A Unitarian Communion

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Short Reflection (10th October 2010 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

In this short reflection I hope to say something about what communion means to me – or, at least, what it has become in my imagination – and why I am so strongly drawn to this ritual with which I have almost no history or previous personal experience. I struggled to articulate my fuzzy and nebulous thoughts in a way that might make sense outside of my own head! But I’ll attempt to explain…

I want to begin by drawing your attention to the words on the front of your order of service. They are taken from a poem called ‘Separation’ which, for me, points towards the essence of communion. In the poem, an old man hears of the death of a friend, and laments the loss of so many others who were dear to him. He realises that he can now count just four men, who he has known and loved, that remain – and even they are scattered across thousands of miles – no-one is close at hand. Thinking of his beloved friends, he says:

“Longing for each other we are all grown gray; through the fleeting world rolled like a wave in the stream…When shall we meet and drink a cup of wine, and laughing gaze into each other’s eyes?”

The sense of longing and loneliness – and the depth of love – in these words touches me deeply.

I imagine that it is an experience common to many of us at one time or another – when times are good we might feel steady enough, but at other times we may feel so alone in the face of life’s troubles, and that nobody is really there to keep us company as we are “rolled like a wave in the stream”. We may encounter so many people in our day-to-day life, and yet it is rare to go beyond surface things, rare to be truly present and make a deep connection, rare to feel that we know and are known by another, and that we are cared for in some ultimate way.

This resonates strongly with my own sense of what communion might mean – and what it might be able to do for us.

It perhaps shouldn’t be all that surprising that I found my thoughts and feelings about this so difficult to put into words. Maybe whatever-it-is that we’re dealing with in communion – for me, something around the ultimate unity of all-that-is, our often-unspoken love for each other in community, and the cosmic love that holds and permeates us all – is something so deep and powerful that it is best approached obliquely, metaphorically, poetically, or even silently.

For me, the ritual of communion offers a chance to reach out to each other with tenderness – to symbolically cross the boundaries of our separate human selves – to express something simple but profound about the depth of our connection and caring – and to affirm the truth that, ultimately, we are one with each other and with all-that-is. We share each other’s joys and sufferings, and our fates are inextricably intertwined, as part of the interdependent web of all creation.

As we prepare to hold our own communion here today, it feels right that we keep an awareness of what communion meant for our Unitarian Christian forebears – and that we are respectful of what it means today for our brothers and sisters in other churches – and yet one of the joys of our liberal religious tradition is that each generation can take the rituals, symbols, and metaphors that have been handed down to us, and make them our own.

I hope that those of us who are here this morning are able to offer our presence – our “nearness” – as we enter into this precious communion ritual together, or simply sit in loving witness, each bringing our own subtly different understanding of its meaning, and each taking something of worth from the experience in our own way.

 

Reflection by Jane Blackall

An audio recording of this reflection (and two others from the same service) is available: