While we have been talking about weddings we’ve really been considering our own faith tradition, the way that a service is constructed; its why’s and wherefore’s. 

We began with the experience of arrival, of the importance of transition when we come into contact with the Sacred and Holy – however we conceive that to be, and I want to conclude with a thought about ritual and rationalism.

Ritual is one of the ways that we have to ‘ground’ our experience of the transcendent, to bring the numinous into the felt realm of the body. Hear this, one of the earliest description of it:

 “Jacob left Beer-sheba and went towards Haran.  He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place.  And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the Lord stood beside him and said, ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’ Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’  And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it.  He called that place Beth El…“

Jacob’s Ladder is one of the most famous of scriptural images but the stone beneath Jacob’s head seems to me to be one of the most important, and most overlooked. Note how the stone seems to ground this most mystical and uncorporeal of dreams, the stone is called Bethel, house of God, the stone seems God’s dwelling place to the Biblical imagination – as it does to ours perhaps, certainly we build our churches in stone …

Todmorden Unitarian is a church quite like our own at Mill Hill, I think its Trustees were inspired by this church but it was built on a grander scale; instead of locally quarried pillars they used a Devonian Marble mined from the last in the seam, a quartz stone, very beautiful, and Rik, who works there, told me about an experience he’d had when some wedding designer was trying to wrap the pillars in battery powered fairy lights – the quartz kept draining the batteries. It’s a property of quartz to regulate electrical charge, which is why we have quartz in our watches, and I found it a lovely reminder that stones have qualities we hardly know, hardly discover …

But there it is, we come to a house of stone, a Beth El, a house of God and exchange rings; another elemental material, gold or silver –  to ground the spiritual experience, to bring it into a realm which we can apprehend, to make it real for our bodily selves.

I think we can see all ritual in this way, messages to ourselves to stay grounded, to hold this moment and dwell in it, as a stone that dwells inside eternity, although we seem to be forever hurrying through it…

At every wedding I celebrate, the certificate states that the couple are married “according to the rites of the Unitarians“. So I always take the opportunity to mention the unique quality of the Unitarian tradition: I say that ‘Our free religious tradition values freedom of conscience and says that everyone should take responsibility for their own spiritual journey, although we travel together on the spiritual path…’

Its a heretical tradition, we celebrate our 350th anniversary this year, but all this time, despite building such grand churches its always been on the margins of Christianity because it has insisted in the application of reason to religion.

I want to close by remembering the Jewish philosopher Spinoza, because he has been an inspiration to our tradition (there was even a stained glass portrait of Spinoza in the Unitarian church at Exeter) which has applied reason in its approaches to the divine, and it is in no little part that Spinoza has inspired this appreciation of reason.

Spinoza was a heretic in his own time, coincidentally about contemporary with the building of the first Mill Hill Chapel, but we know in fact that he was at the time collaborating with religious refugees from Britain in Amsterdam who were radical protestants, socinians and quakers and others, so they were much like the community who founded this church. He worked within a community called the Collegiants and they were very closely linked to our own tradition. 

Spinoza was considered a heretic in his own time and for centuries he was blamed for the most terrible of heresies: mainstream Christians called him an atheist (shudders) and for that reason his works were banned and his thinking was outlawed – but our own faith tradition contributed to Spinoza’s return to high regard when Unitarians like James Martineau wrote one of the first appreciations of his work in English and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) translated his work into English. Unitarians recognised him, held up his values, and began to understand the nature of his challenge: they recognised that Spinoza holds Jesus in the highest regard; after all Spinoza writes that Jesus (who he calls Christ) has “a mind far superior to those of his fellow men, nor do I believe that any have been so endowed save Christ. To Him the ordinances of God leading men to salvation were revealed directly without words or visions, so that God manifested Himself to the Apostles through the mind of Christ”… “and it may be said that the wisdom of God (i.e. wisdom more than human) took upon itself in Christ human nature, and that Christ was the way of salvation… [in the Theological Political Tractatus 1:47-51] and so Jesus is for Spinoza a prophet ‘par excellence’, ‘the supreme philosopher’ someone to whom God was revealed directly not by speaking or visions but in direct continuity of mind.

At the conclusion Spinoza’s great work The Ethics (1677), he kaleidoscopes his philosophy into a profoundly theological treatise on the nature of Love as the highest form of ‘Blessedness’, the continuum between the love of God and the love between and within humanity, which calls Jesus commandment to love God and our neighbour as our selves to my mind at least, along with the reflection that this intuition is for Spinoza an intimation of the mind of reality, God or nature. 

‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’

The religious work we do in this ‘beth El’, this house of God, calls us to ground the spiritual (or intellectual) experience, to bring it into a realm which we can apprehend, and make it real for our bodily selves, we can see all ritual in this way, messages to ourselves to stay grounded, to hold this moment and dwell in it, as apostles of the eternal, the infinte percieved not as time, but timelessness, the eternal perceived as love…