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Each week a member of the congregation reads a passage
of his/her own choice at the Sunday service.
Making financial decisions……Making
spiritual descisions. A few months ago, a friend of mine was approached by a pension salesman who offered to sell him a really fantastic pension. Gandhi apparently thought that pensions and insurance betrayed a distrust of God, but my friend had no such hang-ups. He was very interested and as the salesman was from a reputable firm he decided to buy. But before he did, he asked the salesman if he could have some idea of the company's past performance, its areas of investment, its projected growth etc. But the salesman said to him that those were industry secrets. 'If I told you all that, anyone could set up a rival company in the morning and we'd be out of business'. So my friend was caught between wanting to buy this pension from a very earnest salesman, and not wanting to risk his life savings with a company he didn't know much about. Eventually he came up with a compromise. The pension salesman didn't have to show him any industry secrets as long as he could put my friend in touch with some of the firm's satisfied customers. That way my friend could trust the company without knowing about its inner workings. He duly received a list of contacts. But when he talked to them he found that none of them had reached retirement age. None of them had actually received pensions. They were all waiting to do so. So my friend took some time to think about the situation. And in the following weeks he was approached by four other pension salesmen from different and equally reputable firms. All assured him that their company would reward his investment, but that the other four would go bankrupt before he retired. By this stage he was totally confused. And I said to him at the time, "if I was in your shoes I wouldn't trust any of them. But the trouble with that is that people will call you an atheist. And maybe, if you value your spirituality as much as you value your wealth, being an atheist is the only choice you have. I don't know." Read by Abie Philbin Bowman ******************************************************************************************************************** from “The Alchemist” “What’s the fifth obligation?” the
boy asked. “Mecca is a lot farther away than the Pyramids. When I was young, all I wanted to do was put together enough money to start this shop. I thought that someday I’d be rich, and could go to Mecca. I began to make some money, but I could never bring myself to leave someone in charge of the shop; the crystals are delicate things. At the same time, people were passing my shop all the time, heading for Mecca. Some of them were rich pilgrims, travelling in caravans with servants and camels, but most of the people making the pilgrimage were poorer than I. “All who went there were happy at having done so. They placed symbols of the pilgrimage on the doors of their houses. One of them, a cobbler who made his living mending boots, said that he had travelled for almost a year though the desert, but that he got more tired when he had to walk through the streets of Tangier buying his leather.” “ Well, why don’t you go to Mecca now?” asked
the boy. “You dream about your sheep and the Pyramids, but you’re different from me, because you want to realize your dreams. I just want to dream about Mecca. I’ve already imagined a thousand times crossing the desert, arriving at the Plaza of the Sacred Stone, the seven times I walk around it before allowing myself to touch it. I’ve already imagined the people who would be at my side, and those in front of me, and the conversations and prayers we would share. But I’m afraid that it would all be a disappointment, so I prefer just to dream about it.” That day, the merchant gave the boy permission to build the display. Not everyone can see his dreams come true in the same way. Read by Peter Geoghegan ******************************************************************************************************************** from: The Ancient Sage If thou would’st hear the Nameless,
and wilt dive Read by John D’Arcy
What is Prayer? Why do we Pray? I often have difficulty believing that prayer really
changes anything except my own receptivity to grace. I can agree, however,
that my new receptivity changes my actions, shaping a more Spirit-filled
world. For those of us still stinging from unpleasant religious experiences, who have been “bible-bashed”, I encourage questioning. When we reject all images of God, are we really rejecting the historical church’s attempts to limit and prescribe our theology? Or are we, instead, depriving ourselves of the realness, the feltness of God by our rejection of the church? I suspect that God understands our contempt for hypocrisy and applauds our efforts toward real relationship. Some may claim that rejection of organised religion and its doctrine is a sin, but to fail to risk sensing that God exists is probably a greater sin. I encourage these energetic rejections of doctrine, institutions, even of whole faith traditions if necessary. Do not allow religion to remove you from your God. Guard Her jealously, and let Him have as many genders and images as you can imagine. If there could be any agreement as
to a “correct” way
to pray, it might be to be real, to be as authentic as possible in the
expression of prayer. Sometimes the honest prayer is not one of praise
but rather one of anguish and betrayal. A quick browsing of the psalms
will convince you that this has been true for a very long time. Praying
doesn’t have to be nice or flowery in language. It just had to
be real. I found that trying to pray every day was a hopeless endeavour. The more I forced this discipline upon myself, the less I was able to pray. My impulse to pray needs to come from my desire to be with God, to bring a concern before God or gratefully recognise the presence of a God who is in intimate relationship with me. Trying to pray through my intellect, willing myself to pray at 9:43 a.m. because that’s when I made an appointment for prayer....that doesn’t work for me. This experience raises questions for me. By what criteria do I decide that prayer is “working”? What about the traditional advice that a regular, disciplined prayer life is important? I cannot answer these questions. I can only continue to pray as I can, authentically and irregularly, from my heart. Prayer is about living a life, which is rightly ordered in God’s sight. As we try to do this, we live with questions: What am I supposed to do? What is God calling forth in me, in us? How can we know what we are called to do? How can we be sure? Prayer, like walking, is always beginning again. We are human. We drift away. We fall, but prayer catches us again and again, and we walk with God. Read by Maud Robinson ******************************************************************************************************************** from “The Irish Church:
Beyond the Bleak Landscape” Power is a strange force. Often it seems that it is very needy people who seek power. But the tragedy is that once they have it, they cannot be generous with it. Rather than using their power to empower others, they use it to centralise everything around themselves. As always a little clique or palace guard congregate around the centre to reinforce and when necessary protect it. The effect of this feudal model of power is that people are disenfranchised; creative and critical voices are marginalized. This creates the false dialectic of Us/Them situation, which is totally alien to the creational equality of God’s People. Questions and critique seem to frighten the centre. In this way the centre becomes increasingly isolated from the existent and actual consciousness of the culture in which it finds itself. Frequently it seems that the centre is no longer the centre. When the centre deadens, the real energy thresholds move to the margins. Consequently, the margin becomes the real, living centre, the heart. This dilemma is at the root of the vanishing credibility of the Church. Its power structures are feudal. It is that of the pyramid – everyone at the bottom labours under the burden of holding up the man at the top. Reading the Gospel one recognizes that Jesus worked with a totally different notion of power. His incisive and critical spirituality cut into the pyramids of the imperial and religious power of his day. He advocated the inclusive compassion of the circle not the power of the pyramid. Read by Séan Carr
Inquire within, rather than without,
asking: "What
part of myself do I wish to experience now in the face of this calamity?
What aspect of being do I choose to call forth?" For all of life
exists as a tool of your own creation, and all of its events merely present
themselves as opportunities for you to decide, and be, Who You Really
Are. Read by Doreen Groocock
Please God, give me courage which endureth long, a quiet mind and a contented heart and faith in thy work. Let me help others to be happier and more courageous and full of faith and more able to bear their crosses. Let me help them to see the beauty and wonder and glory of the world as I see it and to have quiet and contented and peaceful minds too. Thank you for my special friends, and for all the cavalcade of people I have met who have enriched my life. Thank you for giving me the power of wonder and worship and appreciation of the glory of the world. Thank you for the sun and the rain, dawn and sunset, the moon and the stars and the blackness of night, the wind in the trees, the mountains and snow, ships, the sea in all its moods and birds and their ways, animals and green grass and flowers, and the colours after rain, white roads, springy turf and heather. Thank you for books and a fire and exercise and a warm bath, sleep and dream, laughter and laughing faces, lovely faces and fine bodies and beautiful movement of all sorts. For the satisfaction of work well done - though this comes very seldom - for knowledge and wisdom - which come slowly and for experiences which teach me about life and its meanings. Thank you for making me think about the universe and religion in its widest sense, and let me never be bound down by dogmas. Let me always be true to myself, always honest and sincere in thought, word and deed. Let me be simple and pure in heart. Give me a large sense of humour, and make me tolerant and never unjust, stop me judging others and being critical and let me never be cruel or sarcastic or hasty in word or deed. Don't let me be petty or mean. Make me adaptable and able to fit into other people's ways and atmospheres without jarrings. Give me dignity in growing old; don't let me grow fussy or small in mind as I age. Let me be some use in the world, please. Don't let me indulge in self-pity and don't let me ever become a grumbler. Make me practical without being over-efficient, and allow me always time for dreaming and 'staring' and walking in the country and listening to music and reading and talking and listening to others talking. Give me sound health and let me never be a burden to anyone. Let me always seek to think and find the best in everything and give more than I get. Amen Read by Jennifer Flegg
We all have periods of spiritual malaise, world-weariness, soul-sickness, times when we feel oppressed by life, or disengaged from things, and we can’t quite fathom the reason why. At such times writes William J Bausch (in his book The Yellow Brick Road), we should ask ourselves four questions. Question 1: When did I stop singing? Question 2: When did I stop dancing? Question 3: When did I stop being enchanted by stories? Question 4: When did I become uncomfortable with silence? So, when you are feeling out of sorts spiritually, when “the world is too much with you”, ask yourself these four questions. They just might help you to identify the problem. Read by Charles McCaw ******************************************************************************************************************** Clue of the New Pin The correspondence from and about the Dean of Clonmacnoise has made us think about Jesus. In the Encyclopaedia Brittanica Liberalism is described as a movement in modern Protestantism, which emphasizes freedom from tradition and authority. This does not mean that we reject all the fine Christian and Biblical traditions but rather that we should read them with an enquiring and lively mind rather than with one of acceptance without question. None of the writings in the Gospels state that Jesus ever requested his followers or disciples to repeat prayers after him. His teachings were practical parables of the day. Unitarian thought and Liberalism run hand in hand. Though Jesus had been dead several hundred years before the word “Unitarian” appeared, the movement that eventually acquired that label could be said to have begun shortly after his death. Then, many who knew Jesus, talked of his humanity and teachings while others who had only heard of him emphasized his divinity and began to construct a Religion that was more about him than of him. Perhaps the words of Edgar Wallace – noted English novelist and dramatist (1875-1932) – are relevant and in a novel way strike home simple but important messages. Clue of the New Pin - Edgar Wallace Churches and sects and religions of all kinds are like rivers. God is like the water that flows down the mountainside and fills the brooks and rivers. There come certain people, usually men, who bottle the waters; some in ugly bottles, some in beautiful ones; and these bottles they sell, saying, “Only this water will quench your thirst”. That it does quench thirst we will not deny, but the water is often stale and flat and the sparkle has gone out of it. You can drink better from the hollow of your hands, kneeling by the brook. In China the water is bottled with mystic writings and flavoured with cinnamon and spices. Here, in England, it is bottled without much regard to the water, but with punctilious care as to the shape of the bottle. I always go to the brook.” Read by George McCaw
The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and the noise of desire—we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the eardrums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions—news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and desire. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose—to prevent the will from ever achieving silence. Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass-production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving—to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its divine Ground. Read by Pam Molony
Joyce Collin-Smith was very caught up with what I think was the zeitgeist of the sixties, the consciousness-raising movements, which proliferated at that time. Over more than 50 years she dived with considerable zest into many well-known self-development movements and esoteric sects. As well as following several other gurus whom I hadn't heard of before reading her book, she recalls the heady period when the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi swept up the Beatles in the flower power era - she was a member of his household and drove him around London in the early days when he had few devotees. Joyce Collin-Smith's approach to seeking for spiritual truth may be very different from that of many people in this congregation, but what I admire about her is her deep commitment to the search itself, having been disillusioned again and again by masters and gurus she continued her search unabated moving on to more personal and individual efforts towards psychological and spiritual development. She became a writer and speaker, developing her interest in the occult and the paranormal and still worked as an astrological consultant at the age of 70. Call No Man Master
I tend to think of Systems and Ways as climbing frames. The climbing frames are good. Like the masters, they exist to be grown out of. In the end, every one has to make his own way into the jungle of ideas, and to some the years in the wilderness may be long. Learning to endure the arid deserts, the slough of despond, even to travel through the valley of the shadow of death, requires endurance. Apparent signposts often turn out to be just mirages, and if followed lead you back again whence you came. Truth lies within the seeker. Once you begin to take responsibility for you own development you are on the Way. But as Krishnamurti said: “Truth is a pathless land”. In truth the Way is always your own. In solitude and with an inward promise, you make the first step, even if it is over a precipice of time and circumstance, saying “for this I give myself” And miraculously you are caught in the arms of Fate and turned to face reality. Read by Maud Robinson
from: Now is the Time - Spiritual Reflections The two pieces below are very relevant to our everyday lives as 'polishing the mirror' can really open our eyes to the very unsettled nature of our lives, the constant seeking for ways of making our lives perfect whether it be materially or spiritually (if only I had this or did this), the regular and predictable thought patterns that do their utmost to reinforce our own particular view of the world, the desire for praise and reassurance, and most importantly the slow but steady realisation that all we have, and all we need is the constant "now" to live our lives in a happy and fulfilled fashion. We don't escape our pain, however we become more aware of it and its causes and are in a better position to handle it, compared with a situation where we ignore it or delude ourselves as to its causes, hoping desperately for it to go away which of course it never does. Therefore it is not a panacea. However, if there is anything worth persevering with in life, it must be the ongoing effort to live in the present moment by continually returning to the "now" no matter how often we have to do it and how difficult it is, after all it is all we have got. We will regularly drift off seduced by our dreams and the way we would like life to be but "now" will always welcome us back and allow us come to terms and accept our life as it is, if we are prepared to engage with the present moment. It seems such a simple thing to live in the "now" because you could argue where else do we live, but most of us myself included, do not experience life directly as regularly as we should, because we get swamped and overwhelmed by the ego driven thought processes which if we let them, can tyrannically direct and control our lives to our own detriment and to the detriment of all those around us. from: Now is the Time - Spiritual Reflections Polishing the Mirror Gradually, you can increase the amount of time you spend deliberately focusing on the present moment, and eventually it will become something that you will find yourself doing all day. This practice of noting our states of mind as they arise keeps us present to the moment. In the Zen tradition, this is called 'polishing the mirror'. The greater our consciousness of each moment, the more we can begin to let go of the stories that control our behaviour and consequently we can develop a greater clarity and better vision. Learning to practice this living in the present moment is a slow process and it can be a daily struggle to do it, but once you move into it and make it part of how you live, it brings extraordinary peace. Surprised by Joy Occasionally, when we least expect it, a grace comes to us, and like Wordsworth we are 'surprised by joy'. A fresh eye looking at the ordinary is the greatest surprise of all. The surprise of the unexpected will wear off, but the surprise of freshness never wears off. When we live in the now, life is full of freshness: for us then, 'There lives the dearest freshness/Deep down things' as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it. That freshness that Hopkins talks about is what the great religions of the world have all recognized in one way or another as a divine energy at the heart of things, what the Tao calls 'grace and what the great medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart calls 'isness' When we are seeing with the heart, we discover that there is no part of life that does not contain a surprise. Nothing is too simple or too small, nothing is too mundane, nothing is too ecstatic or exalted, nothing is too ordinary or extraordinary - all of life becomes full of potential, full of surprise. But freshness is, paradoxically, an acquired perception. We have to train ourselves to see it, like 'a mist from the breath of a wind/a tarnish that goes at the touch of a hand' as Robert Frost said; like e.e. cummings, we have to be able to say 'the eyes of my eyes are opened' if we want to see with that fresh eye, that ability to see things anew, as a child sees them. When we have developed the ability to live in the present moment, when we have learned to take time to see with a fresh eye, then celebration becomes a way of life for us. We recognize and accept and greet each person we meet. Oppression of ourselves or others has no place in our mindset. Compassion becomes the foundation of our attitude to others, as we see them, steadily, with a fresh gaze and an open heart. Read by Cathal Sheridan ********************************************************************************************************************
A fitting, fair and cleanly habitation Read by Pam Molony
'Believe in God and you will have to face hours when it seem obvious that this material world is the only reality: disbelieve in Him and you must face hours when this material world seems to shout at you that it is not all. No conviction, religious or irreligious, will, of itself, end once and for all [these doubts] in the soul. Only the practice of Faith resulting in the habit of Faith will gradually do that. People are told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is act as if you did. Do not sit around trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, "If I were sure that I lived God, what would I do?" When you have found the answer, go and do it.' C.S. Lewis. How can we apply the faith-follows-action principle to leading a church, to planning worship, and to nurturing personal faith? First, a top priority for churches must be to make their members active participants, not mere spectators. Many dynamic religious movements today- ranging from sect like the Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons and discipleship-centred communities - share an insistence that all on board be members of the crew. That is easier said than done, but it does provide a criterion by which to evaluate procedures for admitting and maintaining members. As a local church makes decisions and administers its program, it should constantly be asking, will this activate our people and make priests of our believers? If research on persuasion is any indication, this will best be accomplished by direct, personal calls to committed action, not merely by mass appeals and announcements. In worship, too, people should be engaged as active participants, not as mere spectators of religious theatre. Research indicates that passively received spoken words have surprisingly little impact on listeners. Changes in attitude resulting from spoken persuasion are less likely to endure and influence subsequent behaviour than attitude changes emerging from active experience. What's needed is to have listeners rehearse and act on what they hear. When the people sing contribute prayer, read Scripture responsively, take notes on the sermon, utter exclamations, bring their offerings forward they are making the worship their own. Read by George McCaw ********************************************************************************************************************
When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat But now we must have clothes that keep us dry Read by Maud Robinson ********************************************************************************************************************
Does the silence of Ireland's bishops on environmental destruction in their recent Proclaiming the Gospel of Life letter indicate a lack of concern about the issue, asks Father Sean McDonagh. Sunday, October 14th last, was designated as a Day for Life by Ireland's Catholic bishops. In a letter entitled Proclaiming the Gospel of Life, they drew attention to eight signs of what they called the growing "culture of death". Among these were listed the alarming growth in murders, an acceptance of abortion as a normal response to an unwanted pregnancy, and the increase of road deaths due to alcohol and drugs. I am in no doubt about the importance of these issues. Sadly, however, there is not a single mention of environmental destruction - either here in Ireland or globally - in the letter. Does this silence indicate that environmental issues are not high on the bishops' list of priorities? If so, they would appear to be out of step with Pope John Paul. On January 17th, 2001, he told a general audience that "if we scan the regions of our planet, we immediately see that humanity has disappointed God's expectations. "Man, especially in our time, has without hesitation devastated wooded plains and valleys, polluted waters, disfigured the earth's habitat, made the air unbreathable, disturbed the hydrogeological and atmospheric system, turned luxuriant areas into deserts, and undertaken forms of unrestrained industrialisation, degrading the 'flowerbed' - to use an image from Dante (Paradiso XXII,151) - which is the earth our dwelling place." As Christians we believe that life, in all its diversity, is God's greatest gift. The Bible describes the tender care with which God wove the web of life on earth. It is clear that all life is interconnected and interdependent. Today life is found in every nook and cranny of the planet, from the deepest recesses of the oceans to the wonderful diversity and beauty of the tropical rainforests or coral reefs. Until a few decades ago human activity did not push many other species over the cliff into the abyss of extinction. This has changed dramatically, especially with the plunder of the rainforests. Tropical forests cover just 6 per cent of the world's land area but are estimated to contain over half of the planet's species. In 1993 it was estimated by researchers at Harvard University that 27,000 species were being extinguished each year. Others put that figure higher. On November 29th last, on the BBC's State of the Planet programme, David Attenborough said that unless major protective measures are taken now we could lose up to half of the species of our world in the next 50 to 100 years. As a missionary it was my privilege to live for over a decade among the T'boli people in the rainforest of south-eastern Mindanao. I came to appreciate that the silent haemorrhaging of biological diversity is an extraordinary impoverishment for both the human and total life community. Many of the estimated 80,000 species of plant found in the Philippine forests are highly nutritious and could easily be added to the larder of staple foods there and beyond. Extinction would mean this rich potential for new sources of food and medicine will never come to fruition. Species extinction is not just a Third World problem. In Ireland and Britain intensive petrochemical, agricultural, and building programmes has taken a huge toll on the environment. Three species of wild flower - corncockle, corn chamomile, and shepherd's needle - have become extinct in recent years. Until the 1950s clumps of cowslips, buttercups, bluebells and primroses decorated most fields. They have almost all vanished and been replaced by ubiquitous, monotonous rye grass. It is estimated that the number of endangered bird species grew by 50 per cent between 1993 and 2000. The corncrake, yellowhammer, corn bunting, lark, and cuckoo have almost disappeared. Even thrush and sparrow numbers are down significantly. We are literally clearing our skies and silencing the dawn chorus. Experts believe that the disappearance of bird species is due to intensive agriculture and the cutting of hedgerows. The Wildlife Act of 1976 was amended in 1999 and restricts hedge cutting between April 1st and August 30th. To date, as far as I know, there has not been a single prosecution under the Act. County councils are one of the worst culprits. In his address last January the Pope stated that "we must encourage and support the 'ecological conversion' which in recent decades has made humanity more sensitive to the catastrophe to which it has been heading." I take that to mean that a concern for all life ought to be an integral part of Proclaiming the Gospel of Life. Read by Pam Molony
from: Vistas From Inner Stillness Everything written on these pages can be summarized in one admonition found in Psalms 46:10: "Be still and know that I am God". Or, following a continuous thread of truth through cultures and time, we read from the Taoist, Chuang Tzu: "To a mind that is still the whole universe surrenders". Often, the experience of this stillness floods us with a blissful awareness, and then, when we try to express and share these joyful experiences, an equally overwhelming frustration follows. The light of this Christ spirit comes to us from an inner stillness, but we are forced into a verbal prison as we try to express the acquired insights. Words are the greatest handicap to communication. Only when we share ourselves with others can true communication occur, as the following story illustrates. When I was a boy, we lived on the edge of town, and our home was bordered on two sides by lush green fields of Iowa corn that filled me with a security of God's promise of caring. This beauty was the result of a twist of nature that required hot humid summers; uncomfortable, but necessary for corn to grow. We had no home air conditioners in those times and when the corn grew, the stifling heat at night made sleep impossible. People would take their blankets out to the back yard, lay down, and cover themselves with a sheet, hoping for a breeze of salvation, but the breeze never came for it was an Iowa summer and nature's time to grow corn. Sleep might come from exhaustion, but the stillness of the night held the marvel of the stars for me, and I would lay in awe, watching their motions and fall asleep dreaming of a time when I would calculate those motions, and predict their destinies. Late one night as I lay very still, waiting for sleep, I heard the corn grow! It was a popping and cracking sound as the stalks grew millimeter by millimeter. Grass does not grow by continuum, but rather by quantum leaps, and I could hear it! During that period of personal inner stillness, just before unconsciousness, I was gifted with the blessing of hearing a living entity grow. Decades later, I mentioned this experience to Mary Campbell a seasoned Friend in our meeting, and she understood what I was trying to say. She answered with an analogy so that I would know that she knew. Mary said, "It's like a crystal radio set. Isn't it? You put the earphones on and then ever so gently, silently, with great expectancy seek, with a Cat Whisker, a spot on that lead crystal, which connects you with another universe." "The signal is always there, but you have to block out all external sensations to hear it. The signal is so faint, but distinct, it seems to come from a depth inside us. Yes, yes! and that's what the Light is like too, a far distant, signal that only seems weak; yet, it is so clear and distinct when we listen with all we have." These common denominators in our experiences permitted Mary and me to bridge the inexpressible and find understanding of events that were important to us. These common denominators exist for all of us, I believe, and if we are to convey our understanding of important events in our lives, we must reach out with our experiences and expose ourselves, our feelings, to others who are kind, who are receptive, and who are seeking answers to their life's quest. Glimpses of the multiple facets of this world arrived from deep inside me at a time when I was transfixed in a state of silent awe of the power and beauty of nature. Read by Maud Robinson ******************************************************************************************************************** The Big Bang In the beginning God made the Big Bang Read by Kevin Robinson ******************************************************************************************************************** --from Babylon 5, season
5, episode 1, “No Compromise” The universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice. It is the small still voice that says, Read by Kevin Robinson
“I give you the end of a golden string; One day during my last term at school I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song, which can only be heard at that time of the year at dawn or at sunset. I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked on I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and again I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before. If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing I could not have been more surprised. I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe, which come over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God. These are the words with which I tried many years later to express what I had experienced that evening, but no words can do more than suggest what it meant to me. It came to me quite suddenly, as it were out of the blue, and now that I look back on it, it seems to me that it was one of the decisive events of my life. Up to that time I had lived the life of a normal schoolboy, quite content with the world as I found it. Now I was suddenly made aware of another world of beauty and mystery such as I had never imagined to exist, except in poetry. It was as though I had begun to see and smell and hear to for the first time. The world appeared to me as Wordsworth described it with "the glory and the freshness of a dream". The sight of a wild rose growing on a hedge, the scent of lime tree blossoms caught suddenly as I rode down a hill on a bicycle, came to me like visitations from another world. But it was not only that my senses were awakened. I experienced an overwhelming emotion in the presence of nature, especially at evening. It began to wear a kind of sacramental character for me. I approached it with almost a sense of religious awe, and in the hush, which comes before sunset, I felt again the presence of an unfathomable mystery. The song of the birds, the shapes of the trees, the colour of the sunset, were so many signs of this presence, which seemed to be drawing me to itself. As time went on this kind of worship of nature began to take the place of any other religion. I would get up before dawn to hear the birds singing and stay out late at night to watch the stars appear, and my days were spent, whenever I was free, in long walks in the country. No religious service could compare with the effect, which nature had upon me, and I had no religious faith which could influence me so deeply. I had begun to read the romantic poets, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, and I found in them the record of an experience like my own. They became my teachers and my guides, and I gradually gave up my adherence to any form of Christianity. The religion in which I had been brought up seemed to be empty and meaningless in comparison with that which I had found, and all my reading led me to believe that Christianity was a thing of the past. An experience of this kind is probably not at all uncommon, especially in early youth. Something breaks suddenly into our lives and upsets their normal pattern, and we have to begin to adjust ourselves to a new kind of existence. This experience may come, as it came to me, through nature and poetry, or through art or music, or it may come through the adventure of flying or mountaineering, or of war; or it may come simply through falling in love, or through some apparent accident, an illness, the death of a friend, a sudden loss of fortune. Anything which breaks through the routine of daily life may the bearer of this message to the soul. But however it may be, it is as though a veil has been lifted and we see for the first time behind the façade the world has built round us. Suddenly we know that we belong to another world, that there is another dimension to existence. It is impossible to put what we have seen into words; it is something beyond all words, which has been revealed. There can be few people to which such an experience does not come at some time, but it is easy to let it pass, and to lose its significance. The old habits of thought reassert themselves; our world returns to its normal appearance and the vision, which we have seen fades away. But these are the moments when we really come face to face with reality; in the language of theology they are moments of grace. We see our life for a moment in its true perspective in relation to eternity. We are freed from the flux of time and see something of the eternal order, which underlies it. We are no longer isolated individuals in conflict with our surroundings; we are parts of a whole, elements in a universal harmony. This, as I understand it, is the "golden string" of Blake's poem. It is the grace, which is given to every soul, hidden under the circumstances of our daily life, and easily lost if we choose not to attend to it. To follow up the vision which we have seen, to keep it in mind when we are thrown back again on the world, to live in its light and to shape our lives by its law, is to wind the string into a ball, and to find our way out of the labyrinth of life. Read by John D’Arcy
Under the surface of flux and fear there is an underground
movement, And of these is the Kingdom - These, as being themselves, are apart from not each other
Read by Bridget Spain
Pensive, on her dead gazing, I heard the Mother of All, Read by Sheila McDonald |
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