The congregation of Kensington Unitarians are pictured standing in a service and singing from hymnbooks.

A Community of Spirit

This is the address from our June 1st service in which we recognise new members and celebrate our community on the day of our Congregation’s AGM.

I love travelling – all sorts of travelling – driving a car, going by train, getting on a bus. But I have to be a cautious traveller because over the years it has come to my attention that despite having all the right maps, despite being armed with useful directions, I’m somebody who is more than capable of getting lost.  I come from a family of people who can get lost.  One much loved family story involves my parents driving to the south coast only to find themselves in Minehead in north Devon and my mum saying comfortingly – “well, the sea is the sea isn’t it, whichever coast you’re on”.

My 10 year old grandson has been staying with me this week for half term as he has done every holiday since he was quite small. My flat is not a huge place but when Zak was about 3 it was still quite unfamiliar to him.  He had set off to explore and all had gone quiet when we heard a plaintive Zak shouting anxiously – “granny, granny where am I?” Getting lost does seem to be part of the human condition, doesn’t it – be it in other people’s homes or driving round unfamiliar roads or, at a deeper level, perhaps knowing what path to take next in life or how best to deal with life’s challenges and setbacks.

Where am I? What are we doing here? How can we find meaning and purpose in life? Who am I?  These are the existential questions of life that we creatures of the 20 and 21st centuries get to ask at times, living as we do on a tiny dot of a planet floating in the midst of an unimaginably vast and possibly meaningless universe.  These are the questions posed by existential philosophers such as Sartre and Camus.  And as often seems to be the way with philosophers – the questions they raised became the questions of their era. Their complex works were read only by the intelligentsia yet the concepts filtered through to us all and to some extent have shaped our thinking and our ways of living. You could say that existentialism has set an agenda for our time – how shall we best live in a potentially meaningless world?

Some of the best answers we humans can come up with to such dilemmas seem to involve fostering a sense of belonging; somehow, somewhere – we find ways to put down some roots, stretch out our tendrils, touch the lives near to us, listen and observe, ask questions, find things to do with other people, create some meaning and purpose where they might well otherwise be none.  Margaret Wheatley who has written extensively about ways to create a sense of community, says that “human beings need each other; we cannot exist in isolation”. We can then turn that around and say that the communities we create of course need us – how fortunate – we need to belong and communities need us to belong in order to exist.  I’d take that further and say that the world itself needs our communities because it is by joining together with others that we have enough power to make a difference here on planet earth.

Now we can wax lyrically about the joys of belonging in a community but it would be wrong not to mention the other side – that joining a community is like stepping into the swimming pool or river, or standing up and getting off the spectator’s bench and joining the game on the playing field. When you join in any activity you enter the flow and you cannot entirely predict or shape the outcomes. But you can guarantee you’ll get wet in the river – and if you’ve joined a game of football it’s an almost certainty that you will fall down or get kicked or at least get a bit muddy before the game comes to an end. Life in communities is real life and real life sometimes hurts and at some point anyone who really belongs in any grouping will find themselves rather wishing they didn’t. Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer described it like this in his book called Life Together – “only that fellowship that faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects begins to be what it could or should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and a community, the better for both.”

Our congregations are communities of spirit but they are like any other community – they thrive on open and deep and caring communication. And what can help such a process develop in a community? Here are some words from our very own Michaela von Britzke’s essay on Fostering Spiritual Growth in Unitarian Communities:

“Many unexpected processes of spiritual unfolding follow naturally once we learn to make the mystic’s assumption that everything that lives is holy, as part of our formal spiritual practice. If we could learn to truly meet each other in this spirit, in the groupings that make up a church and its weekly processes, we would be well on the road towards a greater awareness of the holiness of the conversation. Once we learn to adopt the view that everything that lives is holy, we don’t need to turn church into a place where we have to be careful and ‘nice’ to each other. We can start to face our conflicts together and begin to develop a sturdy intimacy with each other – the basis and goal of our longing to belong.”

“Sturdy intimacy” – what a pleasing description for any healthy relationship and what a useful reminder of the work that’s need if we are to create a true community of the spirit. For we all know the challenges of attempting to conduct our lives from the position of ‘everything that lives is holy’ – an easy path when all is sweetness and light – a seemingly impossible task when life is tough and we come up against the wall of our dislikes, our sensitivities, our disapproval, our irritations and even our disgust. If we stick around any community for long enough we come up against those barriers in ourselves and others – and then we have a choice – do we stay and deal with our discomfort or do we back off, retreat, return to a comfort zone of our own creating.

For me a healthy community of spirit needs to be created in such a way that people feel safe enough to stick around, to work through discomfort, to create opportunities again and again for healing – be it our own individual healing or the healing so urgently needed out there in the wider world. And one way of sticking on that path is to recognise something of God in everyone we meet and something of ourselves – this too is me. We are all connected and that connectedness helps us to work through the barriers, to clamber over the divisions, to seek health and healing and wholeness for one and for all.

A community of spirit also needs to be serving something larger than itself. Yes we are as individuals important, yes this congregation and this church building are important too, but we have to perceive ourselves as part of something greater. As the Buddhist teacher and writer I quoted from earlier Jack Kornfield puts it in his book delightfully entitled After the Ecstasy the Laundry, “If people gather in community primarily to alleviate their own isolation and loneliness, to have their needs fulfilled by others, they become like a group of needy children, and the community is likely to fail. But if their vision and creativity is in service to the sacred, to God, to the larger common good, there is a better chance for a healthy and wise community to grow.”

When we serve one another or our wider world, we are connecting I believe with the divine, with the sacred, helping to create heaven here on earth. Our ways of serving may be large or small – the huge sacrifice or the tiniest act of generosity and kindness – all are ways to say ‘yes, I am part of something greater than my self, yes, I want this to be a better world for all, yes, yes, yes to life.

Finding a Unitarian community to belong to all those years ago now made a profound difference to my life. My hope is that all people might find such a community in which to put down roots and flourish – because it is within a community that we can be ourselves and use our gifts for the betterment of all – as Starhawk describes so beautifully in this piece printed on today’s hymn sheet:

“Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.”

As a community of spirit I believe we are making a bridge between the material and the spiritual elements of life. We are faced with never ending practical tasks of governing ourselves and our financial and other assets, taking care of the fabric of our buildings, taking care of one another, playing our essential part in the life of our wider community. My hope for our Unitarian community here at Essex Church and for our whole Unitarian General Assembly is that we play our part well, with fun and efficiency, in right relationship with one another and with the world. And that we remember always that we do this for the greater good of all. Amen.

Rev. Sarah Tinker

Sermon – 1st June 2014