Friday, December 31, 2010

Bathtub Meditation

About 3 years ago I spent a cold winter afternoon surfing YouTube; I stumbled across the YouTube channel of a man in Hastings, East Sussex, UK that uses the moniker "AndyMooseMan". I subscribed to his channel because I like his beach vlog videos and the fact he isn't railing on about politics or conspiracy theories or religion; he just talks about what he's been doing and what's going on with him. He has also gotten into Blogging, Tweeting and Podcasting. In early October Andy Tweeted that the Hastings Pier had burned down. A few weeks later he announced he and a few other people were compiling a music CD featuring local musicians and the proceeds would go to the "Save the Pier" fund. Having followed Andy's YouTube videos for 3 years, and being all for saving historical landmarks, I ordered one when they went on sale.
I have an Anglo-Saxon name. My ancestors migrated to the New World during the colonial period more than a hundred years before the American revolution. A member of the family tree that stayed behind later became the Bishop of Winchester and is buried in Winchester Cathedral - Hampshire. I understand he was a bit of a heretic. For someone who has clergy in his ancestry I am not particularly religious. I find my spirituality in nature. I think the winter constellation Orion is the most beautiful constellation in the northern hemisphere, and there is nothing more spiritual and awesome than a ripping good thunderstorm. Still, over the past few years I have engaged in a peculiar approach/avoidance dance with the propositions of Unitarian Universalism (UU). I frequently listen UU sermons via podcast. A few weeks ago I listened to a sermon by Rev. Mike Morran titled "The Space Between The Stars" [Listen (24m)]. My brief abstract cannot do his sermon justice. In the first half of the sermon he talks about the vastness of the universe and how we seem to vanish into the ever expanding emptiness of space; he concludes with the Monty Python Galaxy song. He is more poetic in the second half of the sermon. He contrasts our aloneness in the universe, to our being bound-up in the universe and to each other. The space that separates us is also the space that connects us. It is our relationships, chosen and accidental, that fill the space between us. He concludes with the proposition "there is a unity that makes us one and binds us forever together in spite of time and death and space between the stars." After listening to the sermon I drew a hot bath and took my iPod with me. I noticed that AndyMooseMan had posted a couple of new podcasts. Try to imagine this: I'm sitting in my bathtub with this sermon fresh in my mind, I have a dead relative buried in Winchester Cathedral, I'm listening to a podcast from the United Kingdom some 370 years after my ancestors came to the New World when I hear AndyMooseMan , who I met by accident on YouTube, announce he just mailed two "Not The End of The Pier" CD's to the United States - one to Wisconsin and one to Colorado.

I paused while I pondered the relevance of Mike's sermon and the sequence of events, over time and distance, that led to that moment in my bathtub.

How's that for the space between the stars?