Times of Change – 14/5/23

Musical Prelude: ‘The Times They Are A Changin’ by Bob Dylan (played by Jess Scott and Peter Crockford)

Opening Words and Chalice Lighting: ‘We Are Connected’ by Leslie Takahashi

Good morning everybody and welcome to Essex Church where this gathered community of Kensington Unitarians has its spiritual home. Welcome to those of you joining us on Zoom from your homes or workplaces – it’s great that you can be with us. And welcome to those here in person this morning. For those of you I’ve not met before I’m Sarah Tinker – I used to be minister of this congregation – a long time ago – and it’s lovely to come back and see you all from time to time.

Our service title today is ‘Times of Change’ and as always I’m exploring a topic that feels relevant in my own life – I wonder if change, or the lack of it, has some relevance for you too. You might have recognised our opening music as Bob Dylan’s old classic – the times they are a changin’ – let’s explore together today what is changing, what is timeless, what we’d like to change and what changes we resist.

But first let’s bring ourselves fully to this time and place, the here and now of our being. You might want to take a conscious breath, a breath in and out that allows us to settle for this hour we have chosen to spend together. As we breathe out we can let go, for a while at least, of any niggles – of the mind or body, let’s appreciate a feeling of presence in this time and space. And aware of our own selves let’s expand our awareness to those we connect with, be that here in person or digitally through a screen or through sound. Our opening words by Leslie Takahashi remind us that we are connected, Leslie writes:

Despite distance and fear: We are connected.
Despite loneliness and change: We are connected.
Across different experiences and lives: We are connected.
Even in the face of the inevitable losses of life: We are connected.
When we wish to laugh: We are connected
When we need to mourn: We are connected.
Across a nation divided: we are connected.
Even when we dance alone in a room: We are connected.
In the heat of the sun: we are connected
In the glow of the stars: we are connected
Across the limits of our imagination, we are connected.
Even when nature trembles: we are connected.

And our chalice flame is lit – another symbol of connection – aligning us with Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist communities the world over, bringing a progressive religious light to our world, a light of acceptance and encouragement and warmth shining on us all this day.

Hymn 33 (purple): ‘Enter, Rejoice and Come In’

Our first hymn today is a cheerful one, it’s number 33 in the purple hymn book, ‘enter, rejoice and come in’ and it has the line ‘today will be a joyful day’ – I always feel the need to say that we are all aware that life will not be very joyful for everyone at present – and if that describes your situation then do let someone know – and may a little spark of lightness and brightness help to lighten your burden, despite everything. For those online the words will appear on your screens – do feel free to sit, stand, sing or simply listen – enter, rejoice and come in.

Enter, rejoice, and come in.
Enter, rejoice, and come in.
Today will be a joyful day;
enter, rejoice, and come in.

Open your ears to the song.
Open your ears to the song.
Today will be a joyful day;
enter, rejoice, and come in.

Open your hearts everyone.
Open your hearts everyone
Today will be a joyful day;
enter, rejoice, and come in.

Don’t be afraid of some change.
Don’t be afraid of some change.
Today will be a joyful day;
enter, rejoice, and come in.

Enter, rejoice, and come in.
Enter, rejoice, and come in.
Today will be a joyful day;
enter, rejoice, and come in.

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)

Reading: ‘Thresholds’ by Arlen Goff

Thresholds.
We cross them every day.
From room to room,
from outside to inside,
and back again,
from here to there,
from anywhere to everywhere,
from age to age.

Each threshold offers an opportunity
for change, for renewal, for transformation,
from what we were and what we are
to what we can be.

In this hour and in this place,
we cross a threshold from
our day-to-day everydayness into
space and time attuned to the other,
to the sacred, to the holy,
into an awareness of new life
pregnant with possibilities.

How will we be renewed in this moment?
How will we be changed by this hour?
How will we be transformed through this
gathering of beloved community?

Come, you longing, thirsty souls!
Come, let us worship together!

Time of Prayer & Reflection:

Let us join now in a time of prayer and reflection upon life’s changes and transitions.

May the divine spirit of life and love be with us now in this our time of worship and bless our togetherness. May our hearts be softened and our busy minds be stilled, may our bodies be at peace within themselves as we turn our thoughts and prayers to our world community. Throughout history, the story of our planet has been a story of change, a great unrolling narrative with its multitudinous characters and settings. To be alive is to move and to move is to change. Let us remember our tiny part in that great drama of life on earth. (pause)

May our thoughts be with the places in our world where changes are enforced and bitter, where life is tough and there can be little illusion of control for the people who live there; let us think too of the many places where change is held back, repressed, where the search for freedom is seen as rebellion, where free speech is denied, the places where people do not dare sometimes even to be themselves. May all such places be touched by love and understanding, may fear diminish and peace expand. (pause)

And let us think with loving compassion of those we know who are facing life’s difficulties – those perhaps who face changes not of their choosing, those who seem stuck and unable to change, those who yearn for life to be different. (pause)

In our own hearts and minds may we also be filled with peace and love, so we are better able to accept the changes in our own lives, challenging and painful though some of them are. In the midst of our transitions may we be granted all the strength that we need and may that strength be something we pass on to others who we meet along the way, for it is perhaps in our common humanity and in the sharing of our paths in life that we find the meaning and purpose that sustain us and guide us, now and always. Amen

Hymn 142 (purple): ‘Shining Through the Universe

Our second hymn today is 142 in the purple hymn book – and words will also appear on our screen – the words are written by Roger Mason, who is connected with both our Golders Green and Rosslyn Hill congregations. Roger is famous as a geologist and worked for some years in Chinese universities where he became acquainted with Taoist philosophies – so these are expressed in this hymn – that idea of The Way – an energetic flow through all that exists. Our order of service today has this Taoist black and white image of the circle on the front, forever in movement, containing the dualities of life as one entity, each containing a seed of potential of the opposite within itself. I hope you like this hymn – shining through the universe.

Shining through the universe
runs the golden thread;
woven in along with white,
black, yellow, green and red.

Cooling water, burning fire,
metal, wood and clay;
in the earth’s five elements
the gold thread marks the Way.

If we try to pick it out
from the fabric fair,
when the threads are pulled apart
the gold’s no longer there.

Under heaven, over earth,
north to southern pole,
if you trace the golden thread
the Way will calm your soul.

“Turn your feet along the Way”,
sages taught of old;
live life well and tread the path
marked by the thread of gold.

Reading: ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for An Age of Uncertainty’ (excerpt) by Alan Watts

This reading is taken from Alan Watts book entitled The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Uncertainty. Alan Watts was a highly regarded writer on the philosophy and psychology of religion and is one of the key figures who brought the wisdom of Zen Buddhism to western minds.

“Perhaps the most exasperating thing about nature and the universe, about you and me, is that it will never ‘stay put’. Yet the perishability and changefulness is part and parcel of its liveliness and loveliness. This is why poets are so often at their best when speaking of change, of the “transitoriness of human life”. For poets have seen the truth that life, change, movement and rhythm are of the essence of all things lovable. In sculpture, architecture, and painting the finished form stands still, but even so the eye finds pleasure in the form only when it contains a certain lack of symmetry, when frozen in stone as it may be, it looks as if it were in the midst of motion.

Is it not, then, a strange inconsistency and an unnatural paradox that ‘I’ resists change in ‘me’ and in the surrounding universe? For change is not merely a force of destruction. Every form is really a pattern of movement, and every living thing is like the river, which, if it did not flow out, would never have been able to flow in.”

Meditation: ‘The changes in our lives’

We’re moving into the meditative time of our service today. There’ll be some words to lead us into three minutes of silence together and that will come to an end with a chime from our bell and then a fine piece of music from Massanet’s opera Thaïs, appropriately called Meditation.

So let’s get ourselves comfy for these next few minutes, make those adjustments that help you turn inwards, maybe slightly straighten your back, give those shoulders a gently wiggle, rolling them up and back and down, whatever works best for you. Maybe take one of those soothing breaths deep into the belly and as we release have a sense of tension being released. Maybe close your eyes or soften your gaze and focus on something that pleases you – the candle flame, a favourite place in the room, a view from a window at home perhaps. And if you want to, the invitation in these quiet minutes is to reflect on changes in your own lives – I’ll take us through some suggestions now.

We might think of changes that have brought us happiness in life – choices we made perhaps or moments of serendipity – when some alteration came about and it felt so right, a clear way forward flowed before us.

We might think of changes that proved difficult, where struggle and effort were an inevitable part, the birth pangs of a new way of being in life.

We might think of changes that were a shock, were unwanted, forced in some way by externals over which we had little or no control.

We might think of the inevitability of change in human lives, even when we may yearn for stability and continuation.

As we enter the fellowship of stillness and silence together now let us consider change.

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

Musical Interlude: ‘Meditation (Thaïs)’ by Jules Massenet (played by Jess Scott and Peter Crockford)

Address: ‘Times of Change’ by Rev Sarah Tinker

They do say that no-one likes change except for a wet baby. I don’t know about you but for me it’s more complicated than that. Change is fine with me, so long as I have chosen it – it is the changes that I haven’t chosen and that life seemingly thrusts upon me, – those are the changes that I don’t like and which, given half a chance, I shall resist.

I’ve been reading around this topic of change these last few weeks and I found a perfect story of Nasrudin, the Sufi wise and holy fool. The story explains that Nasrudin went once to hear a preacher in the house of prayer.

The preacher, shouting, addressed the congregation with a fierce and angry look saying: “Humans are ungrateful creatures. Nothing will ever satisfy their desire. When God gives them winter, they complain they are too cold. When God brings Summer, people complain about the heat….

”Nasrudin raised his hand and interrupted the preacher saying:

“Nobody complains when it is Spring!”

And that’s the truth isn’t it – we like the changes that we like! And most of us really like this season of spring.

As I look around our congregation here today at Essex Church I know how many people have had changes thrust upon them recently; in fact I would be surprised if there was a single person here with us today who has not faced some changes in the last twelve months – some of them joyous, some of them scary, some of them seemingly now completed, some changes still very much in transition, in progress, unfinished, incomplete.

And of course incompletion is the stuff of life – as soon as we are born we are on this journey through life, a journey that rolls and unfolds before us, a journey with unexpected twists and turns. A journey in which we get to make many choices, where we exercise our free will, a journey in which we are, for some of the time at least, conscious and aware. We humans have the ability to reflect on our existences and it is that I think that gives our lives both richness and poignancy. We are aware of time passing, we watch ourselves change and grow both physically and emotionally. We’re born, we die, – and we know it.

The changes in our own lives are mirrored by the universe itself, with its myriad processes, all working to their own timescale – the spinning planets, the burning sun, mysterious black holes, leaves on the trees, roses blooming, birds hatching, – each with its own path to follow, its own sequence of changes. Nothing stays the same be it at the planetary level or at the microscopic. G. K. Chesterton put it well I think when he wrote: “All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.”

And a torrent of change is what we exist in. Alvin Toffler wrote a book about this where he defined the term ‘future shock’ as “… the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” and “the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.”

I wonder if any of you have tried to buy a piece of electrical equipment recently – a television perhaps or something to play music on? Buying a TV used to involve a decision about how big a screen you wanted to buy and you had perhaps half a dozen choices. Standing in the midst of John Lewis’ electrical department recently it dawned on me that we are indeed at the start of a new age – this is the era of ‘home entertainment’ in which every aspect has been made as complex and as varied as possible. And TVs and sound systems are just one tiny example of the complexity of our lives today and as Alvin Toffler predicted when he wrote his book Future Shock over 30 years ago now – the effect on human beings facing too much change too quickly is shock and that shock has to be worked through, processed if you like, be it a change of TV or a far more profound change in our personal lives.

The need to work through change has always been known to the wise. I remember many years ago studying the work of an anthropologist called Van Gennep. He coined the term ‘rites of passage’ to describe the ceremonies that tribal people used to mark a person’s transitions through life – birth, coming of age, marriage and death. Van Gennep studied many pre-industrial societies and identified three key elements in any rite of passage. Firstly there is an acknowledgement of an ending. This must be properly marked in some ritualistic way – perhaps through grieving or through some symbolic letting go. The person under-going the rite of passage is then considered to be in a second phase, a time of transition, they are about to cross over a threshold – to leave the past behind and to step out into the unknown. This is sometimes described as a liminal state, a threshold, that border between what is unconscious and conscious, like the shoreline of the sea; this is a place of uncertainty, it is dis-orientating by its very nature because the psyche is in the process of re-orientating itself, finding its way through the fog. This is the uncertainty that Alan Watts describes – uncertainty that contain great wisdom if we take time to consider it. For this liminal phase is a rich opportunity for self-reflection, for new learning.

And that liminal phase eventually leads on to the stage of transition itself in which the change is made and the new situation is recognised and marked. In an ancient initiation ceremony for example, held to mark a young person’s acceptance into the adult group – the middle phase might well involve a period of isolation and hardship, a time when the young person is tested in some way. Only when the tests have been undergone can the transition to adult status be properly marked by the group. As I thought about changes and transitions this week, one realisation stood out for me. As a society we sometimes lack I think clear ways to mark our transitions. And the transitions that are noted the least are often the private ones, the quite profound inner developments that we go through at various stages of life, the quiet letting go, coming to terms with, the sometimes shocking alterations that are part of most of our lives – these inner changes need marking and honouring I believe.

So here are just a few closing thoughts to take away and consider about this complex issue of change.

Change is inevitable but it is also discombobulating. We really need to help one another adapt, especially when changes are not of our choosing.

Most changes are not of our choosing. It is an illusion of our modern way of life that imagines we humans are in charge of our existences. Of course our will is a factor, but it is only one factor in the midst of a complex and often chaotic world.

Even unwanted changes may contain gifts for us if we take time to look more deeply. Transformation can bring us new possibilities and insights – it’s worthwhile to look for a glint of gold amidst the mud that is churned up in a time of change. As Arlen Groff wrote in the poem we heard earlier called ‘Thresholds’:

Each threshold offers an opportunity
for change, for renewal, for transformation,
from what we were and what we are
to what we can be.

The more we can learn to sense ‘The Way’ and to allow changes to flow through us, the stronger our powers of discernment become – our abilities to discern what part we might play in the great interconnected process of life, in which we are just one miniscule, and o so finite, element. But still with a vital and unique part to play. Amen.

Hymn 102 (purple): ‘May the Road Rise With You’ (sung twice)

And so to our closing song – a blessing – found as number 102 in our hymnbooks – from the Irish tradition – may the road rise with you – let’s sing this twice and sing it as a blessing for one another – all of us travelling this road of life together in company with one another. May the wind indeed be at your back.

May the road rise with you,
may the wind be always at your back,
may the sun shine warm upon your face,
may the rain fall soft upon your fields,
and until we meet again,
may God hold you in the hollow of his/her hands.

Announcements:

My thanks go to our musicians today – Peter Crockford on piano and Jess Scott on flute. Lovely music, thanks. And thanks to our technical team – Ramona here in church and Jeannene as Zoom host. We couldn’t run these hybrid services without you. Thanks to those making drinks and stewarding.

And let me say how delighted I am that Jane Blackall is confirmed as the new minister for this congregation. Do come along to next week’s service which will be led by Jane and members of the congregation on a theme of ‘Ways of Belonging’ and will be followed by the congregation’s AGM – do come and be part of that.

And so let’s have our closing blessing which will be followed by music – again from a French opera this time by Delibes – we’ll be hearing this Flower Duet as an instrumental piece but the original song is sung by two young women gathering flowers by a river bank – and has the words – let us gently glide together, let us drift along … this sacred stream’ – surely a perfect description of life! But first some words from Gary Kowalski to end our time together today:

Benediction: ‘Go in peace, speak the truth, give thanks each day’ adapted from words by Gary Kowalski

Go in peace, speak the truth, give thanks each day.
Respect the earth and her creatures, for they are alive like you.
Care for your body; it is a wondrous gift.
Live simply. Be of service.
Be guided by your faith and not your fear.
(Face life’s changes with good heart.)
Go lightly on your path. Walk in a sacred manner.
Amen, go well all of you and blessed be.

Closing Music: ‘Flower Duet’ by Léo Delibes (played by Jess Scott and Peter Crockford)

Rev. Sarah Tinker

14th May 2023