Deep Is Your Treasure

At a recent “Living the Questions” Adie Tindall led an excellent conversation on how art speaks to us. Art does have a way to reach those parts of ourselves, deep in our hearts, that other media perhaps cannot, maybe this is why we value it so much. So many of us treasure such works of art and artists too. During the conversation John Poskitt told of a limited edition copy of a piece of Bob Dylan’s art that cost him a lot of money and that he was paying for in instalments. John is a great lover of the arts.

Art had been in the news earlier that day. A work of art by “Banksy had sold for almost £10,000,000. It eclipsed anything else he had produced in the past by more than five fold. As someone pointed out whoever was behind “Banksy’s” promotion was a genius. He had after all begun as a gifted graffiti artist. Now no doubt the piece had gone up in value due to its subject. It goes by the title “Devolved Government” and is an image of a Parliament of Chimpanzee’s arguing in the “House of Commons”. I don’t believe it would have raised such a price a few months earlier. I wonder what raised the value so much?

Now as talented as “Banksy” is, and regardless of his mystique and clever promotional work, and regardless of the satire of the piece, how the heck can a painting be worth £10,000,000. It just seems obscene to me. Although it is not just painting’s and other art treasures that seem valued way beyond reason. Football is another example. I love football, but surely no footballer is worth £200,000,000. It seems ridiculous but this is the market value for the best of the best.

Now I am sure there are things that we all value above anything else in life, that we treasure beyond measure. I wonder what it is that you treasure the most? What is beyond value in your life, your pearl of great price, that you would sell all that you have for. Is there anything or anyone that you treasure so much that you would give everything for. Something to ponder perhaps. Some folk devote their whole lives to these things that they treasure the most

The great stories of human history speak of heroes going on epic journeys in search of great treasures. “Mythos”, from a variety of cultures, tell tales of questing for such treasure whether they be material objects or perhaps attempts to reach a certain goal or to manifest a dream. Think of the Arthurian legends, particularly the quest for the Holy Grail. Think of the biblical accounts, Moses and the Israelites, or Jesus's journey into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights, a journey of sacrifice and transformation. Or perhaps the Native American initiation tradition of Vision Quests. Such journeys often included climbs to the summit of mountains, like the climb to the summit of Parnassus, the ancient mount of the Muse. While watching the rugby the other morning I noticed the symbol depicting Mount Fuji with the Red Sun rising behind it. The Japanese people consider Mount Fuji, to be the point of contact between heaven and the underworld. Perhaps the ultimate journey, the final one.

Many of these great adventures described mythical themes depicting great feats such as climbing a mountain, or going off in solitude into the desert, or perhaps going into the heart of a forest forever searching, seeking, and questing. Until it is time to return home with treasure to share.

It’s not just the great heroes that go on such quests, ordinary people do too. Increasingly people are going on Pilgrimage. It’s nothing new by the way. All the great religious faiths have a tradition of pilgrimage within them. What is interesting though is that there seems to be a growing need to seek pilgrimage in our time and space, in these secular times. I even attended a Unitarian pilgrimage recently, as I led worship at the triannual “Rivington Pilgrimage”. I have to be honest though and say that it isn’t a true pilgrimage as we didn’t really walk very far. Although for some of us it was a journey just getting to Rivington due to the severe flooding. Several folk could not get there and had to return home in the end. And of course there was the amazing trip earlier this year to Israel and the magic that Sue and I shared by the Sea of Galilee. The whole trip was life transforming on so many levels. A deep and beautiful treasure of the heart.

I know several people who have walked the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. The Camino is a path to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Since medieval times, people have made the pilgrimage to the cathedral there. And pilgrimage is of course central to Islam, where, every believer is called to make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca in his or her lifetime.

At the core of these calls to pilgrimage is a universal human longing for growth, for becoming more than we were by going father than we ever dared. Now in these physical pilgrimages these longings manifests themselves in walking and somehow in this walk transformation occurs. The destination of such pilgrimages is a new horizon, the one we glimpse from a distant and are drawn to. Like the sun rising behind Mount Fuji.

Now while such physical pilgrimages can be beautifully transformative I have discovered another for more important pilgrimage. This is the pilgrimage to the heart. Not a physical journey but a deeply arduous one. A journey not only to the heart, but of truly awakening the heart, the true frontier of humanity. I suspect that most of the ancient pilgrimages were really about this. The stories were certainly journeys of transformation.

I suspect that this is our greatest treasure of all, our hearts. The Talmud says, 'God wants the heart.' All life stems from and through the heart. In ancient times is was believed that the heart was the center of human intelligence and the seat of the soul. According to Augustine of Hippo the heart was a metaphor for our deepest and truest selves, believing that union with God could only be achieved through it.

It is through the heart that we begin to connect to our truest and deepest selves. And through connecting to our deepest selves and thus awakening our hearts we begin to act in loving meaningful ways in the world. We will not act with compassion without our hearts. We will not act with true reason without the heart. In fact reason can be deadly without compassion, without being led by the heart. This is the true pilgrimage, the journey to the heart. As Howard Thurman once said 'the longest journey is between the heart and the head.' Thurman, the great mystic, theologian and educator was critical of the tendency in the modern age to separate the heart from the intellect. You see it is not only the body that is nourished through the heart but

our whole humanity. This is why it is so vital to take care of not only our physical heart but the heart of our spirit too and this requires an inner pilgrimage, that of silence.

Silence has become an important and treasured aspect of Unitarian worship. I spend time in communal silence several times a week. It enables me to reach that treasure at the core of myself and others too, it is vital to my life as food, water and exercise. We shared a special moment in silence last Sunday at Dunham Road. Some thirty or more human hearts and perhaps twenty dogs all sharing in reverential silence together for several minutes in the middle of the “Blessing of the Animals” service. You could feel a deep power at work in this pure silence, so deep I could almost hear our hearts beating. It was one of the most beautiful silences I have ever shared. Although when I think of it I have shared many such moments with strangers and friends throughout this year. It has been the year of the heart. Last Sunday I was not the only one to feel it either. Several people commented to me afterwards just how special the experience was. 50 hearts beating as one, is there a greater treasure in life. It was a beautiful spiritual journey to share together as we entered the caves of our hearts and helped awaken something beautiful within each and every one of us.

We each of have a great treasure within us, a treasure that needs to nurtured and cared for and brought to life. It’s a treasure that the world needs us to share with it. We need to take care of this priceless treasure and live from it. And if we do we may just begin to bring alive that love that is Divine. To bring the Kin-dom of love alive that dwells within in each and everyone of us, in everything.

The world awaits us, let's take that great journey together.

What do you give your heart to?

We live in an increasingly secular age. Less and less people attend places of worship. I am from this generation myself. For most of my life I had no interest in religion. I didn’t see the point. I only became interested due to several spiritual experiences that I wanted to make sense of. I have never found the answers just a life beyond imagining.

I am a religious person and I am also spiritual one too. It was not enough for me to experience my spirituality alone. I needed to find ways to express it and people to share it with. This is why I needed to community and this is why I eventually found a home with Unitarians, a community that does not demand that I conform to what it told me was the truth, more a space where I could live with my truth, my faith and doubt and to share that with others.

Thank you.

I recently conducted my first funeral with Sue. It was for the mother of a mutual friend. It was a deeply emotional occasion and I was moved observing family and friends coming together in mutual love and support. Like most families there was history and complication but I observed the members coming in devotional support for one another. The father of the grandchildren is Muslim and he and the whole of his family had come to offer respect to the loss in the family and of course to support the three children. This is something I see often in this work and it suggest to me how much we still need places where we can come together in love and share loving support. I believe that we humans need to offer devotion to one another and to life itself, whether we believe in God or not. We also need to worship. Well the truth is that we do in fact all worship, even if we are unaware of the fact that we are doing so. We all hold something of highest value in life, even if we are not fully aware of it.

For as it says In Matthews Gospel Chapter 6 v 21 “21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” What we treasure the most, what we offer our heart to is what we worship.

Ralph Waldo Emerson the great 19th century Transcendentalist had something interesting to say about worship. He wrote:

“A person will worship something, have no doubt that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behoves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”

These words by Emerson have been vibrating in the core of my being, the marrow of my bones for quite some time now. Like I have said, a few years ago I would have dismissed them out of hand. I would have simply rejected them and said I don’t worship, how can I worship I don’t believe in anything. That said things did dominate my imaginations and my thoughts and they did determine my character, by falling into non-being and nothingness, by rejecting life I had become nihilistic and this did dominate my thoughts.

But is this worship?

Well let’s take a look at what we mean by worship.

Worship has its roots in Anglo-Saxon English “worthscipe” or similar variations and meant a condition of being worthy, honoured or renowned . It only became connected to reverence paid to a supernatural being during the 13th century. Worship is not something that is only conducted in places such as here at certain times of the week. We worship all the time; we worship whatever it is that we hold in highest regard. As Mr Emerson says what we worship is what dominates our lives our actions. Therefore it is important that we are careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping me are becoming.

I remember a while ago coming across a “Meme” on facebook that read “If money is the root of all evil why does the church keep asking for it”. Now I know that this was a critique of organised religion, especially the wealth of churches etc and I’m certainly not one to argue against such a critique. That said the Meme is misquoting badly here and failing to understand what the passage from 1 Timothy ch 6 v 10 is saying. The actual quote is “For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil...” It is not so much money that is the problem, but the love of it. By loving money you make it the thing of greatest value in your life. You place its value above anything and everything else and therefore by doing so you may begin to neglect everything else; everything else decreases in value. In Matthew ch 6 v 24 Jesus said something similar when he stated “no one can serve two masters. Either you will hate one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

I do not actually believe that these quotes are really about money at all by the, they are more about what we value the most in life, about what is of ultimate worth to us. We need to pay attention to the things that matter in our lives. We all worship, even if we do not believe that we do. We all give our love, our attention, to something and it is this that dominates our lives.

What we treasure, what we offer our heart to, what we worship really matters. For we all worship something or perhaps someone. By the way I suspect the worship of individual people is perhaps the most dangerous form of worship. I was recently in a rather shocking conversation with someone who suggested that as far as Demagogues go Donald Trump isn’t so bad. I found myself half agreeing when compared to some of the demagogues of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and then thought, hang on a minute there is no such thing as a good demagogue. A demagogue is a demagogue and the a personality cult of any kind is so often deadly dangerous.

You who come and worship together here, do not all believe alike. Something that I believe we all celebrate, certainly something our free religious tradition celebrates. Our tradition, I believe is not so much believing alike, but loving alike. It’s about celebrating difference and working towards acceptance. This is not easy. To me it requires deep faith.

To be a Unitarian is both a blessing and a curse. To be a Unitarian religiously is not easy. To believe in and follow the Unitarian religious ethos is not the easier softer option. Far from it!

As Burdette Backus said "We sometimes hear it said by some of our own members that you can believe whatever you please. Actually we are confronted with a paradox; we are not free to believe what we please, we are free to believe what we must."

Yes we do believe that everyone has the right to seek truth and meaning for themselves and that each individual’s life experience and their reflections upon these experiences must form their own understanding of their own truth. Our communities accept people as they are warts and all and beauty spots too. That said to truly call yourself a Unitarian is not just to believe whatever you like. We as individuals must stand by what we believe. Reason and rationality are as much cornerstones of our tradition as are freedom and tolerance.

It is not easy being a Unitarian, but then who ever claimed that life was meant to be that way. That said it can be incredibly rewarding because to me it's the only way I've found that can reveal what I would describe as acceptable truth and perhaps most importantly give my heart to that that which I believe, to devote my life to it, to worship.

So what is it that you give your heart to? What do you worship? Where is your treasure to be found? For what you give your heart to will shape your life? Something to ponder perhaps.

What we worship matters, as Emerson said “A person will worship something have no doubt about that...that which dominates our imaginations and thoughts will determine our lives and character...for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”

What we worship, what we love, what we give our heart to dominates who are and we how we are. Therefore it is vital that we are mindful, attentive and critical about our habits. We need to understand what it is that we hold of highest value in our lives and why we do so. This is why we need to pay attention to our lives. This is why communal worship is of such high value to me. Yes ok it was life changing spiritual experiences that brought me in search of answers in spiritual communities, but it is not this that held me there. I found so much more by coming to commune, to worship with others. I discovered that by worshipping with others , if only for one hour a week I was then better able to focus my attention to what really matters during the rest of my time.

Everyone desires and we all possess imagination; everyone holds something of highest value in their lives. We worship whatever it is that dominates our hearts. This is why it is important what we worship, because as Emerson said “What we are worshipping, we are becoming.”

So be careful what you worship because we all do so, whether we care to admit it or not.