a silent act of love

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realise what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do...

When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen, Robbie Ross waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that.

It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and kept sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom has been profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world.

from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

This beautiful passage from De Profundis was one of the readings from my Palm Sunday service; the others were the life story of Dudley Cave, and the account of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem.

Palm Sunday

(address given on April 5th 2009 at Frenchay Unitarian chapel.)

Palm Sunday is a curious festival, celebrating as it does a brief moment of happiness and glory before the tragic outcome we all know so well. According to the story in the gospels, Jesus arrived in Jerusalem to a rapturous welcome from the people, who hailed him as a Messiah. Yet only a few days later another crowd was demanding his death. Where were the people who hailed him as a Messiah then, in his hour of need? Were they in hiding, denying that they ever knew him, like Peter? Had they turned against him, embarrassed by their earlier adulation? Of course we shall never know – because the truth or otherwise of the story is concealed beneath centuries of anti-Semitism and the terrible lie that it was the Jews that killed him (whereas, as I am sure we all know, crucifixion was a Roman method of execution; if the Jews had killed him, it would have been by stoning). This terrible lie resulted in centuries of persecution and genocide perpetrated by Christians towards Jews – pogroms in Eastern Europe, forced conversion of Muslims and Jews and then the burning of any who were found to be practicing Judaism in secret in Spain – the list is endless.

So, remembering that it’s only a story, what can we learn from this sudden reversal from adulation to revulsion? It reminds me of the way our society treats celebrities – investing them with all our hopes, and then reviling and despising them when they show their mere humanity. It is like being in love, except that the object of our love is not there to remind us that they have feet of clay; people project all they aspirations outwards onto these figures, and then are bitterly disappointed when they do not live up to the image that has been projected onto them.

It also reminds me of the rise and fall of one particular celebrity, Oscar Wilde. Oscar was the darling of fin-de-siècle Victorian society, until it was revealed that he had had a same-sex relationship. A revelation that cost him his life. He was sentenced to two years’ hard labour in prison, and it is fairly widely accepted that it dramatically shortened his life. George Bernard Shaw, another Irish writer, was born two years after Wilde and lived another forty-eight years beyond Wilde’s death. Whilst he was in prison, Wilde underwent a profound spiritual transformation, and wrote De Profundis (from the depths), a meditation on suffering.

Another gay martyrdom is the tragic death of Matthew Shepard, who was beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die on a hillside in Wyoming by a homophobic mob. A promising young life cut short by a vicious, senseless murder. This is not the only case of homophobic murder – there have been many such murders before and since.

I am not the first person to make the connection between the persecution of Jesus and the persecution of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Several artists have done so, as documented in the excellent book Art that Dares by Kittredge Cherry, a lesbian minister in the Metropolitan Community Church. 

The homophobia of Christians was one of the reasons that I stopped being a Christian (the other reasons were the idea that non-believers would go to hell, the view that sexuality is not sacred, and the idea that other religions were false). I also assumed, wrongly, that the Bible condemned homosexuality, and so I ceased to view it as an authoritative text on pretty much anything. One of my best friends (then and now) is a gay man whose life is dedicated to helping others. All my Christian friends at the time said that if he made love to another man, God could not accept him. I could not believe that this was true, and so (in 1983), I ceased to be a Christian. It was only recently, whilst studying for my MA in Contemporary Religions and Spirituality, that I became aware that there was much excellent radical Christian theology being written by lesbian, gay and bisexual identified people; theology that wrestled with the Christian tradition and reforged it in new, exciting and radical shapes. Writers who dared to reinterpret the Bible to show that the Christian tradition is not inherently homophobic. People who were reflecting on the meaning of gender and spirituality.

Of course, none of this is new to Unitarians, who have been open and accepting of gays and lesbians for at least forty years. The first two ministers to be prosecuted in the United States for performing same-sex marriages appeared in court in 2004. Unitarian Universalist ministers Kay Greenleaf and Dawn Sangrey were charged with multiple counts of solemnising a marriage without a licence. All charges against the two ministers were dropped in July 2004. If they had been convicted, though, they would have faced a fine of between $25 and $500, or up to a year in jail. The British Unitarian movement includes a substantial number of gay and lesbian ministers; Unitarian churches welcome LGBT people. In the US, transgender people are also now found among the ordained Unitarian ministry.

Last year, a gunman walked into a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tennessee, and opened fire on the congregation. The Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church has worked for social change since the 1950s, including desegregation, racial harmony, fair wages, women's rights and gay rights. The shooting was a hate crime motivated by the gunman’s hatred of gay people and liberals. The Tennessee Valley church was targeted for its liberal values. The two people who were killed were Greg McKendry, a 60-year-old usher at the church, and Linda Kraeger, who died of her injuries at a nearby hospital a few hours after the shooting. Church member Barbara Kemper said that Mr McKendry had "stood in front of the gunman and took the blast to protect the rest of us".  

"Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."

So how can we help to bring an end to the terrible destructive violence and hatred of homophobia?

We can campaign for fairer laws – 86 member states of the United Nations still criminalise consensual same sex among adults. Among these, 7 have the death penalty for homosexuality. In addition, there are 6 provinces or territorial units which also imprison people for homosexuality. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people still do not receive completely equal treatment under British law.

We can challenge homophobic attitudes whenever we hear them. We can support campaigns like Stonewall (the gay rights lobby group) and IDAHO. IDAHO is the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia. May 17th was chosen because it marks the anniversary of the day in 1990 when the World Health Organisation removed homosexuality from its list of mental diseases.

IDAHO day can also be celebratory because all over the world people are fighting against the persecution of LGBT people and are involved in positive initiatives and campaigns which can be celebrated and give hope for the future.

I want to finish with some words by Marcella Althaus-Reid, the queer theologian who died in February:

“Our task and our joy is to find or simply recognise God sitting amongst us, at any time, in any gay bar or in the home of a camp friend who decorates her living room as a chapel and doesn’t leave her rosary at home when going to a salsa bar.”

The Divine Feminine

(an address given at Frenchay Unitarian chapel on 8th February 2009)

Recently it was Imbolc or Candlemas, on the 2nd of February.

In Ireland, Imbolc is the feast of Brigit, originally a Goddess, and now a saint. The Goddess Brigit is associated with healing, poetry, and smithcraft. The saint is associated with them too, and with the perpetual flame tended by the nuns of Kildare - which possibly goes back to pre-Christian times. There are numerous folk-customs and stories associated with Brigit.

Candlemas is the Christian festival of the Purification of the Virgin, when Mary presented Jesus at the Temple forty days after his birth, to complete her purification after childbirth in accordance with the Law.

Both these festivals have traditionally also focused on the increasing light and life as the days lengthen and the trees start to blossom and bud. They are also a celebration of the Divine Feminine. This is an aspect of the divine that has been neglected in Christianity, due to its patriarchal traditions and its negative view of Eve as the one who brought sin into the world.

But mystics of all traditions have honoured the Divine Feminine. Julian of Norwich, the great Christian mystic, referred to God the Mother (in the context of Trinitarian theology):

And thus in our creation God Almighty is our natural father, and God all-wisdom is our natural mother, with the love and goodness of the Holy Spirit. These are all one God, one Lord. In the knitting and joining he is our real, true spouse and we are his loved wife and his fair maiden. ...The Second Person of the Trinity is our mother in nature, in our substantial making. In him we are grounded and rooted, and he is our mother by mercy in our sensuality, by taking flesh. Thus our mother, Christ, in whom our parts are kept unseparated, works in us in various ways. For in our mother, Christ, we profit and increase, and in mercy he reforms and restores us, and by virtue of his passion, death, and resurrection joins us to our substance. [http://www.gloriana.nu/mother.htm]

In the Orthodox Church, there is also a long tradition of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom (known as Sapientia in Western Christianity); indeed the great church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was dedicated to Her. She is both the Bride of Christ and the feminine aspect of Christ. Also, many liberal Christians regard the Holy Spirit as the feminine aspect of God.

In Judaism, there is the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, and the Ruach, the Breath of God, both of which are seen as feminine. The Shekhinah is believed to descend on the Sabbath eve at the lighting of the candles (usually done by the lady of the house). The Shekhinah is exiled in the physical world and trying to rejoin the Godhead. We can help reunite them in the process of Tikkun - the exercise of compassion, which helps to heal the rift between the worlds. Also, it is regarded as a holy thing to make love on the Sabbath eve, as this helps to reunite the Shekhinah and the Godhead.
In Islam, there is the Sakina, the peace of God, which descends upon believers, who is mentioned twice in the Koran.

In Buddhism, there is Kwan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion. She has taken a vow not to pass in to Nirvana until all souls have achieved enlightenment.

There are also many goddesses in Hinduism and Paganism, and it is in these two traditions that we see the Divine Feminine in all her glorious variety. And yet, one would expect that the presence of goddesses in a religion would guarantee respect for women. That has been the assumption of feminist theologians who pressed for inclusive language, or wanted to throw out the masculine imagery and language and start again. But women didn't have equal status with men in Hinduism until recently - indeed, Rammohun Roy had to campaign for the abolition of widow-burning.

In Paganism, it is probably the existence of priestesses and the influence of feminism that have ensured the equality of women. Also, very importantly, all aspects of womanhood are represented: the maiden, the mother, the warrior, the sexual woman, the crone who is the embodiment of wisdom.

However, a certain amount of gender-role-stereotyping is present in Paganism, and perhaps Pagans need to think more about the Divine that transcends gender - this is one reason why I became interested in Christian mysticism, since that tradition has always insisted that God is beyond gender, even if they refer to the Divine with masculine nouns and pronouns.

The early advocates of the Great Mother Goddess were social conservatives. Jacquetta Hawkes, a prominent enthusiast for the Goddess in the 1930s, believed that women and men were fundamentally different and that the role of women was to remain in the home and bring up children. This is rather ironic in view of the next generation of enthusiasts, the separatist feminists of the sixties and seventies. Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca, was influenced by the idea of the Great Mother Goddess. This is apparent from much of the material that he wrote for use in Wiccan ritual. He was also (embarrassingly for most Wiccans who are largely left-leaning) a member of the Conservative Party. However, the women he portrays in his two novels are very feisty and independent characters.

In Unitarianism - the first denomination to have a female minister, Gertrude von Petzold, in 1904 - women are of course regarded as completely equal to men. Unitarians have also embraced the Divine Feminine to a certain extent, and use inclusive gender-neutral language wherever possible.

Nevertheless, when I hear the word "God", I hear it as a masculine noun. When I hear Spirit of Life, or the Divine, I hear it as gender-neutral. But it doesn't explicitly include the Divine Feminine - the Goddess.

So, how does the Goddess differ from traditional views of God?

• In all traditions, she is regarded as immanent in the world, not transcendent.
• She is not just an aspect of a male God, but a being in her own right. (If you want to be properly Unitarian about this, perhaps you could regard Her as an emanation of the Divine source.)
• She is associated with Nature and the wilderness.
• She is often seen as a mother who gives birth to the Universe and who also IS the Universe.
• But she is also the wise crone and the wild maiden.
• She is the embodiment of compassion and wisdom.
• She is not interested in imposing laws from on high, but on the emergence of harmony at the grass roots level.
• She is much more than a Virgin Mother - this is an image which has been very damaging to women by holding out an unattainable ideal and denying the validity of sexual pleasure.
• Her worship includes sacred sexuality.

Because she is Mother Nature, she is not always sweet and kind; sometimes she is the terrible mother, dealing death mercifully. In Paganism, death is regarded as a natural part of the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth (in contrast to most of Christianity, which regards it as a result of the Fall).

The Divine Feminine was recognised by some Unitarians as early as 1980. A quick search on the web reveals that quite a lot of UK Unitarians honour the Goddess.

I think it is important, in honouring female images of the divine, not to start gender stereotyping, and assuming that some qualities are inherently masculine, and others inherently feminine. This is clearly not true; and in regarding the Divine as being beyond gender, Unitarians are ahead of the game. But rather than always using masculine and gender-neutral language to describe the divine, it would be great to use feminine language sometimes too, however you regard the Divine.

As Maud Robinson, of Dublin Unitarians, writes:

God does not have a gender and although we can readily accept that intellectually, we should be aware that many of us have a deep history of the use of male-centred language in prayer and that it is embedded in our collective psyche. The word God, in itself, causes me problems, it is a word, which despite our modern sophistication and political correctness can’t but conjure up images of a male godhead for many of us. How can we escape from these deeply ingrained images of a male godhead?

I think the answer to her question is to look at images of the Goddess in various religions, and start to explore this imagery in your preferred tradition, or traditions. There are numerous books and websites devoted to Her; and in a tradition dedicated to inclusivity, it seems only right to include both genders.

Polymorphism

I am sort of a pantheist (the idea that the Divine is immanent in the Universe), sort of an animist (the idea that everything has a soul), sort of a polymorphist (the idea that the Divine has one substance and many faces or forms).  All of which probably makes me a nondualist, too (I don't believe you can neatly divide the numinous up into good and evil).  I also think that the deity-forms we describe are our cultural overlays or interpretations of the encounters we have with the numinous, which probably doesn't have personality, unless it has emerged by social interaction with us.  And its agenda may not be the same as ours (see my suggestion for a polymorphist bus slogan).

Articles about polymorphism:

• Polytheism and nonduality by Jay Michaelson
  
• Monism is not monotheism by Copper Asetemhat Stewart
  
• Monotheism and polytheism by Alain Danielou

magic

Magic is quite often defined as "the art of changing consciousness in accordance with one's will" (e.g. Aleister Crowley defined it as this).

Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic." So magnetism was magic until we understood it. When we understand telepathy (if it exists), that will cease to be magic and become psychology.

I guess magic could also be defined as "the manipulation of external symbols in order to affect internal states of mind".  As Ross Nichols once said, "Ritual is poetry in the world of acts."

Now the green blade rises

Words: John M. C. Crum, in The Oxford Book of Carols, 1928.

Music: Noël Nouvelet, 15th Century French melody

Now the green blade rises from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many years has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.

In the grave they laid Him, Love Whom we had slain,
Thinking that He’d never wake to life again,
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.

Up He sprang at Easter, like the risen grain,
He that for three days in the grave had lain;
Up from the dead my risen Lord is seen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.

When our hearts are saddened, grieving or in pain,
By Your touch You call us back to life again;
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.

This really is a beautiful Easter hymn, with echoes of John Barleycorn and other Pagan fertility deities.

Guitar version - Piano version  

What is a Messiah?

The Jewish view of the Messiah (as explained in Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish), was that he was to be an earthly king who would usher in a golden age of justice and peace. 

But the followers of Jesus were sorely disappointed to hear that his kingdom was not of this earth.   And yet he had said earlier, “The Kingdom of Heaven is all around you but you do not see it.” These two texts seem to me to contradict each other; either this is one of those mystical things beyond my ken, or someone has been tampering with the text – someone who did not want a thousand-year reign of justice and peace on earth. Someone like an emperor, who needed armies to fight for him – and it just so happens that such a person – the emperor Constantine – presided over the Council of Niceaea, where the canonical gospels were decided upon, and from which we get the Nicene Creed (the foundational text of Christianity).

A few weeks ago we heard the story of the fire-maker, who was killed for having the impertinence to make fire, and then people erected houses where they would sing of the miraculous gift of fire-making, and commemorate the miracles of the fire-maker, but never actually made fire themselves. Earlier we heard the story of the little creatures who spent their whole lives on the river-bed and never let go; and when one of them did they hailed him as a messiah, but did not copy him (from Illusions: the Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach). It seems to me that Christianity is like the creatures on the river bed and the people who lost their fire-maker; they make legends of the fire-maker, but do not dare to kindle a blaze themselves. When Jesus said that his holy spirit (his Ruach) would be with the disciples after his death, I believe that he meant he would pass on the mantle of fire-making to them. Perhaps this is the true meaning of the story of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples – they too became messiahs, the anointed of God.

St Teresa of Avila, a 16th century Catholic nun and mystic, echoes this thought in her poem, You are Christ’s hands:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which to look out
Christ's compassion to the world
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about
doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.

According to the Buddhist tradition, we are all future Buddhas and contain essential Buddha-nature. As the seed of our consciousness journeys from life to life, our Buddha-nature emerges. As everything in the universe expresses the Buddha-nature, so we are all connected. It is possible that some such idea was originally part of Christianity, until it got entangled with the Roman and Byzantine Empires, after which it would have been seen as dangerously radical and subversive, because it made all beings equal – whereas under the imperial Church, Christ became an emperor ruling over heaven and earth, far too distant for ordinary people to approach or pray to.

If we delve into the gospels and epistles, these radical ideas are never far below the surface. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,” writes St Paul in his letter to the Galatians.

But the Church has always been more interested in the miracles of Jesus than in the actual values he embraced. It took an Indian, none other than Rammohun Roy, to point out to the West that they had completely ignored the original message of Jesus (which he helpfully summarised in his book, The Precepts of Jesus: The Guide to Peace and Happiness).  When it was published in 1825, it caused an outcry, even though it was simply a series of excerpts from the Gospels of what Jesus actually said, together with introductory remarks – but its message has still not been heard by many people. Those who have heard the message have changed the world, though. Mahatma Gandhi read The Precepts of Jesus, and applied the ideas in it to his movement of non-violent resistance that eventually resulted in freedom for India. Martin Luther King learnt from Gandhi’s example, and used these ideas to help the Civil Rights movement achieve its aims. While at seminary, King became acquainted with Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent social protest. On a trip to India in 1959, King met with followers of Gandhi. During these discussions he became more convinced than ever that nonviolent resistance was the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom. So the values of Jesus – freedom, justice, peace, and love – triumphed again.

In his novel, The Anointed One, Z’ev Ben Shimon Halevi (a Jewish mystic) explores the Jewish idea that there is a Messiah in every generation – a holy one who is working for freedom, justice, peace, and love. The hero of the novel is a holy man who seeks to unite Jews, Muslims and Christians in their quest for the Divine; the setting is the Catholic reconquest of Spain from the Muslims. Muslim Spain was known for its tolerance, intellectual freedom, and interplay of mystical and magical ideas from the three Abrahamic faiths. All this was brutally crushed by the Catholic Church, who forced the conversion of Muslims and Jews, and then persecuted any who sought to practice their original faith in secret. The hero is killed by the Inquisition, and the mantle of the Anointed One passes to one of his followers, a Muslim.

In the 12th century, St Francis was seen as so holy that he was often referred to as “another Christ” (alter Christus). He preached poverty and equality, and is considered the patron saint of animals and the environment. Curiously, the story of his early life is very similar to that of the Buddha. Francis was a rich young merchant’s son who gave all his money to a beggar; the Buddha was a prince whose parents sought to shelter him from the suffering of the world, but when he saw a sick man laid at his gate, he vowed to work to end that suffering.

The problem with the Christian idea of Christ as the only means of accessing the Divine is, how can people who have never heard or understood the message be “saved”? The claim of a unique revelation of the Trinity as the true nature of God means that Christianity necessarily rejects all other faiths, because they do not have the same view of the Divine.

According to the Unitarian booklet, A Faith Worth Thinking About, we are called Unitarians because of our traditional insistence on divine unity, the oneness of God, and because we affirm the essential unity of humankind and all creation.  

The idea that the Divine is one implies that all religions can contact the Divine by their own names for it, and it will respond to them – so Unitarianism is inherently based on the acceptance of other faiths; and this is why the Unitarian idea of the unity of God is so important. 

So if the Messiah – the Christos – is not part of the Godhead, what is it? Again, St Paul gives us the clue. He writes, “so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” (Romans 12:5) The faithful become the anointed ones – indeed in Orthodoxy, there is the rite of chrismation (anointing), more commonly known in the West as confirmation.
As the lovely meditation by Victoria Weinstein that we heard earlier says, there is no point waiting for the Messiah to return; in fact the Messiah has always been with us, waiting for our hands to do the healing, spread the compassion, share the feast.

As John Andrew Storey wrote in his lovely carol, The Universal Incarnation:

Each time a girl or boy is born,
Incarnate deity we find.

Or as Roger Taylor Walke wrote in Children of a Bright Tomorrow:

May we know our timeless mission –
Universal avatars.

Universal avatars – an avatar is a deity incarnate as a human being – so we are manifestations of the divine universe.

So the answer to the question, what is a messiah, is: You are! You are the anointed ones of God.

(address given at Frenchay Chapel, Bristol, this morning - the reception this received reminded me why I love Unitarians so much - it was greatly appreciated)