I hope you will indulge me if I start on a personal note: a slightly surprising indirect silver lining of lockdown for me has been that I have started to get some sleep! Some of you will be aware I have had a disrupted sleep pattern for much of the last decade but now suddenly I don’t have a reason to regularly be awake at 3am and my average sleep has gone right up! While I am not sure if I will ever catch up on the sleep I have lost, my inner sleepyhead is really trying, and, for the first time in years, I am consistently sleeping long enough to remember some of my dreams. I have also simultaneously vastly reduced the amount of caffeine I was consuming as I no longer need the same amount of artificial wakefulness! In combination it’s all a bit like coming out of a dark tunnel into bright sunlight – it can take a while for your eyes to adapt – and at the moment I could sleep for England!

I can’t remember how it recently caught my eye but I have just come across the following statement of Sufi mystic Rumi: “Never give from your depths of your well, always give from your overflow” for the first time (surprisingly given how much Unitarians like his writing!). As a statement of prudence and self-preservation it is fairly clear – do not give so much that it damages your ability to function, to be yourself, to keep living as well as giving. Without wishing to over dramatize my own experience I have sometimes wondered from what I was drawing: was it from something vital that I should have let alone? But it often felt like I had little choice, whether from well or overflow.

Rumi’s quote is perhaps not too dissimilar to the advice that, in an airborne emergency, you should put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others with theirs. It is undoubtedly sound advice for living yet sometimes life doesn’t present in such simple terms – a bit like getting my oxygen mask on but it not fitting so well…

We might be aware of folk who seem to operate with very substantial margins, in whatever sphere (including sleep!), and others that seem to operate with much reduced ones. And I guess it is highly subjective as to what enables a person to feel safe. So to contrast with Rumi we have the story of Jesus and the Widow’s Offering (or ‘Mite’) from Mark’s Gospel (Mark 12:41-44, NRSV):

⁴¹He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. ⁴²A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. ⁴³Then he called his disciples and said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. ⁴⁴For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.’

Arguably much of the Christian message, if not the very heart of it, is about self-sacrifice. If one views the key part of Christ’s life being his dying for others, then it could be argued that it is ultimately about drawing everything that is in the well. While a Unitarian emphasis may be more on his teachings than on his death we should note that elements of self-sacrifice nevertheless remain prominent in his teaching, not least in the verses just quoted.

How do these ideas compare? Rumi’s take seems a good bet for life in the normal run of things. But much of Jesus’ teaching was about the edges, the margins, including those lives that were being lived ‘on the edge’. And sometimes we do have to go into our reserves (of energy, of finance, of hope) particularly if we have no other support available. I hope and pray that you need not do in the current crisis, or if you must, then not too deeply.

Sometimes you don’t know you are ‘overdrawn’ (at least in terms of energy, hope, liveliness: the bank will tell you about money!). It might take a good friend to see it in you and tell you. Or it might take someone sufficiently uninvested in your good opinion that they just tell you as it is (that can be hard to take – if they haven’t got ‘the right’ to say). But, if it has almost become your natural state, the folk around you might not realize – they’ll think that’s just how you are, they won’t see the potential “you” you could be if this difficulty was dealt with.

Of course it can be more complicated. Just as many of us have more than one bank account, with for example most of them in credit but perhaps a significant one is overdrawn,[1] to some extent we compartmentalize our lives, so we may find ourselves energetic in some parts and in the doldrums in other parts. Indeed it is the only way to function sometimes. Hopefully we are in credit overall but not everyone is all the time.

Or at least if our balance be not in credit we may hope to be heading in the right direction, the direction of replenishing: in the way of Mr Micawber in Dickens’ David Copperfield: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”

Spirit of Life, faced with the challenge of our current crisis help us to find ways to replenish our wells and to only draw upon them when truly necessary. Instead may there be an overflow in our lives, an abundance from which we can share and be a blessing to all the lives we come into contact with. Amen

[This formed Upper Chapel’s Wednesday lunchtime reflection on Weds 13th May 2020 and was originally distributed by email due to Chapel closure under Covid-19 restrictions.]

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[1] Most ‘homeowners’ are in this state if they have a mortgage but this is so socially accepted that I set it aside in this analogy!