The core of life

What is the core of life?

This week's quotation is by Oscar Wilde. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find an English version of it, to compare with the translation. And my German is not wonderful. And I'm not sure I agree with the Google translator. So I offer you two versions of this German phrase: "Im Wachstum liegt des Denkens und des Lebens Kern."

Which Google thinks, means, "Growth is the thinking and the life of the core."
I think it may mean. "In growth lies the core of thought and life."

Either way, I think it's saying that without thinking deeply and living wholeheartedly, we will not grow as people. It is so easy to skate along the surface of our lives, not going deep, being involved purely with exterior matters. But going deep hurts. It means facing those parts of ourselves which we have hidden for years, maybe decades, and coming to terms with what we find there. It is the only way to grow, spiritually.

And it's about letting go of the need for the approval, the approbation of others. When we go deep, when we live from the core of our lives, we will find the courage to stand up for what we believe, rather than going along with what others believe, for the sake of fitting in. And living from our core also means letting go of comparing ourselves with others, because we, just as we are, are enough.

It's also about compassion, about walking a mile in the other person's shoes, realising that they, too, have a unique, precious life at their core. Deep may talk to deep, seeing past the shallow façades we present to the world. Allowing our vulnerabilities to show, because that is the truest way to live. Living from our hearts, not our heads.

Karen Armstrong writes, in The Spiral Staircase, "The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology."

Compassion enables us to grow spiritually, to live our lives from our cores.

Consequently, I Rejoice

Five years ago today, I made a leap of faith. I gave up my (then) safe local government job as a professional librarian, and started working as District Facilitator for the Midland Unitarian Association. A few months later, I applied, and was accepted for, Unitarian ministry training, which started in October 2009. It was the beginning of a journey which has changed my life profoundly.

Consequently, I rejoice.

This phrase is taken from T.S. Eliot's beautiful poem Ash Wednesday, which Karen Armstrong uses as the leitmotif for her second volume of autobiography The Spiral Staircase, which is sub-titled My Climb Out of Darkness. Part way through the book, she writes a superb analysis of the poem, which is indeed peculiarly applicable to her life. As a result, this is one T.S. Eliot poem that I (at least partly) understand with my head, as well as feeling with my heart. (As compared with The Waste Land, which I adore, but do not understand at all).

Consequently, I rejoice.

While I do not share Armstrong's initial sense of loss at my change of direction (far from it), I do share her sense of assurance that I have done the right thing. Towards the end of the book, she writes: "In the words of the late Joseph Campbell, we have to 'follow our bliss', find something that wholly involves and enthralls us, ... and throw ourselves into it heart and soul." Yes.

Consequently, I rejoice.

At another point in the book, she writes: "It was not simply my personal circumstances that had changed, but my religious landscape was also being transformed." Oh yes, me too. The process of training for ministry and the privilege of spending the last five years serving the movement I love, has been a transformative experience. In 2008, although I had been a Unitarian for nearly 30 years, I had not really dug deep and explored why I believed what I believed. Attendance at Summer School, my two years at Harris Manchester College Oxford doing ministry training, and my concurrent two years at Regent's Park College Oxford doing the Diploma in Biblical & Theological Studies with Baptist ministry students - these three experiences have certainly "transformed my religious landscape."

Consequently, I rejoice.

One huge change has been the institution of regular spiritual practices in my life, including daily prayer bead practice and journalling, and, in the last 18 months / two years, a regular weekly half-day Sabbath, and a weekly entry in this blog. I have also been working with a wonderful spiritual director, who is showing me how to recognise the Spirit at work in my life, and how to work with it, to try to become the best Sue Woolley I can be.

Consequently, I rejoice.

Finally, Karen Armstrong's work around compassion has been an enormous influence on me, and has shaped the direction of my life and ministry. Reading her words firstly in The Spiral Staircase, and then in Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, has opened my eyes and ears and changed my focus in life. I realise that compassionate living is the journey of a lifetime, and that it will always be two steps forward, one step back, but at least I'm trying to move in the right direction. And I feel so very blessed.

Consequently, I rejoice.

A ship of thought

I have found a beautiful quotation by 19th century American Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, which sums up how I feel about books and reading:

Theodore Parker

"The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty."

Reading has always been a passion of mine, to the extent that it has occasionally got me into trouble, when I have been too deeply buried in a good book to pay attention to life going on around me. Yet few things give me greater delight than the discovery of a new book that makes me think; that makes me see the world and everything in it in a new light. In his introduction to Mister God, This is Anna, Vernon Sproxton speaks of Ah! Books, "those which induce a fundamental change in the reader's consciousness. They widen his sensibility in such a way that he is able to look upon familiar things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time. ... Ah! Books give you sentences which you can roll around in the mind, throw in the air, catch, tease out, analyse. But in whatever way you handle them, they widen your vision. For they are essentially Idea-creating, in the sense that Coleridge meant when he described the Idea as containing future thought - as opposed to the Epigram which encapsulates past thought. Ah! Books give the impression that you are opening a new account, not closing an old one down."

Everyone will have different Ah! Books. Mine include Beliefs of a Unitarian by Alfred Hall; Quaker Advices and Queries; Enough by John Naish; Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain; Rilke's Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke; The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong; The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran; Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life by Frederic and Mary-Ann Brussat and A Backdoor to Heaven by Rabbi Lionel Blue. And of course Mister God, This Is Anna. Each of these books has shown me the world in a different way, and made me think about myself in relation to it. They have influenced what I believe, and how I behave in very fundamental ways.

What are yours?

The core of religion

Last night I was fortunate enough to hear Karen Armstrong speak at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London. The occasion was the World Congress of Faiths' annual Younghusband lecture, and she spoke for an hour, entirely without notes, sharing her passionate belief in the sovereign importance of compassion as a force for good in the world.

Karen defined compassion as "the ability to dethrone yourself from the centre of your world and put another person there." This is promulgated in the Golden Rule, which was first formulated by Confucius in the 5th century BCE "Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself." Its positive counterpart appears in Matthew's Gospel, when Jesus says: "In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets." Most of the world's religions have their own version.

In 2008, Karen Armstrong won the TED prize - a sum of money and the means to make "a wish for a better world" come true. She knew immediately what she wanted to do. In her work as a religious writer and broadcaster, she had come to realise that the Golden Rule was a common thread running through all religions, but it didn't seem to be spoken about in the modern world much. So she determined to set up a Charter for Compassion "to restore compassion to the heart of religious and moral life." An invitation was sent out to leading theologians and religious thinkers from across the world's religions, and between them, they formulated the Charter for Compassion, which was launched in November 2009. Two short years later, it has over 80,000 signatories and nearly 200 Partner Organisations, including my own General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches.

The message of the Charter for Compassion is one that all human beings should heed. Imagine what the world would be like if everyone followed it! If every person genuinely tried to behave to the rest of humankind with a concern and care for how they would feel. As it says in the Charter for Compassion "Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect." We live in a global community, and we need to recognise this, and put aside our petty differences and work to create a world in which all human beings can live together in peace and freedom.

Oh let us live to make it so.