In the midst of my recent travels to Scotland, I had a brief encounter with an older couple who, judging from their accents, were fellow Americans. When I said hello to them, they, of course, recognized my accent, and the inevitable questions followed.
“I’m a Pastor,” I told them, “I live in Massachusetts, but the church that I serve is in New Hampshire. How about you folks?”
The man was remarkably tall. His wife was not. She was a pale woman with sharp features and quick eyes. He, with his great height, and his gray whiskers, had the quiet dignity reminiscent of an older Amish man – like he’d just parked his horse and buggy, and decided to go for a stroll in the Orkney Islands.
But no. They were from Arizona.
As soon as he heard I was a pastor, the man asked:
“Any idea where we could get some Scottish Rosary beads?”
I gave it some thought. There were plenty of stores catering to tourists, but I’d not seen anything remotely religious being sold.
“No,” I said “not that I can think of.”
The man was disappointed. “One of our friends back home asked us if we would bring her back some Scottish Rosary Beads,” he explained. “Well!” he continued, in an exasperated tone… “I’ll tell you one thing that is impossible to find in Scotland – rosary beads.”
“I’m afraid I’m no help,” I said.
The man shook his head with a kind of resigned amusement. “In one shop,” he said, “we asked if they had rosary beads, and the salesman called out to his boss, asking if they carried “rosemary beads.”
Rosemary beads!
How ironic! I thought. There was a time when Christianity was crucially important to the people of Europe – when a difference in Christian interpretation caused wars. That, surely, was taking things too far – but now the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme and all the churches are neglected, sitting quietly among the houses, a ghostly reminder of other times. During my time in Scotland I’d stuck my head in the doors of several of these churches, and the only one with any activity was the Cathedral – but this edifice, while grand and beautiful, was not populated by the faithful, but with tourists, who’d forgotten to take off their hats. Some of the lovely little churches were abandoned outright. On one I found a sign, tattered by the wind, proclaiming that the whole parish was sharing a priest and as a consequence, the church held services once a month.
It would be wrong, though, to give you the impression that the wind tattered sign unceremoniously pinned to the door of a neglected church accurately portrays the extent of the religious life that I encountered in Scotland.
During the week that Cary and I spent on a walking tour of the Orkney Islands, an archipelago of 70 islands (only 20 of which are inhabited) that are 10 miles north of the northern coast of Scotland, we saw a lot of evidence of fervent religious life – it just wasn’t in any form that you and I are familiar with.
It turns out that many of the most significant neolithic archeological sites in Europe are to be found in the Orkney Islands…
If it has been a while since you took a physical Anthropology course, the term “Neolithic” means “new stone” and refers to the late stone age – a prehistoric period that stretched from roughly 10,000 BC to around 3000 BC. Since we are now two thousand years into the common era, we can say that the neolithic period began 12 thousand years ago, and ended about 5000 years ago.
And of all the sites that remain from this early period of human history the most dramatic are the stone circles that dot the landscape of the British Isles and Brittany.
Stonehenge, of course, is the most famous of these sites, but the Stone Circle in Stenness (which is pictured on the cover of today’s bulletin) may be the oldest of them all.
Scholars date the Stenness circle back to 3100 BC.
The stone beside which I am standing in that picture, has been standing in that spot for more than 5000 years.
To put that into perspective, that’s 20 times longer than the 250 year history of the United States.
The stone in that picture had been standing for 500 years before the Pyramids of Giza were built around 2600 BC.
There is a lot of speculation about why the stone circles were built, but it seems to be a matter of general agreement among archeologists, that the stone circles had some kind of ritual or ceremonial purpose in the neolithic communities.
So, going to Scotland in search of Rosary Beads is likely to end in frustration but if you want to encounter ancient and mysterious monuments to the abiding human impulse to reach out to the Divine, Scotland is a very fine place to visit.
*
In the scripture passage that Vicki read for us this morning, Jesus introduces his followers to the idea of the holy communion — the ritual practice that would become the ritual core of Christian worship.
Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood Jesus says, abide in me and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.
Now you and I have been practicing this ritual all of our lives, and our parents and grandparents did so before us – so the idea of holy communion may not seem all that scandalous to us. Our familiarity with the idea, though, should not desensitize us to how deeply shocking the idea must have sounded to Christ’s first followers.
Eat his flesh?
Drink his blood?
Surely not!
What is this teaching?
The actual literal idea of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of another human being may be the most morally repugnant idea one could ever come up with.
So, quite understandably, Christ’s followers are horrified with the suggestion.
When many of his disciples heard it, (the text says) they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”
And though Christ takes some pains to explain it to them, this, some of his followers could not accept it:
Because of this (the text says) many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.
On one level, then, this passage tells a story in which Jesus challenges his followers, and, as a direct result of this challenge, some of his followers choose to abandon him, and his teaching.
Challenge, in some cases, leads people to abandon their beliefs.
In other cases, though, challenge can strengthen some people’s beliefs:
So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?”
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
**
I have recently come into contact with the work of the French philosopher Simone Weil.
Simone Weil was a French philosopher, mystic, and ethical thinker who was born in 1909, and died in 1943 at the age of 34.
I invoke her memory this morning, because of Weil’s contribution to our understanding of of human needs.
Like everyone else, Simone Weil recognized the basic physical needs that humans require to survive – things like food and water and shelter. She pointed out that, in a sense, human society – the complex of cultural agreements that we make in order to live together in community – is established in order to insure that these physical needs be provided. Even repressive, tyrannical governments recognize that it is more useful to have living subjects, than dead ones, so some effort is made to make sure that people are fed.
This is all pretty straightforward.
The fascinating idea that Simone Weil added to this question of human needs, is that she believed that we have needs that are separate from, but no less important for our survival than our physical needs.
She called these the “needs of the soul.”
She pointed out that, while the physical functions of our bodily existence can be maintained from day to day with an adequate supply of food and water and shelter – that existence would be abject suffering without a sense of meaning, without a deep connection to place and community.
The nature of human existence, she said, cannot be reduced to the basic elements that we require for physical survival.
There is more to it than that.
Nor can the nature of human existence be adequately measured by how much money you have in the bank.
Our souls must be nourished.
We must, Weil says, be meaningfully rooted in the life of a community.
Simon Weil made liberal use of the metaphor of “roots.” Indeed, she wrote a book, published in 1949, entitled “The Need for Roots.”
Imagine pulling a plant out by the roots, and replanting it in another patch of ground – but doing this without any concern for whether the new patch of ground resembles the ground that you took the plant from.
Even if the plant was given sun and water, it would likely wither and die.
This, Weil said, is how our souls work. They flourish in the community and culture that they are rooted in. Our souls wither when they are uprooted.
We must share, with those around us, a deep understanding of how and why we are who we are – as a people.
If our souls are not nourished, our lives are a misery.
And here is the tragedy of all this – unfortunately, while our society tends to address our physical needs, our society can, and often does, work actively against the needs of the soul.
Back in 1850’s Henry David Thoreau said “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.”
Why?
Because then – and even more so, today, the vast majority of people work jobs that do not allow them to have an imagination.
Most people are uprooted from any meaningful connection to the earth, and to the communities within which they were born.
We have abandoned our rituals, and with them, so much of the meaning that is rooted in our shared life as a community.
In this context, I believe that the standing stones on the Orkney Islands are evidence of something extraordinary.
The amount of time and effort that went into creating them meant that the basic physical needs of the communities were being met. If the people did not have adequate food and shelter, they could not have imagined erecting these ceremonial circles.
When these neolithic peoples met their physical needs, the first thing they did was put immense effort into addressing the needs of their souls…
The first thing they did was attend to the ceremonial needs of the community.
When they did this, they were making the ground of their culture nourishing so that their roots could grow strong.
We would do well to pay attention to this truth.
It is worth the effort to do as Jesus’ disciples did – work hard to create a culture and a religion that nourishes our roots.
To many of us have done what Jesus’ other followers did – abandoned our convictions and our beliefs when the going got hard.
When it got hard, the neolithic people did not abandon their beliefs.
Somehow (we don’t know how) they moved those immense stones into place – where they have stood, through wind and rain for 5000 years.
When it got hard, those standing stones strengthened their beliefs.
Next week, on the first Sunday of the month, we will observe Holy Communion, as we do every month, here at the United Church of Jaffrey…
And when we do, I will proclaim these words to you:
“This communal meal feeds our bodies and our souls. Through it, we remember. Through it we are renewed in faith.”
Ritual – the work of the people – nourishes our place in community and nourishes our souls.
Thank you God, for our community.
Thank you God for feeding our souls.
Amen.