Prelude Melodia Africana I by Ludovico Einaudi
Opening Words Let us Worship by Kenneth L. Patton
Let us worship with our eyes and ears and fingertips.
Let us feast our eyes upon the mystery
and the revelation in the faces of our brothers and sisters.
Let us live a thousand lives
as we walk in the crowds of men.
Let us know that all lives flow
into great common life,
if we will only open ourselves to our companions.
Let us worship, not in bowing down,
not with closed eyes and stopped ears,
but with the opening of all the windows of our beings,
with the full outstretching of our spirit.
Let us worship and let us learn to love.
Chalice Lighting (you may wish to light a candle in your own home at this point.) Words by Cliff Reed
In the world’s grief and darkness
we keep a flame burning –
the flame of hope, the flame of truth,
the flame that warms the heart with loving kindness.
Opening Prayer
Spirit of Life and Love,
be with us as we gather for worship,
each in our own place.
Help us to feel a sense of community,
even though we are physically apart.
Help us to care for each other,
in this world in which the clouds
of war, poverty, and climate change hover,
and help us to make a difference,
starting where we are, with what we have.
May we keep in touch however we can,
and help each other, however we may.
May we be grateful for the freedoms we have
and respect the wishes of others.
May we hold in our hearts all those
who are grieving, lost, alone,
victims of violence and war,
suffering in any way,
Amen
Reading from After This Manner by Leonard Mason
Heaven is where we dream
the Muslim dream, desire-fanned;
the Socialist dream, poverty-banned;
the engineer’s dream, atom-planned;
Is where we stretch
with Puritan spine
our god, our man, unsullied;
Is where we wonder
at Sagittarius in the night sky,
and the square root of minus one:
at the sun’s hot crucible,
and a child’s handclasp in the dark.
Heaven is where…
we love and fall asleep;
is where we stand sun-drenched
and hug the earth to the bosom of our souls:
is where our mind flows gladly outwards
to our eyes and fingertips,
and time stands still while we create
whatever it is our talent to create.
Heaven is where…
a plane touches down at the end
of its hazardous enterprise,
and men, pagan-like, kiss the good earth;
and the doors of heaven are rolled right back
when one gives all he has of life
for another.
Heaven is where…
the last day ends, and life stops short
on the threshold of eternity,
and our fathers that begot us
sink into willing death;
and sinking, smile,
because they know they have not lived in vain.
God. In these heavens. Hallowed be thy name.
Alternative Lord’s Prayer
Spirit of Life and Love, here and everywhere,
May we be aware of your presence in our lives.
May our world be blessed.
May our daily needs be met,
And may our shortcomings be forgiven,
As we forgive those of others.
Give us the strength to resist wrong-doing,
The inspiration and guidance to do right,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
We are your hands in the world; help us to grow.
May we have compassion for all living beings,
And receive whatever life brings,
With courage and trust.
Amen
Reading Daiyenu by Lynn Ungar
It would have been enough to just
walk by the river on a rare sunny day,
to watch the dogs throwing themselves
after sticks and chasing small waves.
And who wouldn’t have been satisfied
with a mere glimpse of the mountain peaks
strung like snowy pearls along
the northwest’s graceful collarbone?
Certainly, had I known, I would have come out
just to hear the guttural croon of the
sandhill cranes, to see them
stalk the fields like leggy dinosaurs,
and even then I would have
been shaken with delight to find
the snow geese whirling and crying
flashing white and dark and white
in their throngs. Any bit of it
would have been enough, and yet,
greedy creature that I am, I caught up
your gloved hand in mine, only barely
refraining from prancing with my prize.
Prayer by Sheena Gabriel
Spirit of all that is,
we give thanks for beauty unnoticed,
for the many miracles of nature,
which lie like un-opened love letters,
strewn about our feet,
awaiting a response.
May we not be blind or indifferent
to the prodigious gifts that come our way.
Grant us the vision to see
the world with fresh eyes;
to look beneath the surface of things
and be open to hidden wonders.
Help us to remember that despite
the pain and suffering that haunts our world,
somewhere in the universe
beauty is always unfolding –
silently, secretly, without fan-fare,
waiting to be discovered.
Amen
Reading Snowflakes – Nature’s hidden beauty by Sheena Gabriel
A week before Christmas I wake to snow. There has been a light sprinkling for several days, but today the ground is carpeted in white. I resist the urge to launch into tasks and reflect on the scene unfolding in my garden. Snow has a stilling effect on me, so at odds with the demands of the season and today, from the sanctuary of a warm room, I am drawn to its mesmerising beauty. And what makes the sight more marvellous is the knowledge, that invisible to the naked eye, millions of intricately formed ice-crystals are falling and landing, like so many heaped jewels.
I reach for a book on snowflakes and immerse myself in the intricate designs photographed under the microscope. I ponder – for how many centuries has nature kept this miracle hidden from us – exquisite beauty unnoticed and unappreciated? Such jewels have fallen from the sky for millennia, but before the invention of the microscope in the 17th century, they lay unrevealed; and not until 1885, did Wilson A. Bentley capture the first snow-flake on camera. Bentley, who lived in a small rural town in Vermont, would go on to photograph more than 5,000 snowflakes during his lifetime and he found no two flakes were alike.
Snowflakes remind me of the prodigious bounty of nature, which does not wait for an audience. The fleeting existence of each flake adds to the beauty of the world, even though it leaves no record. And I reflect on how much else in this amazing universe goes unnoticed, because we have insufficient vision to see things as they really are. How much still waits to be discovered about our planet, our cosmos? Who knows what secrets now hidden, will reveal themselves centuries hence, if humankind can develop the necessary technology? But must we wait for technology? Perhaps if we honed our eyes to look with a mystic’s vision, we would see, as William Blake did, “a World in a grain of sand and Heaven in a wild flower”
Time of Stillness and Reflection (words by Sydney H. Knight (adapted))
Tomorrow’s world will ask much of us;
tomorrow’s paths are unexplored.
We have no maps of future time,
and there are few signposts.
Tomorrow we shall travel in a strange new place,
where none has ever been before.
Tomorrow waits for pioneers.
And we expect much of tomorrow.
We ask for a new world, happy and glad,
a world free from hunger and war;
where human life is held sacred,
and none shall be cold or miserable.
The kind of world that we shall see tomorrow –
what will it be like?
It will be like the men and women who shall live tomorrow.
It will be like us; for we are the people of tomorrow.
In tomorrow’s unknown world adventurous people will be needed,
Brave and strong to forge a better life;
People warm in heart, who will hear every cry,
who will let none go hungry.
Who will reject all violence, who will not tolerate injustice,
whose love will reach across streets and continents;
people who will care.
[silence]
We are the people of tomorrow;
and tomorrow can be happy only if we are happy;
only if we ourselves are strong to uphold goodness and mercy;
only if we care.
The map of the future is in our own hearts;
we are the signposts of the future way.
Let us live as we would have tomorrow be.
Musical Interlude I Giorni by Ludovico Einaudi
Address Heaven
Where and what is heaven? When I was a little girl, I had a fairly geographical, Old Testament idea of God and heaven. God was “up there” in heaven somewhere above the clouds in the sky, sitting on his throne, looking down on the earth, judging us and waiting to hear and answer our prayers. It seemed to have little to do with my ordinary life, in rural Worcestershire.
As a teenager, I read the four Gospels of the New Testament, and noticed that one thing Jesus was always going on about was “the kingdom of heaven”. Particularly in Matthew’s Gospel, he regularly tells parables which begin, “The kingdom of heaven is like…” a mustard seed, the yeast that leavens bread, treasure hidden in a field, a pearl of great price, and so on. The moral of most of these parables seems to be that there will be a final day of judgement, when the righteous will be taken up into heaven, and the rest of humankind will be thrown into eternal hellfire. And the church taught that this life is a trial, after which (if you’ve been good), you go to heaven, but if not, to hell.
No, sorry, can’t be doing with that. I believe that Heaven is being in relationship with the Divine, and using our lives, here, now, to make a positive difference to our world. We can make of our world a heaven or a hell.
Jesus also warns people that “the kingdom of heaven is near”. The theology professor, Bart Ehrman, explains that Jesus was an apocalypticist. This was “a worldview held by many ancient Jews and Christians that maintained that the present age is controlled by forces of evil that God will destroy at the end of time when he intervenes in history to bring in his kingdom, an event thought to be imminent.” St Paul also believed this, to judge by his letters.
But of course, this didn’t happen, and the end of the world is not imminent (or at least, not in the ways explained in the Book of Revelation). Our understanding of “heaven” has evolved down the centuries, as we learned more about the place of our planet in the universe – that the world is round, and that heaven is not “up there somewhere”, but who knows where?
Most of us no longer believe that “God’s in his heaven; all is right with the world.” This line comes from Robert Browning’s poem, Pippa Passes. On the website, Sanctuary First, reflecting on the first verse of Psalm 107 (“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures for ever”), Jane Denniston comments, “This unshakeable faith that, even when everything seems to be going wrong, God is still God, and a day will come when he will make everything right again, is rooted in the conviction expressed in this verse. God is good, even when life has dealt us cruel blows. And his goodness is shown in this, that God is love, and his love cannot be exhausted or denied or avoided. We may choose to reject his love, but that will not stop him loving us. As the poet Robert Browning put it: “God’s in his heaven. All’s right with the world.” In the world of ‘Pippa Passes’ the poem from which this line is taken, there is much that is not right in the world, but even in the midst of all that is wrong, still there are moments of beauty when all does indeed seem right.”
I believe that this concept of heaven is a more commonly-held one, today. Our awareness of heaven is rooted in sacred living, living with awareness of the sacred among us – in the natural world, in other people, in ourselves. I believe that our spiritual lives and our everyday lives are interwoven, and that if we allow it, our spiritual side can influence the rest. The trick is remembering this during the ordinary activities and experiences of our daily lives, so that we can grow into people whose existence on this planet is a net benefit to humankind and to the world. This is how we can aspire to heaven.
I find the Quaker Advices and Queries particularly challenging in this respect. Every time I read them they “speak to my condition”, as Quakers would say, and remind me of what I should be aiming for, here and now.
No 2 advises “Cherish that of God within you, so that this love may grow in you and guide you. Let your worship and your daily life enrich each other. Treasure your experience of God, however it comes to you.”
The phrase “that of God within you” refers to something which isn’t our body, our mind, or our nervous system. I suppose that the traditional term would be the soul. Others may prefer to call it the heart. For some it is a “still small voice” or a Wise One. Whatever term we use, it is that spiritual side which we all have, and which we should pay attention to; to let it grow in us and guide us.
We come to worship to enrich our daily lives and feed our spiritual selves. I often come away from participating in Unitarian worship with new insights, which are incredibly precious. And if we are awake to them, incidents in our everyday lives can also enrich us spiritually – give us glimpses of heaven, as in Lynn Ungar’s beautiful poem. I have had some wonderful moments of awe and thanksgiving while looking at my sleeping children. Or at a beautiful landscape. Or contemplating the intricacies of a flower. The whole of life can be sacramental, if we let it. I try to remember to give thanks when something good happens, or when I see something beautiful or uplifting.
No 7 advises “Be aware of the spirit of God at work in the ordinary activities and experience of your daily life,” and asks “Are you open to new Light, from whatever source it may come? Do you approach new ideas with discernment?”
Being aware of the spirit of God at work in our daily lives follows on from treasuring our experience of God, and making a conscious effort to take time out to appreciate the good and miraculous things that happen to us or in the world. This is quite different to the widespread cynicism of the world, and much more to my taste. As is the gentle, yet challenging advice of the Tao Te Ching.
Being open to new ideas can be hard. By the time we reach maturity, most of us have fairly fixed ideas about what is right and what is wrong, about what is ethical and what is immoral. So when new ideas or possibilities come along, we need to make the effort to approach them “with discernment” and make a considered judgement.
It is also up to us to work towards realising the kingdom of heaven, here, now, in our ordinary world. The words of our Time of Stillness and Reflection remind us that tomorrow is in our hands. We can make of it a very heaven, or, by doing nothing, allow our world to spiral down further into hell. As Sydney H. Knight proclaims, “In tomorrow’s unknown world adventurous people will be needed, Brave and strong to forge a better life; People warm in heart, who will hear every cry, who will let none go hungry. Who will reject all violence, who will not tolerate injustice, whose love will reach across streets and continents; people who will care.”
Heaven, however we conceive of it, will not happen without our help. There is so much wrong in the world – hunger, poverty, violence, war, climate change, mass extinctions, and on, and on, that it is a daunting prospect to believe that we, as individuals, can make a difference. Yet, if we follow the advice of Unitarian Universalist minister, Forrest Church, and “Do what we can, where we are, with what we have,” good things can happen. Heaven, for me, is something we aspire to, not only for ourselves, but also for our beleaguered world.
I believe that Heaven is also all around us, had we but eyes to see, and ears to hear.
There is a beautiful prayer quoted by Rachel Naomi Remen, in her book My Grandfather’s Blessings, which is a wonderful antidote to cynicism, and the blasé, seen-it-all-before mindset which causes us to lose sight of even the possibility of heaven…
“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, illuminates
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.”
“Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed.” For then, we will have a taste of heaven, here and now. May it be so, Amen
Closing Words
Spirit of Life and Love,
May we be awake to the glimpses of heaven,
here and now,
and work towards making the kingdom of heaven,
here on earth, for everyone.
May we return to our everyday world refreshed,
may we share the love we feel,
may we look out for each other,
and may we keep up our hearts,
now and in the days to come.
Amen
Postlude Melodia Africana II by Ludovico Einaudi