The theologian Peter Rollins said somewhere that whenever the traumatised mind can conceive of a catastrophe the catastrophe has in some senses already happened. 

I thought of this when I was discussing the future of this church, how precarious it is, like any church it is sustained by the work of its congregation, and of course we can’t afford to be complacent, this time of worship is not the time to consider profit and loss reports, but in our discussion my friend said I don’t want to be part of the last congregation of Mill Hill, and it struck me of course that we are the last congregation, as every congregation is a part of the first congregation that Richard Stretton founded, so every member is also participating in the last congregation… because the end is ongoing, and we are the last people of Adam, so to speak, just as we are inheritors of the first breath, lively in the original waters of creativity, in the aspect of eternal to quote a phrase: “In the infinite mosaic of history each piece has its unfading and its perpetual function and effect. A woman who understands herself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to her, and knows that she cannot wholly die, even if she would; for when the moment of her life is over, the truth of her life remains. The fact of her is part forever in the infinite context of existence.” George Santayana from his preface to Spinoza’s Ethics (J. M. Dent and Sons, 1910 and with thanks to Andrew J Brown) …

And so in the light of the eternal we are the Fall, we are the last congregation, the taste of the fruit of temptation lingers in our mouths, the shadow of self awareness, our knowledge of all human vulnerability, our intimate awareness of our own nakedness, our compelling need to rationalise, to find language that can dress up our minds sufficiently to piece out and subdivide our own complexity, to think therefore and be, or think we are because we think, to think that thinking makes it so, and in our ‘enlightenment’ of thought to have become dislocated from our original relationship to nature, truth, life, love – call it what you will, I’ll say God if you don’t mind, God who comes like an anxious parent sleepless on the landing asking ‘Where are you?’ And in our hiding, naked and afraid, we fail to call back ‘Here am I’… instead we keep on obsessive with our relentless work of destruction… 

Think for a minute how we dress ourselves, first in fig-leaves, in textiles woven from plants, and next in a fashion industry that’s built on slavery. The weaver Rosa Smitt said when we worked together on City Square that every piece of clothing you have has been hand-made. No machine is capable of entirely manufacturing an item of clothing. Think of that and the prices we pay for clothes, how little we must offer for the piece work that’s done. Or think of the woollen trade in this country, of the lime kilns that still pepper the countryside reminding us of the processes for fixing dye, think of the accumulation of wealth and the emergence of the nation state, think of naval power and what we did with it, of the cotton trade, woven up with the slave-trade, that dreadful trade which rose up awful to parallel ‘the age of enlightenment’. At the very time when our philosophers were announcing our freedom from the ignorance of former ages, discovering that evolution not creation was the foundation of life, that power could be released from the seams of carbon that had long lain dormant in the tunnels of the earth, the ascent of man, in clouds of smoke, to dominate in the grim glory of death … 

This Friday and Saturday were Rosh Hashanah in the Jewish faith, and now we enter into Days of Awe, so we will turn from Fall to Atonement, 

And I thought to end with these lines of beginning 

A couple sharing a sunny secret

alone together while making good…

Though we live in a world that dreams of ending

that seems always about to give in

Something that will not acknowledge conclusion

insists that we forever begin…

from Brendan Kenelly’s poem Begin