone else's views. It means, among other things, not removing the speck from someone else's eye while ignoring the plank in your own eye. If someone in the community holds views that I consider immoral (such as homophobia), I have a responsibility to engage them in dialogue, because if I remain silent, I am complicit in their prejudice; but my challenge to their views should be delivered in a compassionate way that takes into account their reasons for holding such a view; and I should also be prepared to be challenged by others on views that I hold.

Trying to achieve balance is also a fruitful way of resolving moral dilemmas.  In his excellent book Godless Morality, Richard Holloway points out that moral dilemmas are not usually about a conflict between good and evil, but between two conflicting goods.  The dilemma presented by the issue of abortion is a conflict between the need to prevent harm to the mother (who may have been raped, or whose quality of life could be significantly decreased by having a child) and the potential for the foetus to have a life. These two goods need to be weighed carefully to discover which takes priority at any given stage of the pregnancy.

Similarly, the rights of the individual are in balance with his or her responsibilities.  The idea of inalienable human rights is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on 10 December, 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations. These rights include freedom of religion (a right dear to Unitarians, who only won it in 1813 in Britain); freedom of speech; freedom of association, and so on. But as citizens, we also have responsibilities: to vote, to resist tyranny, to live sustainably, and so on.

So we do need to be active in maintaining the balance, not merely passive. We need to engage in Tikkun Olam, the restoration of balance and the practice of social justice, which is an integral part of many religious traditions, and a perennial concern of Unitarians. It is a way of restoring balance – caring for the poor and the oppressed, protecting the environment, standing up for human rights, and promoting freedom, peace and justice.  Indeed, we cannot really claim to be mystical or spiritual unless we put compassion into practice by helping others.  The two aspects of religion go hand-in-hand: without a sense of connection to others, there is no basis for compassion, and without the expression of compassion in the form of caring, the mystical experience can be barren and unproductive.

Change

(address given to Trowbridge Unitarians, 17 January 2010)

My favourite times of year are the transitional seasons of spring and autumn, when everything is changing rapidly. In spring there are new blossoms and new leaves emerging, and the days lengthen rapidly. In autumn, the leaves turn red and yellow and orange and are blown away in the wind. The smell of bonfires is in the air, symbolising the transformation of decay into the bright energy of fire.

Everything is always changing, transforming into something else; nothing is ever lost. The gathering of life experience is like the laying down of compost. The leaves of individual events fall onto the heap, fade and decay, and are transformed into memories, which feed our sense of identity, which gives rise to new experiences.

Change is constant in life; it is the one thing we can rely on. Some people find it difficult to embrace change; others enjoy it. Without change, there would be no growth, no seasons, no new life. There would also be no death, but just try to imagine what immortality would be like - a barren state of existence with no excitement.

The Buddhists like to point out that there is nothing constant about our bodies. Our cells are replaced so rapidly that every cell in our bodies is replaced by the end of seven years, so you are literally not physically the same person you were seven years ago. This is possibly the origin of the phrase, “the seven year itch”. Each day you acquire new experiences, new dreams, and lose old memories, so you are not the same person you were yesterday.

We constantly shape each other socially, giving approval or disapproval to certain characteristics, and each of us is a slightly different person in different social situations. We change our opinions as we hear new evidence, and this is a sign of flexibility and openness. A lack of willingness to change one’s opinion gives rise to the rigidity of fundamentalism. There’s a lovely quote by Alan Watts (an Episcopalian priest who became a Zen Buddhist in the 1960s) that explains the difference between the openness and trust of faith and the rigidity of belief:

"Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."

This openness and trust is an essential pre-requisite for the building of spiritual community. It is why many communities (such as Quakers and Pagans, and many Unitarians) like to do their rituals in a circle, which involves making eye contact with others, and emphasises the equality of participants.

The sociologist of religion, Emile Durkheim, said that the function of ritual is to manage changes in life, such as the transition from one state to another. Rites of passage (coming-of-age, coming out, initiation, marriage, divorce, birth, and death) are obvious examples; but in a sense all rituals are about managing change. When you come to chapel, you partake of the ritual of hymn-singing and prayer and listening to the address, and the structure of the ritual is a way of managing and enabling the change in consciousness that you experience as you make contact with the Divine by gradually relaxing into the service and entering into the altered state of prayerful awareness.

The major change enabled by participating in a service or a ritual is the building of community with others. As we share the celebration of ultimate worth, singing, praying, meditating, speaking and listening, we are focused on something other than our individual ego. We cease to worry about how we look, or whether we sing off-key, and focus on the experience of being together. The constant presence of the inner commentator is switched off. David Smail, a therapist who regards therapy with suspicion, writes in his book, Taking Care, that more therapeutic benefit is derived from participating in a communal activity than from hours of individual therapy. This is true even if it’s something apparently trivial like your local bridge club.

Being in a community of people sharing their spiritual journeys enables us to rub the corners off each other; to be aware of our own foibles and to tolerate those of others. That’s presumably why the prayer of Jesus emphasises that we are forgiven as we forgive those who trespass against us (or in the original Aramaic, “detach us from the fetters of the faults that bind us, as we let go the guilt of others”).

So change is both embracing and letting go, expansion and contraction. It is a dance of inner and outer, dark and light. It is a cycle of growth, death and rebirth. Everything is in constant flux. The plants grow, blossom, bear fruit and die. Stars and galaxies are born, expand, and then die as their energy is spent.

Sometimes change can be painful. The loss of loved ones, or the ending of relationships, are usually immensely painful, but they may also enable growth and renewal, and expand your capacity to feel. There’s a beautiful poem by Kahlil Gibran about joy and sorrow:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being,
The more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

Similarly, the Baal Shem Tov, a nineteenth century Jewish mystic, equated brokenness with openness to divine mystery:

Once the Baal Shem Tov commanded Rabbi Zev Kitzes to learn the secret meanings behind the blasts of the ram's-horn, because Rabbi Zev was to be his caller on Rosh Ha-Shanah. So Rabbi Zev learned the secret meanings and wrote them down on a slip of paper to look at during the service, and laid the slip of paper in his bosom. When the time came for the blowing of the ram’s-horn, he began to search everywhere for the slip of paper, but it was gone; and he did not know on what meanings to concentrate. He was greatly saddened. Broken-hearted, he wept bitter tears, and called the blasts of the ram's-horn without concentrating on the secret meanings behind them.

Afterward, the Baal Shem Tov said to him: "Lo, in the habitation of the king are to be found many rooms and apartments, and there are different keys for every lock, but the master key of all is the axe, whith which it is possible to open all the locks on all the gates. So it is with the ram's-horn: the secret meanings are the keys; every gate has another meaning, but the master key is the broken heart. When a man truthfully breaks his heart before God, he can enter into all the gates of the apartments of the King above all Kings, the Holy One, blessed be He." — Or Yesharim

When I reflect on the changes in my own life - the beginnings and endings of relationships, moving house, moving to a new city, meeting new friends, learning new ideas - these are always the times of greatest spiritual growth for me. Suddenly I experience a flood of creativity; poetry and prose pours onto the page in an unstoppable flood. Then there may be years of stagnation, until something comes along to shake me out of my rut and force me to move and grow. I should really try to find a way to make change constant in my life...

There could be no stories without change, because stories tell about the transition from one way of being to another - the discovery of spiritual treasure, a struggle for justice, falling in love, journeying from one place to another. The scientist Jack Cohen has suggested that we be renamed Pan narrans, the storytelling ape, because storytelling is a major aspect of our human nature. So let’s celebrate change as being the basis of all good stories, including the unique and special story you are each currently living.

Happy Vertumnalia

Today is the festival of Vertumnus, the lover of Pomona.

I like this story because Vertumnus appears in disguise to woo Pomona, and wins her by his eloquence. Because of his disguise, he is the god of seasons, change and growth. I also love the turning seasons, and approve strongly of change and growth.

Wikimedia Commons has an interesting selection of pictures of Vertumnus in a very convincing disguise.

But I prefer the word-picture painted by Ursula Fanthorpe in her poem, Pomona and Vertumnus.

balance and cyclicity

An address given at Frenchay Chapel on 21 September 2008.

The Archangel Michael, whose feast day is associated with the Autumn Equinox, was a dragon-slayer. The dragon that he slew, according to the Book of Revelations, was the Adversary, the serpent from the Garden of Eden.

What a tangle of mythology is involved in this story! In the West, dragons are seen as ferocious fire-breathing beasts; in China, they live at the bottom of the sea and of wells, and bring rain and other blessings. And in other ancient stories, serpents are a symbol of wisdom. Indeed, the Gnostics saw the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a manifestation of Sophia, the personification of wisdom.

So why is a being of light slaying the dragon? To find out, we need to look at the evolution of another dragon-slaying story, that of St George. In the earliest version of the story, George tamed the dragon and led it into the city by the golden girdle of the maiden who was to have been sacrificed to it.

If we see the dragon as a symbol of the beast within all of us, we can see that it is better to tame it and harness its energies for good, not to try to kill it (for it will assuredly resurface somewhere else, when we were least expecting it). We need to balance the energies within ourselves.
So why did the story evolve into one where the dragon was killed? Because the dragon was seen as the untamed power of nature, which must be subdued wherever it was found – in women or in the wilderness.

In China, meanwhile, they saw life as the balance of opposites – yin and yang, night and day, life and death, eternally cycling around each other in the great dance of existence. Hence dragons were the dynamic energy of the elements, bringing rain and growth. They were part of the dynamic equilibrium of nature. Equilibrium means “equal freedom” – freedom to move, to grow and to change; freedom of choice.

This dynamic balance of opposites can also be seen in the dance of the seasons – “a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted”. The wheel of the year turns; falling in the autumn, rising in the spring. As it falls in the autumn, and the nights draw in, we turn inward, towards home, and hearth, and spiritual things; baking, and making jam and wine; creative projects.

It also means that, instead of being harsh with ourselves when we get things wrong, we need to forgive ourselves; as Mary Oliver writes in Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Many religious traditions call upon their followers to empty themselves and allow the Divine to fill them. This sounds to me like a painful process. Rather, I think the work of spirituality is to relax, to find the inner stillness and space that is already there. All we have to do is to remember who we really are; to reconnect with the ebb and flow of the cycles of life. Everything is cyclical – the seasons, the tides, the orbits of the planets – why not human life? But it is not just a ceaseless round of the same old things, repeated ad nauseam. Everything changes; everything is always becoming something else; nothing is ever lost.

In Judaism, the Autumn Equinox is the birthday of the world. According to the Jewish website “Tel Shemesh”:

Rosh haShanah, in Jewish legend, is the anniversary of the day on which God created humans and animals—the beginning of the world. God creates humanity out of the dust of the earth, and out of God’s own spirit. Of humans, it says that “God created the human in God’s own image, in the image of God God created the human, male and female God created them.” Adam and Eve are born on Rosh Hashanah, as is the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. The first of the year falls on a day that reminds us that the Divine is within us and all beings. We blow the shofar, the ram’s horn, to signal the thunderous impact of this Presence on our lives, and we engage in memory—considering all that we have done during the year, seeking to make right where we have erred, seeking to become whole where we have been in turmoil, seeking to make ourselves new. It is a time of conception in all its forms. There is a tradition that the Jewish year has a “mother”—Rosh haShanah, the 1st of Tishrei—and a “father,” the 1st of Nisan (both are new years according to the Jewish calendar). If Rosh haShanah is the mother, then the shofar is the womb through which our spirits pass on the way to redemption. The ram’s horn represents the power of the Shekhinah to be hollow, to be a vessel for creation. Yet the shofar also reminds us of the ayil (ram) who sounds like El (God)—the masculine forces of the Divine. The liturgy of Rosh haShanah focuses on avinu malkeinu—our father, our king, the stern but loving father of Jewish tradition. We cast bread into bodies of water in the ritual called tashlich (throwing away), to cast away those behaviors we no longer want or need. Yet we can balance this image with the phrase in the Rosh haShanah liturgy: “hayom harat olam”—today is the birthday of the world, or more accurately, today is the pregnancy of the world. On Rosh Hashanah our world becomes pregnant with God, and God is pregnant with us. It is a time of mutual awareness and understanding. It is the time when we enter the inner world, the world of the womb, in order to be reborn into change.

Joseph Campbell wrote about the journey of the hero, who descends into the underworld, confronts his deepest fears, and returns to the everyday world bringing back a blessing for humanity. This story appears in a thousand different forms: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Jonah and the Whale, Jesus dying and being resurrected, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and the plot of just about any film you can think of; they all conform to this pattern. We are all heroes on our own journeys, bringing back wisdom from the depths for the benefit of humanity.