Dundee Unitarian Christian Church, 23 September 2001

Call to worship:
Congregation & Leader: We come together in the spirit of shared worship and prayer, seeking to open our hearts to life with all people in a spirit of tolerance and respect.
Minister: We come, recognising the innate worth and dignity of all people; we come, seeking to promote freedom to believe as consciences dictate;
Cong: We come, believing that the truth is best served where the mind and conscience are free;
Min: We are people of faith, seeking to promote free and inquiring religion;
Cong: We come to worship God and to celebrate the gift of life;
Min: We come, seeking ways to serve humanity ñ our whole human family;
Cong: We bring our respect for all creation; it is a gift and is our home;
Min: We remember Jesus, his life, love and example; and in following his teachings we honour the liberal Christian tradition;
Cong: We pray for strength and courage, that we in turn may encourage and unite in fellowship all causes which support the religious liberty of their members;
Min: We shall remain unconstrained by the imposition of creeds . . .
Cong: . . . for ours is a liberal religious heritage.
Min: We come seeking to learn from and contribute to the spiritual, cultural and intellectual insights of all humanity.
Cong: We come with pride in our rich heritage of sacrifice and service,
Min: and we seek to be faithful successors to the spirit of this witness.
Original (Invocation) by Rev John Midgley based on GA Object (2001), adapted and extended for congregational worship by Rev John Clifford

Lighting of chalice As we light our candle this morning we call to mind the suffering of those whose lives have been affected by the terrorist attacks of 11 September. We are aware of the fears and worries of so many but in the midst of worry and fear we proclaim the importance of the light of Truth, the warmth of Love, and the fragility of Beauty.

Reading from Thoughts and Meditations by Khalil Gibran: "Vision"

'Life without Love is like a tree without blossom and fruit. And love without Beauty is like flowers without scent and fruits without seeds....Life, Love, and Beauty are three persons in one, who cannot be separated or changed. ....

'Life without Rebellion is like seasons without Spring. And Rebellion without Right [Justice] is like Spring in an arid desert..... Life, Rebellion, and Right [Justice] are three-in-one who cannot be changed or separated. .....

'Life without Freedom is like a body without a soul, and Freedom without Thought is like a confused spirit......Life, Freedom, and Thought are three-in-one, and are everlasting and never pass away. .....

'That which Love begets,
That which Rebellion creates,
That which Freedom rears,
Are three manifestations of God.
And God is the expression of the intelligent Universe.'

Sermon: The Object of Our Desires
Introduction:
One of the disadvantages of preparing a sermon ahead of time is that sometimes national or international events occur which religious communities then need to pray about and think about. In the case of the terrorist attacks in the US, one of the objects of the terrorists is to disrupt ordinary life as much as possible. Now I'm one who believes that one task of religion is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted and there's no denying that most of us in the industrialised West have been far too comfortably dismissive of the problems of Palestinians, Iraqis, Bangladeshis, Lybians, Nigerians, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Moroccans, Yemenis, Indonesians, Timorese, Angolans, Zimbabwians ... the list is almost endless, but it is significant that the large majority of the populations of most of these very poor nations are Muslims. But while it is important to pause to share grief, to reflect on global issues, to try to learn something from the utterly devastating events of 11 September, it is also important to carry on with our lives and not allow terrorists to set our whole agenda. So this morning's service is responding to both our need to pause and our need to continue and the address on the Object of Our Desires will now proceed essentially as planned.

1. Start at Essex Hall and Objects Process
I started at Essex Hall in January 1989, having spent 4 years in Germany with the International Association for Religious Freedom. During that period the family and I had made several visits "back home" but my involvement in denominational affairs was limited to attendance at 2 out of 4 Annual Meetings and some services of worship, mostly in Glasgow or Padiham. But as Information Officer for the GA I was plunged right into the thick of the consultation and review process that had already been going for a couple years. In my role of Information Officer, I was a member of the Objects Commission attempting to get the pulse of the movement, to get the sense of what we really felt was central to our religious identity and to build a form of words which would express that sense in a way acceptable to 90% of our religious community. At the end of the day, the hard work of the Objects Commission and the hopes of so many who desired a modern, up to date constitutional statement of where we were and where we felt we were headed, foundered on the 90% rock. It easily passed the Annual Meeting stage but only achieved 79% in a postal poll of all congregations.

2. Passage of Resolution on Aims & Purposes
Two years later a motion was passed at the Annual Meetings which took the text agreed by the 79% and made it a statement of our Aims and Purposes. Upon a complaint from some Unitarians that this was confusing and unconstitutional, the Charity Commission declared the resolution ultra vires, i.e. of no effect because it was beyond our powers and confusing to have Aims and Purposes that potentially conflict with Constitutional Objects. In England and Wales it is a very difficult thing to change the constitutional objects of a charity, because people have donated money, sometimes over several generations, with a certain set of goals in mind and any change in direction must take this into proper account.

3. Passage of Resolution 10 years later. A couple years ago the FOY society and our then GA President, Rev Keith Gilley, decided to resurrect the agreed text as a normal Constitutional Amendment. Of course in 10 years a lot of documentation can disappear and a lot of community memory disappear through forgetfulness and death. But the process was re-started.

4. Negotiations with Charity Commissioners
Negotiations with the Charity Commission started but meantime there had been substantial changes to Charity Law in England and Wales. Registration procedures and financial accountability laws had changed something fundamental in the framework of what was and what was not acceptable. The effects of this change can be easily seen and they are on-going.

5. Complications over definition of 'religion' & Scientologists
While some Charity Commission lawyers were in very helpful discussions with the GA, other Charity Commission lawyers were in discussions with the Scientologists about their status as a religious charity. There are three tests in English law for a religious charity: A belief in a Supreme Being; the use of devotional practices in connection with such a Supreme Being; and Promotion of the religion being to the Public Benefit. In these other discussions the Scientologists, defending their concept of Supreme Being, made reference to the Unitarians and our lack of a creed. Since the Commission is required to operate within the Convention on Human Rights and treat religious bodies equally, this challenge led to a review of the GA's religious charity status. After a couple anxious months, we got confirmation that the GA was validly registered as a religious charity.

6. Charity Commission lawyers in our discussions with them provided us with a good text which included all our desired phrases in a legal form.
Some of our desired expressions had to go into a preamble and our former round of negotiations had established that "civil and religious liberty the world over" was too political to be in our Objects although a reasonable level of such activities was permissible. Interestingly, I have seen it argued in a charity legal journal that with the implementation of the Human Rights Act, it may well now be permissible as an object of a charity. But to return to the ChCmn lawyers: they advised us that it was better to have One Object with various qualifying phrases than many Objects, and this is now the form used in the GA constitution.


7. There were many exciting and good things from our Annual Meetings in Chester earlier this year, (especially the involvement and visibility of youth) but the most long-term accomplishment is to have achieved the Object of our Desires after a 16 year process. We have much cause for celebration, even those of us who have some reservations about particular phrases or emphases. The Object is not a creed, every word of which is to be slavishly followed, it it a statement of where most of us are at this time, recognising that in another 20 years we will need to rethink how to restate our collective purposes in coming together. The King is dead! Long live the King!

8. Closing Thoughts
We now have a modern statement of our shared, collective purposes that focuses on the worship of God and our freedom from creeds. Freedom from a collective statement of belief does not mean that we should avoid personal beliefs -- quite the contrary, we are free from collective imposition precisely because it is important to develop our personal theologies. This is a lifelong task and a reflection of our developing religious maturity. Our community exists to encourage, foster, and enable personal commitment, not to alleviate us from this responsibility in some group-collective-borg-like mindfulness of sensibility. Many of us hope that our new Object will give strength and direction in this process and I hope that members of this congregation will find it helpful.
John Clifford

Benediction: As we leave the peace and fellowship of this gathering to go into a world full of diversity, fear, and hate, may the Spirit of Love inflame our hearts, may the Spirit of Truth inform our thinking, and may the Spirit of Beauty open our eyes, our ears, and our feelings.

Cardiff Unitarians, 15 January 2006

Chalice Lighting: Chalice lighting words from the German Unitarians and recommended to Unitarian congregations all around the world by the ICUU:

Praise of Life
Life, unfathomable plenty –
You carry us and imbue us and flow around us,
You call us like everything into being and give everyone our time,
That we may make use of it to come to know You,
To encounter You in light and shadow.
We take and accept You and we are thankful.
Find us prepared!

Sermon: On being human at the turn of the year.

January is traditionally a time to look forward after having looked backward – Janus, the Roman God after whom the month is named was the two faced god who looked both ways. We’re in the middle of the month rather than the beginning -- ALREADY!, pretty soon we’ll be asking each other where the winter went!

If we stretch our sense of 2005 to include the last few days of 2004, that is to include the Boxing Day Tsunami that killed 200,000 people in a wide swathe of the world and which directly led to two very strong earthquakes during 2005 (Indonesia and Pakistan) and a record number of tropical storms in the Atlantic which converted to a record number of hurricanes hitting the countries of the Caribbean, the past year was a real high for the extent and amount of human tragedy caused by natural forces. It might, in fact, have even been worse, for the day after the Boxing Day Tsunami, astronomers around the world noted an enormously powerful energy surge from a distant star that would have killed all life on Earth if our Sun had been within 50 light-years. As it turned out the stellar explosion was 50,000 light years away and contained as much energy in half a second as our sun puts out in 100,000 years. So we are under threat, not only from the natural forces of our planet, but also from distant objects in space that we cannot even see on a clear night.

If being human means to be sensitive and caring about human suffering and need (and there are those who consider this a good beginning for approaching a definition of “human”) then 2005 was a good year in our developing sense of humanity. The outpouring of donations and aid to Tsunami casualties and Pakistani villagers and the mostly poor black residents of New Orleans; the incomplete but real steps to reform unfair trade rules and expunge massive, crippling debts; the progress on authorising cheaper medications to alleviate HIV and AIDS treatment in the poorest nations; and the cooperative scientific attempt to get to grips with Asian bird flu – all these point improvements in our practical caring for each other.

Today is 15 January, the birthdate of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King. It is celebrated in the US as an official holiday, because of the work he did to try to create a more inclusive sense of identity, surmounting the very high walls which separated then, and continue largely to separate, different racial communities. He was a great man – a man with many faults, no doubt, but still a great man whose life continues to inspire people towards an inclusive sense of justice. As it turns out, King was born on the seventh anniversary of the creation of the Irish Free State and the Partition which created Northern Ireland, the British government’s attempt to keep a toe-hold in Ireland in spite of an overwhelming vote by the Irish for independence. The consequences of that gerrymandering decision are still working themselves through British politics over 80 years later.

My main theme this evening is that a sense of social justice is a key element in what it means to develop our human potential, but that various attempts to draw “clear blue water” (as they say) between our human community and the rest of nature are not only doomed to fail, these attempts can actually interfere with us making progress.

We are creatures of the spirit; we are who we are not just because of the way our physical needs for food and shelter have been met, but because of the way our social and community needs have been met.

Many religions emphasise the special/ unique nature of humanity, for example by talking about being made in the image of God – the creator of the whole shebang. Some talk about an eternal soul which other life-forms lack. Oh, you'll get the occasional fridge magnet that says something like "people who don't like cats must have been mice in a previous life" – I’ve actually got that one myself. And there will be some dog or cat lovers who protest that their pet is "almost human" and they expect to be re-united after death, but generally when people from a Christian cultural background talk about Heaven they don't include pets or mosquitoes. The majority of Christian praxis for 2000 years has emphasised the special nature of being human (made in the image of God) which involves original sin and the need for baptism to remove its effects.

As Unitarians, of course, we have taken a dim view of original sin; baptism for us is symbolic of welcome into the community and respect for individual identity and freedom rather than a cleansing ceremony. But even Unitarians have in the past taken a view which includes a fairly sharp distinction between humanity and the world we live in.

Modern 'green' theology, of course, talks more of co-operation and responsibility for environment than dominion over it and New Age thought emphasises spiritual linkage between people and natural objects, but these ideas are only slowly finding their way into traditional religion, including Unitarianism. For many of us in the 'rich' Western world things are more important than relationships, in fact, the first understandings when we hear the word 'rich' are centered on accumulations of things, not on plenitude and quality of relationships.

So, we are creatures of the spirit and for some this means a conflict with things of the flesh. We hear news about hurricanes and earthquakes and ask where is God -- implying that the God that we are made in the image of is NOT the God that creates natural patterns of such destruction; we read stories about the rich, beautiful, powerful, and famous and are taught that the trappings of success lie in collecting expensive things and power over others rather seeing a successful life as one lived in harmonious relationship with others and with our environment. I watched five minutes of the pre-lottery show on TV last week where people were tested on their knowledge of the price of very expensive objects and praised and rewarded when their materialistic knowledge was up to the challenge. As I watched, slightly disgusted at the values being expressed, I wondered how to make an attractive programme where people were asked to show that they knew the ecological cost of various “items” and whether they could describe their usefulness in reducing human suffering – perhaps a test of what was involved in running a shelter for battered wives or in providing public transport worthy of the name.

We are creatures of THIS world and all our petty attempts to carve out a unique separate identity fall down.
For example, We share 97% of our basic DNA with chimps, -- over 90% with dogs, over 50% with bananas!
For example, We define humans as the species that has language and then find that we can teach words to dogs and sign language to chimps and still cannot decode the complex language of porpoises.
For example, We define humans as the species that uses tools and then find that birds and gorillas use natural objects to accomplish goals -- gorillas will even modify natural objects to make them more efficient. Did you know that another anniversary today is the opening of one of the world’s great collections of culture? It was on this day in 1759 that the British Museum was opened.
And another example of the attempt to separate humanity from the rest of nature, is the definition that humans are the species that has culture, that transmits knowledge between generations, and then we find instances of our ape-like ancestors doing this too -- a recent published study noted that after two separate tribes of monkeys were taught two different but equal ways to do a task, a few generations down the line one could tell which tribe a monkey came from by the way it did the task. Learning and transmission generally came from the mothers to the daughters, although a few sons were also teachable; and recent studies have tried to determine how birds and whales learn their calling signals from their parents.

So the final reserve of those who want us to see ourselves as separate from Nature with rights, even obligations, to exploit her, is that People Have Souls and benefit from God's commandments and Glorious Sacrifice which is to make us glorious and fit for a heaven where we will spend eternity praising God in splendid isolation from other living creatures.

But if you remove something from its context you are in real danger of distorting it. This is true whether we take a fish out of water or a person out of community, or humanity out of our natural world. When Jesus finished his pastoral and healing ministry and headed into Jerusalem to challenge the religious and political authorities of his day, the priests fought back, trying to tempt him into saying something that could be used as a complaint to the political authorities. The priests were in secret contact with Judas Iscariot, who as a Zealot was disappointed with Jesus' pastoral ministry and wanted a political revolution that would overthrow the Romans; the priests were toadying to the Romans to keep their authority; but never mind, they both were upset with Jesus. And both were astounded by Jesus' replies to the trick questions he was asked: about paying taxes, about who was our neighbour, about observing the restrictions imposed by church and custom when these stood in the way of human need, about stoning sinners.

Our difficulty in understanding his message and why the priests were discomfitted lies in the fact that his message is usually presented out of context for us. He was speaking to Jews of his day, Jews, as already noted, under foreign occupation, for whom their Bible and their rituals were the stuff of daily life. Their Bible, of course, is what we call the Old Testament, particularly the first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and the Prophets with their call to personal renewal and social justice.

Since the time of Constantine Jesus is portrayed as affirming existing political and religious authority, but his central message was the importance of social justice. Important passages are often taken to mean that we are obliged to pay our taxes, that charity begins at home, that things of the spirit belong to God who speaks through the church which must be obeyed, but material things belong to the Political Ruler we are also obliged to obey. Notice that in this distorted perspective, things of the spirit are disjointed, separated in treatment from things of the flesh -- we are in this world but not of this world.

What Jesus was actually saying was often almost directly opposite to this and was very radical.

Any Jew hearing Jesus answer his questioners would immediately connected his references to their Scriptures – for instance in the passage commonly known as Ceasar’s coin, they would connect his reference to the image on the coin to Genesis in their Holy Book and its Creation Story where humanity, men and women, are made in the image of God. At the same time he radically challenged the authority of the church as well as the state: The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. We are part of God's creation, not separate from it.

Yesterday Barbara and I travelled to Bristol to see an excellent performance of Charles Dickens’s “Scrooge”. To be a Scrooge has come to mean to be selfish and parsimonious – but Dickens wrote the play to illustrate that we could and should change from being wrapped up in our own little worlds to incorporating love and justice into our daily lives and Scrooge does just that! So a Scrooge is someone who reforms their life and their values and others benefit from this.

To appreciate our enmeshment with the natural world, we have to see with our hearts as well as our eyes. We wouldn't just see surface beauty, we’d feel the connections, we’d value the world as our home, not as something that will make us rich or powerful. We have to see ourselves as part of our context, the natural world with all its beauty and its tremendous, awesome destructive energy. Death is part of the on-going process of this world, and death is integral to our existence. This radical vision is what undergirds, what supports, what guides, the person who is spiritually at one with nature and is what makes religious maturity possible.

Creative Art helps rescue faith from an intellectual coldness that ties faith to beliefs rather than actions. The Unitarian distrust of enthusiasm, of emotion in religion, has a strong historical basis, particularly here in Wales with the area around Lampeter called Smotyn du, Black spot, because the 19C Calvinist revival didn’t make any headway there. But this has led us, and could continue to lead us, away from a fuller appreciation of our world, of life, and of social reality. For the truth that liberty of individual conscience is an essential element of freedom, is by itself, insufficient for a definition of Unitarian Faith. Without the equally true insight that human freedom is nurtured by human community, our Unitarian Faith is without depth. The metaphores we use need to describe our goals effectively -- that is, they need to draw us closer to a larger vision, a creative process, a cooperative venture of actually building the Kingdom with our daily activities. To be human is to be part of our human community and our natural world. To be fully human is to be fully integrated in a cooperative and caring relationship within both contexts – our divine and human potential

John Clifford

St Mark's Edinburgh, 3 June 2007

Meditation and Readings:

(a) from Every Nation Kneeling, a collection of services edited by Rev Will Hayes of Chatham. This reading is by Ernest Crosby and has the title, "On, to the City of God!"

Our highest truths are but half-truths,
Think not to settle down for ever on any truth.
Make us of it as a tent in which to pass a summer night,
But build no house of it, or it will be your tomb.
When you find the old truth irksome and confining,
When you first have an inkling of its insufficiency,
When you begin to descry a dim counter-truth looming up beyond.
Then weep not, but give thanks.
It is the Lord's voice, whispering:
"Take up thy bed and walk."

(b) TS Elliott: “1. What we call a beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. 2. We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

(c) Willard S. Krabill: “Those who are mentally and emotionally healthy are those who have learned when to say yes, when to say no, and when to say whoopee!”

Sermon:

Cycles of Life

Those who know me well enough to know of my life-long interest in cycling may have thought, when they saw the sermon title, that I would be speaking about all the bikes I have owned over the years. Cycling has, in fact, been one of the abiding patterns in my life, a life of many changes over the decades. This pattern, cycling, has stayed with me partly because of newly developing priorities along my path of life: (a) starting with the freedom to explore larger areas of my childhood and later university neighbourhoods, but then (b) the need to make every penny count, later followed by (c) ecological concerns and finally (d) concerns to keep the body in reasonable shape.

But, No, I'm not going to be talking about the joys of bicycling today -- but I can't resist sharing a pithy proverb with you that I heard many years ago and which seems to bear on my very busy life: It’s a sort of “what my Granny taught me” saying: Blessed are those who run around in circles, for they shall be called Big Wheels!

I start my address proper today observing that at many levels change is a watchword of our lives today: (a) as a denomination we are just over one year into a period of real change, with a new governance structure and since April a new Chief Executive; (b) likewise here in St Mark’s the ‘old’ (well, maybe not really all that old) minister and associate minister have demitted office, a guest minister arrives this week, and an interim minister has been chosen to start in September; (c) in Scottish politics the traditional Labour party hegonomy has been shaken to its core and a nationalist First Minister and administration are in place; (d) in British politics the outgoing Prime Minister continues on his lengthy, expensive farewell vanity tour and the incoming Prime Minister waits impatiently as he goes through a show trial as senseless as any devised by Moscow during the Cold War.

Some things, unfortunately, seem to be heading in a constant and consistent direction – you all know my attitude to our beleaguered Prime Minister’s decision to send our military forces into war in cooperation with the United States and a small number of other countries but in contravention of international law without specific UN authorisation for such a move. Whatever our feelings on the justice or wisdom of this action (or lack thereof),, and Unitarians are not quite of one mind on this,, we all recognize that the mistakes made by allied leadership have resulted in civilian and military casualties on a scale totally disproportionate to the declared aims of our attacks. I will not directly address this issue today although some of what I say may be relevant, particularly about learning from patterns of experience.

A bit more personally, my grandchildren are now speaking as well as haring about everywhere with an energy that is frightening and an inquisitiveness that is daunting. We all know about the natural tendency of parents and grandparents to spend a good year or so encouraging children to speak and then the next 18 years encouraging them to be quiet!

Theoretically retired now for two and a half years, I find myself as busy as ever – and truthfully would not have it otherwise even when I complain occasionally of overload. Barbara and I are now giving very serious thought to what is in our long-term best interests regarding housing and our future health prospects. This might mean us returning to Scotland or it might mean staying in Wales – a big decision for us but also for our families.

So, recognizing that all these changes and many others are a continuing part of life, both recent and pending, my thoughts have turned to change, entry to and exit from situations, holding on and letting go, what to throw out (both from my bookcases and from my active interests), attachment and detachment, in short, the cycles of change and patterns in life that are paradoxically always with us.

I digress briefly to recall that when I was minister with the Glasgow Unitarians some 20 years ago, there was a fascinating item in the news that must have given thousands of ministers a useful sermon illustration for several weeks. It was about an accident involving a cruise liner. In this incident, the ship was far out to sea when a woman (I don't recall her real name but let's call her Mrs MacSmith) fell overboard one night without being noticed. In fact it was several hours later that she was missed and a bit longer before it was realised that she had probably fallen overboard. What to do? The captain ordered the ship to retrace its course and sure enough, after several hours they found her! The amazing thing, for me, was not that they found Mrs MacSmith, but that when they found her she was swimming steadily in the direction of the ship's path.

Now that was a brave woman! In the middle of nowhere with no special equipment and she swims after the ship lights that were receding steadily until they were well out of sight. And she kept on swimming even when they disappeared. Mrs MacSmith was also a lucky woman -- no sharks in the neighbourhood, tolerable water temperature and weather, a captain brave enough to turn the ship around, .......

One of the dividing points that anthropologists and sociologists use to describe societies is the division between those that believe in linear time and those that believe in cyclical time, roughly speaking between those who see life as oriented to a specific goal (e.g. to get to heaven) and those who see life as a series of unending repetitions with the hope of some day, some how, exiting from the cycles. Generally speaking, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam base their life-views on linear time, while Hinduism and Buddhism base their views on cyclical time. This difference can also be expressed in astronomical terms between those who think that the force of gravity holding our expanding universe together is too weak and the universe will continue to expand under the influence of mysterious dark force until the energy runs out, and those who think that gravity is strong enough to stop the expansion of the bubble formed at the Big Bang and everything will collapse back to the "Centre", perhaps to restart with slightly different characteristics in the next Bang.

The Buddhist laws of inevitable change and suffering through attachment have meant a lot in my personal theological development -- much more than any personal drive to achieve an exalted status at death -- but I've also found a "goal-less" ethic doesn't suit me. Without trying to deny others the rights to their own choices about destiny, I am convinced that it is possible to specify (clearly enough to be useful guides) the blockages to developing personal freedom and group support; and then to act to remove these barriers, whether we are talking about literacy, poverty, illness, natural disasters, or more cultural specific subjects like economic and political justice. We do this, I hope, with some trepidation, for others who are affected by this cannot always give us feedback and enter into equal dialogue about their situations, but to be faithful to our own searchings, we have to come to some answers, tentative though they be, to move on to the next step.

And this brings me back to cycles, for without cycles of some sort, we couldn't see patterns, we couldn't abstract points of comparative similarity from different events. We couldn't extend our personal sympathies outward to include others in "similar" situations if every situation were unique in virtually all its aspects. Perhaps it would help to drag up an image from one of my previous existences, when I was a maths teacher. It is also the image that scientists tell us is at the heart of life: the helix -- a three-dimensional figure like wire wrapped on the outside of a cylinder. Because, like some short story by Herman Hesse, we go through various adventures in life and wind up back where we started.

But,, not quite where we started, for we have changed on the way -- we have increased in understanding or sensitivity, or maybe even in prejudice, but we have changed and therefore the total situation which includes us is different. Even our perceptions, having been shaped by our incremental experiences, will mean that we exist in a new reality.

If we as human beings, ever get to a stage where perceptions cannot change/develop, if we ever come to feel that we have so much of the Truth that others' contributions couldn't make a ha'penth of difference, if we ever stop trying to develop sensitivity to the patterns of events that we experience and observe, it will be time to leave this existence. Life requires change and openness to change -- not in everything, at least not everything at the same time, but essential openness to change. When one life reaches it's end, new life has to join the dance so new steps can be created and learnt. And this is the secret of human progress: we have BOTH our obligations to the future, to provide the wisdom we have accumulated and ALSO to provide the freedom for the next cycle to sense new patterns. James Luther Adams, a Unitarian and one of the great American philosophers of religion, wrote about the prophethood of all believers -- not in the sense of foretelling specific events but in the sense of being sensitive to the emerging patterns of the future era as we move towards it.

My grandchildren's world will be vastly different from the one of my upbringing. Of course, transmitting the patterns that I have found meaningful and that their mother and father have found meaningful, is part of sensitising them to see the cycles themselves. What sort of patterns do we emphasise as we shape the potentials and leave in place the barriers they will come across? Whatever the decisions of the political and economically powerful, we have the power to help shape the perceptions that can change the world. We can provide both patterns and inspiration to compensate for the mistakes we have made so that those patterns, pollution, greed, war, do not need to be blindly copied.

For us, our basic tools are not answers (necessary as these are), but guiding principles or processes. But we should have the courage to say to our children and grandchildren what our tentative answers are and this is where our principles come in.

When we are asked what we believe, the questioner usually wants an answer with specific content, while we Unitarians want to provide an answer in more general terms. Discovering and testing, however, can be draining activities and a real serious moral struggle every morning as to whether or not to brush our teeth would be ridiculous, so I, for instance, would say that I think it's a good thing to brush my teeth after breakfast even when I’m too rushed or forget; But we Unitarians are good at speculation and rationality and can easily make a long song and dance about water fluouridation, dentistry as a business rather than public service, the ethics of the sugar industry, .... you name it, we can find some way to drag it into consideration, especially if it helps us to avoid giving a clear answer. But recognising patterns in our lives means seeing the answers we come to as well as asking questions.

To have the courage of one's convictions is part of our ideal of the integrity we seek between ideal and real -- the matching of what we think is best to what we actually do. And this is not unique to Unitarians. The only claim we have to a relatively unique approach is to say that even as we dedicate ourselves to living out our highest ideals, AT THE SAME TIME we dedicate ourselves to the possibility that our highest ideals can be improved and this means the change (destruction?) of what we consider the best we have, in order to get The Better.

So let us return to lucky, courageous Mrs MacSmith and give thanks for her that to the list of items that enabled her courage to be effective, we can add that someone cared for her enough when she was younger to teach her, not how to hold on to a life-preserver, but how to swim.

John Clifford

Valentine's Day 2010 at Glasgow Unitarian Church

The Readings comprised some poems written and read by Corinna Tyagi and excerpts from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet relating to our better selves.

SERMON “Love and Suffering”

Today is Valentine's Day. It is also, this year, New Year's Day in the Chinese Calendar: Welcome to the Year of the Tiger.

Valentine's Day and the sending of messages of love is clearly a good example of commercialisation of a Saints Day. When I was a child growing up in the USA it was always secret and anonymous messages that were sent. Sending messages of professed love goes back perhaps 200 years when the refurbishment of a minor Christian saint wound up becoming the focus of a world-wide business plan. Starting with handwritten notes, it moved to the purchase of gaudy and sentimental expressions of romantic love. It is now, perhaps inevitably, moving on to the exchange of gifts and tests of earnestness. And it has moved well beyond its original Christian roots: When Barbara and I happened to be in India on Valentine's Day 8 years ago (on our Honeymoon) we went to a special Valentine's Day meal, at McDonald's in Delhi, with candle-light and soft music. Barbara was even able to buy a Valentine's Day card at a local Market.

I am not a Valentine Grinch: Romantic love has its legitimate place in the broad spectrum of emotions and actions connected with love, but it should have a valued minority place. The central focus of true love needs to be based in Reality, not idealised images, and the Reality of this world includes Suffering. Interestingly, the stories of Saints Valentine (and there were at least two, possibly three) incorporated the reality of suffering into the stories. So it's not the basic myths that have ignored the reality of suffering, but the way these myths have been commercialised. Essentially, tragedy doesn't sell, glamour and sparkle do, unless you can tap into underlying feelings of guilt, which some products do.

Having recently spent almost 5 years in Wales and being married to a Welsh woman, I came across the story of the Welsh St Valentine, a woman known as Santas Dwynwen. She's a minor Welsh heroine, currently in process of a face-lift. There are many reasons why you probably haven't heard much about her in Scotland, the chief one being that her Saint's Day is 25 January, when we are busy celebrating our Great National Hero, Rabbie Burns.

But before I tell you Santas Dwynwen’s story, some thoughts about heroes and heroines. Religious and secular communities need heroes and heroines. As a religious community we exist to promote lives committed to spiritual and ethical values. It is often useful to abstract a value from its context for examination, but this examination is faulty if it does not re-connect with its implementation in ordinary experience. One way religious communities do this is to make heroes/ saints/ avatars/ messiahs out of folk whose lives exemplify some important part of being more fully human. Sometimes this process is firmly grounded in fact (more likely some thin slice of it), often times it is based more on tradition, story and development of myth with little historical foundation. And there is a conundrum: The more single-issue you make your heroine or saint in order to illustrate an important teaching, the more they are de-humanised and removed from ordinary human experience. Getting the balance right can take generations of development.

To digress for a moment on one example of lost balance. We've had news in the past couple days of an evangelical Bible-believing group who are trying to re-establish female submissiveness in relations, not on the basis that human nature somehow would be improved (although they say that would be the result) but on the basis that it is Biblically mandated. Tradition divorced from the real exploitation of women around the world. These Biblical literalists want to reverse the social progress made in bringing women's voices into the decision process of society. You won't get that message in a Unitarian Church.

There are those who delight in showing that saints have feet of clay, but this is often to miss the point. Saints and heroines are not intended to be fully rounded perfect beings. So Martin Luther King was a womaniser and Mahatma Gandhi had kinky ideas about exposing himself to temptation in order to conquer it. But they both were important leaders who brought a deeper understanding of love and commitment to the struggles to free their peoples.

Having annual festivals or rituals connected with these saints is one way of periodically reminding ourselves of the values they have come to represent.

Reaching into myths and legends has sometimes been a very creative process, indeed. In the USA the establishment of Thanksgiving Day as a National holiday about the time of their Civil War used aspects of history very selectively, skipping over the mistreatment of the native Americans both by the colonial settlers and their subsequent generations. The westward expansion brought with it an almost instant rewriting of history portraying Indians as savages whose land didn't really belong to them so taking it wasn't really theft on a massive scale. Last December we once again came through one of the most developed and abused cultural celebrations surrounding the birth of the Prince of Peace. The myths and stories surrounding Jesus's birth and subsequent development of Christmas celebrations around the world quite intentionally incorporated unrelated local celebrations in an effort to make the celebration more inclusive. But the commercialisation of Christmas as more folk got disposable income and more other folk thought of ways to part them from their hard-earned cash hasn't really brought many to a closer appreciation of the values that Jesus sacrificed himself for. Iolo Morganwg, the Unitarian who devised / created the rituals connected with Bardic events at the annual National Eisteddfod in Wales, quite shamelessly distorted historical reality to serve his needs. And of course, here in Scotland some 90-95% of the history of wearing tartan was an instant expansion of myth around the visit of the germanic British King to Edinburgh orchestrated by Sir Walter Scot.

Secular holidays, too, have been variously established, intending to remind us of certain important values: World Aids Day; United Nations Day; Human Rights Day; Mothers' Day; -- now this last on the list is interesting. Established in the US as a Mothers' Day of Protest Against War it is now the biggest American holiday after Thanksgiving and the protest element has completely disappeared. And, like many things American, it has jumped the Atlantic and arrived on our shores and even now is assimilating our own nid-Lent Mothering Sunday.

So, to Santas Dwynwen: As slowly increasing numbers of Welsh are discovering, they have their own Valentine: Santes Dwynwen. In the interest of promoting cross-Celtic understanding, I'm going to tell you a bit about this Welsh holiday now being promoted by the Welsh Assemby as the Welsh Valentine's Day. Much of the following comes from the Web:

St Dwynwen is the patron saint of Welsh lovers and lived during the 5th century. She was said to be one of 24 children fathered by the then King of Wales, Brychan Brycheiniog of Brechon (Brecon). She was renowned to be both very religious and pure and was also said to be enchantingly beautiful. As the legend goes, one evening Dwynwen's father held a feast where everyone attended in the finest attire to eat and dance the night away. At the feast, Dwynwen's beauty captivated the attention of a young prince by the name of Maelon Gwynedd. He fell in love with her immediately and soon made clear to Dwynwen of his desire to marry her.

There are several versions of the story: 1. Dwynwen returned her love but couldn't marry Maelon as her religious beliefs had encouraged her to become a nun. 2. Brychan refused consent due to his dislike of Maelon. 3. Brychan refused consent due to arranging for Dwynwen to wed another suitor.

Consequently, there are several outcomes following the above: 1. Following her father's refusal, Dwynwen is asked by Maelon to run away with him to his court. Dwynwen rejects this, which angers Maelon who leaves never to return again. 2. Some versions claim that Maelon was so outraged by Dwynwen's chosen life of a nun (or by Brychan's refusals) that he raped and left her. 3. Some versions say that Maelon simply 'goes away' after realising that he and Dwynwen will never be together.

Dwynwen's sadness impels her to console herself in the woods nearby. There she prays to God to rid her of her feelings for Maelon. In the version where she is raped Dwynwen prays for help to 'forget' Maelon. Answering her prayers, an angel visits and gives her a potion to help rid her of her feelings or make her forget Maelon. Unfortunately, Maelon drinks the same potion and is turned into ice. Some claim that Maelon was turned to ice as a direct result of Dwynwen drinking the potion. This would probably be apt in the version where was raped. Dwynwen is horrified to learn of Maelon's misfortune and again prays to God, who answers by granting her three wishes: 1. The first was to have Maelon thawed and brought back to life. 2. The second was that God would look kindly on the hopes and dreams of true lovers whilst mending the broken hearts of the spurned. Most versions claim that Dwynwen requested this to be done through her, therefore making her a patron saint. 3. Her final request was that she was never to marry nor have the desire to do so in order to devote the remainder of her life to God. She then became a nun and settled on Llanddwyn Island, off the west coast of Anglesey, where a church or convent was founded. It is said that it was joined by many a broken hearted woman. Dwynwen's most known saying was "nothing wins hearts like cheerfulness".

Dwynwen died around 460 AD. The remains of a 16th century Tudor church in Llanddwyn are believed to be the site of the church founded by Dwynwen. The church and the nearby well have attracted pilgrimages over the centuries, particularly from young lovers. The water of the well was the home for a sacred fish (or eel) whose behaviour and movement predicted the future.

Recent years have seen an increase amongst Welsh people in the celebrating of St. Dwynwen's Day by exchanging cards and gifts such as lovespoons (another Welsh tradition). Special events such as parties and concerts are also held on the 25th of January, signifying a greater popularity of celebrating St. Dwynwen's Day amongst the Welsh.

So there you have it. The basic mythic story of a saint who embodies the determination, sacrifice, the loyalty associated with young love and a national tradition in the making. Romantic Love -- calling us to see and express the best in our loved one even if Reality is temporarily distorted/suspended.

But Love at its fullest deals with suffering compassionately. We all suffer personal loss and pain and we all suffer community injustice and inequality. To be compassionate is much more important than to be romantic, as most couples brought together by soft lights, music, and chocolate discover if they remain together.

As Dostoyevski put it: "Love will teach us all things: but we must learn how to win love; it is got with difficulty: it is a possession dearly bought with much labour and a long time; for one must love not sometimes only, for a passing moment, but always. There is no man who doth not sometimes love: even the wicked can do that. And let not men's sin dishearten thee: love a man even in his sin, for that love is a likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on earth. Love all God's creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all: and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal." (end quote)

We need heroes and heroines; we need special celebrations -- the world is in danger of being seen as drab, dreary, and prosaic when it is really vibrant, varied, and creative. But we too often let our hearts get hardened to the beauty around us and wake-up calls to one aspect or another of our beautiful but suffering world are necessary.

But my closing basic point is: if peace is important to you, work for it all year round, don't just think about it on Christmas when you honour the Prince of Peace in ways he really wouldn't understand, or on Gandhi's birthday, or on Martin Luther King's birthday. If you really get upset at the sight of starving children, work for poverty relief and fair trade, don't just put a fiver in an emergency collection or the annual Christian Aid or Children in Need Appeal. If you really love and respect our natural world, do something about your daily energy consumption and our growing local problems with pollution, don't just go hug a tree in a ritual. And if you love someone special to you, sure, make the most of special occasions like birthdays or anniversaries or general cultural festivities like Mother's Day or Valentine's Day -- but also tell them that you love them regularly and frequently, not just on the special occasions. .... Amen

John Clifford

CLOSING HYMN: sung to “Where have all the flowers gone?”

1) When we have so many doubts of life’s meaning;
when we wonder who we are, which way to go;
when we feel so much turmoil, suffering and grief, we ask,
“Where will we find a way? How will we find a way?”

2) Loss of loved ones, death of friends, isolation;
grief and sorrow, broken lives, illness and pain;
in despair we doubt our faith, “Where is God?” we want to know,
When will it ever end? How will it ever end?”

3) Wars and torture, tyrannies, fear and prejudice;
selling bombs while children starve; polluted skies;
”Where is God’s love and concern in a world gone mad?”, we ask,
Whom do we choose to help? How do we try to help?”

4) How can we commit our lives, broken vessels?
Seek to make our sick world well, not whole ourselves?
Pray we now with heavy hearts, “Give us light that we may see
Why we can give our lives, how we can give our lives.”

5) Love of God, we seek to know your Reality.
Heal our wounds and make us whole! Help us to see
Love is not a ‘thing’ to hold! Love is living lovingly,
which we have yet to learn. “How will we ever learn?”

John Clifford, 2003

Service at Aberdeen Unitarian Church on 24 January 2010

The Selkirk Grace by Robert Burns was jointly recited at the beginning of the Service and the main Reading was several verses of The Kirk of Scotland's Garland. The closing hymn was A Man's a Man for a' That.

Sermon: “The Immortal Memory of Robert Burns”

Well, there is a bit of role reversal here with someone born in the States, although with long and deep immersion in Scotland to the point of taking out citizenship decades ago, appearing before you to talk of your National Poet. But I'll do my best and rely on the fact that Burns is famous around the world and in many languages.

The UUA, an organisation which brings together roughly 1000 congregations, mostly in the States but with some in Canada, has a website of biographies of Unitarians and Universalists and there is an article on Robert Burns which lists his many connections to our liberal faith while acknowledging that he never joined a Unitarian or Universalist Church even though there were a few around during his life. Interestingly, the article was written by Revs Andrew Hill and Peter Hughes, two British Unitarian ministers.

Born in 1759, Burns’s birthday, 25 January, was used as the start and the end of the government's Homecoming Year to promote Scottish identity and tourism and economy. He had a relatively short life, dying aged 37, in 1796 of heart failure. His heart had been weakened by rheumatic fever when he was young. By 1800, four years after his death, his first biography was published in four volumes, by Scottish Unitarian, James Christie! It is believed by some scholars that his poem/ song "Scots wha hae" , 1793, alludes to the show trial and deportation of Dundee's Unitarian minister, Thomas Fyshe Palmer. Palmer had assisted in drafting a petition to the King and for this was deported to Australia. While he apparently flourished in the penal colony, he died on the way home and never saw Scotland again.

Last November and December, STV’s search for the Greatest Scot ever included both Stevensons, Logie Baird who invented television, Charles Rennie Mcintosh, Sir Walter Scott, Sean Connory, The Big Yin, and dozens of others. past and present who help to shape Scottish life and identity. Burns won, hands down as the Greatest Scot ever. Over the years his portrait has adorned various Scottish banknotes and I noticed last week a Bank of Scotland £5 note with Sir Walter on one side and Robert on the other.

Robert Burns: song collector, writer, poet, womaniser, scourge of hypocrisy in the Kirk, a failed farmer and an exciseman. His situation in 1786 was so desperate -- his marriage to Jean Armour had been annulled by her father, his farm was not producing because of (in part) poor soil, and he had been publicly disciplined by the Church of Scotland Presbytery that he resolved to go to the West Indies to make a new life. But he needed money for passage, so he published a book of poems. This received instant acclaim and on the back of that acclaim instead of moving to the West Indies he moved to Edinburgh and became part of “the scene” in the capital of Scotland.

I suppose at virtually all times and all religions to some degree there are tensions within the Community between those who want to keep things as they are and pass them on to the next generation intact without change as evidence of fidelity, as evidence of loyalty, as evidence of one’s spiritual discipline and religiosity, one the one hand. And on the other hand, there are those in the Community who say that whatever we have learned from the past we need to apply with creativity and sensitivity and perhaps even with love to apply to our current situation. It is not enough to take the heritage and pass it along as if we had no existence at all in the process. In Burns’s day in the Church of Scotland, the Kirk, these groups were called the Auld Licht and the New Licht. The Auld Licht were followers of John Knox, who himself had tried to follow the teachings of Jean Calvin in both theology and governance. The perennial tension between those who want to follow tradition fully as literally as possible and those who want to adapt tradition to current circumstances produced a few ministers, especially in Ayr, of the New Licht. Burns talks about some of these with favour in his poems. And then there are, in any tradition, those for whom tradition isn't a focus .... like Ralph Waldo Emerson, or even like Burns himself.

Burns's 'unconventional life-style' was at least partly based on a philosophy which rejected original sin and saw sex as a natural part of love. His father, (whether he was a Unitarian or not is debatable but I think the internal evidence is overwhelming that he was a classical Universalist) taught his children about the love of God as both a reality and a motivation for behaviour rather than fear of punishment. But even more for Rabbie Burns, it was his natural rejection of the hypocrisy of his critics that produced some very fine poetry. In the Kirk of Scotland’s Garland [our first Reading] he makes theological points about the Trinity and about the unfair treatment of New Licht ministers. Holy Willie, an elder in the Mauchline kirk , is mentioned as one of the hypocritical Auld Licht persecutors. He actually was the subject of a separate poem, Holy Willie’s Prayer:

“O Thou that in the heavens does dwell!
Wha, as it pleases best thysel,
Sends ane to heaven and ten to h-ll,
A’ for thy glory!
And no for ony gude or ill
They’ve done before thee.—

I bless and praise thy matchless might,
When thousands thou has left in night,
That I am here before thy sight,
For gifts and grace,
A burning and a shining light
To a’ this place.

What was I, or my generation,
That I should get such exaltation?
I, wha deserv’d most just damnation,
For broken laws
Sax thousand years ere my creation,
Thro’ Adam’s cause!

…..

Yet I am here, a chosen sample,
To shew thy grace is great and ample:
I’m here, a pillar o’ thy temple
Strong as a rock,
A guide, a ruler and example
To a’ thy flock.---”

Burns then continues with a list of Willie’s “indiscretions” and his attacks on others and finishes with:

“But L—d, remember me and mine
Wi’ mercies temporal and divine!
That I for grace and gear may shine,
Excell’d by nane!
And a’ the glory shall be thine!
Amen! Amen!

Burns believed that it was the way we led our lives rather than some Divine Election that made the difference. He believed that the church had become like a hangman's whip to keep the wretched in order through fear -- hardly a picture of love that any of us would recognise. The New Licht followers were trying to open the Kirk to new understandings, the Auld Licht fought back not just by appealing to tradition and Calvinist theology, but by falsely attacking the character of reformers. Burns used his considerable talents to expose this hypocrisy.

Some of his sarcastic wit is unfortunately not suitable for pulpit reading -- if you don't have a Burns' compendium at home, go to a library or website to sample it: it's very rewarding and refreshing.

Many of his poems have been translated into other languages and spread around the world for artistic and even philosophical reasons. I can remember a time, before the fall of the Iron Curtain, reading about a huge shipment of haggis being airlifted to Moscow for Burns’s Suppers there, where he is considered a Man of the People and his poems available in Russian.

However, consider also the spread of Scots around the world who took Burns with them: At the time of Union, the population of Scotland was around 2 million, that of England was around 4 million. So England had twice the population of Scotland. 200 years later and England has eight to nine times the population of Scotland, which in the meantime has grown to about 5 million. Are Scottish men or Scottish women not so fertile? Did they take very seriously the Calvinist condemnation of carnal knowledge? No, Scotland lived those years by exporting its greatest treasure, its people. The reason was poverty. The poverty of Scotland meant we did not have the work to support the babies we produced. So we gave them what for the time was probably the best education in Europe and sent them abroad, as engineers, as architects, as accountants, as politicians, and we now have a situation where our population is about 10% that of England and every country where English is spoken (and many where English is not native) contain communities who trace their roots back to Caledonia, often, it must be said, with an unrealistic idealised picture of life here.

Burns not only wrote poems and lyrics, he collected folk material and saved many oral works from extinction -- indeed he set standards in this area that were important to later collectors of oral tradition. Interestingly, two classical musicians who collected folk music from their traditions, Eduard Grieg and Bela Bartok, also had strong Unitarian connections.

Every year about this time, not just in Scotland but all over the world, Annual Burns’ Suppers take place: There’s the address to the Haggis, the Immortal Memory, the toast to the lasses and the response. There’s the set menu of haggis (vegetarian option now often available), neeps, and tatties. There’s the closing Auld Lang Syne. Barbara & I are going to one in East Kilbride tomorrow where I will give the Selkirk Grace and play a selection of Burns’s songs on my bagpipe. This Aberdeen congregation will be having a Burns’ Supper later this week. While these occasions include recitation of his poems and sometimes singing of his songs, it is the Immortal Memory is the annual reminder of his current influence and relevance. The Immortal Memory is the creative renewal of understanding that makes our appreciation of our Greatest Scot more than routine repetition of the past. It brings the issues and values of our day into our appreciation of his gifts.

I don't want to portray Burns as some kind of saint -- he had some major faults, especially his inability to keep his breeks on in the presence of women, but his fight against hypocrisy in religion stands like a shining beacon through the ages. Those of us who believe that religion can be a force of good and comfort and wholeness for both individuals and the community need to keep this message ever before us: whatever the rationality of our message, whatever the noble aims pursued in the public arena for human betterment, whatever glory and street-cred we get from mixing with folk in high places, if our members and our leaders are found to be hypocrits, not just these people but the whole endeavour will be seen as a sham and it will deservedly revolt those who most need what we are trying to provide. For me the contemporary importance of Robert Burns, aside from his impact on Scottish identity, is this fight against hypocrisy.

Unitarianism tries to be a religion where we say what we believe and if we don’t believe it we don’t say it, hence our rejection of creeds. But Unitarianism is also a religion that believes in a God, however defined, of Love. Our motivation for ethical action is patterning our lives on a God of love rather than a fear of judgment and punishment. Robert Burns’s life, tragically short even in the context of his time 200 years ago, illustrates both these aspects of our religion.

John Clifford