In Giving and receiving we all enjoy the ultimate free meal

I recently came across the following: “it is a cliché that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliché is untrue”. It is attributed to Stephen Fry. I like it. It speaks to me. There is truth in many cliches and sayings, but there is also untruth. One I have found is not true is the following: “There is no such thing as a free meal.” It come from that cynical untrusting place, about the human condition. That nothing is given for free in life, that people always have a secondary motive, that no one gives wholly from their heart, without an ulterior motive. This the true joy in living. As Kahlil Gibran said: “There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.”

As I look back at my life, I cannot even begin to count the number of free meals I have been given. I am not just talking about food here by the way. Throughout my life people have given to me from nothing but pure love. There have been many helping hands, some visible and yet others invisible. Some have given to me before I was even here, that I have freely benefitted from. I have been freely fed by many hands throughout my life. I have eaten and have certainly been filled. Thank you. From this I have been able to give and others have been fed too.

“From you I receive, to you I give, together we share and from this we live”

I am going to share with a piece of wisdom that has been foundational to my ministry. A gift given, that has continued to feed me and those who I serve these last 13 years. It is titled “In The Soup” by Robert Walsh. Interestingly he did a short exchange ministry at the congregations I serve during the 1980’s when John Midgely served as minister. Sadly Robbie died a few years ago. That said his wisdom still feeds. Thank you.

“In The Soup” by Robert Walsh.

My dictionary says that the word minister is etymologically related to the word minestrone. I am not making this up. They are both derived from a Latin root that means to serve.

The image of ministry as minestrone is particularly apt for the ministry church people do all together that make us a ministering congregation. Each bean, each vegetable, each unit of macaroni or pinch of spice gives not only its substance to the soup but also its spirit, its texture its color, its flavour and aroma. Each person offers a unique set of gifts, and if we do our job organizing well, each gift will be creatively matched with a need – so that the whole business becomes a warm, nourishing, life giving religious community.

All who serve the church and the principles and values we hold dear are ministers. If you are doing part of that work, you are doing ministry, no matter how unlikely it may seem. You are in the soup – the minestrone of ministry!

Isn’t it wonderful.

“From you I receive, to you I give, together we share and from this we live.”

I recently had the honour of participating

in “Ministry in the Making”, at Great Hucklow. Those in attendance were newly qualified ministers, those training for the ministry and those about to begin training for the ministry. One of those present was Janine Simms who will be on placement with the congregations I serve from September. It was a privilege to spend time with them and participate in workshops and other activities. They were on the whole an impressive bunch. I feel that our chalice is in good hands. Molly had a wonderful time and it seems that all present fell in love with her. This included the chef who ensured she had a sausage every morning. This has led to one or two problems since we got back as she has got a little fussier about food. Who would want to eat kibble after sausage. They did love her though and she came home with several teddy bears as she kept been given one by the students every time we went to chapel. They certainly want her back and apparently I can accompany her too. The whole week was a wonderful example of both giving and receiving. All certainly gained and abundantly, including Molly.

This year’s “Ministry in the Making” theme was inspired by Kahlil Gibran’s words on ‘Giving’, particularly the following lines: “Then said a rich man, Speak to us of Giving. And he answered: You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.” Giving of yourself is an intimate act. Like the disciples in “The feeding of the five thousands”, when they gave to those they were feeding face to face, in so doing they were filled, as were the disciples no doubt, as both were filled with love by this intimate interaction. In this ultimate free lunch, both receive.

During the week I was invited to speak about ministry. I shared the wonderful piece by Robbie Walsh suggesting that congregational ministry is akin to soup, particularly minestrone soup.

As Walsh highlighted minestrone and ministry share the same root, they both mean to serve. Love and service, I believe. are the essence of true religious living. Our Unitarian tradition is a free religious one, an open one. We come together and serve together, although we may not believe in exactly the same way. Thus we celebrate because as we come together and serve together we create a meal, made up of so many ingredients that could satisfy all and then we serve this meal to those who would like to taste what we have to offer. Our purpose is not to merely serve ourselves, but the world outside of our window. We cannot do this alone, we need one another. We all have something to add to the flavour.

Everyone thirsts and hungers even in our seemingly materially abundant lives. We cannot feed this hunger in isolation, in self-reliance. It is only fed in that relationship that occurs as we feed one another. To me this is the purpose of religious communities like the ones I serve, living breathing fellowships of love. It is also my experience that it is the space, in this relationship that occurs as we serve one another, that God is revealed, that God is once again incarnated. By giving one to another we can know the love that is God.

This brings to mind a rather wonderful teaching story from good old Nasruddin

One day Nasruddin saw a crowd gathered around a pond, watching a priest flailing in the water and calling for help. Of course some people were attempting to rescue--reaching towards the drowning priest and saying "Give me your hand!" The priest kept wrestling with the water and shouting for help. Finally Nasruddin stepped forward: "Let me handle this." He stretched out his hand toward the priest and shouted, "Take my hand!" The priest grabbed Nasruddin's hand so quickly that he nearly fell in. Soon the priest was extracted from the pond... and someone asked Nasruddin what just happened. "It is very simple," he replied. "I know this miser never gave anything to anyone. Instead of saying 'Give me your hand,' I said, 'Take my hand,' and sure enough he took it.

If you are drowning it is advisable to take a helping hand. We all need at times help to pull us out of water. Sorry if this is mixing too many liquid based metaphors, but I’m no Stephen Fry.

No one pulls themselves up from their bootstraps completely alone, all by themselves. From the moment of our births others are involved in creating who we are and who we become. As the old saying goes “It takes a village to raise a child.” No one lives entirely from themselves we are all a part of an interdependent web of relationships that are made of both visible and invisible. Life has taught me that asking for help is actually a sign of both strength and wisdom, rather than weakness. It is a sign of good, mental, emotional and spiritual health. Of course it is not enough to merely ask for health, true healthy humility is about accepting the help offered. We give to others when we allow them to give to others. Those numerous free meals we are given do not only feed us, they feed all. We eat and we are filled by the relationship. Maybe this is what is meant by the old clichéd saying, “there is no such thing as a free meal.” It isn’t true of course, sadly it is a cynical cliché that suggests that you shouldn’t trust generosity. Please don’t fall for it, give and receive abundantly so we can all eat and be filled. If you do it with joy, joy will be your rewards.

From the cradle to the grave we need to keep on giving and receiving whole heartedly, joyfully. We need to keep asking for help when we need it and accept what visible and invisible help is offered. We also need to make ourselves available to be of assistance to others in their need, to be that visible help and to help bring alive that invisible help too. This is not to say that we become unhealthily dependent on others and society as a whole, no not at all. We are though a part of a whole, a complex whole that makes life and community. As we grow and change and become the people that we are this changes shape and reforms constantly, it seems that we are being born again and again to new versions of ourselves. Of course we cannot do this alone. We cannot give birth to ourselves, no one can. We need help and sometimes we need to ask for help from others and in so doing we are of course doing not only a service for ourselves, but for them also. We all feed and we are all fed and abundantly so.

We all hunger for purpose and meaning. As Viktor Frankl pointed out we are driven by a will to find meaning and purpose. I would go further and suggest that we are also driven to find companionship in our increasingly isolated and isolating culture. We need to serve one another, or our souls will starve. I have discovered, and I keep on discovering, that our deepest pangs are not satisfied by the food that is laid on the table but in the relationship that occurs as we feed one another and as we drink from one another’s cup. This is fellowship; a living breathing fellowship of love. This is where the joy in living comes to life.

We are all in the soup of life together and it is our task to serve one another. We all can minister, we can all add substance and flavour to the ministrone soup in which we all share.

Remember we are all in the soup together, let’s all add our substance and our flavour. Lets offer one another those free meals and accept those meals that are offered to us. There is more than enough to go round. The giving and receiving of love is an infinite commodity. It is the joy in living, in life.

“From you I receive, to you I give, together we share and from this we live.”

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

Won't Get Fooled Again: Oh Really?

Last Monday was April Fool’s Day, I think it may be my favourite day of the year. Why you may well ask? Well because we all fall for them, no matter how clever we may think we are; we all get suckered into believing the nonsense from time to time, no matter how clever or rational we may think we are. I love April Fools Day because it brings us down to right size, to our fully human level, it reminds us that we are not as clever as we may think we are, it keeps us humble, it reminds us that we are fully human.

My favourite one this year was not actually an April Fool by design and actually occurred before the official date, in fact it was launched just a few days before Easter (I'm sure that someone will argue that it wasn't one as it did not occur on the official date, well who cares? It certainly worked like one). It was a meme about Ishtar, a Babylonian fertility God who the poster claimed Easter was named after. Now this went viral within a few days and was all over the internet. I received several postings myself and those of an anti-religious bent really went to town on it. Stephen Fry and his followers spread it all over twitter. Some 70,000 facebook followers of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science shared it with anyone in their circles. People just went crazy over it and seemed to use it as a launching pad to attack Christianity, during its most important week of the year. The meme itself read:

“This is Ishtar”, pronounced “Easter”: Easter was originally the celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex. Her symbols (like the egg and the bunny) were and still are fertility and sex symbols (or did you actually think eggs and bunnies had anything to do with the resurrection?). After Constantine decided to Christianize the Empire, Easter was changed to represent Jesus. But at its roots, Easter (which is how you pronounce Ishtar) is all about celebrating fertility and sex.”

(I wonder if anyone reading this blog fell for this one) 

The fact is that very little of this is true. While very few people doubt that Easter is a blend of both pagan and Christian traditions it has absolutely nothing to do with this Assyrian and Babylonian goddess. There have been several rebuttles of this over the last few days, showing that just a little bit of research into the subject would have revealed the utter nonsense that was being claimed. It was eventually removed from The Dawkins Foundation site and others too. I do hope that in the future Stephen Fry brings this up on his excellent quiz show OI, it would be a wonderful act of humilty on his part if he did.

This is a link to my favourite critique. I take issue with a couple of points, but it is more or less accurate, the writer certainly did not disable her rational faculties while writing it.

http://bellejarblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/easter-is-not-named-after-ishtar-and-other-truths-i-have-to-tell-you/

Now what really made me think about all this was the frenzy of excitement that it brought about in so many people who seemingly cast aside all reason and sense just to attack a religion and those who follow it in its many guises. Some of the comments I read were so hate filled it was disturbing, especially from people who claim reason and understanding, there was no sign of any of it. As a couple of friends of mine who are themselves atheists have said they were appalled by it, adding further that they really dislike the kind of anti-religious zealotry espoused by Professor Dawkins and his brand of atheism.

Now while all this was going on Lord Carey, the former Arch Bishop of Canterbury was also all over the news claiming that Christians were being marginalised in this country. He has been roundly criticised for this in many quarters. Certainly it seems difficult for a man who has a seat in the House of Lord, just because of his former position, to claim that he is a marginalised member of society. That said there does appear to be an increase in anti-religious feeling both in this country and around the world. It has impacted my own Unitarian tradition too, we who claim to be a free religion. Only a few weeks ago the Wayside pulpit at Altrincham was defaced. It had originally read “You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist”, nothing offensive in that you would think. This had been covered up another poster that read instead “Religion Is A Lie: Now Stop Worrying And Go Enjoy Your Life”. No doubt this was inspired by the British Humanist Association Campaign, fronted by professor Dawkins, of a couple of years ago. If you remember the campaign placed posters on buses up and down the country reading “There’s Probably No God: Now Stop Worrying And Go Enjoy Your Life”. Now I’m all for people stopping worrying and enjoying their lives and people are entitled to put whatever posters they like on buses. That said I’m not sure it’s ok to deface others open and loving messages or to maliciously and aggressively attack them in other ways. This is especially so when you haven’t even got your facts straight and your unreasoning prejudice just leads to hatred. How can anyone justify that?

Anyway back to the original subject...

What I really love about April Fools Day is that it saves us from our greatest danger “Hubris”

Hubris is the Ancient Greek word for over stretching ourselves; it translates as arrogance or overwhelming pride. The ancient Greeks saw Hubris as the very root of tragedy. Their tragic dramas, played out at their religious festivals centred on human beings, often rulers who forgot their human limitations. In these tragedies the audiences were reminded of the dangers of acting like immortals or Gods. They taught the value of knowing themselves, who they really are and to know what it is to be truly human.

Hubris of course manifests itself in many forms. The one place it appears where you’d think it ought not to is in religion. Yet it’s probably more obvious there than in any other area of life. Those who believe they have a direct link to God and know not only what God’s will for themselves is, but what it is for everyone else do appear to be suffering from the worst form of hubris. My response to such thinking is usually “Come off it who do you think you are?” By trying to convert a person to your way of believing seems like the worst kind of Hubris to me. Although of course if I’m honest I’ve suffered from it myself from time to time. I could be accused of it now, while writing this blog. I do hope that when I am critical of other people's beliefs I do so in a loving way and I do not lose my rational faculties. I'm sure I fail from time to time, but then I am far from perfect. What do I know?

Sceptics also fall into the trap of hubris too. To belittle someone’s genuine faith by calling it a superstition or merely a crutch is deeply disrespectful. It certainly does not honour or respect their humanity. No one can ever truly know what is to have walked in another’s shoes and to have lived their lives. To be smug about one’s personal so called rationalism seems like the worst kind of arrogance to me. The question I’d like to ask is why we need to spend our time proving what someone else genuinely believes as wrong or false or immature, wherever we find ourselves on the faith spectrum? That said, once again, I have to hold up my hand and admit that it’s not something I’m immune from. As I heard someone say many years ago “To be right you don’t have to make anybody else wrong” 

I need to remember that one more often. “To be right you don’t have to make anybody else wrong.”

Sadly so many of us spend our time attempting to do so...We do not "have" to, but so often we do.

Hubris is an insidious beast. We often fail to see it in ourselves. Because Hubris is so well hidden in ourselves it can have a nasty habit of sneaking up on us. Why you may well ask? Well because it is neatly packaged as the virtue of truthfulness and righteousness.

Fortunately there exists a healthy antidote to hubris, humility!

Humility may well be humanities greatest virtue. It is essentially about accepting our human limitations. By doing so we become teachable, we learn from others, which leads not only to us improving our own lives but the world that we inhabit but do not own;  which in turn leads us to nurture and develop healthy relationships with other people. By recognising that we are not, nor do we speak for God we will open ourselves up to voice of transcendence as it speaks to us in life. In doing so we will be honouring life itself as sacred, which will hopefully lead to us taking care of what is our responsibility; our own lives mind, body and soul, our families, our homes, our friendships, our communities, our planet.

Hubris for me can be the most inhibiting and potentially dangerous delusion a human being can suffer from. In the end it actually stops us living the best life we can. Humility on the other hand helps us to see the truth about ourselves “Warts and all and beauty spots too”. From here we can honestly improve our own lives and those who we share this spinning planet with. It achieves more than that though. It draws us closer together not only to one another but to this amazing universe that we play a small but vital role in. The dangers stem from losing sight of this and believing that this universe and rest of humanity revolves around us and is there to do our bidding.

We all know so little and we can all easily be hoodwinked into believing almost anything, no matter how clever and rational we think we are. As the Ishtar meme seemed to prove as it went viral last week. So many people who claimed to live by reason and science loved it as it allowed them to pour scorn on those folk they believed were irrational and stupid, well in the end it is they who ended up with egg on their faces and looked both irrational and hate filled.

Oh well it can happen to us all. I think that’s why I love April Fool’s Day so much, because it reminds me we aren’t as clever as we think we are, we are still fully human and truth be told we know so very little about most things. By the way that’s a good thing, because it leaves us open to experiences way beyond our imaginations.

I’m going to end this little chip of a blog with some words from my old favourite. Good old Forrest Church, words on humility and openness...oh and then a fantastic clip of a fabulous song...

“In every field of human inquiry, ignorance increases as knowledge grows. The Greek philosopher Socrates once said, “I am the most ignorant man in Athens.” He wasn’t indulging in false modesty. He was pointing out that others, knowing far less, had no idea how ignorant they were. Socrate’s ignorance, the knowledge of how much remained for him to learn, expanded in direct proportion to his learning. Of both belief and knowledge, the same is true for us. When reflecting on several years of contemplation on the origins of the cosmos, one cosmologist sighed, “It’s not only queerer than we imagined; it’s queerer than can be imagined.”

“Whether informed by religion or by science, our minds cannot unwrap life’s mystery. This is why, in offering evidence to corroborate religious truth, true believers may more honestly be accused of being too rational than too irrational. They are not alone. We all use our minds to figure out things that can’t be deciphered by anything as small as our minds. On the one hand, the attempt is a noble one. Trying to decode life’s mystery is what makes us human.”

“Balancing these two apparent contradictions. I base my own theology on contrasting principles: openness and humility. No ceiling limits the expansion of the human heart. Yet, humility teaches that when death visits, we will have attained only a flickering notion of what life and death are all about. The light we discover will be framed by darkness. But, when we ponder the nature of our shared mortality, meaning may begin to emerge. Not unlike when we leave a warm, brightly lit room, go outdoors, and contemplate a dark winter sky: one by one the stars come out.”