Our services of contemplative, spiritual worship here at Mill Hill Chapel are acts of resistance to the prevailing culture; We stand between the worlds of finance and retail here in Leeds and offer an alternative narrative to both. Our services are acts of resistance to the prevailing culture because they intentionally acknowledge and centre the sacred.

‘Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity’ says David Whyte in his poem Everything is Waiting for you, and familiarity is the gift of the traditional.

More than at any other time of year each December we re-enact the same rituals, with a great and sentimental affection. I wonder if we can also be alert then to the secret stories that are contained enfolded within them, like immanent spirits?
The deep story of advent is part of this narrative; surprisingly it turns out that advent is not an orgy of consumerism ordained to sit between Black Friday and the Boxing Day sales – it is (who knew) an opportunity to alertness, to wait with discipline until a new awareness can be felt as a present reality in our lives.
And the songs we sing at this time of year are part of the tradition of wisdom to which we belong.
Consider the great power of language, and especially song, as secret store houses of resistance:
Look at this short excerpt from the 1941 film Cassablanca – ‘Knock on wood’.

The brilliant performances led out by Dooley Wilson centre on the congregation at Ric’s Cafe Americaine, in French controlled Algeria during the 1939-1945 War.

On one level the singer is belting out a morale raising song – ‘Who’s got trouble?’ ‘We got trouble!’ ‘How much trouble?’ ‘Plenty trouble!’
In communal song we can band together and belt out our defiance.

But did you also notice in the clip the way the Ric, (played by Humphrey Bogart), hid something in the top of the piano as he walked through the shot? Those are the ‘letters of transit’, the passports that will allow the fugitives to escape to freedom, and they are the crucial element on which the plot of the film turns. They’re why Elsa (played by Ingrid Bergman) has come to the cafe, risking heartbreak and capture, to beg for Ric’s help in her and her new husband’s escape. And its hidden in plain sight that the crucial driver of the film is literally in the piano, freedom is through music.
Cassablanca is one of the great romances of the 20th century, film specialists can be bit stuck up about it but it is one of the most effective of all of the films of its era, the golden era of Hollywood. It was clearly a propaganda film, a piece of ‘agit-prop’, intended to bring America into a European war it was reluctant to get involved with. And look how effectively it understands the use of songs in doing that job –
La Marseillaise
‘Songs form a record of transitional moments in human history.’ Think of the revolutionary song of the French Republic; the Marsellaise, and think of the song of Mary ‘the Magnificat’, with its promise that God will raise up the lowly and send the rich defeated away.
But Cassablanca is quite rightly famous for another song in a different key altogether:
‘As time goes by’

Singing is one of our deep practices, our indigenous technologies – portable thin places where our soul can be reassured and witnessed. And where revolution and resistance, like war or pandemic crisis can be put into their proper perspective: what makes the world turn is not politics or catastrophe but love.

I was talking to someone who works for the NHS, who claimed that one of the drivers of addiction to medicinal drugs is that doctors prescribe drugs for crisis that can be considered spiritual rather than physical: people in transition times in their lives; perhaps they’ve been made redundant and struggle to find meaning without the sense of identity that was given to them by their job, those who become depressed or anxious because their lives lack meaning, who have lost appetite for living, empty nesters who fail to fill the void caused by the loss of family identity or responsibility, those who’s lives change when retirement or failing health bring loneliness, people in transition of all kinds – are being medicalised, and then offered pharmacological support, being offered drugs – but not spiritual resources, not even talking therapies let alone singing, or contemplative reflective or meaning seeking practices like prayer.

Caveat, caveat, caveat: I hope you know by now that I am not against modern scientific responses to physical health crises, pain killers can anaesthetise a broken arm, anti-psychotics can effectively intervene in acute mental health problems, anti depressive medication can allow a sense of balance to return after anxiety or confusion – and those options that modern medicine offer are absolutely invaluable and hugely beneficial, but such help cannot; and must not replace the spiritual importance of witnessing and being heard, seen and accepted in a community such as this one which acknowledges our realities without trying to fix things, and the equal importance of re engaging the sacred as a centre of meaning in our lives.
The founder of the third Viennese school of psychotherapy Victor Frankl developed the theories which he describes in Man’s Search for Meaning and which can perhaps be summarised in the very short aphorism: those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’. In ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ he writes:
“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

The advent period is a time of re-enchantment; a time to reconnect to our deep sources of connection, through tradition, through songs that capture us because of their familiarity, and through the traditional story of love that is embodied; love that takes a human form.
For us to embody love takes time and discipline – and to live this requires the deepest patience, attentiveness, responsibility and wisdom; these are the virtues we must struggle to engage with in our journey together through time.
And this is the most challenging part of the journey: because in our culture, our materialist rational culture, comfort is valued more highly than patience, personal freedom is valued more highly than responsibility, individuality is valued more highly than wisdom and entertainment more highly than attentiveness.
The divine emerges at the meeting place between the soul and the eternal, and we will need traditional practices, durational commitment, real responsibility to the work we are called to; work that takes place over time with deep structure to support it ‘as time goes by’…