Harvest

Address given at Trowbridge, 3 October 2010

The Christian harvest festival seems to be a movable feast, but is generally celebrated at the end of harvest in any given region, and is associated with various harvest customs. Now that we rely less heavily on the outcome of our harvest, the thoughts of churches in the developed world have turned to people in the developing world for whom food production is less secure, and to those in our own society who do not know where the next meal is coming from.

In Jewish tradition, the festival of harvest is Shavuot, which was traditionally the end of the barley harvest and the beginning of the wheat harvest. It is also believed to be the day when the Jewish people received the Torah from Mount Sinai. Traditionally, the 49 days between Passover (Pesach) and Shavuot were a period of semi-mourning, and they are also counted in anticipation of the giving of the Torah. There are a number of theories for why Jews view this period with sadness, one of which refers to a plague that killed many students of the famed Talmudic sage, Rabbi Akiva. It is also a custom to stay awake and study the Torah the night before Shavuot, as it was believed that the Israelites mistakenly feel asleep the night before receiving the Ten Commandments.

One of the traditional readings for the festival of Shavuot is the story of Ruth and Naomi, which is why I chose it for our story today.

In Pagan tradition, there are three harvests; the corn harvest at Lammas; the fruit harvest at Autumn Equinox; and the harvest of meat at Samhain, when some of the cattle would have been slaughtered and preserved for the winter. Lammas commemorates the death of John Barleycorn, the dying-and-resurrecting vegetation god. The corn was believed to be inhabited by the corn-spirit, which was killed at every harvest and resurrected in the planting of the new corn. In Ireland, Lammas was celebrated with games in honour of the goddess Tailtiu, the mother of Lugh the sun god, and was called Lughnasadh.

Autumn Equinox was not celebrated everywhere in the ancient world, but it is regarded by contemporary Pagans as a point of balance, because it is the time when day and night are equal. It is also the fruit harvest and a time to celebrate Pomona, goddess of fruit, and her consort Vertumnus, god of change. In Jewish tradition, it is Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world, when God created everything.

Samhain or Hallowe’en is a much-misunderstood festival. To the ancient Celts it was a celebration of freedom from oppression; contemporary Pagans have adapted the Catholic festival of All Souls, and regard Samhain as a time when the veil between the worlds is thin, and people can commune with the ancestors and the beloved dead. Some Unitarian congregations have started to celebrate Samhain by commemorating their relatives and friends who have died.

People like customs and festivals because they mark transitions; the changing seasons, the tides of our lives. The Jewish tradition is particularly rich in seasonal customs, special foods, and symbolic actions, which help to connect the life of the individual to the great cosmic story. Similarly, contemporary Pagans have sought to re-create the richness of the seasonal festivals. Unitarians can draw from the festivals of many traditions; but I think we should be respectful of their original meaning and context.

But what is the inner meaning of harvest? I am reminded of Jesus’ saying: “As you sow, so shall ye reap.” Many of you are probably familiar with the film It’s a Wonderful Life, in which a man is just about to commit suicide because he has ceased to see meaning in his life, when an angel comes and shows him all the differences he has made to the lives of others, and what the world would be like without him in it. He is a bank manager, who has lent people money when they really needed it; he is a family man who has made his wife and children happy. He has carried out many small kindnesses, and that has made all the difference.

Each of our small acts of kindness can make a real difference in the lives of others; even a smile can make someone else happier, which means they are more likely to smile at others, or be kind to them – who knows how far the harvest of one small act of kindness may spread?

As Louis Macneice observed in his poem, Fanfare for the Makers (which was quoted recently in the TV comedy Rev), sometimes we plant trees but do not see them reaching their full height, and “sometimes one man’s kindness pervades / A room or house or village”, and “mothers sit up late night after night / Moulding a life”, so each act of kindness can “lend the passing moment words and wings”.

Sometimes we feel powerless in the face of all the suffering and oppression in the world, but we can each do our bit. Even signing internet petitions and donating to charity can make a real difference to the lives of others, and you don’t even have to leave your chair to do that.

Another saying of Jesus was “By their fruits ye shall know them”. I once attended a sermon by Ashley Hills where he told the story of a 19th century Unitarian tea merchant. Although his fellow-citizens deplored his choice of theology, they always bought their tea from him because they knew he was an honest fellow who always bought the best quality tea and never adulterated it with other things. They knew him by his fruits, or should that be by his tea? This seems to me to be harvest-related, too.

Harvest is a time when we count our blessings, and seek to share them with others less fortunate than ourselves. Just as Boaz shared the harvest of his fields with Ruth and Naomi, so we are sharing the harvest with the homeless. We are mindful of the gleaners at the margins of the fields. Ruth was a Moabite and not an Israelite, and was related to Ruth by marriage. She had decided to go with Naomi, her mother-in-law, after her husband had died, because of the great love she felt for her. If she gleaned the leavings of the harvesters in any other field, the book of Ruth implies that it was likely she would have been harmed by the harvesters, perhaps raped. So it was an act of radical hospitality on the part of Boaz to allow her to glean in his field. More recently, lesbian Christians have interpreted the story of Ruth and Naomi as an example of same-sex love, because Ruth said:

Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.

Ruth 1:16-17

This quote has often been used as a marriage vow, apparently. Whether or not they were actually lesbians in the modern sense is not important; the fact is they clearly loved each other a great deal, and their story is very inspiring to women who love women.

Unitarianism is also radically hospitable, since we were the first denomination to ordain women, the first to include lesbian and gay people as complete equals, and we have consistently sought to widen our circle of inclusivity. Why, then, are people not flocking to our door? The reasons could be many and varied; but one reason may be that we are hiding our light under a bushel, and not getting out there and showing people that they are welcome at our table. In order to reap the blessings of community, we need to be radically hospitable; and sometimes that can mean being open to change – change that might not be particularly comfortable to embrace.

There is also the problem that people generally do not understand liberal religion, because they think religion is all about what you believe, not about what you do. But it’s up to us (and other liberal religious groups) to show them that it doesn’t have to be like that. You can have a religion where you don’t have to leave your brain at the door; where symbols are resonant with many layers of meaning; where heart and mind can be fed; where we can live in beloved community with one another.
Amen.

Time and eternity

I continued my practice of lectio divina with Dry Salvages, the third poem in Eliot's Four Quartets. I have always liked the first section, which begins "The river is a strong brown god". This section seems to be about the immanence of the Divine in Nature, and the multiplicity of spirits of place. In the second stanza, the rhythms of the sea could be seen as a metaphor for the Divine in which we live, move and have our being.

I found the rest of Dry Salvages quite difficult. Eliot contrasts cyclical time and linear time with Christian ideas of eternity, and the eternal now. I like the idea of cyclical time, with its tides of sowing, growing, reaping and resting, its shifts from outwardness to inwardness. I also like the idea of the eternal now, but Eliot seems to regard both past and future as rather dreary (which they are in linear time), and to regard cyclical time as an endless repeating of the same old stuff. In my experience, cyclical time is the repetition of stages, but each stage has similar elements and different elements, so the combinations of experience are always new.

I did enjoy the descriptions of the eternal now:

...to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement

Vast deep silence

I have continued with the practice of Lectio Divina, using T S Eliot's Four Quartets, every day since my previous post about it. Here are some notes I made after some of the sessions.

17-9-10 (Stanzas 3 & 4 of Burnt Norton)
I've realised that these poems are about the experience of contemplative prayer - descending into the vast deep silence beneath everything. Reading them has also inspired some poetry in response.

Stillness and dancing
Centre and circumference
the stillness is everywhere
and the dance is everywhere
source welling up
eternally from the depths
the music to which we dance
the air we breathe
the life that lives us.

18-9-10 (Stanza 5 of Burnt Norton)

Stanza 5 seems to be about apophatic and paradoxical theology.

O living waters rise in me
Refresh the desert places
that cry out for rain.

23-9-10 (Stanza 4, East Coker)

This stanza uses Christian imagery to talk about the wounded healer archetype.

We are constantly slaying the image of God in each other:
That one walks too tall, looks too free and happy.
Each of us is wounded and inflicts wounds in our turn.
The only way to break free is to accept ourselves:
To feel the constant outpouring of divine love
From the depths of silence.
We must descend again and again into the abyss
To rescue the forgotten parts of ourselves.

24-9-10 (Stanza 5, East Coker)

The last stanza of East Coker seems to be about coinherence, the idea that we are all members of each other; but also that the now contains both the past and the future: "a lifetime burning in every moment".

The whole of East Coker is more melancholy than Burnt Norton - perhaps it represents the descent into the abyss, the dark night of the soul. But it concludes on a hopeful note: "We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion..."

I am finding it really helpful to read the poems as slowly as this (one stanza a day) and reflect on their meaning. Four Quartets is not the easiest poem to understand, but the meaning becomes more apparent after reflection.

Lectio Divina: Four Quartets

I had been meaning to embark upon the practice of lectio divina for some time, but was unsure what text I wanted to contemplate. I had thought of the Tao Te Ching (and that will be next). This morning, I realised that my first effort would be with T S Eliot's wonderfully rich series of poems, Four Quartets, bits of which resonate very much with me.

So this morning, I began with the Buddhist practice of Metta Bhavana (loving kindness meditation) and then read the first stanza of Burnt Norton out loud, then contemplated its imagery, then engaged in wordless contemplation of the deep silence within, and the relationship of time and eternity, and then formulated a spoken prayer out of some of the imagery of the poem. It made me realise that one purpose of spoken prayer is to speak to one's own depths and make a statement of intent.

I did the steps in the wrong order for the classic form of lectio divina, but it felt like the right order at the time.

To be a pilgrim

Richard Wiseman asks what your pilgrimage would be...

I consider all travel that involves engaging with the landscape, culture and/or people to be a form of pilgrimage.

Some of the more consciously pilgrimish travel I have done, though, included going to Down House where Darwin lived and walking along the gravel path where he thought about evolution, and having a conversation about evolution. I think the re-enactment element was important there.

Another example was going to Canterbury Cathedral. I am not a Christian but I find the story of Thomas a Becket moving, and I like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Jean Anouilh's play Becket.

Visiting stone circles always feels like a pilgrimage to me. They are beautiful and numinous places, and some archaeologists think they were made to represent a microcosm of the landscape.

Landscape itself - the wild places - is a place of pilgrimage for me; it is where I go to feel renewed and refreshed.

I also think that places where other people have made a connection with the numinous are special. As T S Eliot wrote in Little Gidding,

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

food blessings

Rev Naomi started a conversation on Twitter about blessings for food. If you want to see it, the tag is #tablebless. It's a great idea for integrating spirituality with daily life, so I'm really interested in what people come up with.

I suggested the Pantheist Grace and a Pagan Grace by Isaac and Phaedra Bonewits. I also came up with a Lolcat blessing: "Hallowed be thy Noms".

Other offerings include:

• "We thank every being that brought this food to our table. We are all a part of the web of life" (by me)
• "Blessed be God who is our bread, may all the world be clothed and fed" (by chickpastor)
• "Thanks for what we receive! With joy, may we give far more than we receive and bless the world." (by Rev Naomi)
  
• "Rejoice in what gifts upon this table lay! Nourished here, may we go forth and feed the world." (by Rev Naomi)
  
• "We give thanks for the life that sustains our life, and the web of which we are all a part." (by TrulySocial)
  
• "For those who grew this food, those who made this meal, and for life that sustains us all, we give thanks!" (by Rev Naomi)
  

There's a collection of prayers before meals from various faith traditions at BeliefNet. Many traditions seem to have the impulse to honour where the food came from and to wish that everyone else will be fed too. For example, this Pagan prayer and this Buddhist prayer do that, and so does chickpastor's prayer (above).

Please add your ideas in the comments. Brevity is of the essence here - it needs to be easy to memorise and not make the food get cold!

Empiricism

An address given to Golders Green Unitarians on 5 September 2010

Empiricism, according to Alister McGrath, is the idea that 'truth arises from reflection within the mind on what the human faculties experience through sense perception'.  So we experience something through our senses, then we reflect upon it, and from this, truth arises.

According to Karen Armstrong, in The Case for God (which should really be called the case for religion), belief and faith both originally meant loyalty to an evolving tradition; first you did the ritual, and then the teachings were revealed – and they only made sense in the context of the ritual. The ritual was experienced through the senses, and then its symbolism made sense.

In the eighteenth century, rationalists and empiricists sharply disagreed about the nature of truth.  For rationalists, the power to reason was an innate quality of the human mind.  But for empiricists, babies were born as a “blank slate” for experience to write upon – with no innate qualities or faculties.  The conflict continued well into the twentieth century, with the nature versus nurture debate in psychology, which was an argument about whether hereditary traits were more important in the development of the personality, or whether your environment could override your genetic inheritance.

But as far as I can see, it is not a case of either / or – it’s a case of both / and.  We need reason to work things out logically, and to ensure our ideas are consistent with reality.  But we also need experiment and experience.  We do not sit isolated in our ivory towers formulating an abstract theology or philosophy.  We derive our understandings of the world from our experience, the stimuli that come in through our senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight and proprioception (the sense of your location in space, which is governed by your inner ear, and enables you to stay upright and balanced).  We can then compare our experiences with those of others, and reflect upon them.  And we learn new things by experimenting, hopefully in a safe space.  The first time you do a new thing is an experiment – you are testing an aspect of your environment.  And it is by experimenting that we gain experience.  Interestingly in the French language, the word for both experiment and experience is expérience.

Charles Darwin had a long-running experiment with worms, where he put a millstone in his lawn and then measured how much it settled into the earth because it was being undermined by earthworms burrowing underneath it.  I have seen the millstone set into his lawn at Down House in Kent; the experiment is still going on.  Thanks to Darwin’s curiosity and imagination, a tiny puzzle about the way the world works is being solved.

They say that curiosity killed the cat; but on the other hand, fortunately the cat has nine lives.  And in fact, curiosity is not generally fatal to cats.  Curiosity is a good thing, as long as it is balanced with discernment and compassion.  I am sure we can all think of scientific experiments that are not done with sufficient compassion; and of experiments that were not done with sufficient discernment (such as the development of atomic weapons or genetically modified crops).  So we cannot allow curiosity a completely free rein; it must be tempered with wisdom.  It’s not that any knowledge is forbidden to us by divine edict; knowledge must be tempered with wisdom. In Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy, he explores the ideas of Montaigne, who decried education that imparted facts but did not teach people how to live well.  It is the great divorce of science and religion that has allowed this split in awareness to develop – the fact that fundamentalists continue to insist on literal interpretations which are contrary to reason and science, makes scientists dismiss the whole of religion as a waste of space.  But Unitarians steadfastly maintain, and many other religions affirm, that religion is not about beliefs, doctrines and dogmas – it is about values, and about experiencing the world with a sense of awe and wonder and gratitude.  It is about celebrating life, and experiencing it to the full; letting our imagination and creativity play over the vast panoply of nature.

Imagination is also an important quality; it enables us to imagine the world differently.  And this is what liberal religions do, too.  For my MA, I studied the relationship between Pagans and science, including their interest in science fiction. One of the reasons that Pagans like science fiction (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was true of Unitarians too) is that it dreams of worlds with different societies, different ethical systems, and different ways of interacting with the planet than our own.  Science fiction is a thought experiment about how things might play out if you had a different set of starting conditions – for example, if people lived in caves with very little living space, how would that affect their sense of space?  They would be agoraphobic and have no sense of personal space.  And if there was another planet that was sparsely populated, they might be claustrophobic and get used to large amounts of personal space.  Now imagine the dramatic possibilities if you transplant the inhabitant of the sparsely populated planet to the cave planet, or vice versa, and how that would affect them.  This is the premise of Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel.  The message of the novel is a hopeful one: that people can overcome the conditioning of their home environment – but they have to be willing to try.

It is the same with our spiritual life.  If we always do the same old stuff, we might get stuck in a rut; but if we try new things, we might gain new insights.  I don’t necessarily mean that the new thing has to be something scary or difficult – it could just be trying again at something you have failed at in the past.  I thought I was rubbish at meditation until I tried again in a morning meditation session at Great Hucklow Summer School, and something that was said – that you can begin again each moment, and that if thoughts arise, do not follow them – gave me the key to learning to relax and just do it.  Sometimes trying something with a different person in a different context can give a different perspective on it.

Similarly with prayer: I didn’t really understand prayer until I read a book about it by a Russian Orthodox monk called Staretz Silouan.  I would never have come across this book unless I had tried Orthodoxy and been lent the book by an Orthodox nun called Mother Sarah.  So doing something outside one’s comfort zone can sometimes be beneficial.  Ultimately Orthodoxy wasn’t for me, but I learnt a lot while I was involved in it, especially about the differences between Eastern and Western Christian doctrine, which enabled me to read the Gospels in a very different way, and look at the Christian tradition differently.

As the Quakers say, “Be open to new light, wherever it may come from” – a very wise saying, I feel.

Another aspect of an empirical approach to religion and spirituality is its pragmatism.  We can try new things and persist with them for a while – but if they don’t work for us, we can stop doing them.  I can’t imagine Unitarians persisting in doing something unpleasant or detrimental just because it was the custom to do it, or because tradition demanded it.  (Come to think of it, this must be the case, because I can’t think of any Unitarian practices that are unpleasant.)

Of course human beings are always a bit reluctant to try new things – we like our safe comfortable ruts and grooves, our tried and tested ways of doing things.  But remember when your mum and dad got you to try that new vegetable on your plate, and you actually liked it?  Or when you first learnt to ride a bike, the feeling of exhilaration when you realised that your dad wasn’t holding on to the back of the bike any more? It can be pleasurable to experiment with new ways of doing things.

So let us approach the world with wonder and a willingness to experiment. Let’s be willing to try new things – even Brussels sprouts.