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Once a month (usually on the fourth Sunday but check the parish calendar), the parish gathers in the chapel at the Unitarian Centre, 15 Francis St, Darlinghurst.

Our current format goes like this:

Anyone is welcome to any part of the evening. If you’d like to come early and meditate, but you’d rather go for a walk instead of the Eucharist and then rejoin us for dinner, that’s just fine. If meditation makes you want to reach for a sharp object, but you want to come to the service, we’re delighted to see you. If you just want to join us for dinner because conversations like this are hard to get, bring a plate and join in!

Contemplation

Many parish members practice Centering Prayer – a method of entering into contemplative prayer or meditation which has become popular in the last 20 years – but any style of silent meditation is welcome. The session will usually start with a brief talk about meditation and some basic instruction for new people, then 20 minutes of meditation, followed by a short discussion and some opportunity to discuss any difficulties with meditation practice.

Eucharist Service

A Eucharist is sometimes known in other churches as “Mass” or “Holy Communion”. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s an ancient type of gathering in which the members of the community assemble, offer praise and give thanks, share in the word through reading scripture, offer prayer on behalf of those in need, commune with the Divine Presence and offer ourselves in service to the world. The Eucharist draws us to each other in community and love and draws us into the love of the Divine.

We celebrate open communion: anyone is welcome to share the service and take communion with us regardless of background, religious belief (or lack of) or affiliation.

If you aren’t familiar with Christian-style church services, you may find it helpful to read “Church For Beginners” which gives a few tips.

Dinner

Sharing food is one of the oldest and most enjoyable human rituals. One of the things that made early Christians remarkable was their dinner tables – women eating with men, slave next to free woman, Jew next to Gentile, tax collectors and saints, apostles and sex workers. Bread and wine – the material form of spiritual nourishment in the Eucharist – are also the material nourishment that bring the community together.

At St Uriel’s, we’ve always tried to share food – either a well-stocked snack table or a full meal. We find that some kinds of discussion only start when people can relax and when we all contribute something to the table, no matter how small, we share yet another sense of being a household together.

Guests are always welcome at our table. If you can bring food to share, please do, but if times are tough or that’s too hard, come anyway. No-one will ask questions and we always seem to have too much.

This Sunday 16 May is the Sunday after Ascension. Ascension is the moment in the Gospel story where Jesus, having died, risen and kept on teaching his core disciples for several weeks, finally leaves them ascends to heaven.

It’s a dramatic point in the story and concludes some very stark and vivid teaching (the Gospel of John, in particular, spends a lot of time on this period).

In the mystical tradition, Ascension represents the non-dual reality of the Divine. Beyond the well-trod path of epiphany, purification, illumination, union with the Divine (in which there is still a Self and a Divine Other), stands a further stage in which the Self is surrendered.

Bernadette Roberts, a Catholic non-dual mystic, talks about this phase as losing the sense that there is even an inside and an outside. She says that at the Ascension, far from simply disappearing, Christ “disappears” into all living reality in a union of the formless with form.

In the Acts, the disciples continue to look to the sky seeking after Jesus until an angel tells them to stop searching for Him “up there”.

In the Eucharist we celebrate this deepest of mysteries: that the Divine is never absent, that She is as close as our very breath, as intimate as the dearest lover. We cultivate this understanding through the sacrament until, in our own journey of discovery we are able to realise it in ourselves.

Come and join us for a chapel service this Sunday to dwell in the mystery and to give thanks.

Readings for the week

I’m away from next Friday for a couple of weeks at the AJC global conclave in Wisconsin, so there won’t be a service while I’m away. That’s the reason for the change in service date.

I’d love a chance to see you before I go and ask for your blessing on my journey.

Fr. Tim+

A quick reminder from Ben Burke, who has been organising the “Future of Christianity” series:

Just a reminder of our get together tomorrow (2nd May) for Part 2 of the Future of Christianity Documentary and talk.

We’ll be meeting at 3:00pm for a 3:30pm start.

This event takes place at the Unitarian Church, 15 Francis Street Darlinghurst.

After the documentary, John O’Neil will be giving a talk based on the following:

The talk that I’m preparing for May 2 is about Raimon Panikkar, a very interesting Catholic philosopher and scholar, aged 92, living in Spain, with Spanish Catholic and Indiann Hindu heritage, who brings together in his life and work ” the marriage of East and West” . He’s written over 40 books and hundreds of articles. I’m starting to make a study of his work and the similarities between his thought and Wilber’s. Ken mentions in Integral Spirituality Page 199 that “the work of Raiomon Panikkar is provocative in many profound ways” I’ll be focusing on his book Christophany which came out in 2004. He said it
sums up 50 years of work Ken sent Rollie Stanich over to dialogue with Panikkar soon after both books came out. My talk will be very much a work in progress with lots of quotes from Panikkar’s book which resonate with Wilber’s philosophy. Hopefully it will be of some interest.

Tim will be performing a Eucharist afterwards in the chapel, around 6pm. Come along for both events if you can!

The next two Sunday afternoons, with Ben Burke from Sydney Integral I’m co-sponsoring a movie and discussion. The movie is a discussion between Father Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk and one of the leaders of the Centering Prayer movement and Ken Wilber, the central intellectual figure in the Integral movement and author of books like “No Boundary” and “Integral Spirituality”.

The topic is the future of Christianity and it covers some broad territory around different stages of spiritual maturity, the centrality of the contemplative traditions and prospects for the development of our tradition. These concerns are central to my own spiritual journey and I’m excited to have an opportunity to discuss them.

The plan is to gather at the Unitarian Church at 3pm – watch the movie, have some time for discussion and then we’ll celebrate our monthly chapel Eucharist service.

Come and join in on what promises to be an enlivening discussion!

Readings for the week

Movie – 3pm
“The Future of Christianity” with Father Thomas Keating and Ken Wilber

Discussion – 5pm
Open discussion about the themes of the movie and people’s own views about the evolution of Christian spirituality.