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"

Turning Presents Into True Gifts

We are now fully into the Advent Season, the days that lead to Christmas Day. These are the days of waiting of preparation. The music is playing, we can hear all the familiar songs in every shop as we no doubt begin the process of selecting presents for our loved ones.

Have you done all your shopping yet? I’ve not even begun. I will soon, but not just yet. I’ve got too much to do.

Have you experienced any “Bah Humbug” moments yet?

I noticed one from a friend of mine. She posted a “Meme” on Facebook. A cartoon depicting two figures. The first is putting up Christmas decorations and saying to the other “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” to which the other responds in far less enthusiastic way “It’s not Christmas though is it Barbara, because it is still XXXXXXX November.”

The Meme was a protest against how soon Christmas had begun this year, especially in the shops etc. I replied to the ”Meme” stating “Just to be an annoying pedant. It’s Advent, it began on Sunday. If you want to be truly liturgically accurate Christmas doesn’t actually begin until sunset on Christmas Eve. None of us want that, so please no more Bah Humbugging. “There followed many other complaints about the celebration of Christmas coming too early, people putting up their decorations too early etc. I put up mine on Tuesday night. I have gone much further than I usually do. Molly is certainly enjoying this. It seems she loves stealing baubles from the tree and playing with them. I have had to move Father Christmas and his little helpers out of her reach. Many folk have been telling me off all week for doing so, telling me I wasn’t allowed to until Thursday 1st December, to which I replied that Advent had already begun. It’s funny how folk suddenly get all Puritanical about these things from time to time.

I get where this all comes from, especially as it has been Christmas in most of the shops, since the beginning of November. There has been a Christmas tree in Café Nero for weeks. I know this because Molly stole a bauble from their tree several weeks ago. It has been her favourite toy since then.

The “Bah humbugging” about the early celebration of Christmas stems from this sense of over commercialisation and the thought that the spirit of the season will be lost. It seems that for many Christmas has become an almost secular exercise. Afterall less than half of the population now identify as Christian, at least according the figures published this week, from last year’s census.

Is it true though. Have we killed the spirit of the season with this over commercialisation? I’m not convinced. I think the spirit lives on and actually is present in the very act of such celebrations and even the buying and commercial activities.

If we look purely at the surface, there appears little evidence of my view. The Christmas season appears to be mass consumerism gone mad. The worst excesses of which seem to form in that most hideous of American imports “Black Friday”, which in reality is linked to the American holiday of “Thanksgiving”. We have not taken that part on, just “Black Friday”, not the giving of thanks bit. This occurred over the weekend that Advent began. And yet there is the spirit of Christmas in the spiritual elements of “Thanks Giving”. This is surely something that can be extended into this Advent season and on into Christmas itself. The spirit of Christmas is surely about giving thanks for the gifts we have been given and expressing this thanks in our lives by using our gifts in this our lives. We can become gifts to this our world, we can live in and through gratitude.

This can be exemplified in the presents that we buy for our loved ones, as they can become gifts. If chosen and wrapped with loving intention, then surely even this commercial activity is spiritual in nature.

In “The Gift” by David Blanchard, distinguished between a gift and a present. How the gift has a far more deeply spiritual and heartfelt significance than merely a present. It touched a part, deep in the heart of me.

Now of course the word “present” is something the spiritually inclined are obsessed with in our current age. So many talk of the gift of the present moment, that this is where life is. I’m certainly not one to wish to argue with these thoughts. That said I wonder if sometimes we become so obsessed with the present that we forget about the gifts we carry with us that we have been given in those many moments in the past. Too often we wish to lose what has gone before in our intense focus on the present that we fail to embrace the gifts that have come throughout our lives. I have come to believe that to truly embrace the moment, to be truly present requires me to be fully engaged with every moment of my life, for there the true gifts of life emerge.

Perhaps to truly live in the present moment is to bring our whole selves, every breath of our lives and perhaps every life that has made our life into this sublime moment.

This year I have reflected much on my life, perhaps more than I have for a while. I have thought much about the gifts I’ve been given throughout my days. Gifts I have not always appreciated at the time. In fact, many I failed to notice when they were given. The gifts of the love given by the precious people I have shared my life with, some who are no longer physically with me. The things they took the time to show me, how to do things and just how to be; the times they made me laugh and cry; the joy that they brought to my being. Gifts given freely from their heart to mine.

I’ve also been thinking of the many gifts I was simply born with, that I have not always made best use of, the Graces of life. I have been contemplating how I can make better use of these, the ultimate of free gifts, not just for myself but for the good of all?

Here's an extract from a prayer I shared during the Advent service.

Now is the moment of magic,

and here's a blessing:
we already possess all the gifts we need;
we've already received our presents:
ears to hear music,
eyes to behold lights,
hands to build true peace on earth
and to hold each other tight in love.

How do we make good use of the gifts we have been given from the beginning and throughout our lives? How do we bring these gifts to life in this beautiful present that is right here, right now? How do we make best use of the gift of life?

I will leave that one with you to ponder…

For most of us Christmas is about the giving and receiving of presents, but not necessarily about the gifts we both give and receive.

I suspect that the tradition of giving and receiving gifts at Christmas time is linked to the three gifts of the Magi “Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh”. Gifts of great value 2,000 years ago, although only gold has retained its worth today. Now in early Christianity the journey of the Magi was celebrated on the Feast of the Epiphany on the 6th of January, the 12th day of Christmas, hence the Carol “On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a partridge in a pear tree”…etc...)

The early Christian church did not celebrate Christmas as we do today. The tradition of giving Christmas presents is really a modern one. By Victorian times the culture of gift giving and the mythos of Father Christmas, St Nicholas or Santa Claus was beginning to take hold, immortalised in the fiction of Dickens and the like. As the twentieth century moved on into the twenty first this culture developed into mass consumerism. Today it would seem that buying, wrapping and giving gifts has become nothing more than a mechanical chore and one of the worst examples of mass consumerism going. Is this really what Christmas is about? Is this really giving by heart? Is this really the spirit of Christmas? Well it is if we select, give and receive these gifts in the spirit of love. In so doing we bring the spirit of season alive, by incarnating the words from my favourite Carol “In the Bleak mid-winter”…

“What shall I give him? Give my heart”

I believe that the true spirit of Christmas is the heart, that this is the gift of the season. Christmas above everything else truly is the season of the heart. When we truly give our gifts to others we are giving them our hearts and when we truly give from our heart to another we are somehow bringing that heart of God alive and that spirit is once again incarnating in life.

This is the religion, the spirit that can still be discovered beneath the ribbons and the wrapping paper. This is the spirit that can once again come alive if we engage in the giving and receiving of gifts and not merely presents. This is one way in which we can truly begin to become a gift to the world.

When I really think of the gifts I have been given the greatest is of course life itself. This is of course the ultimate free gift. The ultimate unearned grace. It is easy to say we are grateful, for the gifts we have been given, whether at Christmas or throughout the year; whether they are material or spiritual in nature. But I am not so sure that this is what gratitude actually is. Gratitude is anactive thing, it is more than giving thanks, it is doing something with the gifts we have been given.

This is something to reflect on over the coming weeks as we approach Christmas. To consider the gifts that we have been granted and to perhaps think of the gifts we would like. To remember, but not passively, let’s instead make it an act of remembrance, of all that has been freely given to us, gifted to us. Let’s also make from these gifts a true act of gratitude for all that is our lives. Let’s become a part of the gift that is life itself and express this in our being. Let’s become the gift to the world. And pour out this gift on one another and to all life, in all that we feel, all that we think, all that we say and all that we do…

Below is a devotion based on 

the material in this "blogspot"

Encountering Angels

Please watch this video clip before reading the rest of the blog...it's a re-enactment of an encounter Kent Nerburn had when he was a taxi driver. He wrote about it in his wonderful book  “Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace: Living in the Spirit of the Prayer of St. Francis"

As each year passes I seem to believe in Christmas more and more. Far more than I ever did as a child. I rejected it all at a pretty young age and became the cynical sniper dissecting it all and saying it’s all humbug…Bah Humbug, Bah Humbug, Bah Humbug…

I believe in Christmas, the soul of Christmas, the spirit of Christmas, the heart of Christmas the religion of Christmas more today than I ever did at any other moment in my life. Today I believe everything about Christmas and a whole lot more than everything that we think we know.

Now don’t get me wrong here I am not suggesting that I believe that everything that the Gospel accounts recounted actually happened. I really can’t answer that, I wasn’t there. Were any of us who argue about it actually there? No of course not. What I mean when I say I believe in Christmas more today than I have ever done before is that I believe in the universal mythos that lies in the soul of the story. I believe in the story and what it has to teach humanity regardless of time and or space.

Waldemar Argow put it near perfectly when he wrote

“Christmas is not a day, really. It is light, I think. It comes when days are shortest and darkest and hearts despair, and it reminds us that winter death is a temporary thing and that light and life are eternal.

And it is hope. For it demonstrates how kind and generous and self-forgetting human beings can be. And we know that what people can be sometimes, they can, if they will, be most times.”

“And assuredly, it is love. Its symbol is a newborn babe, warm and safe in his mother’s arms. To be sure, he was born a long, long time ago. Yet through the ages his influence as he became a man and the truths he taught and the love he incarnated have proved stronger and dearer in matters that matter most than all the kings and armies and governments of history. Oh, whatever else it may be, Christmas is indeed love.”

...this is what I mean when I say I believe in Christmas more today, than I ever did before...

Yes I believe in Christmas more today than I ever did before. I also believe we need Christmas more now today than at any other time before, for we mock the bells at Christmas time probably more today than we ever did before. The problem I suspect is that we do not hear the message at the heart of Christmas…Maybe we have forgotten how to listen or perhaps we have forgotten how to deliver the message…

And who are the messengers of Christmas? Well the angels of course. Now there are angels throughout the Christmas mythos as they are throughout the Bible. By the way they are not just in the Judeo Christian tradition, you will find them in others too.

In Islam they are depicted as messengers of Allah. Belief in angels is one of the six articles of the Islamic faith. The Baha’i faith depicts angels as beings who have been released from the bondages of self and become endowed with the attributes of the spiritual and therefore revealers of God’s Love and Grace. In Buddhism it was a Brahmin angel that instructed the Buddha that after receiving enlightenment he must go teach to others what he had learnt. In Zoroastrianism angels are not seen as messengers of the divine but are instead associated with different aspects of the divine creation, in this sense they are similar to the Hindu Deva’s. Zoroastrians believe that each person has their own guardian angel.

Angels or their equivalent are found in many other traditions too, both ancient and modern. Belief in angels is not some relic from the past that has been dismissed in the modern age. I have met many people in my life who have said that they have had encounters with angels.

So who or what are angels? Well I believe that they are the messengers of that spirit that Waldemer Argo mentioned earlier. They carry the message that light can be found in the darkness, that hope can overcome any despair, that love can incarnate in all our hearts and that peace on earth and good will to all can once again come. Our task is to listen and to look for them, to ensure that “the ears of our ear are awake and they eyes of our eyes are open.”

A friend of mine said something rather lovely to me at 6.30am this Tuesday morning, just before we began our weekly meditation. He said “You know the birds sing much more joyfully and loudly round here.” They do you know and as I left our meditation time together, just after the sun had once again risen I noticed those winter roses in the gardens of the chapel…Messengers of love and hope if there are any.

I went to a coffee shop in town after the meditation as as we talked about all manner of things, some spiritual and some definitely not so I heard in the background one of my favourite Christmas Carols“It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”, by Edmund Hamilton Sears,

Edward Hamilton Sears was an American Unitarian minister from the mid-nineteenth century. He wrote "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" after meditating on the account of the Nativity in Luke’s Gospel and it would appear it was the angel's message to the shepherds that spoke to him.  He was touched deeply by the message of peace that the angels brought, as he opened himself up to “that glorious song of old”.For him it was a song as much for his time and not merely of the past; it was not just a song for the shepherds or Mary and her babe in arms. Instead he saw contained within it  a song that was a message to those of his time and place who were engaged in war. It was a message of peace and love for all humanity. It was a kind of lament about the lack of peace and goodwill on earth.

I would suggest that this song applies perhaps even more today than it did even then. There is very little sign of peace on earth and good will to all now than even in Sears time. If only we could hear the angels as they sing "O hush the noise, ye men of strife and hear the angels sing."

At the beginning of this blogspot is a re-enactment of an account from “Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace: Living in the Spirit of the Prayer of St. Francis by Kent Nerburn. He recounts a  time when he was a taxi driver trying to scratch a living, of an encounter with a woman whose life was coming to an end and who he was taking on her final journey to a hospice. Nerburn says that he was deeply affected by this fare and described it as perhaps the most important encounter of his life.

Surely this was an encounter with an angel, although it is not exactly clear who was the giver and who was the receiver here. I suspect, like many such encounters it worked both ways. They were both givers and receivers of peace on earth and goodwill to all, both brought hope to the other and both were deliverers of love.

At the end of the short film Nerburn reflects that "Compassion is a learnt skill. Through empathy with another person's situation you can exercise compassion and you can give something too them. People feel they are are living in a mean world. We're selling self-reliance as a virtue and really what we are selling is a kind of selfishness. Giving is ultimately an act of creativity. It's the act of creating something new where there was nothing before. You're loving the world into existence when you give. And that to me is the artistry of ordinary living" Now surely this is the voice of an angel, surely here is being delivered a message of love and hope. Here is the message of Christmas that I believe in more and more each year, nay each day, nay each moment.

I believe that we can all become both the receiver and deliverer of the messengers of love, just as Kent Nerburn was.That said in order to do so we need to be open and alive and awake, to those angel voices however and wherever they speak. We need to prepare ourselves for them. We need to truly become channels of love and peace.

We may not be able to bring peace on all the earth but we can do something about our own little worlds. We can become angels to those we meet in our daily lives and we can hear the angels as they speak in our daily interactions. All we need to do is prepare ourselves.

And how can this be achieved? Well we do so by becoming both watches and waiters, like those shepherds in the ancient story “that glorious song of old”. We need to prepare ourselves both to hear those voices that carry that universal message of love and to also become those messengers in our daily interactions. We need to prepare ourselves each and every day and to be ready, because we never know the next encounter might be the one that changes our lives and or the person which we encounter, just like it did for Kent in that timeless and universal story we heard earlier.

We are here for a reason…each and every one of us…that reason I believe is to both givers and receivers, to become messengers of that universal song of love…We are here to bring hope to our world…so let us become the light of the world…Let us manifest hope in our hearts, minds and souls, let us become the hope of the world…

Let us hear the messengers of love and let us sing “that glorious song of old”

The language of the heart is universal. It can break through any barrier...

The key is to listen for it and learn to express it and to let love have its way...