A Dreamers Odyssey: The Sea is Calling Me

During the last couple of weeks I have felt an overpowering urge to be beside the seaside, to be beside the sea...it keeps on calling me...Something from the depths of my being is crying out to go and stare at that wide open vastness. Or maybe it's a call from beyond...is God calling me?...All I know is that it is an irresistible urge...the sea keeps on calling me.

As I'm sure you've noticed the title of my blog is “I Dream of the Ocean”. Now truth to say is I don’t actually dream of the ocean. I am rarely even aware of dreaming. This, I am told, is due to the fact that I sleep so deeply that I am rarely conscious of my unconscious. I am only really aware of dreaming three or four times a year and this is usually when I’m suffering from anxiety or dealing with guilt.

A friend recently told me that water in dreams is tied in with our emotions and that it symbolises something moving from an unconscious level to the conscious level. The sea it would seem represents the transition between the two. It suggests the coming of a new perspective and a new hope no matter what the current difficulties may be.

This makes some sense to me. Maybe this yearning for the sea is keeping me looking forward in hope. It is drawing me out of myself, I do believe in “The Lure of Divine Love”. I have come to know it so well. 

I am not dreaming of the ocean though am I? I am experiencing this urge, this calling, in my conscious moments. It is occurring in my waking hours and not my sleeping ones. Well actually I’m sure it is occurring during my sleeping hours, it’s just that I’m only aware of it while I’m physically awake.

This calling has had a grip on me for about a year now. It struck on a trip to Blackpool. I had gone to the Aquatic centre. It’s an amazing place, but it did not hold my interest that day. All I wanted to do was go outside and look at the sea and feel the wind all around me. I wanted the space and I wanted the freedom. I will never forget looking up and seeing the seagull floating above as I stared out to sea. On reflection I suppose that all of this was deeply symbolic. A relationship was sadly coming to an end and I was in denial about it. The sea and the seagull were drawing me out of myself, I can see this now.

The call of the sea really took a hold at last year’s Unitarian Annual Meetings in Swansea. They were set by the sea and each day I would walk on the beach alone, stare out into the nothingness and feel the wind coursing all around me. The relationship had just about come to an end by then and I was no longer in denial about this. The walks on the beach and the staring out into the abyss were partially about me letting go, but they were also about reconnecting to hope, to God and understanding what I am here to do. That “Lure of Divine Love”, felt very strong there. Those few days in Swansea were a celebration of Bob Pounder, Daniel Costley and myself becoming Unitarian ministers.

As soon as I returned from Swansea I began my blogging adventure. I gave my blog the title “I Dream of The Ocean” after a line in the New Model Army song “Ocean Rising”. One of the major themes of my blogs is hope growing from despair and I think that this is what this call to the ocean is all about.

The call to the ocean and the call to the sea is a common theme. Our history and literature is rich with such stories. Several friends of mine have recounted personal tales when they were called to sea over the last few days.

It is the story of Odysseus that always springs to my mind when I think of the sea.  Homer’s Odyssey is rich in metaphor and speaks to a universal human condition. He sets out from Troy for the Isle of Ithaca where his wife and son await his homecoming. The journey is fraught with danger and distractions.

Trouble begins when Odysseus blinds one of the sons of Poseidon during battle. Poseidon in his rage blows his crew off course by sending storm after storm and brings all kinds of trouble to the adventurers. At one point they land on the Isle of Lotus Eaters. Here they eat poisonous leaves which produce a memory erasing, death inducing waking sleep; as a result they lose sight of home and become lost. Eventually they escape and fortune appears to turn in their favour as they arrive at the island home of Aeolus, the king of the winds. Here the weary travellers finds rest bite and Aeolus puts all the winds that have been blowing them off course in a bag and sets them back on track, they can now head for home. But just as they sight Ithaca, the men let the winds out of the bag and once again they are blown off course. They land on the isle of Aeaea, home of the Greek Goddess Circe. Here they become trapped and spell bound by the beautiful allures of the island. The men are cursed and turned to pigs. The curse is only lifted when Odysseus agrees to become Circe's consort. Once again disaster appears to have befallen them but somehow Odysseus is rescued from the comfort of her arms and persuaded to continue on his journey home, by his men.

On the way back to Ithaca the crew pass through the Underworld. Here Odysseus is guided by the blind prophet Teiresias, who reveals the dangers he has yet to face before he can once again gain Poseidon’s favour. He is offered full knowledge of the dangers of the Sirens songs and even a solution to them, which he passes on to his crew. The crew ignore the warnings and become trapped by the Sirens songs. Odysseus secures himself by chaining himself to the mast, but most of his crew, enchanted by the sirens songs, plunge into the reef and to their deaths.

Odysseus must now navigate the channel between the six headed monster Scylla and the whirlpool of Charybdis. He has by now lost most of his crew and in order to pass through must sacrifice six more men. He passes through and is finally washed up on the shores of Phaecia. Here he tells his story and wins Poseidons forgiveness. Finally he can return home.

Finally Odysseus reaches Ithaca, but fails to recognise it as home. In his despair he drags himself along the shoreline and comes across the goddess Athena, dressed as a young shepherd. Exhausted and seemingly close to death he begs her tell him where he is. She gazes at him through her star like eyes and replies “Sir, you must be a simpleton or have travelled very far from your home to ask me what country this is.”

How true this, how few of us recognise the treasure we are surrounded by. We go on wild adventures seeking oh so many things and we lose so much on the way, including friends who are dear to our hearts. The truth is, of course, that what we were searching for was there all along, we just couldn’t recognise it. We still can’t recognise it some days, even when we return to that place of love after we have escaped from disaster. We rarely recognise the treasures in our very hands. We already have the answer deep within us, imprinted in our DNA we just need to connect to it.

The Odyssey is a story that speaks powerfully to me. I fell in love with it due to the Coen Brother’s modern day adaptation “Oh Brother Where Art Thou”. A film that offers bitter sweet memories for me. You see the film always brings Ethan to my mind, a song from it was played at his funeral “Fly Away, Oh Fly Away.” The seagull on the beach in Blackpool got me to think of him too, I felt his presence there and then. I always do when I feel a little lost.

Birds are just as important to me today as the sea is. They keep calling me too. In many traditions the bird is of course a symbol of the soul and as I have said before it was Ethan, in his short life, who showed me how to connect to my soul and to the universal soul that I call God.

We can all connect to that that is deep within us and all life. No matter how far we get blown off course we can return home. We cannot control the wind, we do not get to choose what happens to us; but we do get to choose how we respond to these event. We can set our sails accordingly.  Remember Odysseus and his crew were given directions on how to avoid the sirens but most of the crew chose to ignore this advice and as a result they perished.

These days I try to head the call, however it comes to me; whether it’s the call from the sea or the birds in the air or the birds in the tree, or from the folk around me. Yes sometimes I still go off on my own and I get lost and sometimes I even flee but eventually I remember that everything I’m searching for is already here. The gifts are bountiful and all around me, I’ve just got to open my eyes and see.

Love is universal it is open to all, no one is excluded from it and no one can flee its range and reach. All that we have to do is learn to recognise it, because I know that sometimes it is hard to see. Even so it is always there calling, calling us out to sea.

The trees in winter

The trees in winter

I was travelling through the Derbyshire hills the other day, on my way to the Nightingale centre at Great Hucklow. I spent most of the journey simply staring out of the window and taking in the beautiful winter scene. The fields were white with snow and sheep. I also noticed the lonely winter trees, stretching out from cold pale ground.

There is something very beautiful about the trees in winter. These lifeless stick like sculptures stretching out from the ground are stripped right down to the bone. They look vulnerable and exposed, but they are not. By next spring life will have returned and I know this scene will be very different. If I travel this way then I will see the new lambs and the rolling fields, separated by dry stone walls and the trees will once again be bursting into life.

I am enjoying this winter, I have a new found sense of appreciation for it today. This is because I am able to empathise with it. I feel that I have been stripped of some unwanted and unneeded skin these last few weeks; I feel that some of those barriers that block me from life, from love, from God have been removed; I feel that I have been opened up once again. Now some may see this as making myself vulnerable, well I have no problem with that. Life is a vulnerable experience; you cannot be protected from it. Actually by trying to protect myself from life is to actually live in fear and I do not believe that this is living at all. I know that my attempts to protect myself in the past have only ever made me feel increasingly lonelier and cut off. I need to feel the cold this winter, to truly experience it. I need to feel bare and stripped at times because I know by doing so I am preparing myself for the new birth of the new year and the coming of spring; I need to prepare myself for the pink snow that I use to see falling from the cherry blossom in the courtyard at Luther King House. But first I must feel the cold and not fear it. It’s funny I don’t seem to mind the cold this winter, in fact I’m actually enjoying the fact that I can feel it. I know that I am alive and by golly do I want to be alive.

I have been talking an awful lot about the coming of light these past few weeks, this is of course in celebration and appreciation of Advent. I have also talked about darkness and the “ache of loneliness”. Well now I am beginning to question myself. Is the dark all bad? Should we fear it? I am not wholly convinced that we should, it has its place in the circle of life, just as much as the light. The winter Solstice will soon be upon us. This year it will fall on the 22^nd December. This is the shortest day of the year, in terms of daylight hours of course. Every day last 24 hours, obviously. This shortest day marks the end of the descent into darkness and the beginning of the new light.

In Hinduism, which has recently celebrated its own festival of lights, the Deity most associated with darkness is Kali. On the surface she is seen as destructive, she drinks blood and wears a chain of skulls. Seen literally she would have to be viewed as monstrous and terrifying. This though is not what this icon is about, at all. There is something much deeper going on in the imagery. It is a mistake to get lost in the metaphor, this is true of all religious symbolism by the way. “Kali” in Sanskrit is the feminine word for time. In time we all die, it is a fate that cannot be avoided, no matter how clever we think we are. She is black, not because there are racial undertones here but because death is a mystery; we cannot know what will happen to us when we die. Kali represents the mystery of life and death and the continuing cyclical relationship between the two.

This is an image that seems particularly pertinent during the winter when everything has died off. The ground is hard and the trees are bare and generally speaking people’s moods seem a little lower. This though is not something that we should fear, in fact perhaps it should be celebrated. Everything that lives and grows, including we humans, needs to lie fallow for periods of time. We need this because we need to rest and regenerate. The leaves that fell from the trees in the autumn are now regenerating in the soil. By spring this will lead to new life. It is the death of these leaves that actually makes new life possible.

We need not fear the dark it is both regenerative and nurturing. Darkness symbolises the holy, just as much as the light. There can be no Easter without Good Friday. To ignore the darkness or to try and flee from is to ignore elements of the Divine revelation in life itself. There is nothing in life that is beyond the range and reach of God. These words from Psalm 139 always come to my mind when I think of darkness and light.

⁷ Where can I go from your spirit?

   Or where can I flee from your presence? 

⁸ If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

   if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. 

⁹ If I take the wings of the morning

   and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, 

¹⁰ even there your hand shall lead me,

   and your right hand shall hold me fast. 

¹¹ If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,

   and the light around me become night’, 

¹² even the darkness is not dark to you;

   the night is as bright as the day,

   for darkness is as light to you. 

Advent truly is the season of darkness and light. Both of these qualities offer vital religious insights and both are worthy of our reflection during this sacred season. In the symbol of Yin and Yang, we see clearly the relationship between the light and dark. Where the whiteness of Yin is most dominant we see the seeds of Yang emerging and where Yang is more dominant we see Yin emerging. You see the light and dark give way to one another, they complement each other. You cannot have one without the other. Neither is beyond the reach of the Divine either, for they are both a like to this universal love. I do not believe that God would reject anything or anyone. This is not the way of love.

This year I am learning to appreciate the cold bareness of winter. Yes I am celebrating the coming of new hope and light, but not by ignoring the dark. I need the dark, I need to be stripped bare at times, I need to lose this skin that sometimes I feel so imprisoned in. I need to let the new life within me spring into being and thus allow my soul's recycle to continue.

I now understand how important it is to really feel the cold at times.

The Ache of Loneliness continued: Hell is a place where nothing connects

There is no greater ache than the loneliness of no longer being touched by life, this is hell. Hell is a place where nothing connects, where as Heaven is a place where everything connects.

T.S. Elliot said that “Hell is a place where nothing connects” and that “Hell is oneself,” John Paul Satre replied to this by saying that no, “Hell is other people.”

The truth is that to some extent they are both correct. Hell, at least on earth, can often be oneself and it can be other people too.

Elliot believed that self absorption and self protection was what caused people to feel separate and alone. Many people today have a great deal of self awareness and yet they still feel cut off from life. Are we too self absorbed and are we suffering because we are experiencing over examined and under connected lives? Have we become lost in ourselves?

I believe there is truth in this, although it is not the whole truth. Perhaps some people feel cut off and alone because they are too focused on the faults in others. How often do we hear folk blaming others for all of their problems? This builds barriers and creates loneliness and cuts people off from one another. Yes hell can be ourselves and yes it can be other people too.

For many years of my life I felt disconnected cut off, lost and lonely. I felt like I was living in hell. I saw hell as myself and I also saw it as other people too. From a young age I learnt to protect myself from life, from pain. Of course I failed utterly in my attempts to do so, all I succeeded in achieving, eventually, was to cut myself off from any joy and actually experienced a deeper more ingrained suffering, what I have heard described as “the suffering within the suffering”.

I have learnt that Heaven and Hell, at least here on earth, are two sides of the same coin. They possess similar characteristics, although there is one important difference, how they are experienced. How we respond to suffering illustrates this perfectly. Two people can go through the same difficulties in life and yet they will often react to them very differently. For one it may well be described as a living hell and yet for the other they may well claim that they got a taste of heaven as they walked through it.

Suffering can cause division within ourselves and others either through self pity, or embarrassment or through the sense that life is treating us unfairly, that fate is singling us out. That said the very same experience of suffering can also unite us through a deeper shared sense of compassion and empathy. Suffering can lead us to feel as though we have been cast into hell and yet through it we can also get a taste of heaven. Or as Forrest Church put it “At times of trouble, alone we are often lost. But by reaching out to and for others we entertain the possibility of redemption.” In our suffering we can build up walls of self protection and yet at the same time this same suffering can foster compassion within us.

The fostering of compassion is I believe the purpose of religious community. By developing our compassion we can create heaven in our own lifetimes. By not fleeing from suffering, our own, or that of others, we can show to one another that in times of trouble we are not alone, we are not lost. By reaching out both to and for others we get a taste of heaven. Karen Armstrong says” that religion isn't about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness." For me these intimations of holiness and sacredness is what connection is all about.

Heaven is a place where everything connects.

Lessons from geese

There's always something new to fall in love with...

When flying in V formation each goose creates uplift for the birds flying behind it, by flapping its wings. The whole flock together creates 71% greater range than if each bird flew alone.

People who share a common sense of direction and community can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are travelling on the thrust of one another.

When the lead goose tires, it rotates back into the formation and another goose flies to lead position.

It pays to take turns doing the hard work and sharing leadership, as with geese, people are interdependent on each others skills, talents, understanding and capabilities.

The geese flying in formation honk to encourage those at the front to keep going.

We need to make sure our honking is encouraging. Groups where the honking is encouraging work much better. The power of 'encouragement (to stand by one's core values and beliefs and encourage the core values and beliefs of others in the group) is the quality of honking we seek.

When a goose gets sick, wounded or shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. They stay until it dies or can fly again. Then they launch out with another formation or catch up with the flock. .

If we have as much sense as geese, we will stand by each other in difficult times as well as when we are strong.

May we have at least as much sense as geese.

from a speech given by Angeles Arrien,
based on the work of Milton Olson

One of my favourite songs is “Bluebeat” by New Model Army. There is a line it that goes “There’s always something new to fall in love”. I find this to be a consistent truth of my life.

Last year I fell in love with Geese. It all really began as an antidote to anxiety.

Prayer is really important to my life, it gives me the strength and direction I need to live as openly and honestly as I possibly can and therefore fully experience all that is before me. That said I have discovered, in recent times, its limits; for whatever reason prayer did not take away that anxiety that would come a calling, every Thursday morning, just over a year ago. I can see now that it was the very stillness and solitude of prayer that may well have caused its limitations. When I was in prayer I was still alone. Solitary spiritual practise was not enough it seems, well not at that moment in my life.

So what was the cause of this over powering anxiety, what created this ghost of fear, to come knocking at my door once again?

Well it was learning to drive, something that did not come naturally to me. I let the struggles I had with it get to me at times and I have to say I never thought I would be able to learn. That said I stuck with it and eventually passed.
You may well ask, how did I overcome that anxiety that would almost overwhelm every Thursday morning?

One Thursday morning I rose from solitary prayer and stepped into the cold of winter, crossed the road and walked around Platt Fields Park. I was studying for the ministry at the time at Luther King House, which is where the Unitarian college is, is just across the road from Platt Fields Park between Fallowfield and Rusholme in Manchester. I walked and walked and connected to the simple beauty of nature, the people and the animals. Over the next few weeks and months I would continue this walk, often several times a day. I got use to the similar sights. The group of middle aged men, with their cans of beer and their dogs; the students and Asian women jogging; the BMX boys; the mothers with prams; the men fishing and on Sundays the old guys with their model sail boats. I also took friends there and we would walk and talk together. It became more than a weekly ritual; it became a daily one or even sometimes a several times a day one.
Of all the different things I encountered on these walks, it was the geese who had the greatest impact.

You see I’ve fallen in love with the geese.

I’ve fallen in love with the geese. Just as Milton Olson did in seeing them as an inspiration for how our human societies can function successfully. He observed how every individual gains in power by simply working together for a common purpose, each taking it in turns to lead.

Just by simple watching these geese in a park in central Manchester I was able to connect to the humble reality of my own existence. As I passed them and watched them as they took off and landed as they cried out and honked to one another. I would often chuckle to myself as they waddled about and I observed their funny feet. This love deepened during the spring and summer as they gave birth to their own chicks, which followed them around the lake.

Just gorgeous, yes I’ve fallen in love with the geese, not the swans, or ducks or other birds. The geese, I’ve fallen in love with the geese.

I fell in love with these simple creatures. They took me out of myself and enabled me to connect to that greater reality that for some reason prayer was failing to do at this juncture of my life. Actually that may not be quite true because it was of course in this quiet time of prayer that the voice in my gut told me get up and walk outside into that cold winter morning.

So what has this experience taught me? Well it taught me once again that I cannot exist as a solitary individual. I need to connect I need to relate. To me this is the essence of spirituality. Spirituality is about relationships and about developing a simple and loving connection to the greater reality. As I understand it spirituality is really all about developing relationships at every level.

Whatever I do in life and wherever I go if I forget this I’m in trouble. Spirituality is about relationship. Nothing in life exists alone, without something to relate and connect to life will lose its meaning. No man is an island.

I think this is why I despair at so much of what is described as “New Age” spirituality. It is also why I believe my own Unitarian tradition is open at times to appropriate criticism. It can be too individualistic. Rightly no one has authority over another’s right to a private faith, doubt, belief and disbelief. That said we can’t just believe what we want, what we feel like on a whim from one week to next. Our faith offers freedom to search and seek and to ask the difficult questions. This I believe leads to a vibrant faith without certainty. That saidUnitarians do not just simply believe whatever they want, at least not in my experience.

A few years ago my brother took a holiday, with his wife, to America. One day they were being shown around Dallas by a taxi driver. At one point they passed a church and the driver exclaimed in a mixture of bewilderment and humour “That over there is a Unitarian Universalist church and those folks can believe whatever they like”

Now when he initially related this story it irritated me. Why peoplemay well ask? Well it’s this caricature that is so often painted aboutthe Unitarian faith “that we can believe whatever we like”, that gets to me. As I have heard others state "It’s not so much about believing whatever I like, but about believing what I must." What life in all its mystery and wonder compels me to believe. For me this is a painful and difficult task at times. There are no easy answers.

Also if spirituality becomes a purely private affair, who’s sole aim is to relieve an individual of the pain and discomfort that life can bring, it becomes narcissistic.

Narcissism leads only to more pain and suffering and in the end merely enhances the isolation. Narcissism is the antithesis of spirituality. It is the total annihilation of our humanity. A narcissist is a person utterly absorbed and preoccupied with themselves and their own pain to the total exclusion of others. It was Sigmund Freud who actually coined the term. He was influenced by Frederic Nietzsche, who was fascinated with the Greek Myths, and how these myths told the stories of our everyday lives. Freud saw in the myth of Narcissus this common state of preoccupation with our own pain.

Narcissus was a handsome Greek youth who rejected the desperate advances of the nymph Echo. As punishment, he was doomed to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Unable to consummate his own love, Narcissus wasted away over time and changed into the flower that bears his name. He lost his humanity.

A free religious faith cannot be narcissistic and I do not believe that Unitarianism is and I do not for one minute believe it encourages such instincts. Yes we are individuals, who often believe and disbelieve differently from one another, but we are also much more than that we are a community with a common purpose, we do have shared values. By coming together in community we strengthen one another far more than we could do by sitting alone in solitary isolation, trying to make sense of life. We learn from one another but we do more than that we open one another up to many of life's great mysteries.We share each others joys and pains. We cry together, we laugh together and we celebrate together.

Yes I’ve fallen in love with geese, why you may well ask?

Well, because they have taught me what it is to be truly human and how to live in community with other folk.

Honk...honk...honk