Cosmic Harmony – 7/5/23

Musical Prelude: ‘O Taste and See’ by Vaughan Williams – Peter Crockford and Quartet

Opening Words: ‘In Need of Healing’ by Maureen Killoran

Welcome, you who come in need of healing,
you who are confused, or have been betrayed.
Welcome, with your problems and your pain.
Welcome, too, your joys and your wonderings,
welcome your need to hope, your longing for assurance.
Instead of answers, here may you find safety for your questions.
Instead of promises, may you find community for your struggles,
people with hands and hearts to join you
in engaging the challenges and changes of our day.

Words of Welcome and Introduction:

These opening words, by Maureen Killoran, welcome all those who have gathered this morning for our Sunday service. Welcome to those who have gathered in-person here at Essex Church and also to all who are joining us via Zoom from far and wide. We are glad to have you with us this day. Whoever you are, however you are, wherever you are, I hope you find some of what you need. If we’ve not previously met, my name is Patricia Brewerton, and I’m a member of this congregation.

Today’s service is on the theme of ‘Cosmic Harmony’ and the theme was chosen by Rev Stephanie Bisby, minister with York and Bradford Unitarians, who is our guest preacher today. It’s a bit far for her to travel so she’s pre-recorded a story and a sermon for us. And she also chose the quote on the front of our order of service which sets the tone for today – it’s from Rabindranath Tagore – ‘When our universe is in harmony with man, the eternal, we know it as truth, we feel it as beauty.’

Let’s take a moment before we go any further to settle ourselves, arrive, and prepare for worship. We’ve each chosen to take some time out of the everyday doings of our lives to be here this morning. So let’s take a conscious breath. And another. And with each exhalation let’s visualise a letting go. A setting aside of anything we’ve come in carrying. We can pick it up later if need be. Let us bring our whole selves to the here and now, as we consecrate this hour with our presence and intention.

Chalice Lighting: ‘The Music Within Us All’ by Marnie Singer

Let’s light our chalice flame now, as we do each week. This simple ritual connects us in solidarity with Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists the world over, and reminds us of the proud and historic progressive religious tradition of which we are a part.

(light chalice)

The chalice is the container—
the space where the musicians and the listeners gather.

The oil is the fuel—
the hours of practice and the life experiences of everyone in the room.

The wick is the instruments and vocal cords
through which the music will flow.

And the flame—the flame! —
is the music, which is created, as if by magic,
when the instruments are lifted,
the breath is inhaled,
and the downbeat is nodded.

May this flame ignite the music within us all!

Hymn 51 (purple): ‘God of Grace and God of Laughter’

Let’s sing together now. Our first hymn today is number 51 in the purple hymnbook: ‘God of Grace and God of Laughter’. For those joining via Zoom the words will be up on screen to sing along. It’s not one we sing often, in fact our guest preacher Stephanie chose it for us, so I’ll ask Peter to play it through once before we sing. Please stand or sit as you prefer as we sing: ‘God of Grace and God of Laughter’.

God of grace and God of laughter,
singing worlds from nought to be;
sun and stars and all thereafter
joined in cosmic harmony,
giving songs of joy and wonder,;
music making hearts rejoice;
let our praises swell like thunder
echoing our Maker’s voice.

When our lives are torn by sadness
heal our lives with tuneful balm
when all seems discordant madness
help us find a measured calm.
Steady us with music’s anchor
when the storms of life increase;
in the midst of hurt and rancour,
make us instruments of peace.

Turn our sighing into singing,
music born of hope restored;
set our souls and voices ringing,
tune our hearts in true accord
till we form a mighty chorus
joining angel choirs above
with all those who went before us
in eternal hymns of love.

Candles of Joy and Concern:

Each week when we gather together, we share a simple ritual of candles of joy and concern, an opportunity to light a candle and share something that is in our heart with the community. So we’ve an opportunity now, for anyone who would like to do so, to light a candle and say a few words about what it represents. This time we’re going to go to the people in the building first, and take all of those in one go, and then I’ll call on the people on Zoom to come forward.

So I invite some of you here in person to come and light a candle and then if you wish to tell us briefly who or what you light your candle for. Please do get up close to the microphone as that will help everyone hear (including the people at home). You can take the microphone out of the stand if it’s not at a good height for you – it’s still going to be important to speak up – and have the microphone pointing right at your mouth. And if you can’t get to the microphone give me a wave and I’ll bring it over to you. Thank you.

(in person candles)

And if that’s everyone in the room we’ll go over to the people on Zoom next – you might like to switch to gallery view at this stage – just unmute yourselves when you are ready and speak out – and we should be able to hear you and see you up on the big screen here in the church.

(zoom candles)

And I’m going to light one more candle, as we often do, to represent all those joys and concerns that we hold in our hearts this day, but which we don’t feel able to speak out loud. (light candle)

Time of Prayer & Reflection: based on words by Jerry Goddard and Tanya Cothran

And let’s take those joys and concerns into an extended time of prayer now. This prayer is based on some words by Jerry Goddard and Tanya Cothran.

You might first want to adjust your position for comfort, close your eyes, or soften your gaze. There might be a posture that helps you feel more prayerful. Whatever works for you. Do whatever you need to do to get into the right state of body and mind for us to pray together – to be fully present here and now, in this sacred time and space – with ourselves, with each other, and with that which is both within us and beyond us. (pause)

Spirit of Life, God of All Love, in whom we live and move and have our being,
we turn our full attention to you, the light within and without,
as we tune in to the depths of this life, and the greater wisdom
to which – and through which – we are all intimately connected.
Be with us now as we allow ourselves to drop into the
silence and stillness at the very centre of our being. (pause)

You who knows the secrets hidden within all hearts;
who knows all sorrow and all joy,
all hope springing from sources unknown,
all pain, all loneliness, all desolation;
the One who knows all this, and understands,
and with everlasting love seeks to lead us
in each moment toward beauty and harmony:
we bring ourselves just as we are into your transforming presence. (pause)

Teach us, once again, the ways of loving kindness,
that we may spread loving kindness from within our souls out into the entire world;
communicate to us, once again, your peace, that we may spread peace
from within our souls out into the entire world;
We may feel like strangers even to ourselves at times;
help us, once again, to feel your steady patience at work within us,
that we may spread patience from within our souls out into the entire world. (pause)

Teach us to consider also how others experience this world we share.
To understand how our reality and their reality are different
and yet they share qualities of the same deep desires.
Teach us to listen for shared feelings, for places of connection.
Teach us to be curious and open to hearing differences.
Teach us to love into brokenness, to give space and patience for healing. (pause)

Let us be strong in our vulnerability, in our not-knowing,
in exposing our less-than-perfect scary bits, to those in front of us.
Give us courage to face judgment, scorn, and hatred because of the greater good.
Let us be disciples of Essential Goodness, strong in our knowing
that in each Being there is a divine light of the soul.
And give us the strength to keep feeling empathy, even when we are tired and broken.
For it is then that You are feeling the empathy through us. (pause)

And in a few moments of shared stillness now,
may our hearts speak silently all the prayers of our lives—
our souls’ greatest joys and deepest sorrows, our triumphs and failures,
our regrets and fears, our disappointments and losses, our hopes and dreams –
our concerns for all those to whom we know to be suffering right now. (long pause)

Spirit of Life – God of all Love – as this time of prayer comes to a close, we offer up
our joys and concerns, our hopes and fears, our beauty and brokenness,
and we call on you for insight, healing, and renewal.

As we look forward now to the coming week,
help us to live well each day and be our best selves;
using our unique gifts in the service of love, justice and peace. Amen

Hymn 21 (purple): ‘Come and Find the Quiet Centre’

Let’s sing together now. Our next hymn is ‘Come and Find the Quiet Centre’. If you’re here in-person it’s number 21 in your hymn books and the words will also be up on your screen to sing along at home. Please feel free to stand or sit, as you prefer, as we sing.

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.

Silence is a friend who claims us,
cools the heat and slows the pace;
God it is who speaks and names us,
knows our being, touches base,
making space within our thinking,
lifting shades to show the sun,
raising courage when we’re shrinking,
finding scope for faith begun.

In the Spirit let us travel,
open to each other’s pain;
let our lives and fears unravel,
celebrate the space we gain:
there’s a place for deepest dreaming,
there’s a time for heart to care;
in the Spirit’s lively scheming
there is always room to spare.

Reading: ‘The Art of Living’ (excerpt) by Thich Nhat Hanh (read by Stephanie) (video)

In Plum Village we have organised retreats for Israelis and Palestinians. Back in the Middle East, their lives may be a daily struggle to survive. There is always something to do and not a minute to stop. But when they come to Plum Village, we create a peaceful environment for them to rest, stop, sit quietly and come back to themselves. They just sit with us, walk with us, and eat with us. They practice deep relaxation. No one is doing anything special, yet it is already a revolution. After only a few days of practice, they feel a lot better. They have space inside, and they are able to sit there and listen to the suffering of the other side with compassion. Many young people on these retreats have told us that it was the first time in their lives that they believed peace was possible in the Middle East.

If we want to organise a peace conference or a conference on the environment, we can do it in the same way. World leaders can come together, not merely to sit around a table and make decisions, but to spend time together as friends and establish a human relationship. When we can listen deeply to each other’s suffering and difficulties, and when we can express our insights and ideas using loving speech, then our negotiations will be successful. Once there is understanding, releasing fear and anger becomes possible.

We have to organise so there is enough time to live together peacefully, think peacefully and act peacefully during the conference, in order to give rise to the kind of insight that our nations need. Peace is not something to hope for in the future. Peace is something that we can be in every moment. If we want peace, we have to be peace. Peace is a practice and not a hope. We say that our leaders can’t afford to spend one or two weeks together like this, and yet war and violence are costing us so much money and so many lives. Our political leaders need the help of spiritual leaders to address these global problems. They have to work hand in hand. True peace work requires a spiritual dimension – the practice of peace.

Meditation: ‘Music Master’ by Rumi

We’re moving into a time of meditation now. To take us into the time of meditation I’m going to share a short poem, ‘Music Master’, by Rumi. This will take us into a few minutes of shared silence which will end with the sound of a bell. Then we’ll hear some soothing music from Peter. So once again let’s each do what we need to do to get comfortable – adjust your position if you need to – put your feet flat on the floor to ground and steady yourself – close your eyes. As we always say, the words and music are an offering, feel free to use this time to meditate in your own way.

You that love lovers,
this is your home, welcome!
In the midst of making form, love
made this form that melts form,
with love for the door,
soul the vestibule.
Watch the dust grains moving
in the light near the window.
Their dance is our dance.
We rarely hear the inward music
but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless,
directed by the one who teaches us,
the pure joy of the sun,
our music master.

Period of Silence and Stillness (~3 minutes) – end with a bell

Musical Interlude: played by Peter Crockford

Sermon: ‘Cosmic Harmony’ by Rev. Stephanie Bisby (video)

Hello. For those who don’t know me, I’m Stephanie Bisby. I live in South Yorkshire and I’m half time minister with York Unitarians, and also support Bradford Unitarians, around quarter time. It’s probably not entirely chance that I’ve ended up working with two congregations which are very musical. St Saviourgate Chapel, the home of York Unitarians, is well known in the city for its early music, late music and Friday lunchtime concerts. We have some wonderful Sunday musicians, and our congregation includes Andrew Hill, former minister at Edinburgh Unitarian Chapel, who’s responsible for the lyrics of a huge number of the hymns we sing together on Sundays. And Bradford Unitarians for many years benefited from the musical contributions of David Dawson, who was responsible for a fair proportion of the arrangements and original hymn tunes in our hymnbooks, including the tune we use for ‘God of Grace and God of Laughter’, whose beautiful words by Carl Daw draw out the connection between music and wider creation, and talk of “God… singing worlds from naught to be,” and of the “cosmic harmony” of the universe.

I was about twenty years old the first time I walked through the doors of a Unitarian building, and I wasn’t there for worship – at least, I didn’t think I was. The building was Golders Green Unitarians, and I was there to see a friend perform as part of an evening of music and poetry. At the time I was part-way through a degree in English Literature at Trinity College, Oxford. I was drawn in particularly by the idea of hearing new, or new-to-me, poetry, but I’d also been playing the piano – with more enthusiasm than skill – since the age of five, and I was keen to see what musical delights were in store. I soon came to love these evenings, and to feel an extraordinary sense of peace every time I walked into the beautiful space, with its beautiful and inspiring Ivor Hitchens mural. Among the poets I was introduced to at Golders Green were Rabindranath Tagore and Jalaladdin Rumi (both poets I hadn’t encountered at college, since our three-year romp through literature from Chaucer and Spenser to Eliot and Plath didn’t include any literature in translation (well, unless you count translating Beowulf from the Anglo-Saxon).

Through Tagore, Rumi and others, I began to understand something of the drive that lay behind my love of words and music.

“Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.” Those are, perhaps surprisingly, the words of Martin Luther – yes, the grumpy guy who’s principally famous for nailing 95 points of order to a church door. I like to think that if he’d lived now he’d have been blasting the Internet with his manifesto. And when he said the Word of God I guess he meant the Bible, though for those of us who’d use that phrase at all nowadays, we’d probably mean something quite different. For me as a Unitarian, God, or the divine, or simply all that is best in us, did not speak just once in a single book of divine revelation (though I doubt many thinking people of other faiths really continue to believe that either, if they’re honest). We hear the word of God, or the voice of the spirit, or our higher selves or whatever else it is that speaks to us, in the morning paper and the evening news, in poetry and popular fiction –and, yes, in song.

“The freedom songs are playing a strong and vital role in our struggle,” said the other Martin Luther, one greatly revered by Unitarians: Martin Luther King, Jr.. “They [the songs] give the people new courage and a sense of unity. I think they keep alive a faith, a radiant hope, in the future, particularly in our most trying hours.” Sometimes what music says is truer than the truths we can manage to harness into language.

“When our universe is in harmony with man, the eternal” Tagore wrote, “we know it as truth, we feel it as beauty.” It’s not a million miles from the sentiments of the Romantic poets I was so enjoying studying at the time I first walked through the doors of Golders Green Unitarians. Keats in his Ode on a Grecian Urn teased his readers with an equation you won’t find in any maths book “beauty is truth, truth beauty” and suggested that this equation is just as fundamental to life as 2+2=4 is to maths: “that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”

The mathematician and musician Pythagoras – yes, the triangle guy – is generally credited with making the connection between the patterns of the heavens and the musical patterns which are so pleasing to the human ear. ‘There is geometry in the humming of the strings,” he wrote. “There is music in the spacing of the spheres.’ And there we have the connection between music and celestial harmony which is built into the bedrock of so many faiths in so many ways.

Cellist Jacqueline du Pre described a similar feeling: “I love the physical thing of being on the earth that bore you. I have the same feeling when I walk in a very beautiful place that I have when I play and it goes right.” That connection between the universe, the earth and our own flow is hard to articulate, but undeniable.

There is a Buddhist story of a young martial arts student being tutored by a famous master. One day, the master was watching a practice session in the courtyard. He realized that the young man was being distracted by the presence of the other students. Instead of focusing on his own form, the youngster was desperately trying to impress, and in the process making himself clumsy and self-conscious. The master went over to him and the young man expressed his frustration, whereupon the master responded, “Before you can master technique, you must understand harmony. Come with me, I will explain.” The master led him into the woods to a stream, where he told the young man to watch how the water flowed around the rocks. “Be like the water, the master said, “and you will know what harmony is.” The young man watched the water for a while and then returned to his practice, this time with his focus firmly on his own actions, and sure enough, he soon found his flow.

Rumi writes, “we rarely hear the inward music, but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless, directed by the one who teaches us, the pure joy of the sun, our music master.” It’s that cosmic song again, the harmony of the planets and the stars, the pure joy of creation, so complex and perfect that it sometimes seems impossible not to imagine someone behind it, a music master, a power singing worlds from naught to be, calling us to be instruments of peace.

Looking at the world around us, can we doubt the words of Thich Nhat Hanh? “We have to organise so there is enough time to live together peacefully, think peacefully and act peacefully… Peace is not something to hope for in the future. Peace is something that we can be in every moment. If we want peace, we have to be peace. Peace is a practice and not a hope….Our political leaders need the help of spiritual leaders to address these global problems. They have to work hand in hand. True peace work requires a spiritual dimension – the practice of peace.”

Only when our leaders begin to find a connection with their own and each other’s humanity, only when they begin to operate not from greed or fear but from a sense of the pattern underlying all life and action, will nations and races be able to live and work together in true “cosmic harmony.”

May we find new ways of seeing and of living which bring us ever closer to the eternal which we know as truth and feel as beauty. In the name of love, may it be so. Blessed be, and amen.

Hymn 208 (purple): ‘When Our Heart is in a Holy Place’

Time for our last hymn, and it’s an old favourite, number 208 in the purple hymnbook ‘When Our Heart is in a Holy Place’. The words will be up on the screen as usual so please do sing along.

When our heart is in a holy place,
when our heart is in a holy place
we are blessed with love and amazing grace,
when our heart is in a holy place.

When we trust the wisdom in each of us,
every colour every creed and kind,
and we see our faces in each other’s eyes,
then our heart is in a holy place.

When our heart is in a holy place,
when our heart is in a holy place
we are blessed with love and amazing grace,
when our heart is in a holy place.

When we tell our story from deep inside,
and we listen with a loving mind,
and we hear our voices in each other’s words,
then our heart is in a holy place.

When our heart is in a holy place,
when our heart is in a holy place
we are blessed with love and amazing grace,
when our heart is in a holy place.

When we share the silence of sacred space,
and the God of our heart stirs within,
and we feel the power of each other’s faith,
then our heart is in a holy place.

When our heart is in a holy place,
when our heart is in a holy place
we are blessed with love and amazing grace,
when our heart is in a holy place.
When our heart is in a holy place.

Announcements:

Thanks so much to Stephanie, our guest preacher today. Thanks to Ramona for tech-hosting and Maria for co-hosting. Thanks to Peter and the Quartet for our lovely music. For those of you who are here in-person, Juliet will be serving refreshments after the service – thanks Juliet – thanks to Julia for greeting today. There will be virtual coffee on Zoom with Maria so do hang around for a chat.

We have various small group activities for you to meet up during the week. There are still spaces left for our Heart and Soul contemplative spiritual gatherings (online Sunday and Friday evenings at 7pm) with guest leaders while Jane is on holiday. Charlotte Chanteloup is leading that tonight on ‘Dreams’, Alex Brianson is going to lead it next Friday on ‘Colour’, and you can find their emails to sign up in the Friday email if you want to join Heart and Soul.

Our service next Sunday will be hybrid once again and it’ll be led by Sarah Tinker. Details of all our events are on the back of the order of service and also in the Friday email.

And please save the date for our congregational AGM which will be after the service on 21st May. I’ll be sending round the annual report later today to those who are signed-up members.

The congregation very much has a life beyond Sunday mornings; we encourage you to keep in touch, look out for each other, and do what you can to nurture supportive connections.

I think that’s everything. Just time for our closing words and closing music now.

Benediction: ‘The Blessing of Music’ by Maureen Killoran

As we listen to the blessing of music,
May we know this ending
As more than a time of goodbye.
May the warmth of this community
and the memory of our chalice flame
sustain our hearts and encourage our minds,
as we engage the blessings
of life’s challenges and joys.

The service has ended.
Your service has begun
Go in peace. Go in joy. Go in love. Amen.

Closing Music: ‘Ave Verum’ by Mozart – Peter Crockford and Quartet

Rev. Stephanie Bisby and Patricia Brewerton

7th May 2023