A Space of possibility

An address on my induction to the ministry of Bradford Unitarians

When I was a few years into my first ministry, we took a much needed holiday as a family, we went camping in a beautiful part of the Yorkshire Dales, but in the first few days I realised that I didn’t feel good at all, I was dislocated, miserable tetchy and restless (this is an eventuality that is all too familiar to Ann – sorry Ann …)

and added to all my miseries we lost Little Nudgey  ( a giraffe). 

Looking back on it now I realise that being away from the church with all its difficulties made me lose my bearings, and without my sense of myself and my role in life I went into a head spin. 

To try to stabilise myself I felt the need to somehow articulate what it was I thought I was doing or trying to do, and I felt that if I could get it into some form of words I would have something coherent to cling on to. 

As a side note I spent over twenty years as an actor in the theatre which is objectively the most pointless activity a human being can voluntarily do and never once in all that time did I ever feel the need to articulate what on earth I thought I was doing or why, but I digress…

I suppose in corporate terms this would be called a mission statement or a strategic goal and in theological terms it could be called a ‘personal kerygma’ 

After a lot of thought this is what I came up with:

My job is to facilitate encounters with the Divine & Holy. 

Over the years I’ve elaborated it 

“To provide spaces which facilitate participatory encounters with the holy and sacred” …

but every addition is really just decoration –  the main idea has remained essentially the same 

To facilitate encounters with the Holy 

and that was enough for me then, and enough to be going on with.

It has service at its heart which i think is proper to ministry…

But I am beginning a new ministry in a new key and perhaps because I’ve got old in the interim time I suppose I want to ask the question behind the question (which is also what infants do) and ask 

Why? 

To what purpose? What is the reason that such encounters, even if they are possible, are inherently valuable?

I think the answer to this question, like the answer to all good questions, is in the doing, but I think there is a pretty good clue in the luminous piece of writing that Rev’d. Rob Foreman shared by Rabbi Abraham Heshel (The Vocation of The Cantor) 

Do we have a need for encounter with the sacred? 

Sometimes you have to step out of the circle to see what the bubble contains. 

When I worked for 18 months in psychiatric intensive care and acute mental health units I was left without a shadow of doubt that human transformation operates on the level of the soul;

that restrictive and false metaphysics are as damaging as false diagnostics and intrusive sedation and that to heal the soul requires a witness. 

I have seen first hand what happens when people are given the resources to make personal connections with the divine and holy. I know that the psyche has a need to be witnessed in whatever extremes of distress and disorder it finds itself, and that sometimes must include a witness beyond what we rationally can comprehend.

Abraham Heshel asks: “Are the well springs still open in our time?” 

I think that deeper wellspring holds water necessary for human flourishing, I think that without an opportunity of personal and relational encounters with the sacred we are less than our full selves, partial, we are diminished, and wither. I believe that much of our contemporary cultural distress, our pandemics of addiction, anomie & disconnect, our many relational disorders and  our current, endless attempt to find something to fill the void, all stem from the vacuum where encounter with the sacred once provided a sense of meaning and identity and purpose.

The seventeenth minister Richard Baxter described the work of ministry as the the care souls, and the care of the soul, is care for the inner depth of what it means to be human. 

The root of the word holy springs from the same source as the words for health and wholeness and it is in that hope of completeness, of wholeness that we will seek direct and participatory encounter with the Holy, the Divine and sacred at Bradford Unitarians.

Oh we found Little Nudgey… on a bench where we had picnicked the day before, she was in the last place I looked before giving up, staring out across the meadows as the twilight chorus mingled with the mist over the hillside rising towards the blue evening star which receded into the infinite. On the Swale side of Oxnop Ghyll I had an experience I can only share with you now because I was looking for Little Nudgey…