There are some "spiritual" stories that are so cheesy that they richly deserve to be parodied... and sometimes the parody itself achieves greatness - well beyond what might have been expected.
Two examples spring to mind. Footprints and The Giving Tree. Both of these stories express a passive and quietist view of life which I find deeply disturbing.
There is a wonderful Discordian parody of the footprints story which expresses a Pagan ethic of independence and laughing at life.
And Victoria Weinstein has done a brilliant parody called The Demanding Tree, which expresses feminist and ecological concerns beautifully.
Thursday, 25 October 2012
Wednesday, 22 August 2012
The Endless Knot
Paperback, 49 Pages
Poetry of place, experience, the seasons, and the sacred.
Written over many years, these poems are the distillation of experiences of ritual, landscape and mythology.
Lovers of landscape and nature will enjoy this collection.
Thursday, 19 July 2012
The silent heart of God
Another lectio divina poem. This one is a reflection on a phrase from "On Marriage", with some ideas from "On Children", from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.
God cannot tell all that She knows,
for God is in the silent unfolding
of every heart, every flower,
every moment.
God is in the wind that dances
between lover and beloved.
She is the Archer
who lets fly the arrow of time.
She is life's longing for itself.
So do not ask what
is in the silent heart of God
but rest there, within the silence
and feel Her heartbeat
in every moment.
God cannot tell all that She knows,
for God is in the silent unfolding
of every heart, every flower,
every moment.
God is in the wind that dances
between lover and beloved.
She is the Archer
who lets fly the arrow of time.
She is life's longing for itself.
So do not ask what
is in the silent heart of God
but rest there, within the silence
and feel Her heartbeat
in every moment.
Tuesday, 17 July 2012
In the heart of life
Another Lectio Divina poem - a reflection on the stanza "On Love" from The Prophet.
If we would be in the heart of Life,
We cannot escape from Love,
neither its pain nor its ecstasy.
The reversals, the uncertainty,
the opening of the heart to the beloved
And the vulnerability.
We must pass through
the refining fire of love
and be remade.
Accompanying music - Soeur Marie Keyrouz, Chant Traditionnel Maronite
Saturday, 14 July 2012
Leaving for Orphalese
Lectio Divina poem for this morning: The opening scene in The Prophet, where he is standing looking out to sea and sees his ship coming to take him back to Orphalese, his home town.
We are all, always, leaving for Orphalese,
The remembered country of the heart.
Looking for home in the faces of strangers,
Dreaming of the dark cypresses and the mellow stone.
We stand at the edge of the fathomless sea
And look towards the West,
Dreaming of the impossible islands of legend.
But we must turn our faces to the land
And the people among whom we walk
And love them for who they are,
Cherishing their inmost flame
That burns with the same ardour
For their own personal Orphalese.
Let us not look for Orphalese on some distant shore
But find it here, now, in our own hearts.
Yvonne Aburrow, 9:30, 14-7-12
We are all, always, leaving for Orphalese,
The remembered country of the heart.
Looking for home in the faces of strangers,
Dreaming of the dark cypresses and the mellow stone.
We stand at the edge of the fathomless sea
And look towards the West,
Dreaming of the impossible islands of legend.
But we must turn our faces to the land
And the people among whom we walk
And love them for who they are,
Cherishing their inmost flame
That burns with the same ardour
For their own personal Orphalese.
Let us not look for Orphalese on some distant shore
But find it here, now, in our own hearts.
Yvonne Aburrow, 9:30, 14-7-12
Thursday, 3 May 2012
Inhabiting the paradox
There's a great post by Andrew Brown over at Caute about inhabiting paradox, which addresses the identity of British Unitarianism - is it Christian, post-Christian, pluralist, eclectic...?
I blogged about this in a series of posts last year: The empty path; Is Unitarianism Christian?; Roots hold me close, wings set me free; Golden heresies; Blessed are the poor.
I think it is very important to keep inhabiting the paradox. Places of tension are places of creativity.
I think that in rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity, as well as establishing the right to interpret the Bible for themselves, the Socinians did something else important. The doctrine of the Trinity, and Christ's divinity within that, could only be made known to humanity by a particular revelation (and therefore available only via Christianity); whereas the idea that the Divine is either one or many is accessible to reason and experience, and therefore available to all religions.
Andrew pinpoints correctly that there is a debate between "those who would like us to land definitively on the side of our inherited Christian tradition" and "those who would like us to land definitely on the side of open-ended change and to insist that we must let go of our distinctive traditions and roots and move into an undiffentiated pluralistic landscape".
I agree that we should not plump for one side or the other of this debate.
I think there is a third possibility: that we acknowledge that Unitarianism has always divagated between these possibilities, and that the Unitarianisms of the past contained the seeds of the humanist element, the earth spirit element, and the pluralist element. It is not (as I am sure Andrew is aware) that the Unitarianism of the past was uniformly Christian, and that the pluralism is a new thing. Rather, there were the Transcendentalists, deists, theists, pantheists, humanists and nature-lovers (Coleridge, Morganwg, Frank Lloyd Wright, etc). And Servetus was inspired by the religious pluralism of Moorish Spain and by reading Hermetic texts.
I think that it is possible to develop a distinct Unitarian tradition with its own particular traditions and rituals, and that this is what is happening with things like the flower communion, water communion, chalice lighting, and Unitarian ways of celebrating Pagan seasonal festivals, or doing bread and wine communion, or lectio divina, or other spiritual practices. And there are so many excellent Unitarian writers on spirituality and religion who have created a rich and deep culture for us to draw upon.
I blogged about this in a series of posts last year: The empty path; Is Unitarianism Christian?; Roots hold me close, wings set me free; Golden heresies; Blessed are the poor.
I think it is very important to keep inhabiting the paradox. Places of tension are places of creativity.
I think that in rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity, as well as establishing the right to interpret the Bible for themselves, the Socinians did something else important. The doctrine of the Trinity, and Christ's divinity within that, could only be made known to humanity by a particular revelation (and therefore available only via Christianity); whereas the idea that the Divine is either one or many is accessible to reason and experience, and therefore available to all religions.
Andrew pinpoints correctly that there is a debate between "those who would like us to land definitively on the side of our inherited Christian tradition" and "those who would like us to land definitely on the side of open-ended change and to insist that we must let go of our distinctive traditions and roots and move into an undiffentiated pluralistic landscape".
I agree that we should not plump for one side or the other of this debate.
I think there is a third possibility: that we acknowledge that Unitarianism has always divagated between these possibilities, and that the Unitarianisms of the past contained the seeds of the humanist element, the earth spirit element, and the pluralist element. It is not (as I am sure Andrew is aware) that the Unitarianism of the past was uniformly Christian, and that the pluralism is a new thing. Rather, there were the Transcendentalists, deists, theists, pantheists, humanists and nature-lovers (Coleridge, Morganwg, Frank Lloyd Wright, etc). And Servetus was inspired by the religious pluralism of Moorish Spain and by reading Hermetic texts.
I think that it is possible to develop a distinct Unitarian tradition with its own particular traditions and rituals, and that this is what is happening with things like the flower communion, water communion, chalice lighting, and Unitarian ways of celebrating Pagan seasonal festivals, or doing bread and wine communion, or lectio divina, or other spiritual practices. And there are so many excellent Unitarian writers on spirituality and religion who have created a rich and deep culture for us to draw upon.
Thursday, 12 April 2012
The human soul
The human soul, far from fixed, linear and predisposed to suspicion and doubt, is instead a fluxive, malleable, infinitely evolving thing, matching the insane, kaleidoscopic sweep of life itself. To lock the human heart into a cage of timid ideology or rigid sexual conduct, to forcibly limit its capacity for love is one of the most oppressive things you can ever do.Mark Morford
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