In Praise of I Don’t Know – 18/2/24

Musical Prelude: Rondeau’ by Henry Purcell (played by Andrew Robinson)

Opening Words and Chalice Lighting: ‘Forged in the Fire of our Togetherness’ by Gretchen Haley

In silence light chalice and hold candle: This one chalice flame reminds us that we are one people, living one life on this our one planet earth home. And though its flame is small it gives a warmth that can make a difference. And so may we too make a difference, living as we do in a world community so in need of warmth and connection. May this day be brighter because of our presence, because of the smiles we bestow upon strangers, because of our generosity of spirit that seeks the good in others.

So good morning everybody and welcome to Sunday morning with Kensington Unitarians, be you here in person in our church in Notting Hill, or joining us online from lands near and far. If we’ve not met before I’m Sarah Tinker and it’s a pleasure to be here with you again as your minister Jane has a well deserved morning off.

Our service today is exploring what we don’t know, life’s mysteries and uncertainties. I hope there’ll be something in our words and music and silence that speaks to a need in you this day. As Unitarians we don’t tend to offer solutions or certainties but we do celebrate the connections that can be made when we explore life’s uncertainties in good company with others. Our opening words are written by Gretchen Haley and she starts with the kinds of questions many of us find ourselves asking in these sometimes unsettling times in which we are living. Here’s what she writes:

What’s going to happen?
Will everything be ok?
What can I do?
In these days we find ourselves, too often,
Stuck with these questions on repeat:
What’s going to happen? / Will everything be ok? /What can I do?

We grasp at signs and markers, articles of news and analysis,
Facebook memes and forwarded emails
As if the new zodiac
Capable of forecasting all that life may yet bring our way
As if we could prepare
As if life had ever made any promises of making sense, or turning out the way we’d thought
As if we are not also actors in this still unfolding story

For this hour we gather
To surrender to the mystery
To release ourselves from the needing to know
The yearning to have it all already figured out
And also the burden of believing we either have all the control, or none

Here in our song and our silence
Our stories and our sharing
We make space for a new breath, a new healing, a new possibility
To take root
That is courage
forged in the fire of our togetherness
and felt in the spirit that comes alive in this act of faith:
that we believe still, a new world is possible
That we are creating it, already, here, and now
Come, let us worship together.

Hymn 347 (grey): ‘Gather the Spirit’

And let’s start by singing our first hymn which is number 347 in our grey hymnbook. If you have a look at the hymn you’ll see this hymnbook sets words out with music, which can be hard to follow. And it goes over three pages. But it’s a lovely tune and words written by Unitarian Universalist Jim Scott who ran a workshop for us here some years ago now.

Gather the spirit, harvest the power.
Our separate fires will kindle one flame.
Witness the mystery of this hour.
Our trials in this light appear all the same.
Gather in peace, gather in thanks.
Gather in sympathy now and then.
Gather in hope, compassion and strength.
Gather to celebrate once again.

Gather the spirit of heart and mind.
Seeds for the sowing are laid in store.
Nurtured in love and conscience refined,
with body and spirit united once more.
Gather in peace, gather in thanks.
Gather in sympathy now and then.
Gather in hope, compassion and strength.
Gather to celebrate once again.

Gather the spirit growing in all,
drawn by the moon and fed by the sun.
Winter to spring, and summer to fall,
the chorus of life resounding as one.
Gather in peace, gather in thanks.
Gather in sympathy now and then.
Gather in hope, compassion and strength.
Gather to celebrate once again.

Candles of Joy and Concern:

Our opening words by Gretchen Haley included these lines:

Here in our song and our silence
Our stories and our sharing
We make space for a new breath, a new healing, a new possibility
To take root
That is courage
forged in the fire of our togetherness, our coming together.

Our simple ritual of candles of joy and concern, is an opportunity to share something that is in our heart with the community. We’ll hear from 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 tell us briefly who or what your lit candle is for. If you’d rather have the microphone brought to you, give me a wave and I’ll bring it over. 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’ll light one more candle, as we often do, to represent all those joys and concerns that we hold in our hearts this day, that its one light may remind us of our connections, one with another, none of us live our lives alone.

(light candle)

Time of Prayer & Reflection: for uncertain times

Let’s join now in a time of reflection as I call on the divine spirit of life and love to be with us now and to bless all that we do and say together here today.

Let us pray for our world, with all its grievous troubles. Our hearts ache for those suffering through violence in Israel and Gaza, in Ukraine, the Sudan, as well as so many other places where violence rules. May the spirit of peace and possibility whisper its healing message in the ears of all who seek vengeance. May the spirit of love and compassion touch all whose hearts are hardened or despairing. In a shared time of silence now let us pray for all who are suffering. (pause)

Let us pray too for the peacemakers, those who dedicate their lives to finding solutions to the most difficult of situations and the medics who seek to heal the wounded, sometimes in the hardest of circumstances. May they be inspired and strengthened in their work. May they be protected and supported in all they do.

At times many of us feel that we live in a far too complex world, with too many matters calling for our attention and too many irresolvable issues filling our awareness. Life is confusing and we make mistakes. In such moments of error may we be generous and forgiving both to ourselves and others. When we find ourselves in a mess may we slow down and re-consider, rather than rushing ever onwards. May we discover once again the simplicity of stillness and balance, a quiet calm centre in the midst of all the hustle and bustle of both our inner and our outer lives.

May we remember when we claim to be certain and sure that there is indeed so much for us yet to understand. When we are assailed by doubts and uncertainties, may we discover an inner strength that allows us to rest gently in our unknowing. To be human is to be at times confused and bewildered; may we remember that when we are about to judge other people or ourselves and resolve to be a little kinder than we might sometimes be.

Let us take time now in quietness for our own thoughts and prayers, for those we love, for the aspects of our lives that are troubling us, for all that we are carrying this day …….

That all who are troubled might know the comfort of a loving presence and a helping hand. And may this be so for the greater good of all, so may it be, amen.

In-Person Reading: ‘Relaxing into uncertainty’ by Jack Kornfield

This reading is from writings by Jack Kornfield. Jack is a Buddhist teacher in the States who has been generously sharing his spiritual insights with people for many years. In this piece he explores how we might best relax into life’s inevitable uncertainties.

He writes:

“I remember seeing a poster in a health food store in Santa Cruz in the 1970s of the Hindu guru Swami Shantananda with his long, flowing beard, standing on one leg in a little orange loin cloth in the yogic posture called the tree pose. (possible demonstration of the tree pose) What was remarkable about this picture was that Swami Shantananda was balanced in the tree pose on top of a surfboard on a really large wave. Underneath, it said in big letters, ‘You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.’ The spirit of the practice of equanimity and peace is not that the waves will stop, but that our heart and mind become so open and balanced, that we can behold the turning seasons of the world from a place of stillness.

“To find equanimity and peace requires an acceptance of the mystery of life itself. Modern science tells us that a big bang started the universe, hurling matter through space. Some of this matter formed stars, and some of the residue formed the planets. In this way everything on the Earth — stones, frogs, clouds, and our own living bodies — is formed out of the same material that formed the stars and planets. As the cosmologist Brian Swimme says, ‘Four and a half billion years ago, the Earth was a flaming molten ball of rock, and now it can sing opera.’

“When you can appreciate your life as part of this unfolding mystery of the immense forces that formed the entire universe, you can more easily accept the difficulties and hardships that you face. They are part of the unfolding of your life. Many of the difficulties you’ve faced include endings, but none of them so far has been the end of your story. Without knowing the whole story, it is impossible to draw definite conclusions about our difficulties. We are still in the middle of them and don’t know how they will turn out.

“Unfortunately, there is no rule book for life. ‘Things are uncertain, aren’t they?’ my teacher Ajahn Chah used to say. To accept this basic uncertainty in life is to find the wisdom of insecurity. When we realize that things are fundamentally uncertain and learn how to relax into this uncertainty, we come to trust in the unfolding of our individual lives within this vastness of all time and all space.

Hymn 352 (grey): ‘Find a Stillness’

The hymn we’re going to sing now is from a Transylvanian text and it’s sung to a Transylvanian hymn tune. Some of you will know of the Unitarian congregations in Transylvania, now part of Romania, where there has been a long Unitarian history amongst the Hungarian minority there. I suggest we stay seated for this one.

Find a stillness, hold a stillness,
let the stillness carry me.
Find the silence, hold the silence,
let the silence carry me.
In the spirit, by the spirit,
with the spirit giving power,
I will find true harmony.

Seek the essence, hold the essence,
let the essence carry me.
Let me flower, help me flower,
watch me flower, carry me.
In the spirit, by the spirit,
with the spirit giving power,
I will find true harmony.

Meditation: ‘in praise of I don’t know’ by Maya Stein

If you’re here in church you’ll have been given a copy of a poem when you came in and a little piece of what is known as sea glass, a piece of glass that has been shaped and smoothed by long years of movement by the tides, amidst the sand and rocks on the shore. There are some beaches in Kent just south of London that are particularly well known for finding sea glass and that’s where these pieces have come from. If any of you at home feel you’re missing out just send me an email with your address and I’ll put a piece of sea glass in the post to you.

And we’re going to put the words of this poem up on the screen – because I was so touched when I read it a year or two ago. It’s written by Maya Stein and it’s called in praise of i don’t know and it’s about beach-combing – scanning a beach for interesting objects. And though we yearn for perfect whole objects – what we usually find are little pieces, fragments. Yet, Maya Stein tells us, these uncertain fragments may hold unexpected answers for us if we can accept and move towards them. This is a poem that holds gifts I think if we read it a few times. See what you think.

Mostly, what washes up at the beach isn’t whole, though our eyes are peeled
for the perfect form of, say, a perfume bottle, or an old coin, or a message from the dead.
Instead, what reveals itself as the tide pulls back is a sea of uncertainty, cryptic shards
with the vaguest clues whose answers are scattered in places likely too far from here.
We will never retrieve them, not in the way our mind craves assembly.
But look how, against the late season light, a filmy beauty descends, nearly silencing
the clamour of what pulls at our sleeves to solve. What if we could let ourselves rest
for a little while in this halo of I don’t know, feel its soft touch against our urgent skin.
What if the thing in our hands, and every fractured remainder, is its own answer. What if
leaning into the wobbly shapes of our lives is another kind of sweetness and gold.

So let’s enter into a quiet time together now, let’s rest in silence in quiet praise of all we do not know. And our silence will end in a few minutes with a chime from our bell and then we’ll hear Erik Satie’s fine piano piece of sparse fragmented notes in his Gymnopedes.

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

Interlude: ‘Gymnopedie No. 1’ by Erik Satie (played by Andrew Robinson)

Address: ‘In Praise of I Don’t Know’ by Sarah Tinker

In praise of ‘I Don’t Know’ is the title of this address. As my years go by I find myself saying those three words more and more – I don’t know. Life’s uncertainties are very much with me now, life’s mysteries, life’s vagueness and complexity. We could just leave it there, couldn’t we – admit all we don’t know – and sit in companionable silence together.

This is the message of the mystics isn’t it, that life is so complex and multi-faceted and downright confusing that all a holy fool can do is laugh. I’ve been reading Nasrudin stories again this week, drawn to these ancient wisdom stories from the Sufi tradition. I found a modern re-telling by Peter Hawkins of a time when the Mulla Nasrudin had retired to a quiet village in the mountains where each day he’d sit in the village square and watch the world go by. One day one of those huge new cars drove into the square and stopped right by Nasrudin. The window glided silently down and a very loud voice boomed out, one of those voices that commands attention. ‘Do you know the way to Vienna?’ the voice asked.

‘I’ve no idea’ came Nasrudin’s reply.

‘Well can you tell me the way over these mountains?’ the voice asked.

Again Nasrudin replied with ‘I’ve no idea’.

The voice from the big car was getting irritated now. ‘Well can you at least tell me the way to get out of this village?’

‘I have no idea’ answered Nasrudin.

‘Well you must be a complete idiot then’ shouted the driver.

‘Ah yes,’ said Nasrudin, ‘I may be an idiot but at least it’s not me that’s lost’.

There can be some wisdom in admitting we don’t know in life. I reckon that’s what drew me to Maya Stein’s poem about the sea glass and other fragments found on the beach that we heard earlier. Do look up her work online – she has lots of creative writing projects to engage with and I appreciate writers who make their work so freely available online. There’s a button on some websites now where you can buy a creative person a coffee to thank them for the work they’re making freely available so I’ve bought Maya a few coffees to say thanks for inspiring today’s service – and getting me to go out to the beaches of Kent in search of the pieces of sea glass we’re holding today here in church.

Searching a beach for sea glass and interesting pebbles and shells and bits of broken pottery is such a soothing way to spend a morning – I found myself leaning into the search – both literally hunched over, sifting for something, leaning in also with my mind – utterly focussed on the task, on the search, on the sensations of the moment – the sounds and smells of the seashore, the touch of the sand.

We need those moments of absorption don’t we – the tasks that insist on our single focus. For many of our lives are busy and fragmented, and the life of our world can be so troubling for our minds. We have too much to think about and too much to concern us, with little we can actually do to mend or heal what is going on. I wonder if you have a particular image for how your mind churns over its concerns. I sometimes think of my mind as being like rats caught in a trap – running around its maze-like layout – trying to find a way out. Its an image of a busy mind that finds it difficult to stop thinking, or to take that thinking to a more useful level. I wonder how you might describe the workings of your mind?

It’s in the nature of the human mind to be forever chewing over issues. But one of the gifts of the spiritual path is our ability to utilise methods to still our minds. It’s an area where I’ve still lots of work to do. Let me introduce you to a practice described by Pir Elias Amidon – a Sufi teacher in one of his Notes from the Open Path – on Finding Silence. He describes being on a desert retreat and struggling to empty his mind. He writes: ‘I discovered a humble practice. I don’t know how it started, maybe I was trying to find where my thoughts were happening, or where I was, but I touched my fingertip to my forehead, and then touched a point opposite it at the back of my head, and looked into the space between those two points. What’s in there?

You might like to try it. See what you find when you look into the space between the front and back of your head. If you say it’s your brain, that’s a thought. What’s your immediate sense of what’s in there?

For me, the immediate sense is emptiness — I can’t find anything! What’s more, that space, that emptiness, is silent. Yes, thoughts seem to run through it with their little noises, but the emptiness doesn’t stop being silent.

What’s awesome for me about this “practice” is that it’s so quick and available, and it’s so close I can’t look at what I find. The silent emptiness I sense inside my head resists becoming an object in my awareness — it is that awareness. Whatever I am, wherever I am — in the middle of my head, in the middle of my heart, in the middle of the sensate noise of the world — is this mysterious, spacious silence.

Rumi’s little prayer — Let me be quiet in the middle of the noise — opens a window onto this same simple awe. He doesn’t say, “Noise, be banished so I can be quiet!” He knows that noise is always around — in the market place, in our sensations, in our thoughts and emotions — it’s all noise. As long as we’re embodied like this, we’re in the middle of the noise.

I find that when I feel aggravated by that noise, when I feel it pressing on me with multiple demands, or self-judgments, or incessant thoughts, this simple practice of looking into the middle of my head, my heart, my being, and finding nothing but soundless emptiness there, that’s medicine. The silence at the heart of our being is healing.’

So with thanks to Elias Amidon for that simple yet profound technique let’s remind ourselves how inspiring it can be to admit the limits of our powers and our knowledge. Let’s be people who regularly say ‘I don’t know’. Let’s be people who cultivate that calm and empty space within us so that we can ride those waves and face those torrents and tyrants. Let’s be people who embrace life’s mysteries and absurdities with good grace and good humour and be sure to join hands with all the other wise fools we meet along the way, each of us clutching our little fragments of sea glass. Amen.

Hymn 273 (grey): ‘Immortal Invisible’

And our closing hymn is the old classic ‘immortal invisible’ though the makers of this hymnbook have left out the best verse – the one about ‘blossoming, flourishing, withering and perishing’. Ah well. Let’s enjoy its rousing tune – immortal invisible.

Immortal, invisible, God only wise
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessèd, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise.

Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,
Nor wanting, nor wasting, thou rulest in might:
Thy justice like mountains high soaring above
Thy clouds, which are fountains of goodness and love.

To all life thou givest — to great and to small;
In all life thou livest, the true life of all;
All laud we would render: O help us to see
‘Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee.

Announcements:

My thanks to Hannah for our reading today, Andrew Robinson for great music, Patricia for hosting our online gathering and dear Ramona for keeping all our technology in order here in church. Thanks to those greeting people here in church and making us drinks afterwards.
If you’re with us online do stay after the service and have a chat with folks. And we’ll do the same here in the hall.

And you’re very welcome to stay and join our monthly Finding Our Voice singing class with Margaret Marshall, that’ll start at 12.30 to 1.15 and it’s always good fun and Margaret assures us that all are welcome. She quickly builds our confidence as singers.

Your congregation has various small group activities during the week. Heart and Soul, a contemplative spiritual gathering, is happening this evening and Friday online. It’s a great way to get to know people more deeply. This week’s theme is ‘Give & Take’. Sign up with Jane.

Community singing will be back on Wednesday 28th February – a date for our diaries. Sonya is back with her Nia dance classes on Friday lunchtime starting at 12.30pm. Both are great fun and accessible to all.

Looking a bit further ahead, if you want to join the ‘Better World Book Club’ online, the next session will be on Sunday 25th February when we’ll be exploring ‘Less is More’ by Jason Hickel – that’s on an environmental theme – let Jane know if you need a copy and you can’t get one elsewhere.

On the first weekend in March there’ll be your next congregational mini-retreat, on ‘The Stories of Our Lives’, the plan is to offer it online on the Saturday and in-person on the Sunday, but if you want to attend it is essential for you to register in advance, as we need at least six sign-ups to go ahead – sign up by the Wednesday before at the latest. If you want it to go ahead sign up early!

Next Sunday at 11am Jane Blackall will be back here with a service intriguingly entitled ‘Learning from Lionel’ and I think that’s the much loved Rabbi Lionel Blue – a wise and funny man.

Details of all our various activities are printed on the back of the order of service, for you to take away, and also in the Friday email. Please do sign up for the mailing list if you haven’t already. 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.

So now it’s time for our closing words and then some cheery closing music by 18th century French composer Francois Joseph Gossec.

Benediction: ‘Our unity even amidst life’s discord’ by Joan Javier-Duval

As we bid one another fare-well, may we embrace the mystery that surrounds us.
May we sink deep into the truth of our unity even amidst life’s discord.
May we keep our hearts open to those moments of more than mortal splendour,
when there is indeed a touch of glory in just being alive.
Amen, go well all of you, and blessed be.

Rev. Sarah Tinker

18th February 2024