Visiting Southampton Unitarians

This morning I went to join the congregation at the Edmund Kell Church in Southampton. The service focused upon the season of spring, the return of life, the waking up of our gardens. The service took place in their chapel (pictured to the right) situated on the first floor, above their Church hall. It was a very nice space, with a modern wooden beamed ceiling; the church was redesigned and rebuilt in 1990. The original building which was built by Edmund Kell in the 1850’s was destroyed by Nazi bombing in 1940.

“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” – Words from the Native North Americans.

The address unpacked the ecological reality of an interconnected world: the pollution of one country impacts upon another. The El Niño warm water current of the pacific impacts the weather of the American West Coast, but even impacts weather right here in the UK.

Reading from Lay Blaylock’s Creation in Reverse - “On the last day before the end of the earth, man finally realised that he had completely destroyed the way plants, animals and people could live on the earth.  He also had no idea how he was going to get himself out of the fix he was in. And man said: “Oh God!”

And God said…

The obvious question to be posed is what can we do better, how can we respond to the ecological time bomb?

And yet, we do not want to simply reduce creation to an obstacle to be overcome, we want to delight in it also. We should enter into a place of wonder, through enjoying the sacred space which is the garden, by joining with others in religious rituals and metaphor which draw us into delighting in the wonder of this planet.