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It is a great pleasure for me to be gathered with so many people I love in this act of worship: my father Louis and my mother Rita, my sisters Clare and Siobhan, my brother in law Mark and of course my soul mate, best friend and beloved Dan. Then there are all of you in this my home congregation. To each of you I owe so much. My parents always taught me that the colour of a person’s skin and their religious affiliation were unimportant. They gave me a home where I learned the importance of hospitality and kindness to strangers. In fact as a teenager when I was involved with voluntary services international and various environmental organisations our house was often filled with hungry campaigners and eco-workers. My mother would think nothing of cooking for 20 people before we piled into my fathers car or van to visit one of the many sites of interest close by such as the Hill of Tara, not far from home. Not far up the road was the border with Northern Ireland. I see it as a great credit to my parents that while sinister forces sought to highlight the divisions on this island, they raised us to respect all people and never to allow an idea take precedence over a person. Most importantly though, my parents shared their faith that there is a God who has faith in us even when we have no faith in ourselves, and when I was lost in the darkness of depression over ten years ago it was this faith that carried me through, eventually. I’d like to talk to you today about ministry and I’d like to start off in the village where I was born. We lived a few doors away from a saint, Granny Power. She wasn’t my granny, but I called her granny because Eileen and Kitty, my grandmothers were both dead by the time I was six. During the week Clare, Siobhan and I would always say the rosary with her and on Sunday mornings we would go to her house in our Sunday best before we went to mass and be told we looked like cats eyes shinning from under the bed and we’d get a sweet to suck for after communion. Up the road lived Mrs Dukes, organist at the church of Ireland and responsible for decorating the church for Sunday services. In the1950s Mrs Dukes was laid up in bed with influenza and Granny Power paid her a visit. All Mrs Dukes was concerned about was whether anyone would decorate the altar of the church the following Sunday. Granny volunteered to do it, but Mrs Dukes reminded her that her faith barred her from entering a Protestant church. Granny told her it didn’t matter, sure who would find out. She cut flowers from her little patch and the following Saturday night, under the cover of darkness she made her way over the fields to the church of Ireland and decorated the altar. In 1952, the great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade interviewed Carl Jung. In the course of that interview Jung said, “The modern world is desacrilised, that is why it is in crisis. The modern person must rediscover a deeper source of his own spiritual life.” Well, sources don’t come much deeper than Granny Power’s. In those days when religious commitment was gauged by how obedient a person was to an external authority, Granny Power decided to break the rules and place the person before the regulation. I was struck by what Jung didn’t say. Jung didn’t say, “the modern person needs higher ideals.” He didn’t say, “the modern person needs more transcendent values.” He said we need “ a deeper source.” Oscar Wilde from whom the title of this address comes, learned something important about our source during his spell in prison. He reached a powerful insight into the essential nature of his life. His sense of shame, his over-riding sense that he had betrayed the ones he loved, his expulsion from polit society and his sense of hurt at being used as a pawn in a family feud with the Douglas family led him to a place where he saw beyond the beauty he once admired as an end in itself, and grasped that life is about being courageous and daring in response to that great beauty. Oscar never had time for the moralists of his day, who insisted that Christianity was synonymous with good manners and propriety. It became obvious to him that to live in this fashion was to live in the prison of other people’s opinions of us. As he committed himself to reading the gospels in Greek it became clear to him that this character Jesus of Nazareth was not one for propriety either. It became obvious to Oscar that Jesus was a daring and courageous individual precisely because he had visited the underworld and discovered that we are connected – and not just holding hands together connected. It was deeper than that. It was actually an assertion that at a certain level we are the same thing – we are one, we are not isolated egos. Ironically, according to the traditions that teach this, we can only become true individuals when we realize it. Appreciating the deep existential connection between us all allows true individuality to flourish. The paradox is that by becoming aware of ourselves as collective beings, we learn the true meaning of individuality. By learning to see the fabric we learn to value and understand the true meaning of the individual threads. Allowing ourselves to feel connected, saying no to the many voices that seek to divide our human family into black and white, catholic and protestant, straight and gay, Muslim and westerner – saying no to these voices and feeling our connectedness is one of the ingredients of holiness and holiness is the opposite to neurosis – the affliction of many religious people. Thomas Moore, in his book the Souls Religion says, “I see no anxiety in Jesus, but his followers are often full of it.” Full of it, maybe, because they have settled for the relative comfort of a divided world, a world where manners and propriety uphold the smugness of the saved. But as Oscar Wilde discovered, there is no smugness in the carpenter of Nazareth. He didn’t come to tell people to behave. The man who broke with the law regarding the Sabbath, who upturned tables in the temple, who hung out with prostitutes and officers of the imperial occupying force – this man was no herald of good manners. Then I suppose it’s worthwhile asking what was he. St John says in his gospel Jesus is the way, the truth and the life and Christians have used this to justify claims that theirs is the only valid religion. But the word John uses for truth is the Greek word “aletheia” a word which properly refers to truth as an unveiling. In Jesus we see an unveiling of our true nature. And what might we say about that true nature? Henri Nouwen, whom we heard from earlier, was once asked to write a book for secular people. The request came during a conversation between Henri and his friend Fred Bratman, a secular Jew with no religious background whatsoever put it this way: Henri’s response was a book, Life of the Beloved, which he starts with the words, Fred all I want to say to you is you are the Beloved and all I hope is that you and your friends can hear these words reverberate in your hearts as if spoken to you with all the tenderness and force which love can muster. We live in a world where there are many voices telling us we are anything but the beloved. In fact much of what passes for Christian theology is based on the rather damaging notion that we are stained with original sin. In the secular world, despite its apparent rejection of Christianity, the tendency to denigrate and demean human existence still persists. There are so many voices around us, encouraging us to be only fractions of the people we are. Be respectable – that’s what religions tend to say. Sing our song, act this way, be one of us, but don’t whatever you do be yourself. Far from liberating people, religion has simply offered people barriers to put around themselves, layers and layers of defensive clothing to protect them from life. And far from telling people that ultimately they are loved, religion has told them they are stained and not worthy of love. But I am going to say something to you now which might strike you as contradictory. In as much as we are blessed by being the beloved of God, we are also broken. Lurking behind whatever facades we have constructed there is a sense of fracture, a disconnectedness, a discord. And fundamental to this discord is the loneliness of being a human person. When I started talking about loneliness in Unitarian circles, I used to apologise for being perhaps too personal, but the more I have spoken about it the more I have come to appreciate it as a universal phenomenon. There is deep loneliness in people and we tend to treat it a bit like we treat a drunken guest at a dinner party – we try to pretend it is not there by ignoring it and hoping it will stop. But is doesn’t stop and often it drives people into all sorts of behaviour, behaviour which we hope will distract us. And sometimes the more we seek distraction the more bizarre our behaviour becomes. The distraction can only stop when we accept our brokenness and by accepting it we learn that we are fundamentally called to be a community of the broken. We love from that place where we hold our blessedness and our brokenness as two inseparable aspects of one life. This is why Jesus loved the sinner. He loved the sinner not in some patronizing way that sought to change them. He knew that change could only come from within. He loved the sinner because he saw in the sinner the same struggle he knew – the struggle to be the person his beloved God called him to be. He loved the sinner because at least the sinner was attempting to occupy their own distinctive nature. He loved the sinner because ostracized by society, just like Wilde, the sinner learns to sing their own song and in doing this ultimately they will learn to love the world more passionately than is possible if we are merely imprisoned by it. I would love it if religion dropped the word sin and embraced the word broken because I have never met a person who hurt another from a sense of their belovedness. We hurt each other when we refuse to accept our brokenness, when we give it power over us by denying its presence at all. Conversely we love more passionately when we do accept it, when we accept that, as the Roman poet Terence put it, nothing that is human is alien to me. This is at the heart of what is meant by beloved community. Unitarians in Britain seem to spend so much time worrying about the size of their congregations. But the calling at the heart of all true religion is not to be strong and powerful. It is to be loving and kind. As Jung put it people don’t need higher ideals or more sophisticated metaphysics. I want to join with Henri Nouwen in saying that we need the ministry of presence where we are courageous enough to hold another persons pain because we have learned to hold our own. I have a child in my congregation who is blind, mute and paralysed from the neck down and she has taught me more about God than any theology course I have ever taken. She is going to be three on Christmas Eve. When she comes into our chapel everyone lights up. People actually queue to hold her. She has never said a word in her life and yet the simple joy she displays by being held touches the heart of everyone who meets her. It has dawned on me that we do not hold Phoebe, she holds us and she is for me the model of ministry. She is the embodiment of the ministry of presence. She asks for little and gives her all and whenever I meet her she is always there, present and keen to have fart noises made on her belly. I think the future of our movement rests in taking a leaf out of Phoebe’s book and simply learning to be present to others, learning to accept the truth of another person and leaving the work of change up to the Spirit who is charged with hanging us all. We can be present to another only to the extent that we have been present to ourselves. When we are resent to ourselves we understand that in some mysterious way we are all blessed and we are all broken. We all share this fundamental paradox. So let us reach out from it, love from it and praise God from it. Amen.
Cathal Courtny |