You can also enjoy a Zoom version of this service at 11am on Sunday 24th May. If you wish to access the serivce the code is as follows: Meeting ID: 841 9082 8195
This is a recurring meeting so it will be the same code each week and for all future.
“The Real Lord of the Flies: Survival of the Friendliest”
Light Chalice
I invite us to still ourselves together now in silence…Let us invite a loving presence to be here amongst us and to awaken within us
Opening words
From beyond the playful late spring clouds,
beyond the earth's thin blue line,
from beyond the bright moon and meteor showers,
we hear the call to look and listen carefully,
to turn away from a world that buys and sells happiness,
to fully experience the luring whisper of our heart's truth.
Why not today, why not now?
We are here and together and yet physically separate at home in this evolving place,
home in this ever changing breath and body,
home in this morning even as it reaches toward the fullness of the day.
We hear the call from far beyond and deep within and we do not hear it alone.
Come, let us worship together.
Hymn Green 249 “Life’s Great Gifts” words adapted by Waldemar Hills from William E Oliver Tune Brother James’s Air 86. 86. 86.
Life is the greatest gift of all the riches on this earth;
life and its creatures, great and small, of high and lowly birth:
so treasure it and measure it with deeds of shining worth.
We are of life, its shining gift, the measure of all things;
up from the dust our temples lift, our vision soars on wings;
for seed and root, for flower and fruit, our grateful spirit sings.
Mind is the brightest gift of all, its thought no barrier mars;
it seeks creation’s hidden plan, its quest surmounts all bars;
it reins the wind, it chains the storm, it weighs the outmost stars.
Love is the highest gift of life, our glory and our good;
Kindred and friend, husband and wife, it flows in golden flood;
So, hand in hand, from land to land, Spread sister-brotherhood.
Prayer
I invite you now to join me in a time of prayer.
Let us pray
Spirit of light, Spirit of Love, Spirit of life hear our prayer…help us to see that we are children of this earth, children of God, children of the universe. Help us to see that we are precious and that our world is a precious blessing…still us, help us to be still and to know that we are loved.
If we come here feeling alone, help us to know we are not alone…we are here among friends, some we have known for many years, some we have known for only a short time and some we may never have met before...
If we come here with guilt for what we have done, or failed to do, help us to see we are not alone that we are in the healthy company of others with the same guilt over the same shortcomings…
If we come here wishing our lives were more whole, more satisfying, perhaps even more perfect, help us to see that the honesty of these wishes marks us out as someone who belongs here…here we come to face the truth unafraid, even when we are afraid. Because we know, even when we do not want to know, that the truth can set us free. Perhaps not painlessly, but the truth can set us free…
After all we do know…we just need to remember that we are children of the earth, children of God, children of the universe. We know that we are precious and the world needs our blessing.
Be still, be still and know that you are loved.
Amen.
I invite you all now to join together in the prayer that Jesus taught. Our father…
Lord’s Prayer
Story
“The Real Lord of the Flies” by Rebecca McPhee from “Explorersweb.com”
Western culture tends to present people as innately selfish. This widely accepted view even has a name: It’s known as the Veneer Theory, and it states that human kindness and morality are just a thin veneer over an otherwise selfish and nasty human nature.
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman takes a more optimistic view of humanity: He says that our species dominance has depended on human kindness and communication. He explores this idea in his latest book, “Humankind: A Hopeful History”
One of the starting points for his book was the true story of a group of boys who were stranded on a desert island for over a year. So far, it sounds like Lord of the Flies, but unlike William Golding’s literary classic, this group of real-life boys did not descend into savagery. Bregman tracked down their rescuer, Peter Warner, and one of the members of the shipwrecked group, Mano Totau. Their story is nothing short of amazing.
In June 1965, six students aged 13 to 16 from a strict Catholic boarding school in Tonga, in the South Pacific, decided that they were so bored, they would run away. Their vague idea was to escape to an exciting new life in Fiji or New Zealand. As none of them owned a boat, they “borrowed” one from a local fisherman they disliked and set off.
They didn’t exactly think their adventure through. No one thought to take a compass or map, they packed very little food and had no real plan. They also made a terrible mistake –- they all fell asleep. When they woke, they were in the middle of a storm. The wind shredded their sail, the rudder broke and they drifted for eight days. They survived by collecting rain water in hollowed-out coconut shells. They shared it equally; each allowed a mouthful in the morning, and another in the evening.
On day eight of drifting aimlessly, they spotted an island. ‘Ata was more of a big rock sticking out of the ocean than a tropical paradise, but it was their only option. Today, it is considered uninhabitable, but Warner noted that by the time he had rescued the boys, they had “set up a small commune with a food garden, hollowed out tree trunks to store rain water, [and had] a gymnasium, badminton courts, a chicken pen and a permanent fire”. So far, their experience could not be more different from Lord of the Flies.
The six boys agreed to work in teams of two. They started and ended each day with song and prayer, imposed time-outs when quarrels arose and made a guitar out of driftwood and parts of their boat to lift their spirits. They initially survived on fish, coconuts, tame birds and seabird eggs. But when they reached the top of the island, they discovered a volcanic crater where inhabitants had lived a century before. Within it, chickens had been reproducing for last 100 years.
During their year on the island, one boy broke his leg in a fall. They set it using sticks and leaves, and when they were rescued, a physician was amazed to see it has healed perfectly.
Peter Warner was a well-off kid who worked for his father’s company, but he yearned for a life at sea and kept a fishing fleet in Tasmania, where he went as often as he could. It was on one of these trips in winter 1966 that he noticed through his binoculars burned patches on the cliffs of ‘Ata.
For an uninhabited island, this was puzzling. He kept looking and to his amazement, he saw a naked boy, hair down to his shoulders, leaping from the cliffs into the water. More boys appeared and followed him into the sea, screaming and frantically swimming for his boat. When the first boy reached him, he cried out, “My name is Stephen, there are six of us and we think we’ve been here for 15 months.”
When Warner took them back home, almost the entire population of their island turned up to greet them. The boys had been gone for over a year and were presumed dead. Their funerals had been held. Everyone was overwhelmed with emotion. When he returned to Sydney, Warner resigned from his father’s company and bought a new ship –- he had found his new crew on ‘Ata. He offered them all the chance to see the world beyond Tonga — what they had been aiming for when they stole the fishing boat a few years earlier. Despite their experience at sea, they all accepted.
While this is a story of loyalty, survival and friendship, showing the best side of human nature, one of the survivors, Mano Totau, now 73, admits that his memories of the island are far more harrowing. The six teenagers were stranded; they were not happy, they were terrified. He cautions everyone against thinking their experience was an enjoyable one.
Reflection
I’m sure that it was horrific, but it certainly paints a very different picture of what would happen to group of boys stranded on a desert island than that pictured in William Goulding’s work of fiction “The Lord of the Flies”. This also took place on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. A plane has just gone down. The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who can’t believe their good fortune. Nothing but beach, shells and water for miles. And better yet: no grownups.
On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts. One boy, Ralph, is elected to be the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic and handsome, his game plan is simple: 1) Have fun. 2) Survive. 3) Make smoke signals for passing ships. Number one is a success. The others? Not so much. The boys are more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Before long, they have begun painting their faces. Casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.
By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island is a smouldering wasteland. Three of the children are dead. “I should have thought,” the officer says, “that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.” At this, Ralph bursts into tears. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence,” we read, and for “the darkness of man’s heart”.
Goulding’s “Lord of the Flies” is a work of fiction and perhaps its success was in its ability to portray the darker aspects of human nature and the fear that if allowed to run riot would descend into darkness. That civilisation is thin veneer that is easily torn apart, but is this true? It is interesting that the fictional account is the one that is often held up as the true picture and yet the true story has almost been lost to history. Thank God that good investigative journalism has brought it back into focus.
Which one do you believe is the accurate portrayal of humanity? Do we live behind a thin veneer of civilisation that constrains our savage urges and innate selfishness or are we cooperative by nature that actually it is about the survival of the friendliest?
Reading
From “Practice Random Acts of Kindness: Bring More Peace, Love, and Compassion into the World”
Rabbi Harold Kushner on the value of performing acts of kindness.
"Performing an act of kindness is a tonic for the one who performs it. It is a cornerstone of my faith that, just as our bodies are made so that certain foods and certain habits are healthy and others are unhealthy, so are our souls made so that certain kinds of behavior nourish the soul and other kinds are toxic. Human beings were fashioned to be friendly, honest, and helpful to each other. When we act that way, when we resist temptation, when we go out of our way to do a favor for someone, we feel right. Something inside us says, 'Yes, this is the way a person is meant to feel.' When we are deceitful or jealous, we are acting against our nature, and we have to work hard to resist the message our bodies and souls try to send us. . .
"Why did God create the world and fill it with such erratic, unpredictable creatures as we human beings are? One Jewish tradition would have it that God made the world the way it is so that we would have the possibility of being nice to each other. The Talmud teaches that when a person does a good deed when he or she didn't have to, God looks down and smiles and says, 'For this moment alone, it was worth creating the world.'
"When we go out of our way to be kind to someone, in large ways or small, our reward is the knowledge that we have redeemed the world.”
Hymn Green 14 “Beauty of the earth”
“The Beauty of the Earth” words Falliott Sandford Pierpoint Tune “Englands Lane 77. 77. 77
For the beauty of the earth, for the splendor of the skies,
for the love which from our birth over and around us lies:
Source of all, to thee we raise this, our hymn of grateful praise.
For the joy of ear and eye, for the heart and mind’s delight,
for the mystic harmony linking sense to sound and sight:
Source of all, to thee we raise this, our hymn of grateful praise.
For the wonder of each hour of the day and of the night,
hill and vale and tree and flower, sun and moon and stars of light:
Source of all, to thee we raise this, our hymn of grateful praise.
For the joy of human care, sister, brother, parent, child,
for the kinship we all share, for all gentle thoughts and mild:
Source of all, to thee we raise this, our hymn of grateful praise.
Story
“The Secret of Happiness”
The spiritual teacher was getting old and began to look for someone to replace him. There were two candidates; a young man who had excelled at meditation, at fasting and at singing. He was very popular among his peers, polite and well mannered. The second was a young man from a remote village who had always seemed shy and a bit backward in his exercises.
The master called them both and said, “I have decided to give you both a test, to see who is best suited to lead our cause in the future. I am going to tell you the secret of all happiness. But if you tell anyone else, happiness in this world will always be denied to you.” He whispered in their ears, one at a time.
In the days that followed, the first young man went about smiling to himself. He said nothing to anyone. The second young man went directly to the market place and loudly told everyone there the secret of happiness.
The master called them both back and asked what they had learned. The first young man said, “I have learned that I can keep a secret. “The second young man said, “I have learned that it is not right to keep such a secret, when so many people are unhappy.”
Which one was chosen to lead the monastery?
Reading
“A Baptism” by Robert R Walsh
She called to ask if I would baptize her infant son.
I said, "What we do is like a baptism, but not exactly. And we normally do it only for people who are part of the church family. The next one we have scheduled is in May."
She said, "Could we come to talk with you about it anyway?"
They came to see me, the very young woman and her child and the child's very young father. She explained that the child had been born with a heart defect. He had to have a risky heart operation soon. She had asked the clergyman of her own church if he would baptize her son, and he had refused because she was not married to the baby’s father.
I told them that their not being married would not be an impediment to anything we might do, but that our child dedication ceremony still might not be what they were looking for.
I explained that our ceremony does not wash away any sin, it does not guarantee the child a place in heaven, it doesn't even make the child a member of the church.
In fact, I said, it doesn't change the child at all. What we expect is that it will change the rest of us in our relationship with the child, and with all children.
She listened patiently. When I was through she said, "All I want is to know that God blesses my baby."
In my mind I gasped at the sudden clarity in the room. I said, with a catch in my throat, "I think I can do that." And I did.
Reading
Genesis 1 vv 26-31
26 Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind* in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth,* and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’
27 So God created humankind* in his image,
in the image of God he created them;*
male and female he created them.
28God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ 29God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. 31God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Meditation
Let us now enter a time of quiet reflection and meditation together.
I invite us to still our thoughts, quieten our minds, connect to our bodies to our breathing…Let us be still and silent together
5 minutes of silence
Followed by music of your own choice
Silence
Amen
Music for meditation
Hymn Green 204 “We shall overcome” words Pete Seeger Tune “We shall overcome” 557.97
1 We shall overcome,
we shall overcome,
we shall overcome someday;
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe,
we shall overcome someday.
2 We’ll walk hand in hand,
we’ll walk hand in hand,
we’ll walk hand in hand someday;
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe,
we shall overcome someday.
3 We shall live in peace,
we shall live in peace,
we shall live in peace someday;
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe,
we shall overcome someday.
4 Truth shall make us free,
Truth shall make us free,
Truth shall make us free someday;
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe,
Truth shall make us free someday.
5 We shall overcome,
we shall overcome,
we shall overcome someday;
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe,
we shall overcome someday.
Reading
“Monkey Hill” by Stan Rice
We will sit all day on a bench in the sun watching the spider monkeys.
It will at moments resemble an internal Eden.
But we will not know this.
We will think that we are just taking pictures with our minds.
The male will stand upright and scratch his silvery-gold chest.
It will sound rough and shameless.
Over and over the egg of tenderness will break in our hearts
at the sight of the baby spider monkeys.
For nothing could be more guileless or curious.
The mother will stand on all fours and stare into space
and we will see by her eyes that all of this is beyond her,
though she is intelligent she is unable to fathom
this sweet injustice nature has made cling to her back.
And we will wait for those moments
when out of the concrete slabs piled to resemble a hill
a splendidly squealing chaos of monkeys
rushes, some trespass or crime in monkeydom,
causing us to cry aloud, Look at that one!
And then also there will be those moments we are embarrassed
and only through a deliberate effort
will we not look away as the monkey
reaches backwards to pull at the indescribable
pink something that dangles from its bottom,
and we will feel our humanity is endangered
and that our intimate moments might lap over into the animal world
and our privacies be beheld with such ghastly frankness.
But no monkey does any one thing for very long.
So soon the candor will pass.
And gradually the shadows of the trees will touch our bench
and it will get cool, then uncomfortably cool, and there will be fewer
and fewer monkeys, and no one will be on the opposite bench
with detached and absorbed expression, and even the thief gulls
will have left the moat, and we will say these words as we stand; no;
think them: Oh God, whatever else be true, though nothing is permanent,
may the myth of our lives be like this memory of monkeys; that real.
Stan Rice, Singing Yet: New and Selected Poems
Reflection
The phrase Pollyanna is often used as term of ridicule for the kind of person who lives with a child-like enthusiasm for life. Such people are told that they need to grow up and see the world for what it really is. That they need to have a realistic view of life and human nature.
Is this true? Do such people need to see the world for what it is?
In Book of Genesis, the first chapter, the creation is seen as good. God looked at his creation and saw that it was good. Is life with all its ups and downs good? What about violence, war and senseless tragedies? What about germs, disease and famine? What about the Corona Virus and the devastation that this has brought to life? What about the pain of our families, our friends, our loved ones?
Some people seem to live with unending tragedy; they seem to experience it far more than the average person. What always blows me away is that it is often the very same people who find the most joy in life, even in extreme pain and suffering. These are the kind of people that stand out as beacons to us all. They are often the most joy and hoped filled. They are angels in our midst. From this joy they give of themselves for others.
Isn’t it so often the case that the people who have been through the greatest hardships become our guiding lights. Such people have learnt to balance the good with the bad, the joy with the suffering. They are able to see the goodness in their lives as a generous, if at times mysterious gift. Now outsiders looking in at their lives may not see it this way, they may only see suffering and trouble, but it so often is not the case. These are folk of genuine faith, people who have not lost faith in life, but who see life as a gift as a blessing and not a curse as some who would look in on their lives may well do. Such people see life’s difficult moments as a challenge to rise up to, rather than burden to be endured. They affirm life as “very good indeed” despite the sadness that they know only too well, despite the real or imagined threats of violence from natural and manmade sources that are all around everyone of us. They see life as being “very good indeed” because of the gifts that it bestows upon us, the gifts that it gives us that can sustain us through the losses that we all experience in life. It is wrong to mock them as “Pollyanna’s” they are people of genuine faith, who know and experience “Love’s Way”
Such people see life as “very good indeed” not because they do not see the darkness present in life and no doubt within themselves, but because they are able to rise above such challenges and even shine some light upon them. Such light can guide us out of own troubles if we only took the time to pay attention to how these people live their lives and stopped mocking them as “Pollyanna’s”
It is so easy to see life as a curse as a vale of tears. I remember when I was at university reading “Leviathan” by Thomas Hobbes, written just after the English civil war. I was struck and disturbed by the bleakness of his view. I did not like it, but it has stuck with me ever since and in my darkest moments, a few years later, I began to agree with him.
Hobbes said:
"Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."
I will repeat the last few words “And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”
For Hobbe’s what is required is an ultimate authority to bring order to wayward humanity and subjugate our anarchic and brutish nature. I see similarities here to the traditional Christian view, at least in the west, of humanities nature; that we are fallen and broken, “rotten to our timbers”, selfish to the core; due to Adam’s original disobedience in the “Garden of Eden”, which led to humanity being cast out of paradise and being forced to suffer.
But are we fallen, broken and sinful by nature, rotten to core?
Well a strand of biology, speaking from a purely secular perspective tends to agree. This has been named “Veneer Theory”. This was mentioned in the “Real Lord of the Flies” story I shared earlier. It was named by the Dutch Primatologist Frans de Weal as a way of labelling this Hobbesian view of morality, that he is himself is highly critical of. The thought is that civilization is merely a veneer “a cultural overlay, a thin veneer hiding our otherwise selfish and brutish nature, exemplified in the novel “The Lord of the Flies”. One of the leading proponents of the view was Thomas Henry Huxley who believed that morality was not a part of our nature, that our ancestors did not become moral by evolution but by choice. It is a dualistic view of humanity and the animals suggesting that such instincts are not related to the social instincts of animals. It is a view shared by Richard Dawkins, who in “The selfish Gene” wrote “we alone on Earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
Many have criticised this view from a secular biological perspective. Stephen Gould being one of them, along with De Waal himself, liking our better qualities with that of the other animals, especially the apes. Stephen Jay Gould said himself: “Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our 'noble' traits as well?”
Peter Godfrey former minister at both Queens road and Dunham Road posted a rather lovely quote from Gould last week. He said:
“Soon after the Twin Towers disaster in 2001 Stephen Jay Gould wrote: The patterns of human history mix decency and depravity in equal measure. We often assume, therefore, that such a fine balance of results must emerge from societies made of decent and depraved people in equal numbers. But we need to expose and celebrate the fallacy of this conclusion so that, in this moment of crisis, we may affirm an essential truth too easily forgotten, and regain some crucial comfort too readily foregone. Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus, in what I call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by ten thousand acts of kindness, too often unnoticed and invisible as the "ordinary" efforts of a vast majority.”
Powerful and isn’t it true. How come the darkness always seems to get all the publicity; how come we say that a work of fiction speaks the truth about nature, when it is allowed to run wild and yet we doubt the story of the “True Lord of the Flies” the beautiful tale of the six Tongan school boys. Rutger Bregman who has once again brough the real story to our consciousness claims that human society has always been based on the survival of the friendliest and that the mistake we are making is that we fail to have a realistic view of humanity in that we focus too much on what is wrong. He, echoing views held by Viktor Frankl and Goethe, suggests that to take a truly realistic view of humanity is to see them as better than we truly are, what we are capable of being and then if we fall short, we will at least achieve a realistic level.
There is great tragedy in life, but that is not all that there is. There is a great deal of quiet goodness, which we rarely celebrate, it certainly gets little publicity. As they say they rarely print the good news. Why are only negative things called radical, what about radical decency, radical goodness, even radical ok-ness. You know I once heard a wonderful speech on “radical ok-ness” It was given by the father of the bride at my nephew Joe’s wedding. I remember when I heard it how it caught me in that place deep in the soul of me. I remember him talking about the joys and sorrows of life and the pains and struggles we all go through and then he talking about an abiding love that is present in life that can hold us and sustain us in all of this. He named it “Radical Ok-ness”. This phrase really caught the heart of me and awakened the soul of me. I thought yes that’s it and in my mind I began to sing a song I once heard based on words by Julian of Norwich, the words were “All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things, they will be well.”
It is easy to look at the world through eyes of despair and say that it is not ok, there is something rotten in life. There is much that is not ok. I am sure we could all make a long list of all that is wrong with life and particularly humanity. So yes it is easy to say that nothing is ok; it is easy to fall into the Hobbesian nightmare and believe has he said “And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” or in the words of the confession in the Book of common Prayer that “there is no health in us”. Human beings do some terrible things to one another and yet on the whole what I see is goodness and in the end goodness seems to prevail. I do see an ok-ness in life, when we choose it. When we bring it to life. This begins I believe by first of all seeing this, by baring witness to this ok-ness. I suspect that radical ok-ness is about bringing this goodness to life, in our very lives. When we do we bring “Kin-dom” of Love to life. I would say what those young boys did on that island together is a beautiful example of this. It was tough and at times terrifying, but they stuck together through it all. Perhaps survival of the friendliest is what the “Kin-dom of love truly looks like.
A couple of weeks ago Peter and Sheila Godfrey joined us for the Zoom service. During the service Alison Jackson reminded Peter that she was the first child that he had ever Baptised, Sheila said that no child that he ever baptised cried and I thought to myself how beautiful. I love to conduct such services myself although I prefer to call them child blessings. It interesting what different Unitarians call such ceremonies and perhaps it reveals something of their personal beliefs. Some call them naming ceremonies, others Christenings and Baptism, I prefer blessings. For that is what I believe I am doing. Yes I use water in the ceremony but not to wash away sin, our tradition rejected this concept long ago. No child is born into this world carrying any baggage; I cannot and will not accept that. Instead what I do is celebrate and bless the life of the child. I touch their brow, their lips and their hands to bless their thoughts, words and deeds. I bless the child and ask they become a blessing to life. We all need to bless more. I then ask those present to make promises to child and their family to offer guidance and to help her become a blessing to life. That they live their life as a part of the kin-dom of love that they become advocates of the “survival of the friendliest.”
Life is the greatest gift of them all. It is not a veil of tears; it is not “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.". Yes it has its troubles and challenges and we all experience suffering from time to time. Even so it is a gift, a blessing.
As Rabbi Herschell said “Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy”
So let us bless life in all that we feel, all that we think, all that we feel and all that we say.
Let us make life very good indeed.
Let’s create the “kin-dom of love, right here right now, let’s engage in the survival of the friendliest.
Hymn 191 Green “To Worship Rightly words John Greenleaf Whittier Tune Londonderry Air 11. 10. 11. 10. D.
Now let us sing in loving celebration;
The holier worship, which our God may bless,
Restores the lost, binds up the spirit broken,
And feeds the widowed and the parentless.
Fold to thy heart thy sister and thy brother;
Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;
To worship rightly is to love each other;
Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.
Follow with reverent steps the great example
Of those whose holy work was doing good;
So shall the wide earth seem our daily temple,
Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.
Then shall all shackles fall; the stormy clangour
Of wild war-music o’er the earth shall cease;
Love shall tread out the baleful fire of anger,
And in its ashes plant the tree of peace.
Blessing
Many days may we share life together
And flower and flow
With all that is,
and was,
And ever shall be.
Let us bless life in our hearts and through our thoughts, words and deeds
Story
“The Real Lord of the Flies” by Rebecca McPhee from “Explorersweb.com”
Western culture tends to present people as innately selfish. This widely accepted view even has a name: It’s known as the Veneer Theory, and it states that human kindness and morality are just a thin veneer over an otherwise selfish and nasty human nature.
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman takes a more optimistic view of humanity: He says that our species dominance has depended on human kindness and communication. He explores this idea in his latest book, “Humankind: A Hopeful History”
One of the starting points for his book was the true story of a group of boys who were stranded on a desert island for over a year. So far, it sounds like Lord of the Flies, but unlike William Golding’s literary classic, this group of real-life boys did not descend into savagery. Bregman tracked down their rescuer, Peter Warner, and one of the members of the shipwrecked group, Mano Totau. Their story is nothing short of amazing.
In June 1965, six students aged 13 to 16 from a strict Catholic boarding school in Tonga, in the South Pacific, decided that they were so bored, they would run away. Their vague idea was to escape to an exciting new life in Fiji or New Zealand. As none of them owned a boat, they “borrowed” one from a local fisherman they disliked and set off.
They didn’t exactly think their adventure through. No one thought to take a compass or map, they packed very little food and had no real plan. They also made a terrible mistake –- they all fell asleep. When they woke, they were in the middle of a storm. The wind shredded their sail, the rudder broke and they drifted for eight days. They survived by collecting rain water in hollowed-out coconut shells. They shared it equally; each allowed a mouthful in the morning, and another in the evening.
On day eight of drifting aimlessly, they spotted an island. ‘Ata was more of a big rock sticking out of the ocean than a tropical paradise, but it was their only option. Today, it is considered uninhabitable, but Warner noted that by the time he had rescued the boys, they had “set up a small commune with a food garden, hollowed out tree trunks to store rain water, [and had] a gymnasium, badminton courts, a chicken pen and a permanent fire”. So far, their experience could not be more different from Lord of the Flies.
The six boys agreed to work in teams of two. They started and ended each day with song and prayer, imposed time-outs when quarrels arose and made a guitar out of driftwood and parts of their boat to lift their spirits. They initially survived on fish, coconuts, tame birds and seabird eggs. But when they reached the top of the island, they discovered a volcanic crater where inhabitants had lived a century before. Within it, chickens had been reproducing for last 100 years.
During their year on the island, one boy broke his leg in a fall. They set it using sticks and leaves, and when they were rescued, a physician was amazed to see it has healed perfectly.
Peter Warner was a well-off kid who worked for his father’s company, but he yearned for a life at sea and kept a fishing fleet in Tasmania, where he went as often as he could. It was on one of these trips in winter 1966 that he noticed through his binoculars burned patches on the cliffs of ‘Ata.
For an uninhabited island, this was puzzling. He kept looking and to his amazement, he saw a naked boy, hair down to his shoulders, leaping from the cliffs into the water. More boys appeared and followed him into the sea, screaming and frantically swimming for his boat. When the first boy reached him, he cried out, “My name is Stephen, there are six of us and we think we’ve been here for 15 months.”
When Warner took them back home, almost the entire population of their island turned up to greet them. The boys had been gone for over a year and were presumed dead. Their funerals had been held. Everyone was overwhelmed with emotion. When he returned to Sydney, Warner resigned from his father’s company and bought a new ship –- he had found his new crew on ‘Ata. He offered them all the chance to see the world beyond Tonga — what they had been aiming for when they stole the fishing boat a few years earlier. Despite their experience at sea, they all accepted.
While this is a story of loyalty, survival and friendship, showing the best side of human nature, one of the survivors, Mano Totau, now 73, admits that his memories of the island are far more harrowing. The six teenagers were stranded; they were not happy, they were terrified. He cautions everyone against thinking their experience was an enjoyable one.
Reflection
I’m sure that it was horrific, but it certainly paints a very different picture of what would happen to group of boys stranded on a desert island than that pictured in William Goulding’s work of fiction “The Lord of the Flies”. This also took place on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. A plane has just gone down. The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who can’t believe their good fortune. Nothing but beach, shells and water for miles. And better yet: no grownups.
On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts. One boy, Ralph, is elected to be the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic and handsome, his game plan is simple: 1) Have fun. 2) Survive. 3) Make smoke signals for passing ships. Number one is a success. The others? Not so much. The boys are more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Before long, they have begun painting their faces. Casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.
By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island is a smouldering wasteland. Three of the children are dead. “I should have thought,” the officer says, “that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.” At this, Ralph bursts into tears. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence,” we read, and for “the darkness of man’s heart”.
Goulding’s “Lord of the Flies” is a work of fiction and perhaps its success was in its ability to portray the darker aspects of human nature and the fear that if allowed to run riot would descend into darkness. That civilisation is thin veneer that is easily torn apart, but is this true? It is interesting that the fictional account is the one that is often held up as the true picture and yet the true story has almost been lost to history. Thank God that good investigative journalism has brought it back into focus.
Which one do you believe is the accurate portrayal of humanity? Do we live behind a thin veneer of civilisation that constrains our savage urges and innate selfishness or are we cooperative by nature that actually it is about the survival of the friendliest?
Reading
From “Practice Random Acts of Kindness: Bring More Peace, Love, and Compassion into the World”
Rabbi Harold Kushner on the value of performing acts of kindness.
"Performing an act of kindness is a tonic for the one who performs it. It is a cornerstone of my faith that, just as our bodies are made so that certain foods and certain habits are healthy and others are unhealthy, so are our souls made so that certain kinds of behavior nourish the soul and other kinds are toxic. Human beings were fashioned to be friendly, honest, and helpful to each other. When we act that way, when we resist temptation, when we go out of our way to do a favor for someone, we feel right. Something inside us says, 'Yes, this is the way a person is meant to feel.' When we are deceitful or jealous, we are acting against our nature, and we have to work hard to resist the message our bodies and souls try to send us. . .
"Why did God create the world and fill it with such erratic, unpredictable creatures as we human beings are? One Jewish tradition would have it that God made the world the way it is so that we would have the possibility of being nice to each other. The Talmud teaches that when a person does a good deed when he or she didn't have to, God looks down and smiles and says, 'For this moment alone, it was worth creating the world.'
"When we go out of our way to be kind to someone, in large ways or small, our reward is the knowledge that we have redeemed the world.”
Hymn Green 14 “Beauty of the earth”
“The Beauty of the Earth” words Falliott Sandford Pierpoint Tune “Englands Lane 77. 77. 77
For the beauty of the earth, for the splendor of the skies,
for the love which from our birth over and around us lies:
Source of all, to thee we raise this, our hymn of grateful praise.
For the joy of ear and eye, for the heart and mind’s delight,
for the mystic harmony linking sense to sound and sight:
Source of all, to thee we raise this, our hymn of grateful praise.
For the wonder of each hour of the day and of the night,
hill and vale and tree and flower, sun and moon and stars of light:
Source of all, to thee we raise this, our hymn of grateful praise.
For the joy of human care, sister, brother, parent, child,
for the kinship we all share, for all gentle thoughts and mild:
Source of all, to thee we raise this, our hymn of grateful praise.
Story
“The Secret of Happiness”
The spiritual teacher was getting old and began to look for someone to replace him. There were two candidates; a young man who had excelled at meditation, at fasting and at singing. He was very popular among his peers, polite and well mannered. The second was a young man from a remote village who had always seemed shy and a bit backward in his exercises.
The master called them both and said, “I have decided to give you both a test, to see who is best suited to lead our cause in the future. I am going to tell you the secret of all happiness. But if you tell anyone else, happiness in this world will always be denied to you.” He whispered in their ears, one at a time.
In the days that followed, the first young man went about smiling to himself. He said nothing to anyone. The second young man went directly to the market place and loudly told everyone there the secret of happiness.
The master called them both back and asked what they had learned. The first young man said, “I have learned that I can keep a secret. “The second young man said, “I have learned that it is not right to keep such a secret, when so many people are unhappy.”
Which one was chosen to lead the monastery?
Reading
“A Baptism” by Robert R Walsh
She called to ask if I would baptize her infant son.
I said, "What we do is like a baptism, but not exactly. And we normally do it only for people who are part of the church family. The next one we have scheduled is in May."
She said, "Could we come to talk with you about it anyway?"
They came to see me, the very young woman and her child and the child's very young father. She explained that the child had been born with a heart defect. He had to have a risky heart operation soon. She had asked the clergyman of her own church if he would baptize her son, and he had refused because she was not married to the baby’s father.
I told them that their not being married would not be an impediment to anything we might do, but that our child dedication ceremony still might not be what they were looking for.
I explained that our ceremony does not wash away any sin, it does not guarantee the child a place in heaven, it doesn't even make the child a member of the church.
In fact, I said, it doesn't change the child at all. What we expect is that it will change the rest of us in our relationship with the child, and with all children.
She listened patiently. When I was through she said, "All I want is to know that God blesses my baby."
In my mind I gasped at the sudden clarity in the room. I said, with a catch in my throat, "I think I can do that." And I did.
Reading
Genesis 1 vv 26-31
26 Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind* in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth,* and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’
27 So God created humankind* in his image,
in the image of God he created them;*
male and female he created them.
28God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ 29God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. 31God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Meditation
Let us now enter a time of quiet reflection and meditation together.
I invite us to still our thoughts, quieten our minds, connect to our bodies to our breathing…Let us be still and silent together
5 minutes of silence
Followed by music of your own choice
Silence
Amen
Music for meditation
Hymn Green 204 “We shall overcome” words Pete Seeger Tune “We shall overcome” 557.97
1 We shall overcome,
we shall overcome,
we shall overcome someday;
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe,
we shall overcome someday.
2 We’ll walk hand in hand,
we’ll walk hand in hand,
we’ll walk hand in hand someday;
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe,
we shall overcome someday.
3 We shall live in peace,
we shall live in peace,
we shall live in peace someday;
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe,
we shall overcome someday.
4 Truth shall make us free,
Truth shall make us free,
Truth shall make us free someday;
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe,
Truth shall make us free someday.
5 We shall overcome,
we shall overcome,
we shall overcome someday;
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe,
we shall overcome someday.
Reading
“Monkey Hill” by Stan Rice
We will sit all day on a bench in the sun watching the spider monkeys.
It will at moments resemble an internal Eden.
But we will not know this.
We will think that we are just taking pictures with our minds.
The male will stand upright and scratch his silvery-gold chest.
It will sound rough and shameless.
Over and over the egg of tenderness will break in our hearts
at the sight of the baby spider monkeys.
For nothing could be more guileless or curious.
The mother will stand on all fours and stare into space
and we will see by her eyes that all of this is beyond her,
though she is intelligent she is unable to fathom
this sweet injustice nature has made cling to her back.
And we will wait for those moments
when out of the concrete slabs piled to resemble a hill
a splendidly squealing chaos of monkeys
rushes, some trespass or crime in monkeydom,
causing us to cry aloud, Look at that one!
And then also there will be those moments we are embarrassed
and only through a deliberate effort
will we not look away as the monkey
reaches backwards to pull at the indescribable
pink something that dangles from its bottom,
and we will feel our humanity is endangered
and that our intimate moments might lap over into the animal world
and our privacies be beheld with such ghastly frankness.
But no monkey does any one thing for very long.
So soon the candor will pass.
And gradually the shadows of the trees will touch our bench
and it will get cool, then uncomfortably cool, and there will be fewer
and fewer monkeys, and no one will be on the opposite bench
with detached and absorbed expression, and even the thief gulls
will have left the moat, and we will say these words as we stand; no;
think them: Oh God, whatever else be true, though nothing is permanent,
may the myth of our lives be like this memory of monkeys; that real.
Stan Rice, Singing Yet: New and Selected Poems
Reflection
The phrase Pollyanna is often used as term of ridicule for the kind of person who lives with a child-like enthusiasm for life. Such people are told that they need to grow up and see the world for what it really is. That they need to have a realistic view of life and human nature.
Is this true? Do such people need to see the world for what it is?
In Book of Genesis, the first chapter, the creation is seen as good. God looked at his creation and saw that it was good. Is life with all its ups and downs good? What about violence, war and senseless tragedies? What about germs, disease and famine? What about the Corona Virus and the devastation that this has brought to life? What about the pain of our families, our friends, our loved ones?
Some people seem to live with unending tragedy; they seem to experience it far more than the average person. What always blows me away is that it is often the very same people who find the most joy in life, even in extreme pain and suffering. These are the kind of people that stand out as beacons to us all. They are often the most joy and hoped filled. They are angels in our midst. From this joy they give of themselves for others.
Isn’t it so often the case that the people who have been through the greatest hardships become our guiding lights. Such people have learnt to balance the good with the bad, the joy with the suffering. They are able to see the goodness in their lives as a generous, if at times mysterious gift. Now outsiders looking in at their lives may not see it this way, they may only see suffering and trouble, but it so often is not the case. These are folk of genuine faith, people who have not lost faith in life, but who see life as a gift as a blessing and not a curse as some who would look in on their lives may well do. Such people see life’s difficult moments as a challenge to rise up to, rather than burden to be endured. They affirm life as “very good indeed” despite the sadness that they know only too well, despite the real or imagined threats of violence from natural and manmade sources that are all around everyone of us. They see life as being “very good indeed” because of the gifts that it bestows upon us, the gifts that it gives us that can sustain us through the losses that we all experience in life. It is wrong to mock them as “Pollyanna’s” they are people of genuine faith, who know and experience “Love’s Way”
Such people see life as “very good indeed” not because they do not see the darkness present in life and no doubt within themselves, but because they are able to rise above such challenges and even shine some light upon them. Such light can guide us out of own troubles if we only took the time to pay attention to how these people live their lives and stopped mocking them as “Pollyanna’s”
It is so easy to see life as a curse as a vale of tears. I remember when I was at university reading “Leviathan” by Thomas Hobbes, written just after the English civil war. I was struck and disturbed by the bleakness of his view. I did not like it, but it has stuck with me ever since and in my darkest moments, a few years later, I began to agree with him.
Hobbes said:
"Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."
I will repeat the last few words “And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”
For Hobbe’s what is required is an ultimate authority to bring order to wayward humanity and subjugate our anarchic and brutish nature. I see similarities here to the traditional Christian view, at least in the west, of humanities nature; that we are fallen and broken, “rotten to our timbers”, selfish to the core; due to Adam’s original disobedience in the “Garden of Eden”, which led to humanity being cast out of paradise and being forced to suffer.
But are we fallen, broken and sinful by nature, rotten to core?
Well a strand of biology, speaking from a purely secular perspective tends to agree. This has been named “Veneer Theory”. This was mentioned in the “Real Lord of the Flies” story I shared earlier. It was named by the Dutch Primatologist Frans de Weal as a way of labelling this Hobbesian view of morality, that he is himself is highly critical of. The thought is that civilization is merely a veneer “a cultural overlay, a thin veneer hiding our otherwise selfish and brutish nature, exemplified in the novel “The Lord of the Flies”. One of the leading proponents of the view was Thomas Henry Huxley who believed that morality was not a part of our nature, that our ancestors did not become moral by evolution but by choice. It is a dualistic view of humanity and the animals suggesting that such instincts are not related to the social instincts of animals. It is a view shared by Richard Dawkins, who in “The selfish Gene” wrote “we alone on Earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
Many have criticised this view from a secular biological perspective. Stephen Gould being one of them, along with De Waal himself, liking our better qualities with that of the other animals, especially the apes. Stephen Jay Gould said himself: “Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our 'noble' traits as well?”
Peter Godfrey former minister at both Queens road and Dunham Road posted a rather lovely quote from Gould last week. He said:
“Soon after the Twin Towers disaster in 2001 Stephen Jay Gould wrote: The patterns of human history mix decency and depravity in equal measure. We often assume, therefore, that such a fine balance of results must emerge from societies made of decent and depraved people in equal numbers. But we need to expose and celebrate the fallacy of this conclusion so that, in this moment of crisis, we may affirm an essential truth too easily forgotten, and regain some crucial comfort too readily foregone. Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus, in what I call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by ten thousand acts of kindness, too often unnoticed and invisible as the "ordinary" efforts of a vast majority.”
Powerful and isn’t it true. How come the darkness always seems to get all the publicity; how come we say that a work of fiction speaks the truth about nature, when it is allowed to run wild and yet we doubt the story of the “True Lord of the Flies” the beautiful tale of the six Tongan school boys. Rutger Bregman who has once again brough the real story to our consciousness claims that human society has always been based on the survival of the friendliest and that the mistake we are making is that we fail to have a realistic view of humanity in that we focus too much on what is wrong. He, echoing views held by Viktor Frankl and Goethe, suggests that to take a truly realistic view of humanity is to see them as better than we truly are, what we are capable of being and then if we fall short, we will at least achieve a realistic level.
There is great tragedy in life, but that is not all that there is. There is a great deal of quiet goodness, which we rarely celebrate, it certainly gets little publicity. As they say they rarely print the good news. Why are only negative things called radical, what about radical decency, radical goodness, even radical ok-ness. You know I once heard a wonderful speech on “radical ok-ness” It was given by the father of the bride at my nephew Joe’s wedding. I remember when I heard it how it caught me in that place deep in the soul of me. I remember him talking about the joys and sorrows of life and the pains and struggles we all go through and then he talking about an abiding love that is present in life that can hold us and sustain us in all of this. He named it “Radical Ok-ness”. This phrase really caught the heart of me and awakened the soul of me. I thought yes that’s it and in my mind I began to sing a song I once heard based on words by Julian of Norwich, the words were “All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things, they will be well.”
It is easy to look at the world through eyes of despair and say that it is not ok, there is something rotten in life. There is much that is not ok. I am sure we could all make a long list of all that is wrong with life and particularly humanity. So yes it is easy to say that nothing is ok; it is easy to fall into the Hobbesian nightmare and believe has he said “And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” or in the words of the confession in the Book of common Prayer that “there is no health in us”. Human beings do some terrible things to one another and yet on the whole what I see is goodness and in the end goodness seems to prevail. I do see an ok-ness in life, when we choose it. When we bring it to life. This begins I believe by first of all seeing this, by baring witness to this ok-ness. I suspect that radical ok-ness is about bringing this goodness to life, in our very lives. When we do we bring “Kin-dom” of Love to life. I would say what those young boys did on that island together is a beautiful example of this. It was tough and at times terrifying, but they stuck together through it all. Perhaps survival of the friendliest is what the “Kin-dom of love truly looks like.
A couple of weeks ago Peter and Sheila Godfrey joined us for the Zoom service. During the service Alison Jackson reminded Peter that she was the first child that he had ever Baptised, Sheila said that no child that he ever baptised cried and I thought to myself how beautiful. I love to conduct such services myself although I prefer to call them child blessings. It interesting what different Unitarians call such ceremonies and perhaps it reveals something of their personal beliefs. Some call them naming ceremonies, others Christenings and Baptism, I prefer blessings. For that is what I believe I am doing. Yes I use water in the ceremony but not to wash away sin, our tradition rejected this concept long ago. No child is born into this world carrying any baggage; I cannot and will not accept that. Instead what I do is celebrate and bless the life of the child. I touch their brow, their lips and their hands to bless their thoughts, words and deeds. I bless the child and ask they become a blessing to life. We all need to bless more. I then ask those present to make promises to child and their family to offer guidance and to help her become a blessing to life. That they live their life as a part of the kin-dom of love that they become advocates of the “survival of the friendliest.”
Life is the greatest gift of them all. It is not a veil of tears; it is not “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.". Yes it has its troubles and challenges and we all experience suffering from time to time. Even so it is a gift, a blessing.
As Rabbi Herschell said “Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy”
So let us bless life in all that we feel, all that we think, all that we feel and all that we say.
Let us make life very good indeed.
Let’s create the “kin-dom of love, right here right now, let’s engage in the survival of the friendliest.
Hymn 191 Green “To Worship Rightly words John Greenleaf Whittier Tune Londonderry Air 11. 10. 11. 10. D.
Now let us sing in loving celebration;
The holier worship, which our God may bless,
Restores the lost, binds up the spirit broken,
And feeds the widowed and the parentless.
Fold to thy heart thy sister and thy brother;
Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;
To worship rightly is to love each other;
Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.
Follow with reverent steps the great example
Of those whose holy work was doing good;
So shall the wide earth seem our daily temple,
Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.
Then shall all shackles fall; the stormy clangour
Of wild war-music o’er the earth shall cease;
Love shall tread out the baleful fire of anger,
And in its ashes plant the tree of peace.
Blessing
Many days may we share life together
And flower and flow
With all that is,
and was,
And ever shall be.
Let us bless life in our hearts and through our thoughts, words and deeds
It will bless us in return
In all that we feel, all that we think, all that we say and all that we do.
Amen.
Extinguish chalice
Amen.
Extinguish chalice
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