Aberdeen Unitarian Church
CALENDAR
FEBRUARY 2009
FOREWORDWhen I was a youngster, we had two neighbours living either side of us, one was called Wexie and the other Mexie.. As I slouched past them on the first morning of a new school term each of them in turn would inevitably greet me with, 'Weel, laddie, that's the holidays aa ower again is't. Back tac porridge and aul claes again.' For sometime the point of this traditional North-east pleasantry eluded me. I would never be sent to school in aul claes, and porridge I disliked intensely. Returning to the classroom was bad enough after a few weeks of freedom, and the thought of porridge for breakfast, dinner and supper plunged me into a state of alarm and despondency. Eventually, of course, I got the point: it was a figure of speech, metonymy, meaning our normal work-a-day routine was being restored. Routine, 'the same old same old', the ordinariness of every-day things tend not to prompt expectations of excitement and glamour. We don't expect to be dazzled by the commonplace or swept off our feet by the humdrum. Nevertheless, the ordinary is the foundation upon which most of us build our lives and most ~f us are lucky enough to have created for ourselves a niche with which we are comfortable. We feel confident in the presence of the familiar and competent in exercising a well-learned routine. What would be the point of learning anything, otherwise. There is nothing more familiar to us than our mother tongue, and while we admire the ingenuity and originality of poets, if we were not all using the same language, how could we conduct the ordinary business of the day? Communication is absolutely basic, yet, like so many more of the commonplace things of life, is taken for granted. The necessities of life always seem so ordinary ...until. of course, they are withdrawn! It occurs to me what we need in our multi-ethnic, multicultural, pluralist societies is more emphasis on the ordinarinesses that we all share. We all have to earn a living to supply our basic needs; we all use the same services, medical, financial; the same utilities, water, electricity, transport; we all want to feel safe and secure. We all need to love and be loved; we all need reassurance that we are significant on an eternal scale; we all need to feel our life is meaningful. The ordinary things in our lives are more numerous than the exotic and strange, and yet it is what is unique or different in our various cultures that we choose to highlight. If only cooperation and tolerance were commonplace in our world, instead of differences and prejudices! Routine, however, sometimes contradicts itself. It startles us by generating a new and exciting concept that wc had not antic~paied. In. the twinkHng of all eye aii is changed. Who would have thought that the routine processes of D.S. politics would have launched Barack Obama upon a prejudiced and strife-torn earth! In the next few years it may be that the exercise of justice, cooperation and compassion may indeed become routine in the dealings between the various races, nations and religions of the world. If 'porridge and auld claes' were to signify peace and well-being for all then few of us would regret returning to such a routine. Wm. S. Stephen (Editor) Email: william134@btinternet.com or editor@aberdeen-unitarians.org.uk Tel: (01224) 317450 PASTORAL GREETINGSWe send greetings to our members who are ill or infirm or house-bound. You were in our thoughts over the Christmas period and we have you in mind every time we meet as a congregation at worship and on social and leisure occasions. Your happiness and well-being continues to be our concern. Congratulations to Dorothy and Alan Prosser who have become grandparents for the first time and to great-grandfather Eric Foote. Their daughter Sara gave birth to her daughter, Sophie Cameron Reid (8lbs 4ozs.) on 28th November 2008. We wish Sophie and her parents, Sara and Allan the very best of fortune in the years ahead. Sophie has already attended church and may be seen photographed on the back page of this Calendar. We send many happy returns to grandfather, Alan, who has just celebrated his 60th birthday. We also congratulate Sue and Bill Good who have also joined the ranks of grand parents. Their daughter, Alix, gave birth to a daughter, Thea Grace Parley (7Ibs. 90zs.) on December 2008. We send Alix, Craig and Thea Grace our best wishes for a happy future. Congratulations to Karen Ortega and to Mark Stephen who were married at Eastwood House, East Renfrewshire, on 29th December 2009. The marriage Service was conducted by Wm. S. Stephen. We send the happy couple our best wishes for their future together. Our website, www.aberdeen-unitarian.org.uk, which is operated by Alex Speed, has a wealth of information about our church, including the current calendar and services recorded live in church by Bill Good. Alex set up our website a number of years ago and we would like to thank him for all he does in developing it and keeping it up to date. The Induction of the Rev. Maud Robinson into the charge of St. Mark's Unitarian Church, Edinburgh, will take place on the afternoon of Saturday 21st February. Aberdeen Unitarians wishing to attend will be made most welcome. ANNUAL GENERAL MEETINGThe Annual General Meeting of our Congregation will take place in Church on Sunday 29th March at 10.30am. The Annual Report and Accounts will be available before this meeting. Members of organisations who traditionally furnish reports for this document should hand them to the Church Secretary by 15th February. The Annual Subscription currently £25.00 or £12.50 (unwaged), is now due and may be paid to Kathleen Bruce, our assistant treasurer. Members are reminded that their subscriptions must be paid before they may exercise a vote at the A.G.M. The following Committee Members retire by rotation but are eligible for re-election: Rhona Stewart, Kathleen Bruce, Bill Good, Bill Stephen. Names of candidates for the vacant places on the committee, along with those of proposer and seconder should be added to the list on the Church Notice Board. The consent of potential Nominees should be sought before their names are added to this list by Proposer and Seconder. A Nomination Meeting to receive these names will be held after the Service on Sunday 15th March 2009. Treasurers of Church societies etc. should close their accounts as from 31st December 2008 and hand them to our Accounts Examiner, Dr. Eric Naylor, as soon as possible. MISCELLANEOUSMembers who subscribe to the 'The Inquirer' or 'Unitarian' are reminded that the annual subscription is now due and may be paid to Kathleen Bruce. 'The Inquirer' costs £18.20 and 'The Unitarian' £3.60. The 'Smarty Tube' collection for Church funds organised by Alex Speed has so far raised £60.00 'Smarty Tubes' are available at the back of the church and are a handy way of saving up small coins. The Women's League members are organising a Sales Table for their fund-raising project, 'Sight Savers' on Saturday, January 31st. A Table Top Sale has been arranged for Saturday 28th.February, at 2.00pm. Tables may be hired for £5.00 each. Kathleen Bruce and Kathleen McGregor are the organisers and will provide potential patrons with more information. The Annual Scottish Country Dance arranged by Kathleen Bruce and the Terrace Scottish Country Dancers will take place on Saturday 7th. February, at 7.30pm. LEARNING TO LIVEBy Bill Stephen In a newspaper interview a few months before his death, the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, said he was now devoting his time to learning how to live. This seemed a surprising remark from a man well into his seventies who had spent his career at the centre of European intellectual life and whose thinking hadinfluenced his contemporaries, academics, writers and policy-makers, not only in France, but throughout the world. What could there be left of human life for him still to learn? The life process itself does not have to be learned at all. It is purely instinctive. No act of ours brought us into being; and all we had to do to set our life in motion was to take that first breath as an independent creature, and our instinct did that for us. 'Learning to live.' What could Jacques Derrida have meant by it? However, it occurred to me that if we do look at the process of living as something to be learned, we may come to see our spirituality in a new light, to reach a new understanding of it, as it applies both to each one of us as individuals and to us as a religious community. Life as we know is unpredictable, because we are on this earth by sheer chance. Evolution is an irresponsible parent It is a slap-dash artist It creates, but it never thinks anything through to a conclusion. Whether its creations survive or not, or how they survive or how long they may survive or how they may get on with each other does not concern it. And so we have nature red in tooth and claw, one species preying on another, all sorts of diseases, infirmities and disabilities, natural disasters and bodies that function in specific environments only, as evolution works with what is available at the time, and within the climatic and physical conditions of the time. As we learn to live with what evolution has bequeathed us, we encounter the absurd situation that we are at war with our own creator. Evolution, irresponsibly generous as it has been towards us, has saddled us with many intractable problems which have caused us as a species and as individuals no end of misery. Evolution has made it possible for us to develop great intelligence. An aspect of this intelligence is self-awareness. Each one of us knows that we are dominated by our own awareness of ourselves. We are essentially selfish creatures. As such we know that our period of personal consciousness is limited and most of us do our utmost to protect and if at all possible extend our life-span, that is our period of awareness. We know about eternity, that we are presently living in that eternity, but that we only have a certain period of consciousness to appreciate this fact As a result we are aware of beginnings and ends, of extremes and of the passage of time, since time is a function of consciousness. This awareness of chronological extremes, the beginning and the end of the life of ourselves and everything else, by analogy, I think, leads to an knowledge of other extremes, of perfection, of ideals, of accuracy, of heaven and hell, of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, of for and, .against, of white or black, of plus or minus, a binary arrangement that seems to dominate our thinking and decision making. Evolution does not seem to deal in accuracy and individualities but in approximations and generalisations. A species may work well enough to survive at least for a time, but the fate of any particular individual of that species is left entirely to chance. No individual is given a right to survive. Evolution accepts no responsibility. This, however, conflicts with our self-awareness. Above all we are individuals, and our fate is vitally important to us. Each of us has a strong sense of ourselves and we have our ideals, our values, and our concepts of perfection and beauty. We want to be fit, healthy, energetic, active, fulfilled physically and emotionally, but evolution is indifferent to our wishes and so we are what we are, not what we would prefer to be. As a species we expend vast resources in pursuing our ideals, by means of medical science, better nutrition, better housing, improved hygiene etc. but in the end it is always up to the individual to make the best of his or her lot. Evolution's irresponsibility troubles us deeply. Our sense of responsibility, no doubt derived in first instance from our instinct for parenthood, caring for children, is I am sure associated with our need for meaning. Creating life, whether on a multiple species basis or on a single individual level, seems to us to demand a sense of responsibility towards what has been created and a reason for creating it. We instinctively expect some kind of order, some shaping entity, some authority which understands what this existence business is all about and knows its purpose. This then is the situation we find ourselves in. How have we learned to cope with it? The mess we are in at the moment would suggest our education has barely begun. Evolution made us greedy, competitive and aggressive in order to survive as individuals. However, we are also gregarious creatures, programmed to live in communities for our own protection. Unfortunately, from time to time, the desires of the individual clash with the decisions of the communities. Furthermore communities acquire the instincts of their members and in their turn become greedy and aggressive and go to war with each other. Our fertile imagination is adept at producing solutions for our problems, but these solutions, be they political, philosophical, economic or religious, also compete with each other for influence and domination and so create yet more excuses for hostility. Every new year we assert our desire to establish peace, harmony and justice throughout the earth, but every year other less visionary priorities intervene, and so ideals, as usual, give way to the pressing importunity of self interest. We, Unitarians, are members of a spiritual community. We reflect the experience of our species. We have instincts, feelings, needs, physical, emotional and spiritual to be satisfied. We also realise we are existing in eternity and that through no effort of our own, for a short term, we have been given a window through which we may observe the unfolding landscape of eternity. I find this an overwhelming thought, that the whole of creation is accessible to us if we have the imagination to realise it. Last weekend, yet another sociological survey of 18 to 25 year-olds, discovered that 20% of them did not consider life worth living. They complained that they did not have the money to support the life-style they aspired to, they did not receive the prestige and respect they yearned for and they felt rejected by society. This is the legacy of rampant materialism, which is itself only a symptom, and not a cause of frustration and disillusionment. Materialism, the desire to gratify the appetite for personal possessions and the prestige that riches bring, is an attempt to satisfy the hunger left by spiritual starvation, just as people who are unhappy may eat for comfort. ,,. The spirituality bequeathed to us' by evolution acts as a counterweight to our physical appetites and keeps us in balance. Just as the love of family and friends makes us feel wanted and important to them, so the instinct that we are significant on a metaphysical and eternal scale gives us the spiritual fulfilment that we all need. Without this spiritual counterweight we are like frightened children, abandoned by our parents and lost in a hostile wilderness. We suffer an agony of loneliness, of excruciating redundancy, of utter pointlessness. It is I think the objective of the service of worship to create a corridor from our pre-occupation with the temporal and material to the spiritual, so that we can be aware of being valued on an eternal scale. Bear in mind that eternity is now, and that sense of belonging is now. We are part of all that is. We have always been part of all that is, as pure energy. Now for a time we are energy blessed with senses and intelligence and self-consciousness. 'Let there be light', declared the writer of Genesis, so bringing consciousness into being. We are that light. Without our consciousness the universe is a place of dark unknowing, and existence is unaware of itself. We arrive at church as a congregation on a Sunday morning in all kinds of moods; some of us are happy, some sad, some fulfilled or frustrated or complacent or anxious, generous or covetous and so on. Our moods come and go like fitful sunshine on a rainy day. Each of us exists in our own universe which we may describe to others but into which no one else may ever enter, such is the exclusive nature of subjectivity. Our moods are ephemeral, the froth that irritates the surface of our mind. We wish to seek deep within us that assurance, that confidence that however fleeting our consciousness, we have a validity, a significance as who we are, acknowledged by the source of all being. This awareness of our one-ness with all creation, produces in us a moral sense which imposes upon us responsibilities towards the community of all living things. The words, the music and the 3i1ences of our worship are aimed at helping us reach that ineffable source of being which is couched in the depths of our own being, and also to encourage us to bear in mind our moral obligations to each other and to all living things. Looking at the concept of life, in this way, as something that has to be learned, has I think revealed the fundamental truths of religion, our need for love, our need for meaning, our need for responsibility, our need for order. Over the coming year I hope our services will continue, in some measure, to help us meditate upon these truths. GENERAL ASSEMBLY ANNUAL MEETINGSThe G.A. Annual Meetings will take place from Wednesday 15th April to Saturday 8th April 2009, at the University of Chester. The total cost, including B.& B. and all meals and fees will be £279.00 per person. The costs of travelling to and from Chester and of cancellation insurance, which the G.A. strongly advises everyone to purchase, are not included in this sum. Forms of application, which should be returned to Essex Hall before 13th February 2009, are available from the Church secretary. WOMEN'S LEAGUE PROGRAMMESFEBRUARY 2009
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