Futility and Other Life Lessons

A service titled ‘Futility and Other Life Lessons’, led by Rev. Sarah Tinker, with readings from Heidi Ferid and Brian Ellis, and music from Jack Campbell.

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 2:20

Welcome. Welcome to this, our house of love. Welcome in the spirit of love, in the spirit of openness, in the spirit of reverence. Here may we revere God. Revere life. Revere one another. Here may we find peace, rest, comfort and challenge. In this time and place, may we find community and meaning. Here may we know we are loved, accepted and encouraged to be all that we were born to be. So know that you are welcome here, no matter who you are and wherever you have been. Welcome to this, our house of love. So good morning everyone, and welcome to this Sunday gathering of Kensington Unitarians. Opening words from my friend and ministry colleague Danny Crosby from Altringham up north. Welcome to those of you joining us online this morning. Welcome to those of you here in person at Essex Church in London. And a special welcome to those of you listening to this service as a podcast or watching the video sometime in the future. I hope life is treating you well wherever you are. If we've not met before, I'm Sarah Tinker and I would like to be with you today when we're going to be exploring some aspects of one of my favourite topics, futility. Now, like all Unitarian gatherings, my thoughts about this are simply suggestions to help us explore what it means to be alive and human. So I hope there'll be at least something in this next hour that will be helpful in your own lives. And the invitation now is to just take a moment to settle in the here and now of this moment. It's a time that has never been before. And this gathering this gathering is in itself unique and unrepeatable. So that sounds special, doesn't it? Let's take one of those conscious breaths if we like doing that kind of thing. Just gently breathing in and out. And on the on in breath, we might connect with that which we hold to be of greatest worth. And as we breathe out, we might release anything that we feel ready to put to one side for a while. Those niggles, those concerns, thoughts about the rest of our day, or what happened in the past. Anything that keeps us from being present with ourselves, with one another, and with that which we hold to be divine. It's connecting us with progressive, Unitarian, Unitarian Universalist communities, and indeed all communities the world over. Maureen Killoran writes It matters. It matters that we remember that each one of us walks this chilly world in some way as a stranger. It matters that we remember that the purpose of the community is to welcome the stranger in from the cold. So may our chalice flame burn brightly and warmly now within our hearts, that all may feel included in this, our shared journey of life. And I'm going to invite you all to sing now our first hymn. It's in this green hymn book, which uh is looking old now if you're here in person, but it's full of great great words and great tunes, often tweaked by the Unitarians to be more inclusive, and I do appreciate it for that. So this first hymn is number 76, the green book in the cupboard at the back, and it's called Immortal Invisible. Uh let's have a thing. Our human hearts ache for the suffering of others. And for the little that we can do to improve things. Yet may we do the little we can do. And may we educate ourselves to better understand the sources of suffering. And let us pray that leaders of our world be inspired by the possibility of peace rather than war. In a moment of quiet now, let us offer up those private hopes and fears of our own hearts, our own lives, and the lives of those dear to us. And to that aspiration let us say together Amen. So may it be. And now I'm inviting Heidi to come and read John's poem, which kind of fitted this theme, didn't it, Heidi?

SPEAKER_03 15:13

In an Analytian orchard. Yes, I can believe that in some distant dimension there are orchards more beautiful than this one, where I might listen to the rhythmic screech of combatant sparrows, the harsh crackle of geese, the high fascetto of cockrulls, the tedious twitter of circumvent swallows. Yes, I can believe there are mountains less harsh with sun bleached canopies, fruits of orange and apicot trees miraculously mature, uninfested with insects, though harmlessly beset with droves of butterflies apparently here extinct Yes, I can believe in nightingales more sonorous and more frequent, of grass less choked with weeds and spring flowers like these blooming perpetually. I can believe in free flowing rivers uncluttered with human detries, of dogs less raccous, of roads never crowded with aggressive cars and ear splitting scooters. Yes, I can believe there is an extraterrestrial paradise, but I refuse to pain for it. I'm happy here, amongst dust and showers and whiffs of decaying fruit, the distant cacophony of motorbikes and discordant sparrows, the frequent chill of a breeze and a skin scorching sun. I am happy here because I am still human, but without my precious mortal body, however could I be? So this it comes from a little booklet that John and Irving John's poems in my images, and if anybody would like a copy, I've got a few spare ones here. It was inspired, of course, by our time. We had a little thinker in the in Ochiva in Andalusia and uh uh yeah, and we spent many, many nice times there. There were, of course, always, as one can imagine, problems like barking dogs and motorbikes and stuff like that. It was nearly paradise, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_05 18:00

That is such a lovely photo of me too on the back.

SPEAKER_03 18:03

Beautiful. It was, it was, yes.

SPEAKER_05 18:06

Thank you, Heidi. Well, we get to sing again now. Um the if you're here in person, um this hymn, the words are on your hymn sheet, which also has a copy of John's poem that you might like to take home with you. And this one is called I am tr We Are Travellers on a Journey.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

It's taken from writings by the famous astronomer Carl Sagan. And he's referring to a particular photo taken of our planet Earth home back in 1990 by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft. You might consider this piece of writing as Sagan's attempt to wake us humans up to our remarkable insignificance alongside the miracle of our existence on our blue planet home. Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone. You ever heard of, every human being who ever was has lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there, on a moat of dust suspended on a zombie. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel, on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of that dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this pale point of light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the earth is where we make our stone. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

SPEAKER_05 25:28

Thank you. Thank you, Brian. So we're moving into a time of meditative quiet now, and there'll be just a few words to lead us into several minutes of silence. Then there'll be a chime from our bell, and that will bring us some music from Jack Campbell, our pianist today. This piece of music I'd not heard before, written by a notable American composer who, Margaret Bonds, highly recommend her work. So let's settle ourselves and get comfy as best we can for a few minutes. And I'm inviting us to consider some of the aspects of life that matter most to us, perhaps sparked by that reading from Carl Sagan of just all that goes on on our planet Earth home. I wonder what our current response would be to the query, what matters most? What matters most to us? But of course, don't feel in any way obliged to follow that suggestion. This is your time. So let's get comfy, perhaps just adjusting how we're sitting. Some people like to straighten themselves and feel their feet on the floor. Others just want to be comfy in their seat. You might like to check your shoulders for any tension that could be eased by a little movement. Nice to think of our bodies resting in these chairs and our feet on the floor, actually here on this planet Earth. You might want to take one of those soothing breaths deep into the belly, allowing the tummy and lungs to expand as they wish. Naturally, no need to force anything. As we breathe out, we might imagine our shoulders relaxing back and downwards, away from our ears. Some people like to soften their gaze or close their eyes as they're entering silence, or maybe focus on the candle flames or the chalice. Let's join in a spirit of quiet now as we consider what matters most in life for us. One of my many annoying habits was to respond to most requests from teachers or parents with a kind of moaning, well, what's the point? This query can be used in reply to so many different requests or suggestions. Tidy your bedroom, what's the point? You know it just gets messy again. Practice these Latin verbs for homework, what's the point? Did any of you go through a similar stage in in your teenage years? I wonder. If not, it's not too late to use that, you know, just to cause trouble. Did you know I think most of us from time to time throughout our lives, just get visited by a kind of sense of life's ultimate futility. What's the point? Now I'm using now a story that is so often used by motivational speakers that it has been had the Mickey take on out of it quite a bit. I'm sure you some of you will have heard it many times before. It seems, though, to have been first written by someone called Lauren Isley in a longer essay, which I think is worth reading. The story became known as the star thrower, you know the one, and it tells of the old man walking along the seashore when he noticed thousands of starfish that had been washed up on the beach overnight. Then he came across a young child picking up starfish, carefully throwing them back into the ocean. What are you doing, child? he asks. Well look, the sun is coming up, the tide's going out, and if I don't throw them back in the water, they're going to die, the child responds. But don't you see though, look, look, this beach is miles and miles long, there's starfish all over it. You possibly, you can't possibly make a difference. And that young child listens politely, pauses, and then bent down, picked up another starfish, threw it back into the ocean, saying, Well, it made a difference to that one. Now, marine biologists really prefer us to take a starfish back to the water carefully and submerge it rather than just throwing it. But apparently, if it is still alive, it's certainly worth a try to save their lives. It's also not recommended that we start picking up jellyfish. So this story of the star thrower, it highlights a delightful aspect of being human, I think, that many of us get motivated by the possibility of doing something helpful for someone else. Not all of us, of course, but I think many of us do want to make a difference if we can. And I reckon that many of us find it easier to be motivated by a cause greater than ourselves, by that possibility of assisting another person or making life better for them. And I think that explains why my most effective doubts of tidying the house come shortly before someone is about to visit. And if people could arrange to visit on about a weekly basis, that would maintain standards where I'd like them to be. Or is it that I just can't bear the thought that they might see the mess I sometimes create at home behind closed doors? It's futile tidying up just for myself because it's just going to get messy again. So I've long been pondering this word, futility in life, and then it came very much to my mind recently. Spent a week on the Azores, which, if you've not managed to visit there, um have a good think before you go. These are small rocky um outcrop islands in the middle of the Atlantic, all formed from volcanic activity over millennia. And we visited a part of one island that had only been created back in the 1950s by the last volcanic eruption. And there I read this story that really made me smile. It told of a volcanic eruption in 1810, 1811, that briefly created a whole new island, quite small, very small in fact. Now the British apparently had always coveted these Portuguese islands of the Azores. And so one of the navies, the British Navy's frigates, rushed towards that small island, planted a Union Jack upon it, and called the Isle Sabrina, which was the name of their ship. Alas, alas, a few months later, the rocky outcrop sank back down into the Atlantic Ocean, taking the flag with it. And its appearance, its disappearance caused quite a bit of teasing of the British in the international press. If only the long-term effects of colonialism and flag waving the world over could be resolved so simply by going back under the water. Oh, that line, that line in the pale blue dot piece that Brian you read so well for us, thank you, it echoes in my mind. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent the understandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. They could plant a flag. Our human endeavors they just seem so very futile. If we take a different perspective from the mainstream narrative. And if we think of our world economic system with its current obsession with economic growth or lack of it, the need for us to consume more, more, more in order for the economy to grow, grow, grow. Yet all of this taking place on a planet of a certain size and with resources that are almost entirely finite. The adverts tell us we really need a new this or a better that. And late-stage capitalism surely has futility written all over it, but hidden behind a frontage that is sparkly and new and exciting, promising people happiness and contentment, if only we managed to get hold of the latest this, that, or the other. When I find myself yearning to buy something new, as I do from time to time, I remember dear old Wordsworth, who spotted all this back in the early 19th century, in the relatively early stages of the Industrial Revolution, and told us all about it in his sonnet, The World Is Too Much Withers, with its hard-hitting line that in getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Let's mutter that next time an advert yet again exhorts us to find joy through buying something. So, as you will well know, philosophers throughout the centuries have been exploring our human feelings of futility in life. On the front of today's order of service here in church, we have a modern picture of the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, condemned to push a huge boulder up a mountain each day, only for it to roll back down and for the task to begin again for all eternity. Oh, haven't most of us had a few Sisyphean times? Isn't that a pleasing word? Sisyphean times in life where tasks are endless and effort is seemingly pointless. Yet the philosopher Albert Camus argued that by embracing the futility and absurdity of existence, choosing it, celebrating it even, we can live fully, joyfully with passion. That's clearly where I've been going wrong with those repetitious household tasks. I must tidy with greater passion and intensity. In sociology classes back in the day, I learned from what was called the philosophy of futility that industrialization made it far more likely that workers would feel alienated from their tasks and would then tend to seek out excitement and novelty through consumerism and through ever-increasing obsessions with entertainment. And isn't that just what's happening to this day in social media, in sports and celebrity culture? And I think we can also sense the hollow core, the emptiness that such entertainments sometimes fail to fill. So thank goodness we live. On a planet so beautiful that we can also be entertained for free in parks and gardens and allotments by birds, plants, and trees, by walking or simply sitting outside, by reaching out to another, holding a hand, and making a phone call. All the more reason then for us to consider deeply how to respond to climate emergency so that there is a wondrous and miraculous natural world for future generations to enjoy and be restored by. I'm really grateful for all the spiritual teachings that I've received over the years on this crucial issue of where and how we can then find purpose in life. I found Buddhist teachings particularly helpful when seeing life as empty and meaningless has then been like a wake-up call that I've needed. If life is inherently empty and meaningless on one level, nothing matters. But it also matters greatly. It matters how we live our lives, how we treat one another, how we share our planet Earth home. No external forces, as far as I know, give our lives meaning or decide our life purpose for us. We then are the meaning makers, and it's for us to shape our lives according to our circumstances and to find a sense of purpose to guide our living. And our individual identities matter a little less once we realise that we're part of the whole. So I hope that all our lives have some activities within them that can be considered futile. Yet they're life-enhancing, they fit with our values. On my list for those are I've got a strange pleasure in recycling anything and everything. I love picking up litter, and if any of you have got some woolen socks that you'd like mending, I'm the go-to person for that task. And also, maybe every life could do with a review process from time to time that encourages to consider any ways of being or thinking that are futile, and it would be a relief to stop. For example, it would ease my troubled mind to stop expecting world politicians to think and behave in the ways that I want them to, and think they should the loving world should. So I look forward to hearing from you what your favourite futilities are in life, and which ones are heading for that recycling bill. Now then, let me just check what we're doing now. It's the announcements. Oh no, it's a hymn. They occasionally let me go and talk in other churches, and they all do it in different ways, so I'm now perpetually wrong footing myself. Oh, but I love this hymn. It's number 209. And it speaks of that perfect realm that John was writing his poem about. Let's sing together. It's number 209, a world transfigured. Ah, well, thank you everybody for making today happen. Thanks for turning up, especially those of you online. It's really lovely to see you there. Thank you to Dear Ramona at the back here for hosting, for you, Lochlan, for co-hosting. Thanks to Jack Campbell for great music, really smashing. Thanks to greeters, readers, and coffee makers. If you're online today, why don't you stay for a chat after the service with Lochlan if you can? And if you're here in person today, do stay for refreshments and good conversation. I want to know what futility means to you. Um tonight and Friday at 7 pm, there's the online heart and soul. And that's a contemplative spiritual gathering. And this week's theme is escapism. Sign up with Jane by email. And do, if you're in town, um do consider coming to the church this Wednesday at 7 pm for an in-person heart and soul gathering. It all began here down in the library, and it's a beautiful way to just uh you know spend spiritual time together in a really prayerful way. I highly recommend that. And it would be great if you could let us know if you're thinking of coming. Um Sonia, you're going to be here next week, no, this Friday, uh, with um the Nia dance class. Everybody's welcome to that. Any level of fitness, it will suit you. And next Sunday, the service will be with your uh Minister Jane Blackhall, a very pleasing title of Something to Say. I'm sure she will have after her holiday. Um after the service next week, we're going to be hosting a screening of the People's Emergency Briefing. I think this is really important. Jasmine, you're organising this, aren't you? Would you want to say something and encourage us all?

SPEAKER_00 52:12

Uh thank you to the patience of those who heard me speak about this several times now. Um but I would like to um speak to it with some fullness. So um a few months back I went to see this film called the People's Emergency Briefing in a Church in Pancras. And uh essentially it's a film that brings together lots of different experts who are speaking to different issues related to the climate crisis, the climate emergency, whatever words you want to use for it. Um and it's presented by well-known wildlife presenter Chris Packham, who is very clear, very enthusiastic. Um the film uh is, I suppose, I would call it a kind of a bridge to reality, by which I mean obviously issues related to the climate are huge, overwhelming, and confusing. I think that this film does really well to sort of clarify where are we, what's going on, and where might we be headed if we don't act now. Um so the film that we we are screening is going to be, it's less than an hour long, and it's going to be followed by a discussion. Um, because in the face of this information, we may be daunted, we may be scared. So the discussion will support us. I think what can we do in our small and perhaps even even if thinking, oh, everything may be futile and the powers are too big. Um thanks for that. Um yeah, so so please do come. I will be um I I suppose Jane will mention it again at the end of service next week. Um it will be at 1 pm. So that means that you will have, if you're coming to service, you have time to go and have lunch, come back, or whatever you need to do. Um it would be really lovely to have any and all of you there. Thank you, Jasmine.

SPEAKER_05 54:09

That's a fine um uh invitation. Um the uh the walking group is uh going to the Lee Valley on the 26th of May. And all these notices, by the way, are on the back of this order of service and they're in the weekly email. So don't think you uh you you can't get this information somewhere else. The Better World Book Club is reading Is This Working? And they're talking about that on the 31st of May. And um really want to encourage people to uh sign up for the online course on how to be a Unitarian. It's such a good course. I may go on it again, it is worth repeating in some ways. Lots of interesting information and conversations to have, and it's going to be uh for people all around the country, so you get to know uh other people. I suggest Oh, I haven't missed the most important one. Well, we're doing this this afternoon, the soonest, the very soonest. It was at the top and I skipped by it. So um we are having our quilting project um as a way of remembering the uh is it 20,000 children, over 20,000 children who have been killed in Gaza, and each of their names is being embroidered onto a square, and uh individuals can uh take on one of these projects. It's so moving to be involved with it. And we're starting at one o'clock, and much help will be given, and just the conversation, even if you don't want to sew the conversation really makes a difference. Thank you. So I think now it's just time for our benediction, and then uh Jack is going to be playing a great tune called Defying Gravity from the musical wiki. So as I extinguish this play. Let's have its warmth and its light remaining in our hearts when we step back out into that world is a soul yearning for love and connection. Since we never know the difference we might make in the life of another, let us be people who stay alert to life's possibilities, to chance events and unexpected encounters, to the miracle of existence, that we truly are.

SPEAKER_04 56:58

So to finish, I'd like to play Define Gravity, which is a song from the musical Wicked. Um so in this song the main character is Alphabet, and she sings it when she discovers that she can fly. And I chose this song because it's about finding the self-belief and the confidence to do what you want to do, even if the circumstances are against you. Thank you.