Finding Peace

I have just returned home from spending a couple of days on retreat with my covenant group. We are all Unitarian ministers, who meet together a couple of times a year (and inbetween via Zoom) for mutual support and spiritual sustenance.

It's the first time we have been able to meet in person for nearly two years and it was wonderful to spend some time together at Holland House (pictured above).  There was a lot to catch up on. 

Holland House is a Christian retreat centre in Worcestershire and has its own very peaceful atmosphere. When I arrive there, I can feel a sense of peace stealing into my soul, like it does every time I turn left into the entrance to the Nightingale Centre at Great Hucklow. And each time I walk up into Salcey Forest.

I think that everyone needs to have some place where they can let their hair down, be themselves, not have to put on any 'front', or pretend to be who they're not.  And some people who see us as we are. 

It is wonderful to be with people who know you 'warts and all' and like you in spite of, or even because of them. With people who will listen deeply and with compassion. Without judgement. Such friendship is a great blessing.

At their best, our Unitarian congregations are such places, such gatherings. 

Where do you find your place of rest? People who see and hear you deeply? Treasure them, for they feed our souls.

Faith and Doubt

 This week's quote, by Austrian writer, Karl Heinrich Waggerl, is a very Unitarian one: "Faith moves mountains, doubt climbs them." 

Because Unitarians take very little on trust, or at least, on blind faith. We ask questions, apply our reason to our beliefs. I have blogged about this before, here.

We live in a very strange world. Bertrand Russell once wrote:  "In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted." Which I wholeheartedly agree with. But in our world today, in both politics and mainstream religion, it seems to be certainty that is prized. To doubt or question is seen as somehow bad, or incorrect. I find this quite ironic, particularly in the religious sphere. Many mainstream religions, in both Christianity and (for example) Islam, insist that their followers believe X, Y and Z, otherwise they are not deemd to be "proper" Christians / Muslims / fill in the blank yourself. 

The reason why I find it odd is that the definition of faith always used to be "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen", to quote the Epistle to the Hebrews. Frederick Buechner writes, "Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway. A journey without maps. [And Paul] Tillich said that doubt isn't the opposit of faith, it is an element of faith."

We can never prove that God exists (or doesn't exist), but we can have faith that He (or She or They) does. And live our lives as though we believed it. Which includes a healthy dollop of doubt - not taking anything for granted, not accepting anything without questioning it first. I believe we should cherish our doubts, keep asking questions, for this is how we grow and mature in faith.

Forrest Church, late minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City, summarises it very neatly in his book Born Again Unitarian Universalism: “We value one another’s thinking. We respect one another’s search. We honour it even when it differs from our own. We resist imposing our perception of truth upon one another. Embracing a kind of theological pluralism, we affirm the human importance of our joint quest for meaning in life without insisting upon the ultimacy of any single set of theological criteria … At our best, we move … to a fundamental trust in our own and one another’s  inherent ability to make life meaningful.” 

We share a devotion to spiritual freedom, and find that the insights of others can enrich our own beliefs. What could be better?

Real Conversation

 The French author, Albert Camus, wrote (something like) "Real conversation means stepping out of the I and knocking on the door of You."

Deep, empathic listening is a rare commodity these days. One of the first skills we were taught on the Encounter course in spiritual direction was how to be a good listener, and what gets in the way. There are many blocks to good listening. For example,  it is difficult if we are distracted by external noise or our bodies are uncomfortable. 

But the main blocks to listening come from our minds. Only too often, our minds are going 100 miles an hour while we are "listening" to someone. In the Encounter handout on good listening, Julie Dunstan lists the following blocks:

"Comparing what we hear with something or someone else, including our own experience. 

Mind reading – thinking we know what will be said. 

Judging or evaluating rather than listening with unconditional regard. 

Problem solving: because we think that is our task or because we are unable to stay with the tension of something unresolved. 

Advising 

Making Assumptions 

Being pre-occupied with other thoughts or concerns. 

Daydreaming – just letting our minds drift away. 

Offering Platitudes – often because we think we need to get someone to feel better. 

Derailing the conversation; not staying to the proper focus but going sideways."

She also suggests that the words of the person we are listening to might lead to feelings within ourselves, which also distract us from what is being said:

"Often what takes us away from another in our mind begins with feelings of fear or strong reactions in ourselves based on our own experience. We might be afraid of being overwhelmed by certain feelings. We might be confused about whose feelings are whose. We might feel a certain passion or prejudice about something that stops us from hearing the other. We might have difficulty allowing certain feelings, like intense sadness or anger."

It takes a lot of practice to be able to put all these things aside and to "step out of the I" and truly listen to what the other person is saying.  And it has been even harder in the last year or so, when we have been unable to meet people face to face, and so are unable to read their body language, catch the fleeting expressions on their faces, which are the non-verbal parts of real conversation.

But it is essential, if we are to have "real", deep, meaningful conversations. For the speaker, it is about being heard, held and deeply accepted. For the listener, it is about putting all the blocks aside and concentrating exclusively on the other, that deep listening might happen.

Aim Small and Build

 This week's quotation is attributed to "Chinese wisdom". It reads, "It is better to do small deeds, than to plan great ones." 

I think the implication here is that we often get overwhelmed by great deeds and give up part way through. 

But I believe that the biggest and greatest deed can be completed, so long as we break them down into smaller parts and patiently complete each smaller part, one at a time.

In her wonderful book for writers, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott includes a chapter on short assignments, because she knows how overwhelming the prospect of writing a whole book can be. She writes, "I finally notice the one-inch picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments. It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being."

She further quotes E.L Doctorow, who wrote, "Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

I find the words of both Lamott and Doctorow inspirational. It means that we don't have to panic about completing a big task (like writing a dissertation or a novel or whole service, or cleaning the entire house from top to bottom) but need only tackle the small task at hand.

I try to write for an hour each morning. Some days I breeze through it, the ideas floating up in my mind, eager to be transcribed onto the computer. But far more often, I sit and gaze at the blank page on my laptop and have absolutely no clue what to write. Then I think of Anne Lamott's words and get down a small picture frame I have above my desk (see below) and remind myself that I only have to write one scene, or even part of a scene. And that it won't be perfect, but that doesn't matter. The important thing is to write something, anything. Because that can then be revised and edited.

Even Mount Everest was climbed one step at a time...

Self-help or Grace?

 This week's quotation is by that inimitable apologist for atheism, Richard Dawkins. He writes, "Our life is as meaningful, as full and as great as we make it ourselves."

And I do agree with him, up to a point. Our attitude to life, to the events, people, places and things we encounter is very much up to us. Some of us are glass half-full people, who look on the bright side, others are glass half-empty people, who see the problems and pain in everything they encounter. Then there are the realists, who insist that they see life exactly as it is. 

BUT, for those of us who are religious and/or spiritual, there is another dimension to life, which for simplicity's sake, I will call grace. Christians have many ideas as to what "grace" means, but for me, it is a free gift from God, which has the power to transform us, on the soul level. 

I love liberal Catholic theologian Richard Rohr's take on the meaning of grace. He believes (and I do too) that God's love is limitless and unconditional - we don't have to earn it; we just have to accept it. Grace is how God works in the world to wake us up and enable us to accept His/Her love. I believe that it is through God's freely-given grace that we are able to live full and great and meaningful lives.

In her wonderful book, My Grandfather's Blessings, Rachel Naomi Remen shares a beautiful prayer, which for me, epitomises the difference between relying on ourselves, as Richard Dawkins advises and accepting the gift of God's love: 

"Days pass, and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles.

Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing.

Let there be moments when your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk.

Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed.

And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder:

'How filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it.'"

Amen.

 

Seeing Our Reflection

 William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the 1848 novel, Vanity Fair, once wrote, "The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face."

I think that what he meant by this is that what we see depends on how we look at the world. And that how we act may influence how the world responds to us. It's the old "glass half full or glass half empty" effect.

I'm not saying that the world is a wonderful, perfect place (although parts of it surely are), nor that we should ignore all the bad things happening to our neighbour (in the broadest sense of that term). On the contrary, when we see living beings in distress, it is our duty to reach out and do what we can. 

Each of us is a complex human being, whose life has been shaped by all our experiences leading up to this moment. And I believe that how we have responded to these experiences in the past will dictate how we respond to them now, how we will respond to them in the future. Of course, bad things happen to all of us, and it takes a good deal of resilience to bounce back from these, rather than being broken by them.

But I believe that our underlying attitude to life does have an effect on how well (or poorly) we respond to events in our lives and in the wider world. If we look at the world to see the best in it, then that is what we will see. If we focus on the unpleasant, sad, bad, that is what we will see. If we see the world as a harsh place and ourselves as victims, it will be more difficult for us to discern the beauty and good all around us.

Because there always *is* some beauty and good around us, no matter how harsh our circumstances. Victor Frankl, the Austrian Holocaust survivor, shared some precious wisdom about this:

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitdue in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

"Between stimuls and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response." How we see the world, how we see ourselves, will depend on the response we choose.

One Step at a Time

 Martin Luther King Jr once wrote, "Faith is taking the first step, even when you can't see the whole staircase."

Yes. We have to learn to trust in ourselves, in what is important to us, and take that first step anyway. I believe that faith and trust are facets of our nature which we are born with. But as life goes on, and we encounter betrayal in our lives, that faith and trust can be eroded. It can take a lifetime to choose to be sufficiently vulnerable enough to dare to trust again.

And these betrayals, which sadly seem to be an inevitable part of life, need not be great ones which bring our whole world crashing down around us.  Any time someone lies to us, even a white lie, or doesn't turn up when they said they would, or is unkind to us, we can feel betrayed. Once we feel that way, it can take a lot of time to build up sufficient faith to make the world seem trustable again. 

In her book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead, Brené Brown explains that, "it's a chicken-or-the-egg issue: We need to feel trust to be vulnerable and we need to be vulnerable in order to trust. There is no trust test, no scoring system, no green light that tells us that it's safe to let ourselves be seen. The research participants described trust as a slow-building, layered process that happens over time."

So it is wonderful to see people like Martin Luther King Jr, who have faith in what they believe, have faith in what they are working towards, and take that first step anyway, regardless of the consequences. It takes courage to have faith, courage to trust, courage to be vulnerable. But if we choose to live with faith and trust, the rewards can be wonderful, wonder-ful.