Openness and Humility: Hearts, Eyes, Minds and Hands

Once upon a time there were six blind men. They lived in a town in India. They thought they were very clever. One day an elephant came into the town. The blind men did not know what an elephant looked like but they could smell it and they could hear it. 'What is this animal like?' they said. Each man touched a different part of the elephant.

The first man touched the elephant's body. It felt hard, big and wide. 'An elephant is like a wall,' he said.

The second man touched one of the elephant's tusks. It felt smooth and hard and sharp. 'An elephant is like a spear,' he said.

The third man touched the elephant's trunk. It felt long and thin and wiggly. 'An elephant is like a snake,' he said.

The fourth man touched one of the legs. It felt thick and rough and hard and round. 'An elephant is like a tree,' he said.

The fifth man touched one of the elephant's ears. It felt thin and it moved. 'An elephant is like a fan,' he said.

The sixth man touched the elephant's tail. It felt long and thin and strong. 'An elephant is like a rope,' he said.

The men argued. It's like a wall! No, it isn't! It's like a spear! No it isn't! It's like a snake! They did not agree. The king had been watching and listening to the men. 'You are not very clever. You only touched part of the elephant. You did not feel the whole animal. An elephant is not like a wall or a spear or a snake, or a tree or a fan or a rope.'

The men left the town still arguing. A little girl heard them and said 'Each of you is right but you are all wrong … but I know what you are talking about!'

Maybe if they learned to listen to each other, been open to another then together they might just have learned the truth of what an elephant is.

I received many lovely gifts for my birthday. Some arrived through the letter box , others given to me directly a few were left on my doorstep. I was given a wonderful book on Ralph Waldo Emerson written by a former member of Dunham Road Chapel Alexander Ireland, the father of the composer John Ireland. Alexander Ireland and Emerson were great friends. As Emerson said “The only way to have friends is to be one”, inspired by their lifelong friends. On my birthdays I often think that he greatest gifts I have in my life are my friends, the folk I get to walk the journey of life with. One friend sent me a lovely WattsApp message which included the following that opened my heart.

“When asked about the lens through which she chooses to see the world, Quaker songwriter Carrie Newcomer shares her practice of seeing with the eyes of love:

My life as a songwriter and a poet has asked me to consider how I look at the world on a daily, moment-to-moment kind of way…. Our first job is to pay attention and then to take in what we see with a certain kind of spirit and for me, a certain kind of love. I think it’s a practice and the more you practice it, the more you see; the more you see, the more you see with love….

The big things I love: I love my husband. I love my daughter. I love justice. I love mercy…. I love so many big things, but my life is also filled every day with all these glorious little loves…. There can be great meaning and great love in small things. I love blueberries and I love the smell of lilacs and I love how little kids hold each other’s hands when they go across the street….

In looking at the small moment and the small thing through love, it’s not always completely joyous…. You take it all. When you decide I’m going to be here, I’m going to be present, and I’m going to be present with love, you take it all.”

Thank you, Carrie, and thank you my friend for sending me this on my birthday.

It is not always easy taking it all, but there is no other way I have discovered. You have to look at it all with eyes wide open and heart, mind and soul too and then respond with hands open to all that is.

Like Carrie, I know it is often the little things that bring the greatest blessings in our lives. I continue on day by day. I share my blessing every morning upon awakening with friends on social media. I have a little quiet time, in prayer and then I reflect and share. I was thinking of the little blessings as I reflected on my birthday gifts and greetings, including a few friends, with mixed ability singing happy birthday on voice notes. As I did I looked down at my little blessing Molly who I collected 3 years ago. As you know I had gone for one of her sisters, but she insisted on coming home with me. A day of deep sorrow as it was also the day that our youngest cousin Cheryl died. Molly kept my heart open in that time of grief, as she does every day. I need to keep it open as sometimes I am tempted to close it to all the pain, anger and suffering abound, those things that trouble me deeply day by day.

I had a beautiful experience of open hearted conversation on Wednesday at the Urmston “Common Search for Meaning” Group. We were exploring and sharing about memory. It was a beautiful conversation and lifted several folk present out of their worries and anxieties as they connected with each other and the moment they were living it. We spoke with open minds and hearts. One thing that came up in the conversation was how folk can remember things so differently. How we experience life oh so differently. How vital it is to remain open to the experiences of others. A bit like the blind men and the elephant, we only get the full picture if we listen to one another, if we listen with the ears of heart to one another’s experience and somewhere in there we might discover something that resembles the truth. This is not always easy though. It is vital to remain open, or as open as possible and to remain humble too, especially when it comes to truth claims.

If I have learnt anything about spiritual living I have learnt that the key is openness; the key to spiritual living is to live with open hearts, open minds, open eyes and open hands. These four are spiritual living in practice, which I have come to believe is the essence religion. Not creed like religion but truly living breathing practising religion. A religion, a lived spiritually, that not only brings us to life, but it enables us to live truly alive and awake in this our shared world.

Unitarian minister James Vila Blake (1842-1925) wrote the following covenant, "Love is the spirit of this church, and service its law. This is our great covenant: To dwell together in peace, To seek the truth in love, And to help one another." I think in many ways this covenant articulates the essence of what it means to come together in love as a worshipping community. It has been adopted by many Unitarian Universalist and Free Christian communities. It expresses beautifully what it means to live in an open, living breathing spiritual community, what free religion ought to be about.

Openness is at the heart of my understanding of our Unitarian tradition. I have come to believe the essence of openness is humility, especially when it comes to truth claims.

Openness is very much a doing word. It’s not so much that you are open, more that you live openly. To do so religiously, is to be open in four ways. To live with open hands, open eyes, open hearts and open minds. To live faithfully is to do so with open eyes, an open heart and an open mind and so doing our hands will open so as to accept one another and to serve one another, this life and the living breathing spirit that connects all life, what I name God.

Now to practise the first three open mind, open heart and open eyes so as to enable us to live with open hands is no easy task. In fact to master them is virtually impossible. The key is to begin and to continue; the key is intentional practice. To live with open eyes is to see the world as is truly is; to see reality as it really is, warts and all and in its beauty spots too. To live with open eyes is to not turn away from the suffering present in life but also to pay attention to life’s beauty too, to notice those little things. To live with open eyes is to see the reality of the whole of life. This is not easy, so often we are tempted to turn away. To live fully connected lives, we need to live with open eyes, to see life with all its blessings and curses. This is my morning practice of sharing the little things I notice in life.

To live with an open mind is to be able to search for truth and meaning while maintaining an awareness of the tension between certitude and curiosity. It is the balance of being receptive to what is new and foreign, while at the same time holding onto what is most dear. It is to try to know while in the presence of the unknown and unknowable. This can make others feel uncomfortable and they may try to close an open mind or put their things in it. This does not mean that we do not discern that we don’t come to conclusions, quite the opposite actually. It is vital to come to conclusions, so that one can act in the world, it’s just that after the decision the openness must be maintained, it is never too late to change our minds. So, keep your minds open but please do be careful what you put in it.

The key to living with a loving and open heart is live with all our senses, including our sixth sense, our soul open to all the wonders and mystery of life. There are though dangers to this. Living with an open heart exposes us to pain and fear. To truly live with an open heart is to allow ourselves to be touched in the most tender of places. This can hurt sometimes. Remember Cupids arrow had to first of all pierce the flesh before it could penetrate the heart, love hurts. To live with an open heart is to follow the great commandment, it is Agape. It is to love others, no matter who they are what they have done, where they have come from, it is to love without condition. It is to follow the Golden Rule. It is to love our neighbour as we would wish to be loved ourselves. This requires love and compassion for ourselves of course, which can at times be the greatest challenge. It is to feel a deep connection with all that is, all that has been and all that will ever be. It is to recognise that in order to feel this connection requires that we share of ourselves. To love is to practice forgiveness, over and over again. Practicing living with a loving heart is to live willing to be transformed by what we encounter in our daily lives.

By living with these three open eyes, open minds and open hearts we can then practice living with open hands. Hands that welcome, hands that humbly accept our interconnectedness, humble hands and hands that are willing to do what they can do to serve, to play their part in the world.

This means being willing to practice committing and recommitting to use my hands, my abilities, in the service of life. To take responsibility for attempting to create the kin-dom of love right here right now. Living with open hands is about being a loving presence, regardless of the world we inhabit. Our open eyes allow us to recognise where our hands can be of use in the world, if our minds and our hearts are open.

Open hands though are not just about what we do, they are also about connection and perhaps more importantly humility. It is humility that is the key to living openly.

Now humility is a word that is often misunderstood. To be humble is to be at home in our true humanity, to be grounded in our own reality and shared humanity. The key to humility is to recognise that we are a part of something larger than our singular selves.

Humility is not about being meek and mild and bowing and scraping, it is not about being self-deprecating or denigrating. Too often humility is seen in this way, particularly from a religious perspective, as an excuse for suffering and or meekness. To me this is not true humility; true humility is about living with open hands and doing what we can in the world, we can only do this if we live with open hearts, open minds and open eyes and by recognising our common humanity.

I believe that Dag Hammarskjold, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, expressed the true meaning of humility when he said:

"Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is-nothing, yet at the same time one with everything."

Humility is an interesting word, when understood correctly. It has its roots in the word “humus” which means earth. It also shares the same linguistic root as human and humanity. To be humble is to be grounded in this life; to be humble is to recognise our honest place in the world and life in general, whilst recognising that life itself does not revolve around us. Humility is the core of my chosen Unitarian faith. I believe that we are a humble faith. Our tradition is open and accepting, we welcome diversity, we honour one another’s points of view. Are these not by their very nature acts of humility? And in doing so are we not accepting that each of us have limits to our own individual perspectives; that we need to be open to one another in order to see new and deeper truths; that we cannot make sense of anything alone. This is free religion in its essence, this coming together and experiencing more than we could have imagined alone, by coming together, in love. We honour and acknowledge that on our own we cannot know everything and that by being open to others who may see and understand things differently we are challenged to expand our understandings, doing so in love and respect and honour these differences. Humility is about rejoicing in the challenge that others who see things differently can reveal to us and therefore expand our understanding.

The key is to live openly and of course the key to openness is humility. No one lives apart from anyone else we are all interdependent. Also, none of us knows everything, we all see through the glass dimly. There is limitlessness in openness. Who knows how much we can truly change and learn to love if we just stay open, in our hearts and minds and eyes. Who knows what we can do with our loving hands if we live with truly open eyes, open hearts and open minds.

The key is to live with open eyes, open hearts open minds and open hands; the key is to live with true humility, to see that we are grounded in our shared humanity; the key is to see that we are a part of something far greater than ourselves and that through recognising this we will know the love present in life and begin to bring that love alive, right here right now.

Every day is a day when we can bear witness to a Power Greater than ourselves. We do this when we love one another with open hands, when we see the world with truly open eyes, when we live with minds that are truly open and heart open to the love waiting to enter and to be poured out onto our world that really needs it.

I believe it is our task to live truly open lives. This is real spiritual living, this is true religions. I believe it is our task to bring love alive, through our openness. It is our task to allow God to incarnate through our lives. To do so we need to live with open hands and love this our shared world.

Please find below a video devotion based on the material in this "Blogspot"