Reconnecting with the Quiet Centre

 I've been away from home quite a bit for the last couple of weeks - I went to stay with a dear friend for a few days, came back home for 48 hours, then drove up to the Nightingale Centre in Great Hucklow to attend the Ministerial Fellowship's Autumn Conference. Which was marvellous.

The Nightingale Centre 

Nevertheless, in spite of the joys I found in visiting my friend and attending the conference, it was good to reach home again yesterday afternoon and, after catching up with my e-mails and recording this week's worship service, to spend a quiet evening with my husband and the cat, before having a soaky bath and an early night.

This morning, I felt the need to reconnect with the quiet centre and was glad to be able to spend some time in front of my personal shrine and simply sit. I found a beautiful greetings card which reminded me of the importance of this while I was at Hucklow... by Gwyneth Roper of Altrincham. It is beautiful and I will be adding it to my shrine...

Because I find that when I have been away, or even too busy at home, I tend to forget how deeply I need to reconnect with that quiet place inside myself, with the Divine presence within. I love the words of hymn number 21 in our hymnbook Sing Your Faith, written by Shirley Erena Murray, which reminds us all of the need for cultivating some peace in our lives:

"Come and find the quiet centre

in the crowded life we lead,

find the room for hope to enter,

find the space where we are freed:

clear the chaos and the clutter,

clear our eyes, that we can see

all the things that really matter,

be at peace and simply be."

Where do you find peace?

 

Learning to Live with Ourselves

 "The joyful one smiles when he is with his friends. The fortunate one smiles even when he is alone."

This, according to the Harenkalender, is a quote from Asiatic wisdom.

It is something I have rediscovered over the past few years - it didn't come naturally. Or at least, it did when I was a child, but was forgotten as I grew up and became the kind of person who needed the validation or approval of others to be happy. So I spent much of my teens, twenties and thirties and even forties doing what Brené Brown calls "acclimating" - learning to be a social chameleon, so that I fitted in with other people. And using alcohol to lubricate the journey. I now feel sad for that young woman, who believed that she had to suppress her own beliefs, her own opinions, in order to fit in, wasting her time chasing the elusive goal of popularity.

As I have written before, my spiritual journey began in the mid-noughties and has continued ever since. I now hope that I will never stop learning, never stop growing, never stop striving to be the best Sue Woolley I can be. And if that means that I am not popular, so be it.

I used to be terrified of solitude. I suffered from FOMO - the fear of missing out - and would drop everything to spend time with my friends. These days, I have rediscovered my natural ambiversion, and am just as happy to curl up with a book or sit in front of my laptop writing, as I am to be socialising. In fact, since I quit drinking in 2013, I have learned that I am happiest in my own company, or with one or two close friends or with my husband and children.

Of course, there is a difference betwen choosing to be alone and being forced into it. The recent pandemic has had many negative consequences, one of which was enforced solitude, which I blogged about here. It is only when we choose to be on our own that it can bring a smile. Because loneliness can be a terrible thing - it makes us feel unloved, unwanted, as though the world has passed us by. Whereas solitude, the ability to spend time alone, by our own choice, with the Spirit, can be wonderful. 

I have also come to appreciate silence and no longer feel the need to fill all the spaces in my life with words. I have found that sometimes, to sit in silence, either meditating or placidly crocheting, is to be at peace. I have learned to be at peace with myself and that is good.

 

Information Overload

 I found this week's quotation, by Edgar Allan Poe, puzzling... "In forever knowing, we are forever blessed. But to know all, were the curse of a fiend."

Then I thought about it some more... Perhaps he means that when we use the knowledge we have for good and useful purposes, we are "forever blessed" but that if we take in everything we see, hear, and read uncritically, that would be "the curse of a fiend".

I know several friends who have taken holidays from social media this year, because they have found reading all the thousands of news items and stories, and worse, the comments below them, made them feel belligerent and depressed by turns. When we engage with posts that are spewing hatred and intolerance, or with whose views we disagree, root and branch, it can be difficult to remain objective, not to get sucked in.

I think that each of us needs to choose our battles carefully, to decide what matters to us, what we "forever know" and to defend those things against people with diametrically opposing views. The whole Black Lives Matter movement is a good example... when uninformed people ripost with "All Lives Matter" or with racist comments, it is easy to rest on our white fragility, our white silence, our white apathy, shrug our shoulders and scroll on down. Rather than engaging honestly and deeply with the conversation, explaining why the balance has been skewed for so long, and what we can do to ensure that black voices are heard, black people and others with non-white skin matter, and to help dismantle the system of white supremacy in which we were born and brought up. I have blogged about this recently. 

One of the key Unitarian tenets is the defence of freedom of belief. But not without limits. Espousing freedom of belief requires us to take a responsible attitude towards what we read and hear and see, and to discern critically what truth it has for us. So that if we see or hear or read untruth and misrepresentation and hatred, we can defend the belief or people being attacked. We are limited human beings, so it is not possible for us to "know all". But I believe it is possible to choose to inform ourselves as much as we can about subjects which are consonant with our values, and be prepared to engage with others in meaningful discussion about them.

And not be scared of being perceived as traitors to our class, our families, our people, if that is what it takes. It is as simple and difficult as that.