the dance of the elements

What is mysticism?

2012-01-26T10:56:00.000Z

I like to think of mysticism as the art of meeting reality, or the art of richer and deeper awarenesses. ... It is an experience that comes unbidden ... [It is] a very special experience ... of that Oneness, a rare and wonderful realization of what always is but of which we are seldom aware, flooding in to overwhelm the illusion of aloneness, separateness. ... There are moments when life seems vivid and resplendent, when a more than mortal splendor breaks in, when there is a touch of grandeur and of glory in just being alive. ... In our experience ... of those moments when we're rapturously one with the wonder of all that is, we have some indication of what has been meant by the mystic experience.

Jacob Trapp was a Unitarian Universalist minister who served congregations in Salt Lake City, Denver, and Summit, New Jersey, he was the editor of Modern Religious Poems and author of the hymn, “Wonders Still the World Shall Witness.”

Prayers by Jacob Trapp

Fire in the darkness

2012-01-18T09:30:00.001Z

Fire illuminated the darkness,
swinging in arcs and swirls
A fire-juggler in the street
Fire in the darkness
primordial comfort
primordial magic
I stopped to admire the dancing flames,
the skill of the juggler
maintaining three flaming torches in the air at once.

epiphany moments

2012-01-13T11:37:00.004Z

It's still the season of Epiphany, until Candlemas / Imbolc.

Malcolm Guite's epiphany poem today reminds us that epiphany is about seeing things differently, perceiving something with the eye of the heart, opening the way from heaven to earth.

Sometimes one meets a person who is illuminated from within, or perceives the world and nature as illuminated from within. Sometimes gazing at the Moon and the stars can bring about an awareness of the numinous.

This set me thinking about the experience of epiphany as a moment of transformation. As Blake put it, "if the doors of perception were cleansed, we would see everything as it is - infinite". Blake it was who saw angels in the trees, and heaven in a flower.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake - Auguries of Innocence

I have had moments of transformed perception when I perceived the numinosity of everything, as it were the immanent indwelling divine light shining though things. These moments cannot be induced, they just happen, a gift from the universe to remind us that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Even through the suffering and the sorrow.

It is hard, in the experience of the daily grind, of feeling depressed, sad and lonely, to recall these experiences and make them live. Perhaps that is what meditation and contemplative prayer is for - to open the way for the numinous to make itself felt.

In praise of Alain de Botton

2012-01-09T09:51:00.001Z

Quite possibly single-handedly responsible for reviving interest in philosophy among the general reading public (that is to say, the small proportion of the population that actually reads books), de Botton has certainly made philosophy accessible to me. I wanted to be interested in philosophy, but found the long-winded, overly abstracted and tortuous way it is generally written completely inaccessible. De Botton's engaging and laconic style, however, makes it available, and interesting, and applicable to the real world.

I started with The Art of Travel, which explores the experience of travel, why we do it, and which bits we focus on and which we ignore. Then I read The Consolations of Philosophy, which explores the approaches of various different philosophers to the common problems of life (love, death, meaning). Then I read The Architecture of Happiness, which looks at which types of architecture make us happy, and which make us miserable, and why. I am currently reading The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. I've only got as far as chapter 1, on logistics, which explores why we ignore the romance of goods coming from far away places and being delivered to our doorsteps, and why we allow warehouses and distribution centres to be so ugly and boxy. But it's very good indeed and promises to be as interesting as his other stuff. I look forward to reading his next book, Religion for Atheists. A timely offering if ever there was one - there are plenty of religions which don't mind if you're an atheist (Unitarians, Quakers, Pagans and Buddhists all welcome atheists and don't try to change them into theists).

De Botton's writing does what good poetry and comedy should do: it looks at the world from a different perspective, and makes connections between things that no-one else had noticed a connection between. Presumably that is what good philosophy should do, too. He also asks why things are as they are, and whether the status quo could or should be changed - or, if he doesn't ask this question himself, he certainly provokes it in the reader, and gives the reader the conceptual tools to ask the question, and work towards an answer.

It is a truism that the in France, philosophers are held in popular esteem, whereas in England, they are regarded with suspicion. De Botton has single-handedly reversed that trend, so that it is cool to be seen reading one of his books. And about time too.

Of course there have always been people who enjoy Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell and so on, but they were few and far between; now there are more people who read and enjoy philosophy, thanks to de Botton, who has succeeded in popularising something without dumbing it down.

Tradition and particularity

2012-01-06T15:45:00.000Z

There is a peculiar tendency in Western thought (probably introduced by deists) to assume that

there is "behind", "underneath" or "at the back" of everything something that is the really real, the real truth, the essence of religion/philosophy etc

as my friend Andrew Brown wrote in a comment in reply to me (and he is rightly critical of and resistant to this tendency).

I think it is possible to draw parallels between, and gain illuminating insights from comparing, different religious traditions, without saying that they are the same or that there is an essential underlying truth which they both fall short of. For instance, it is fruitful to compare Christian contemplative prayer with Buddhist meditation, without saying that they are both imperfect expressions of some lost original. However, I do think that all these practices and ideas are grounded in some actual psychological experience which is common to human beings because we are finite entities in a physical world yearning for epistemological transcendence. I have tried to draw such comparisons in a previous blogpost which was a reflection on a paragraph from his previous blogpost.

I think I still failed, and still fell into the trap of assuming an underlying reality to which different traditions point, though. It's easier to make a distinction between practices than it is between abstract ideas.

However, I know that you can't simply transfer symbolism from one tradition into another. For example, the Unitarian interpretation of Hanukkah seems rather different from the traditional Jewish view of it. Similarly, someone once asked me to "do a service about Wicca", and I found that it was impossible. You can't understand what Wicca is like and why it is attractive without actually participating in it fully, and that means being initiated and really immersing yourself in the symbolism, the mythology and the seasonal festivals. Anyone trying to experience a taste of Wicca through the medium of the Unitarian hymn sandwich would come away sadly perplexed; and if you tried to do a Wiccan ritual in a Unitarian church, you'd end up watering certain things down to the extent that it just wouldn't be Wicca any more.

I get different things out of being a Wiccan than I do out of being a Unitarian. Both are necessary to my spirituality, but in very different ways. And you can't translate the one into the other. In order to enjoy Unitarianism, you have to be immersed in its symbol-systems and assumptions about how the world works. You can find places where Unitarianism and Wicca overlap; you can use ideas from one to illuminate the other - but they are not interchangeable.

Similarly, you can't assume that the Runes are a "Norse version of the Tarot". The Runes are a symbol-system in their own right, with their own cultural and historical background, which is very different from the cultural and historical background of the Tarot. It might, however, be interesting to do a rune-reading and a Tarot-reading on the same issue, and see how the two systems described it.

So I do agree with Andrew - we should not assume that all religions are imperfect views of the same underlying mystery. They are each unique and beautiful symbol systems, and it reduces them to something less than they are to try and shoehorn them into a "Theory of Everything". That's not how religious language works; it is metaphorical and embedded in its particular context.

I think the metaphor of religions as languages is helpful here. Sometimes it is possible to translate from one language to another, but sometimes the metaphor and symbolism is lost. Some authors cannot be translated from their original language because the imagery is lost thereby. Sometimes there is a word or expression in one language which has no satisfactory equivalent in another language. This is because its network of connotations and denotations is different. This is even true for closely-related languages like English and German, and is even more true of distantly-related languages like English and Sanskrit. Words used for complex concepts in Buddhist and Hindu thought have often been mistranslated or poorly expressed in English. The same thing happens when you try to import a practice or a concept from one religion to another. Especially if one of those religions is a conscious attempt to recreate an initiatory mystery tradition, and the other is an heir of the Enlightenment impulse to de-mystify everything. Even if you try to translate the concept of the real presence in the Eucharist, or different models of the atonement, from one form of Christianity to another, confusion and miscommunication can result. In order to understand a concept or practice thoroughly, you really do need to be immersed in the tradition from which it comes. That's not to say that a reasonable level of understanding cannot help to illuminate one's own practice and theology; but we should beware of facile borrowing just for the sake of innovation or "being inclusive". Some attempts at including elements from other traditions can seem patronising or inept, or just plain fluffy. (I've seen this happen.)

Pagan deities as expressions of values

2012-01-06T10:38:00.000Z

Some Christian theologian or philosopher (was it Tillich? Ricoeur?) came up with the idea of contrasting the self-emptying of God in the Nativity with the old gods as expressions of "totalitarian power, dominion and violence". The self-emptying of the Divine into the human is a powerful idea; indeed most mystics affirm the path of kenosis or self-emptying as the path to union with the divine, or theosis. However, as this is presumably a fairly universal experience, stemming from human psychological processes, I would be surprised if it was invented in the Axial Age, unless that represented a shift in consciousness as well as culture.

Maybe some of the old Greek and Roman deities were expressions of "totalitarian power, dominion and violence" - however this was not true of all of them. I think it's a lazy reading of pagan mythology, and a failure to note the many historical and cultural shifts in antiquity, such as the transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence to an agrarian one; the emergence of city-states; the imposition of new deities by Arian invaders, the rise of patriarchy, and so on. Apologists for Islam also like to claim that the way in which the worship of Allah transcended local and tribal deities and loyalties was a force for unfying the warring tribes and bringing peace to the Arabian peninsula. Maybe it was, but the local tribal deities were not all that was lost in the transition to the worship of a supreme deity. The worship of goddesses and the respect for spirit of place were also lost.

The rural deities who were expressions of spirit of place, change, and process were not expressions of "totalitarian power, dominion and violence" - I'm thinking of Pan, Faunus, Pomona, Vertumnus, Picus, Silvanus, etc. Even city deities (such as Athena) may have been seen as expressions of democracy (though that is admittedly a bit of a stretch).

The story of Pomona and Vertumnus - where Pomona is courted by Faunus, Silvanus, and Picus, but chooses Vertumnus, who came to her disguised as an old woman to put forward his own case as her suitor - could be applied to the search of the soul for union with the divine.

Faunus is the god of animals; Silvanus is the god of woodland; Picus is the woodpecker-god. Each is charming and rustic, and represents an aspect of nature. Vertumnus is the god of change (and of constant surprises, as U A Fanthorpe so memorably put it). In other words, he is the deity of processes within nature. He also has the ability to disguise himself as something more humble than his god-self (indeed, many deities of antiquity are said to have masked their divine glory when visiting the Earth, so as not to overwhelm humans, which must also have involved a self-emptying).

So Pomona, goddess of orchards (of Nature domesticated) is allied with wild nature and the process of change in the form of Vertumnus. Is it too much to see in Pomona a symbol of the soul, and in Vertumnus a symbol of epistemological transcendence? (Of course, there's nothing to stop would-be theologians from applying new meanings to old myths.)

The message of the story is that change is desirable, and that growth comes from being open to new experiences and an encounter with wild nature, not just enclosed in the managed environment of the orchard (the world of "prune, graft, spray and pick").

These deities of Nature are a far cry from the warrior deities of urban Greece and Rome. They are expressions of an older spirituality which was in touch with Nature and its rhythms. To be sure, the emphasis in antiquity was mostly on propitiating the unruly forces of Nature rather then getting in tune with them (a preoccupation introduced by the Romantics after the Industrial Revolution removed the direct experience of nature from many people's lives). But this story is not about deities who are expressions of "totalitarian power, dominion and violence".

There are plenty of other examples - Hermes Kriophoros, the ram-bearer, also known as the Good Shepherd (a title which was reused by followers of the Nazarene); the psychopomp deities who guided souls to the afterlife (Charon and Hermes); Demeter who mourned for Persephone and created winter in her grief; Hecate, goddess of the Moon and the underworld; Cupid and Psyche, and so on. Indeed, these stories persisted in Greek folklore long after the advent of Christianity.

coherent authenticity

2011-12-29T12:18:00.000Z

...it is wholly insufficient merely to proclaim either to ourselves or to the wider world that "everything is holy now" without, at the same time, living ourselves and offering to others a coherent religious practice that allows such an insight to be shown by us in our words and deeds and, therefore, passed on to those who chose to follow us.

~ Andrew Brown

I've been thinking along these lines for a while now. I want to ground my life and spirituality in a coherent understanding of reality. This understanding is bound to grow and evolve, possibly in response to experience and ritual and spiritual practice; but it is good to have a theological or theoretical basis for one's practice. (Note that by 'theological' I don't necessarily mean having to do with deities, and I certainly don't mean anything dogmatic.) If you don't have a theoretical underpinning for your practice, you become known as the religion where you can believe what you like (instead of a religion that is engaging in a search for the truth, whatever that turns out to be).

It's not enough to say that all paths point to the same underlying mystery - one needs criteria to ascertain which path gets there without pitfalls along the way. One needs to be able to explain how spiritual paths that look wildly different on the surface actually do point to the same underlying mystery. I think that the common features of different paths can be found by looking at how they relate to the processes of transformation within the human psyche, which seem to be consistent at least within cultures, and probably across cultures too. However, one needs to make this comparison without implying that the experience is merely psychological; without reducing the rich variety of colours of different traditions to a sort of sludgy mystical fog; and whilst respecting the particularities (historical, cultural and spiritual) of different traditions.

With that caveat in mind, what are the common features of different paths? They have been described in various ways in various traditions (Alchemy, Kabbalah, Wicca, the mystics' journey into the interior castle, Jacob's Ladder in Freemasonry, Jung's description of the individuation process, Campbell's Hero Journey, Lewis Rambo's stages of conversion).

Common features of all these descriptions of the spiritual journey are the sense of descent into one's inner world, which is also connected with the vast interior space of the collective unconscious or the Divine; the realisation that one is inwardly connected with everyone else; the experience of encountering the Void (possibly including self-emptying, or at least the setting aside of the ego); then entering into a larger consciousness (sometimes described as theosis). These experiences are probably more accessible if one takes the view that the Divine is accessible through inward contemplation; that the whole of reality is suffused with the Divine presence; that we ourselves carry sparks of the Divine. But sometimes people go through these processes of inner transformation in spite of having very different ideas of the nature of reality - which is what suggests to me that they are intrinsic to the functioning of the human psyche and its relationship to the universe.

Just as it is possible to have a deeper insight into one's own language and culture if one is conversant with another language and culture (preferably having been immersed in that other culture to some extent), so also it is possible to have a deeper engagement with one's own religious tradition by engaging with other spiritual traditions. I did not understand what Jesus was saying until I had compared his ideas with those of Sufism and Taoism. I am immersed in the symbol system of Wicca (and have been for twenty years now), and having travelled on my spiritual journey through its particular highways and byways, I can appreciate the shape of other spiritual journeys, including that of Christian mysticism - but I could not have travelled by that route because I was encumbered with the baggage of an evangelical Christian background. I had to set Christianity to one side for a long time before I could look at it afresh and see it differently.

You have to travel by one particular route in order to experience the journey fully - but it's good to find out about other journeys and compare their particular scenery with that of your own. If you don't have a concept of journeys and maps, you might never even set out on the journey; and if you don't get tips from other travellers, you might head off in the wrong direction entirely.

Happy Hanukkah

2011-12-24T09:07:00.001Z

On the first day of Hanukkah my true love sent to me
A latke with apple sauce
On the second day of Hanukkah my true love sent to me
Two dreidls spinning, and a latke with apple sauce.
On the third day of Hanukkah my true love sent to me
Three rabbis dancing, etc.
On the fourth day of Hanukkah my true love sent to me
Four klezmer bands, etc
On the fifth day of Hanukkah my true love sent to me
five Torah scrolls, etc
On the sixth day of Hanukkah my true love sent to me
A six-pointed star, etc
On the seventh day of Hanukkah my true love sent to me
Seven Sabbath spice boxes, etc
On the eighth day of Hanukkah my true love sent to me
Eight Maccabee warriors, etc
On the ninth day of Hanukkah my true love sent to me
Nine candles flaming, etc
Happy Hanukkah!
If you can come up with lyrics that fit the Hanukkah story better, feel free!

Autochthonic, revealed and rational religions

2011-10-21T19:07:00.000+01:00

Pagan and indigenous religions are said to be "autochthonic" which literally means "earth-born" or self-generated from the Earth. They are traditional and indigenous practices and folk customs which people develop in order to facilitate their relationship with the land and nature. They are the kind of religions that deal with hunting, farming and fishing. Typically they regard the divine or deities and spirits as immanent in the land; they are either pantheistic or animist.

Revealed religions are those which are revealed by the deity or deities to humanity, and seem to come from a transcendent reality. Most of the religions of the so-called Axial Age (the age of great founder-figures like Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Lao Tsu and Jesus) are revealed, and are characterised by having scriptures and a transcendent view of the divine.

Rational religion is a child of the Enlightenment, and refers to the idea that people should be able to work out for themselves that the divine exists, and apply their reason to scriptures and other revealed ideas. I am not sure if anthropologists and sociologists of religion actually use this category, but it seems to me that Unitarianism doesn't fit in either the revealed religion category or the autochthonous category. It grew out of a revealed religion but it was trying to get back to "natural religion" and often regards the divine as immanent rather than transcendent.

I am strongly drawn to the idea that the experience of divinity should be compatible with reason, and accessible to anyone. However I do not think that the experience of the divine is a rational experience - it is accessed through the subconscious and the collective unconscious, which are associated with dreams and visions, and therefore not rational. What we should do with these promptings from the subconscious is to test them using our reason to see if they are harmful or beneficial, however.

I also believe that when you get to the heart of the religious experience, whatever religious tradition you are in, it is the same experience, albeit with different cultural trappings. The mystics of all traditions have reported similar feelings and developed similar practices.

Mother Goddess

2011-10-21T15:33:00.001+01:00

Sinking gratefully back into the land,
Into the folds of the Mother,
Her creases in time and reality,
Her magic is a wrinkled apple,
A golden ball dropped from a tree's galaxy of branches
into Her green and fertile lap
where it will decay and then grow into a tree.

O Mother I hear your call,
the wild clear call of the Moon,
the barren and compassionate one
who gazes down upon the Earth,
your green and blue sister.

May I dance with the Sun, Moon and stars;
May I feel their dance within me
and know that it is the One at play in the many -
the dance of being and non-being,
the laughter and tears of the divine at play
in each one of us -
wearing different masks,
now tragic, now comic.

May I hear the song of the stars,
feel the rhythms of the Earth pulse in my body,
lie upon the beloved land
and know that my depths are Her depths
all the way to the ends of the Universe.

17-10-2011, 11.35 am

Blessed are the poor

2011-10-11T14:55:00.000+01:00

In previous posts, I have looked at whether Unitarianism is Christian or not, and what kind of Christianity it is heir to. In my view, it is the heir of Christian heresies. In the ancient world, a heresy was a school of thought, and not a pejorative term implying deviance from the true path.

Some of the earliest Christian heretics were the Ebionites, who were the Church in Jerusalem. They were led by James, the brother of Jesus, who probably knew a thing or two about Jesus' life that did not get into the Gospels. The Ebionites took their name from the Hebrew word for poor; this was derived from the many references to the poor in the Hebrew bible, and from the line in the Beatitudes, "Blessed are the poor in spirit" (which I always assumed meant that the poor were spiritually blessed, not that the poor-in-spirit were blessed). They did not believe in the doctrine of the virgin birth, which was in any case based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for a girl or young woman into Greek (parthenos). They also rejected the teachings of Paul of Tarsus. They may have been vegetarians, and they held an adoptionist view of Jesus as the Messiah. They are also said to have denied the pre-existence of Christ, and vicarious atonement (both doctrines which Unitarians have rejected since the Racovian Catechism).

Some Unitarians look to the Gnostics as spiritual fore-runners, but since the Gnostics were world-denying and Unitarianism is world-affirming, I personally do not think that the comparison is helpful, except insofar as the Gnostics denied vicarious atonement, and held that the purpose of Jesus' existence was to bring enlightenment.

Other early Christian groups which broke away from the mainstream were the Miaphysites and the Dyophysites. They rejected the compromise on the nature of Christ which was hammered out at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

The Pelagian heresy is interesting, in that Pelagius rejected the doctrine of original sin. However, the implication of Pelagianism is that since humans are capable of exercising their free will to become good, we ought to be able to live blameless lives, and there is no excuse for not doing so. Pelagius himself was quite puritanical, and expected people to live up to quite high standards. Semipelagianism sounds more manageable than full Pelagianism.

The Arian heresy (see my previous post) was a very important and widespread view, which influenced early Socinians. Arianism was very popular in the early medieval Germanic kingdoms, and for a while, it looked as if it would become the mainstream theology of the church in Northern Europe.

The Racovian Catechism was an important milestone in the development of Socinian thought, though it is by no means the final statement of either Socinian or Unitarian theology, and it was recognised by its authors that it was a provisional statement, and that the church was open to the discovery of new truth.

Why are all these ideas important? Because they show that mainstream Christian doctrine was arrived at by a series of disputes, controversies and compromises, and was not inevitable or obvious. They also show that real Christian theology is a far cry from the simplistic formulations of many modern evangelical churches, which are usually based on penal substitution theology (a combination of the doctrines of total depravity and vicarious atonement).

Golden heresies

2011-10-01T17:48:00.002+01:00

Having said in the previous two posts that Unitarianism has its roots in Christianity, we must ask: in what kind of Christianity does it have roots?

It is the heir of Renaissance humanism; of Anabaptists, Socinians, Arians, Lollards, Universalists, Arminians, and other liberal and heretical schools of thought. And it is the child of Enlightenment Deism, and of Enlightenment thought generally.

In ancient Greece, a haeresis was a school of thought, and diversity of ideas was considered valuable; it was only in the Christian era that a definitive version of truth was thought desirable and so heresy became anathema.

The Renaissance humanists were the first to campaign for education in the humanities (grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy), and to improve the understanding and translations of Biblical and early Christian texts, as well as translating classical pagan texts. Unitarianism has, for most of its history as a movement, been keen on biblical criticism, and using one's reason to work out what the texts mean (not relying on external authority for an interpretation).

The Arian heresy, first propounded at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, is the view that Christ is not "very God of very God" - he is either God's son by adoption or by creation. The Arian concept of Christ is that the Son of God did not always exist, but was created by — and is therefore distinct from and inferior to — God the Father. This being so makes him no longer unique, and also has implications for other Christian doctrines.

The Socinians held an Arian view of Christ, and it is arguably they who discovered the principle of tolerance which is such an important part of Unitarian values. At one of their earliest church councils, they discovered that they could not agree on several theological points — so they agreed to differ, rather than create further schism. The Socinians emerged from among the Anabaptists of Northern Italy in the late 16th century; Fausto Sozzini, their founder, had read the works of Servetus on the errors of the Trinity. When they arrived in Poland, the Socinians started a printing press at Rakow (which town was subsequently razed to the ground by the Catholics) and from Rakow, Socinian and Unitarian ideas spread to England and Transylvania — where, in due course, the Polish Socinians fled, as Poland was caught in the grip of the Counter-Reformation. In due course the Unitarians of Transylvania became a church which still survives today, and Unitarianism was founded in England by Joseph Priestley and Theophilus Lindsey.

The Lollards do not, as far as I know, have any direct connection with Unitarianism, but they are interesting as the first group to have translated the Bible into English, and to have looked outside the Catholic Church for the source of religious authority. Some of them were thought to have been non-trinitarians.

The Universalists never formed a formal church in England (although the General Baptists, who were much influenced by Arminianism, did reject the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and most General Baptist churches joined the Unitarian movement and retain a distinct identity within it). However, the idea of universal reconciliation was popular in England, and was held by many Unitarians, who also rejected vicarious atonement.

Many early Unitarians believed in "salvation by character" and so were interested in books like The Imitation of Christ. So it seems that they drew on mystical and contemplative forms of Christianity as well as the liberal and rational Protestant forms mentioned above. Many Unitarian churches started out as liberal Presbyterian; others were Independents.

But the most important aspect of Unitarianism for me is that it is reasonable, and tolerant, and honours diversity. The famous Unitarian values of freedom, reason and tolerance are said to have emerged because people wanted the freedom to reason about what the Bible meant; but then they found that different people came to different conclusions about what it meant, so then they had to tolerate each others' different opinions. Unitarians have never burnt anyone at the stake or killed them for their beliefs. On the contrary, Unitarians have frequently been killed or burnt for their beliefs.

Another massively important aspect of Unitarianism is its positive attitude to other faiths, which stems partly from the idea that Jesus is an exemplar and not a saviour — if he is not a saviour, there is no need to convert people of other faiths to Christianity; and because Unitarians believe that the Divine reveals itself to different peoples in different ways, other religions are respected (though might be criticised for harmful practices).

The Unitarian insistence on building the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth also appeals to me. And of course the fact that it is inclusive of LGBT people, and has always campaigned for the education and emancipation of women, the abolition of slavery, and social justice generally, is really important. And so is its positive attitude to science. Charles Darwin was the son of a Unitarian, and his wife Emma was a Unitarian as well. Unitarians were probably among the earliest to accept evolution — certainly Barbara Bodichon (Unitarian and Pre-Raphaelite) had accepted it, as she painted controversial geological views of cliffs.

Modern Unitarianism has also been profoundly influenced by Transcendentalism, which grew out of 19th century American Unitarianism, and also influenced the Pagan revival, and much of American and European life and literature. I have written elsewhere on how Ralph Waldo Emerson, and hence Transcendentalism, was influenced by the translation of the Upanishads into English by Rammohun Roy, founder of the Brahmo Samaj and campaigner for the education of women and the abolition of sati. The Transcendentalists believed (among other things) in an ideal spirituality that "transcends" the physical and empirical and is realized only through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.

So these are the kind of ideas of which Unitarianism is the heir — not the narrow and pessimistic doctrines of Calvinists, Evangelicals and scholasticism, but the broad and tolerant strains of the Reformation, which sought freedom and tolerance. The systems of thought which were the forerunners of Unitarianism were optimistic about human and divine nature. They were not world-denying, but world-affirming.

Roots hold me close, wings set me free

2011-09-28T16:03:00.000+01:00

Roots hold me close
Every religious tradition needs roots. We need the forebears who shaped our traditions and our thinking. If we were not proud of them, why would we want to be part of our tradition? We need the spiritual practices, rituals and symbolism of our tradition - these are the things that transform us, and help us to cohere as a community.

How does ritual effect transformation? By allowing us to symbolically represent the inner processes of our individual and collective psyche, and change their relationships to each other.

What are the rituals of Unitarianism? There's the hymn sandwich (yes, it is a ritual), the Flower Communion, the Water Communion, the lighting of the flaming chalice. There's communion. We need these rituals because they are part of our identity as a worshipping community.

But we also need personal spiritual practice, which we have the freedom to choose from many different traditions. However, our roots lie in the Christian tradition, and if we chop off our roots, the plant might die. We can learn about lectio divina, prayer beads, contemplative prayer, and liberal and mystical Christian theology. All of these practices and traditions were developed by people who were rooted in the same culture that we are, and they fit in with our cultural background. We also have roots - albeit further back - in the pre-Christian polytheist traditions of these islands, and these inform many of our folk customs and festivals.

Of course there's nothing to stop us from learning the spiritual traditions and practices of others, but let's be careful to avoid a shallow engagement with them, one that is not rooted in the philosophical outlook of the tradition being borrowed from. It's worth reading this critique of Pagan UU rituals, which points out that they are often engaging with the fluffy end of Paganism, rather than the full depth of Pagan theology. I have 20 years' experience of Pagan rituals, and they have considerable transformative effect and powerful resonance. I also practice Buddhist meditation (specifically Metta Bhavana), which I find really helpful.

Wings set me free
So I am not by any means arguing that Unitarianism and UUism should only use Christian practices - it could be argued (by those who do not view us as Christian) that this is also a form of cultural appropriation, depending on whether you see Unitarianism as post-Christian, universalist, interfaith, multi-faith, or something else. What I am suggesting is that we should feel free to explore Christian mysticism alongside other spiritualities, and that whatever tradition we are drawn to, a pick and mix approach, or a shallow engagement with it, will most likely not be conducive to spiritual growth.

I think we need to be aware of what we are doing when we borrow any practice, whether it is Pagan, Christian, Buddhist, or whatever. What is the underlying theology and philosophy of the practice? Is it compatible with our values, theology and philosophy? If we adapt the practice to fit our values, theology and philosophy, have we taken the soul out of the practice and made it into something else? If this is the case, should we rename the practice? If we are going to engage with Buddhist or Jewish or Pagan practices, we need to do so in a mindful way, with an understanding of the underlying philosophical tenets of Buddhism, Judaism or Paganism.

Given the way that the Christian ritual of communion has developed, is it valid for Unitarian communities to practice bread-and-wine communion? (I'd say yes, because we have always done so with our own interpretation of what it means, which is not so far away from other liberal Protestant groups.)

Unitarianism has also developed its own special rituals and symbolism, which help us to form our identity. These are our wings, if you like. Many religious traditions have their own special rituals and prayers and symbolism that make them unique (the Druids have the Awen and the Druid's prayer; Wiccans have cakes and wine; Quakers have Meeting for Worship; Anglicans have their liturgical traditions; and so on). Different Christian denominations do communion differently, and with a slightly different underlying theology.

We can interpret rituals and symbolism differently from others, but we should be aware of their history and origins, and not lift them out of context without considering the theological and philosophical implications.

Unitarians and UUs cherish our freedom, but let's not use it for a shallow engagement with spiritual practices. Let's use it to engage meaningfully with theology and symbolism and ritual, and to enrich our understanding of both our own tradition and others. If you are not rooted in your own tradition, it's difficult to engage meaningfully with other traditions.

Religions are like languages - you can speak more than one language, but if you don't know the grammar of your own language, it's difficult to learn another one.

I've practised Wicca for 20 years, so I would say that I speak the language of Wicca really well. But I was brought up as a Christian, so I speak that language too. Whether I like it or not, Christianity informs my thinking to a certain extent (even if I am reacting against some aspect of it). Over the last three years, I have immersed myself in Unitarian history and thought, so I would say I speak that language pretty well too. I also see it as a distinct language, rather than as a dialect of Christianity.

One of the things that I really value about Unitarianism is that it allows me to speak in all three languages, and to offer translations between them - as well as bringing in concepts from other religions which may shed some light on the ideas being discussed.

I also find it helpful to interpret and critically evaluate ideas from all three traditions in the light of ideas from other religions. The ideas of Sufism (which was partly derived from Neoplatonism and Gnosticism) are particularly helpful for understanding what Jesus was talking about. The ideas of Hinduism are really helpful for developing a deeper engagement with Pagan theology and philosophy.

Is Unitarianism Christian?

2011-09-27T19:30:00.000+01:00

There has been much debate recently about whether Unitarianism (and Unitarian Universalism) is Christian, post-Christian, universalist (in either the modern sense or the 19th century sense), or something else.

In our insistence on being non-creedal, have we adopted an "anything goes" approach?

Many Christians would claim that Unitarianism is not Christian, because most Unitarians do not believe in the Trinity and the doctrine of vicarious atonement. But not all Christians believe in vicarious atonement (at least not in the penal substitution theology version of it). The Orthodox Christian view of Christ's role and function is quite different from that of Western Christians. Early Christians did not believe in the Trinity; the doctrine was finalised at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. So neither of these beliefs are essential to Christianity. It might be argued that certain values (such as forgiveness, social justice and compassion) are unique to Christianity, or promoted by Christianity more than by other faiths - but in fact Roman polytheism listed compassion as a virtue. It is difficult to define any religion by listing its beliefs and values, because religion is about identity and community rather than beliefs and values.

Many Unitarians would claim that Unitarianism is not Christian, sometimes for the same reasons that some Christians would make that claim, and sometimes because Christianity is viewed as exclusivist (in the sense of regarding itself as the sole possessor of truth) - but many Christians take part in interfaith dialogue and study other faiths in a spirit of humility which avoids cultural and theological imperialism.

My own view is that Unitarianism has Christian roots (and that the tree is made of the same wood). We use the Bible in our services. We are rooted in a Christian culture (whether you like it or not, Western Europe has been Christian for centuries - and yes, that religion was imposed by the sword, but it's still part of our culture, rather like the way that British law and morality is part of the culture in post-colonial countries). The values promoted by Christianity (and by other traditions) are still widely valued in our culture, and by Unitarians. We still celebrate Christian festivals, together with all the Pagan trappings that come with them (who doesn't like Christmas presents, Easter eggs, Christmas trees, and all that?) We still think Jesus was a good bloke.

And yet... Unitarianism and Unitarian Universalism include some unique traditions of our own: Transcendentalism, Deism, Universalism (in both senses), the Flower Communion, the Water Communion, the flaming chalice. We have the writings of our Unitarian and Universalist forebears. And, inherited from Servetus, some Unitarians have a pantheist understanding of the Divine that was partially informed by Neoplatonic and other hermetic writings, which has fed into the Pagan revival via Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists, and made room for Pagan spirituality in the 20th and 21st century.

So it is true that Unitarianism is both Christian and non-Christian, depending on your understanding of what "Christian" means. Given that mainstream Christians can't agree on what it means, it's hardly surprising that Unitarians can't either.

I think the key to defining whether a group or an individual fits into any particular category is, in the end, about membership and identity. What do you identify as - and do the other people with that identity agree with your self-identification?

I do not identify as a Christian, but I do identify as a Unitarian, because I am accepted as a member of a Unitarian community; I share the views of the majority of Unitarians about the value of the Bible and the Christian tradition; I espouse the values of Unitarianism; and I am pretty well versed in the history and culture of Unitarianism.

But there's nothing to stop a Unitarian from identifying as a Christian. Unitarianism does after all emerge from the Christian tradition, and there's much to value in the Christian tradition (as well as much to criticise). And if we reject the Christian tradition outright, we reject much that is of value.

The empty path

2011-07-28T11:37:00.000+01:00

Someone once said to me that Unitarianism is an empty path. They meant it as a criticism, but I thought it sounded rather positive and Taoist. "The way that can be named is not the true Way" (usually written as "The tao that can be named is not the true Tao", but Tao just means "way").

In "Mind your language", Danny Crosby reflects on the view expressed by a character in The Simpsons that Unitarianism is like an empty bowl. The point about an empty bowl is that you can fill it with whatever you like; it is clean and receptive, and it gives form to whatever fills it.

The point about an empty path is that it is not cluttered up with extraneous symbols, meaningless rituals, and pointless prohibitions.

I like the idea of the empty path, because it reminds me of apophatic theology and the via negativa described by Matthew Fox.

My christology

2011-07-03T21:02:00.000+01:00

“The incarnation is true, not of Christ exclusively, but of Man universally, and God everlastingly.” - James Martineau

My christology is neither high nor low,
but broad and deep.

We are all Christ,
emerging wet and shining
from the River Jordan,
with the light of heaven
shining on us.

We are all Buddha,
reborn each moment,
arising dependent,
Buddha-nature unfolding.

We are all John Barleycorn,
cut down in autumn,
ploughed back into the earth each winter,
putting on green shoots in spring.

We are all Aradia,
bringing her subversive message of hope
to an oppressed people.

We are all messiahs,
and we must all save the world
together, like rainbow warriors.

Let us recognise the work
to which we are called,
and open our sacred hearts to the world.

Yvonne Aburrow
2-7-11, 6.01 am

Notes

Aradia is the messianic figure supposed to have appeared to Italian witches and taught them the mysteries of Diana
Christology is what you think the nature of Christ is (in relation to God and humanity)
John Barleycorn is a dying and resurrecting vegetation spirit in Wiccan mythology
The Legend of the Rainbow Warriors is a prophecy of the coming of saviours

(part of the Write for your Life practice developed by Merle Feld)

This day

2011-06-23T08:25:00.001+01:00

This day
I desire to make connections
to sustain a sense of the sacred
to be graceful and gracious
to listen to the silences between the words
to be mindful of the beauty in each moment
to give thanks for the beauties
of tree and flower,
birdsong and laughter,
friendship and fellowship.

Great Mystery at the heart of all that is,
may I be constantly aware of the wonder and joy
of being awake, alive and aware
and treasure each moment
whatever it brings

and when I fail,
as often happens,
let me not be too hard on myself,
but gently reconnect with the heart of the mystery
sinking gratefully into the soft darkness,
the singing silence.
For each moment we can begin again.
It is never too late.
The time is always now.

23-6-11
7.55am

(Morning - setting an intention)

(part of the Write for your Life practice developed by Merle Feld)

World Refugee Day

2011-06-20T12:24:00.000+01:00

I just received this from the Refugee Council, who stand up for the rights of asylum seekers.

World Refugee Day is observed on June 20 each year. This day honours the courage, strength and determination of women, men and children who are forced to flee their homeland under threat of persecution, conflict and violence.

I stand accused

I stand accused
For asking for my rights
For exercising my right to live
For choosing the party of my choice
For choosing which leader to lead my country
I stand accused

I stand accused
For demanding proper health care
For demanding better education
For demanding freedom of speech
For demanding freedom of association
I stand accused

I stand accused
For belonging to a political party of my choice
For being ungrateful to war mongers posing as war veterans
For asking how a state minister becomes a millionaire overnight
For asking why some people are above the law
I stand accused

by Hasani, an asylum seeker from Zimbabwe

Sunshine after rain

2011-06-19T09:49:00.001+01:00

Light unending
Light transforming
Light revealing.

The world is transformed by light
especially after rain.

The rain makes everything seem grey and misty
But it washes the dust and weariness away
And when the sun returns,
everything gleams, fresh and bright,
colours sparkling.

The light renews the world,
transforms it,
reveals its brilliance.

Water and light: sources of life,
refreshment and renewal.

The soul's seasons are like this:
tears and laughter, water and light.

When the tears come,
may they be swiftly followed by laughter,
Laughter that renews and refreshes,
illuminates everything
and reveals the joy,
the inexpressible joy
at the heart of everything.
Amen.

(part of the Write for your Life practice developed by Merle Feld)

Sleep

2011-06-13T18:25:00.002+01:00

Where does the mind go during sleep?
Does it rest in the Divine?
Wherever it goes, it returns refreshed
from the shores of forgetfulness.

And what of dreams,
those messengers from the deep?
Beautiful and fearful,
they bring up treasures and horrors
from beneath the sea.

My body sinks thankfully into sleep
like a sloth settling onto a branch.

Let us be grateful
for the gift of sleep
and the healing it brings.

Let us be grateful
for the gift of dreams
and the insights they bring.

1.30 pm
8-6-2011

(part of the Write for your Life practice developed by Merle Feld)

Tread gently on the earth

2011-06-11T00:03:00.003+01:00

a song by Carolyn Hillyer (tune on YouTube)

Drum your footsteps to the sacred mountain
Lay down on the bleeding earth and sigh
Breath the rhythm of the Mother sleeping
Listen to Her dream, She whispers: Come alive!

Tread gently on the earth
Breathe gently of the air
Lie gently in the water
Touch gently to the fire.

She bears the scars of our fears and our follies
The dark night hovers and the world sits blind
But the waters flow and the moon is singing
Daughter winds are gathering and hope is high.

Tread gently on the earth
Breathe gently of the air
Lie gently in the water
Touch gently to the fire.

You were born of Her, She gave you being
She healed your body and brought your soul fire
As the Mother wakes we must awaken with Her
We will fade away if we let Her die.

Tread gently on the earth
Breathe gently of the air
Lie gently in the water
Touch gently to the fire.

I have always loved this song, which has a really beautiful tune and a great message.

Source: The Neith Network Library which also has several other poems / songs by the same author:

Carolyn Hillyer: House Of The Weavers - I come to you
Carolyn Hillyer: Turquoise Lady - Sweet mother ocean
Carolyn Hillyer: Night Woman - She is woman who sees
Carolyn Hillyer: Magdalene, Magdalene
Carolyn Hillyer: A Sister's Passion - The doorway is narrow
Carolyn Hillyer: Jaguar - Ee-oo-ee, ee-oo-ee
Carolyn Hillyer: Rise Of The Corn - I sing the ripening corn to you
Carolyn Hillyer: Secret Stream - I am a secret stream
Carolyn Hillyer: Sacred Marriage - In forest heart the Man of Leaves is dancing
Carolyn Hillyer: Egypt Dust - I knocked at the door of the Three Guardians
Carolyn Hillyer: Angels of the rising dawn
Carolyn Hillyer: Tread Gently - Drum your footsteps to the sacred mountain
Carolyn Hillyer: Mother Of The Moor - Small river brings me to your gate
Carolyn Hillyer: Give Me Wild - Way, way, way, o-hey
Carolyn Hillyer: Heron Valley - There's a Maiden coming in
Carolyn Hillyer: A Mystery Unfolding - Fox passing through the purple dusk
Carolyn Hillyer: Holly Woman - She is the eye of the storm
Carolyn Hillyer: The Mask - The travellers spoke in this way
Carolyn Hillyer: Two Drumbeats - Through the softening night
Carolyn Hillyer: I (Am The Spirit) - I…, I…, I…, I…, I…
Carolyn Hillyer: The Fish And The Moon - So she journeyed to sit at the ocean edge
Carolyn Hillyer: Filled By You - We float in a water with no shore
Carolyn Hillyer: Little bird on your maiden flight
Carolyn Hillyer: Celebration Road - Someone is running at the edge of the world

And her website, where you can buy her CDs, is Seventh Wave Music.

Pain

2011-06-08T18:17:00.001+01:00

When pain comes to live in the body
It has a way of taking over
my whole awareness,
making me feel trapped in my body with the pain.

But then there's the gratitude
for the love and concern of friends
who wish me well,
ask how I am,
some of them reaching out of their own pain
to touch me in healing.

And so my awareness moves
from the pain to my heart
opening in gratitude
for the gift of friends,
sending messages of concern.

A true friend is one who shares
pain and laughter
love and companionship
sorrow and joy.

I give thanks for friends.
I give thanks to friends:
manifestations of divine love.

8-6-2011
6.11 pm

(part of the Write for your Life practice developed by Merle Feld)

Where does your theology come from?

2011-05-30T14:21:00.000+01:00

Daniel over at Benge has an excellent blogpost about creating heaven on earth - a great idea, relating to some of the sayings of Jesus:

"Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew, 6: 10)

When he was asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, "The Kingdom of God does not come with observation, nor will they say, 'See here!' or 'See there!' For indeed the Kingdom of God is within you." (Luke, 17:20)

His disciples said to him, "When will the Kingdom come?", Jesus answered and said, "It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look here!' or 'Look there!'. Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the Earth, and people don't see it!" (Thomas, 113)

Daniel also says that he was partly inspired by the lyrics of a Belinda Carlisle song.

They say in heaven that love comes first
Let’s make heaven here on earth.

This led me to think about where I get my theological ideas and inspirations from. A lot of my theological ideas come from science fiction.

I am very inspired by the eco-spirituality of Ursula Le Guin, who is a fan of Taoism. I especially enjoyed her book Always Coming Home, which elucidates a spirituality based on the ecology of the Napa Valley in California, as well as being an exciting tale of a conflict of worldviews. As a child, I found the idea of the Equilibrium outlined in her Earthsea trilogy very inspiring, too. And the ethics implied by her wonderful short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (I would walk away).

I was also very struck by the ideas of Julian May, who is a fan of Teilhard de Chardin. May talks about the idea of Unity, which is similar to Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point. Unity is the point at which the whole galaxy becomes unified in a metapsychic way.

I also have to mention Michael J Stracinsky, creator of Babylon 5, and a fan of interfaith dialogue. There are some wonderful ideas about religion and diversity in this series, particularly the episode where the commander of Babylon 5 is asked to showcase the religion of planet Earth, and decides to have a long line of people from different religions, to illustrate the religious diversity of humanity.

There's an entire tradition of theology devoted to listening to the ideas of the people, not just the "expert" theologians - so I don't think there's anything wrong in Daniel getting his theology from 1980s pop songs and me getting mine from science fiction. Indeed, as is well known, new religions have been founded on the basis of science fiction (well, space opera, anyway).

Where do you get your theological ideas?

Reclaiming religion-words

2011-04-26T13:00:00.001+01:00

Many people have difficulty with words like church, religion, and worship because they have acquired negative connotations through association with evangelicalism and fundamentalism. As Dennis Potter once said, "The trouble with words is that they've been in other people's mouths."

So I would like to suggest some more positive meanings for these words.

Religion - to reconnect with all that is; to connect with one's deeper being in community with others.

Church - a community of people with whom one goes on a spiritual quest or journey.

Worship - a celebration of what is of ultimate worth in our lives

Belief - trusting and loving something greater than yourself (not necessarily something supernatural - it could be humanity or your community)

Faith - a state of openness or trust

God - the experience of connection with other beings, the ultimate mystery, the source of all life, the spirit of life, the ground of all being

Some words might be irredeemable... but let's give them a try:

Christian - someone who follows the teachings of Jesus and tries to live by his values

Salvation - a process of healing and restoring the lost parts of the soul to each other (not undertaken by some strange supernatural means, but by being in loving community with others)

Sin - a state of alienation or separation from the wellsprings of life

The trouble with using these words without carefully qualifying of what you're talking about is that people will hear the original meaning of the word that they were taught, rather than the (new to them) liberal meaning - especially in a culture where people are more interested in the dictionary definition (denotation) of a word than how it is used in different contexts (connotation). So if you're going to use one of these words to mean something other than the accepted view of what it means, it can cause difficulty to newcomers to your liberal religious community.

From the rising of the sun

2011-04-25T08:05:00.001+01:00

Praise be to the source of all life.
Praise, all beings who come from the source, praise the source of all life.
Blessed be the source of all life from this time forth and for evermore.
From the rising of the sun until its setting, praise the Name that cannot be named.
The source transcends nations and boundaries, and its glory is beyond the heavens.
Who is like unto the source of life, which dwells in the deep,
The source that becomes like the earth
to behold the things that are in heaven, and in the earth!
The spirit of life raises the poor out of the dust, and lifts the needy out of the dunghill;
And sets them with princes, even with the princes of their people.
The life wells up even in the barren, and makes them joyfully bring forth life.
Praise the source of all life.

(A NeoPlatonist / Taoist / Unitarian version of Psalm 113)

Third Annual Pagan Values Blogging Month

2011-04-21T17:23:00.001+01:00

Pax of the Pagan Values Blogject has just announced the third annual Pagan Values Blogging Month.

You can sign up for it on Facebook.

Pax writes:

We must not be afraid to discuss the values and virtues and ethics we have discovered in our contemporary Pagan faiths. There are enough books on rituals and spells and prayers to last us a few generations… let's start writing works on confronting poverty and hunger from Pagan perspectives. Let us set aside the fear of prejudice, and the once glamorous but now tattered and worn mantle of the outsider and the rebel, and take pride in ourselves and our faiths, in our works and lives and worship and in our Pagan communities and our larger communities.

Learn more about the event.

When you get your contribution written/recorded and posted in June put a link to it in the comments stream on the Facebook page. Tags such as "PVE2011" and "Pagan Values" are also encouraged.

Pagan Values Blogging Month 2010 and 2009 produced some excellent reflections on Pagan values and virtues - it was popular theology in the making.

Earth Spirit talk at Unitarian GA

2011-04-18T18:05:00.004+01:00

Slide 1: Introduction
Many people think that the Pagan or Earth Spirit element in Unitarianism started around 1980 with the first Unitarian Universalist Pagan ritual, or with the foundation of CUUPs (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) in America in 1986, or the Unitarian Earth Spirit Network in the UK, founded in 1990. In fact, it has its roots in some much earlier developments.

Slide 2: Unitarians and ancient pagan ideas
A notable pagan thinker of late antiquity was Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, who pleaded for religious tolerance for pagans in the face of Christian intolerance:

We ask, then, for peace for the gods of our fathers and of our country. It is just that all worship should be considered as one. We look on the same stars, the sky is common, the same world surrounds us. What difference does it make by what pains each seeks the truth? We cannot attain to so great a secret by one road.
— Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (340–402)

Paganism is generally tolerant of different viewpoints because most Pagans believe that everyone has their own unique path to walk, and that there is a vast array of deities. Unitarians are tolerant because they tend to believe that everyone’s experience is unique and different religions are different perspectives on the same underlying reality.

Slide 3: Michael Servetus
Michael Servetus (often regarded as the first Unitarian martyr) decided on the unity of God in part because he had been reading Hermetic texts, according to Earl Morse Wilbur, author of a history of Unitarianism in two volumes. The Hermetic texts were a loose compendium of Platonist and Neo-Platonist texts from late antiquity (the last days of the ancient pagan world). Some pagan thinkers of antiquity held that there was a divine unity.

Slide 4: Deism and Natural Religion (18th century)
Two key strands in Unitarian thought were Deism and Natural Religion.

Deism in the philosophy of religion is the standpoint that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that a supreme being created the universe. Further the term often implies that this supreme being does not intervene in human affairs or suspend the natural laws of the universe. Deists typically reject supernatural events such as prophecy and miracles, tending to assert that God (or "The Supreme Architect") has a plan for the universe that is not to be altered by intervention in the affairs of human life. Deists believe in the existence of God without any reliance on revealed religion, religious authority or holy books. … Deism became more prominent in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Age of Enlightenment — especially in Britain, France, United States and Ireland — mostly among those raised as Christians who found they could not believe in supernatural miracles or the inerrancy of scriptures, but who did believe in one God. The Founding Fathers of the United States were heavily influenced by Enlightenment philosophies, and it is generally believed that many of them were deists.

Most deists saw the religions of their day as corruptions of an original, pure religion that was simple and rational. They felt that this original pure religion had become corrupted by "priests" who had manipulated it for personal gain and for the class interests of the priesthood in general.

According to this world view, over time "priests" had succeeded in encrusting the original simple, rational religion with all kinds of superstitions and "mysteries" – irrational theological doctrines. Laymen were told by the priests that only the priests really knew what was necessary for salvation and that laymen must accept the "mysteries" on faith and on the priests' authority. This kept the laity baffled by the nonsensical "mysteries", confused, and dependent on the priests for information about the requirements for salvation. The priests consequently enjoyed a position of considerable power over the laity, which they strove to maintain and increase. Deists referred to this kind of manipulation of religious doctrine as "priestcraft", a highly derogatory term.

Deists saw their mission as the stripping away of "priestcraft" and "mysteries" from religion, thereby restoring religion to its original, true condition – simple and rational. In many cases, they considered true, original Christianity to be the same as this original natural religion.

(Wikipedia)

The original, simple and rational religion was known as the Urreligion or natural religion.

Many early Unitarians were Deists (particularly the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence) and were accused by their contemporaries of atheism. Deists believed that religion was natural to humanity, and that God was accessible to reason. They looked for an original form of religion from which all current forms had decayed or evolved. Hence many of them were interested in ancient Greek religion, and also in Druidry, believing it to be a form of the ancient Hebrew religion which had been brought to Britain by the Phoenicians.

Slide 5: Iolo Morgannwg
Hence, when Unitarianism in Britain officially began, it was not long before it attracted the attention of one Iolo Morganwg, who had earlier written a huge collection of material for the nascent Druid movement, and went on to become a Unitarian minister and to write many of the hymns used in the Welsh Unitarian hymnbook. At that time ancient druidry was thought to have been a debased form of the Hebrew religion, brought to Britain by the Phoenicians, so it is hardly surprising that Morganwg became interested in Unitarianism. Nevertheless, the Druid movement of which he was one of the founders has evolved into the modern Pagan Druid movement.

Ronald Hutton’s comprehensive work on the druids shows that there was hardly any evidence of what the druids were like; the only evidence available was from Roman sources, but there was hardly enough there to reconstruct a religion that looked anything like druidry.

Druids did not generally identify themselves as Pagans until the early 20th century. Before that, druid orders had names like the Universal Bond, and their views were universalist rather than pagan, in other words, they believed that there was an essential element in every religion that was the same – a mystical core of religion.

Contemporary Druidry is part of the Pagan revival. Druid and Pagan beliefs range from non-theism to animism to (neo-)shamanism to duotheism (a god and a goddess) to monism to polytheism. Most Pagans feel a sense of connection to the land, the Earth, and/or Nature. A number of Druid orders are drawn to ancient sites because they feel connected to their builders and former users. Some Druids consider themselves to be the successors of the ancient druids described by Julius Caesar and others, often using arguments of dubious intellectual provenance, as we know almost nothing about what ancient druids did or believed.

A key theme in Druidry (particularly at the festival of Samhain) is the connection with ancestors, usually defined as including one's personal kin, the people who once dwelled in the place one lives in (house, village, town, region), and spiritual kindred, that is, inspirers.

There are two main strands of Druidry, the countercultural (associated with road protests and similar events, and sometimes clouded by a reputation for public drunkeness) and the more retiringly 'spiritual' (who tend to be more middle class). There is much overlap between the two strands.

Druidry and the Pagan revival are very diverse and cannot be easily pigeonholed. Contemporary Pagans are drawn from a range of backgrounds and include some professionals and scientists.

Slide 6: Rammohun Roy
Another non-Christian who became interested in Unitarianism – and became in the process a major influence upon it – was Raja Rammohun Roy. He had had encounters with various Christian missionaries in India, but found their arguments unconvincing. Tired of Hindu stories of half-human half-deities, he was not minded to accept the divinity of Jesus, and argued that Jesus was human and not divine. He founded the Unitarian Society of Calcutta and the Brahmo Samaj (One God Society). He also translated the Upanishads and Vedas (Hindu scriptures) into English, and it was probably he who coined the word “Hindu”. He corresponded with Unitarians in Britain and eventually travelled here to ensure that the government did not repeal the law banning widow-burning, which he and others had campaigned so hard to abolish. Sadly he died here and is buried in Arnos Vale Cemetry in Bristol. His writings influenced many Unitarians.

Whilst he was in England, Roy toured the country and met many people of all walks of life, including George IV (whose coronation he attended) and Jeremy Bentham, who had Unitarian sympathies and many Unitarian friends. Roy presented three papers on the Revenue System of India, the Judicial System of India and the Material Condition of India to a committee of the House of Commons.

Religious and political thinkers sought him out to engage in spirited discussions, and Dissenting and Anglican clergymen vied with each other for the honor of his presence at their services. Prominent middle-class reformers were constantly at his side, their daughters or unmarried sisters often especially attentive to him. And, while in Manchester, a crowd of factory workers followed Rammohun about on his tour, the men and women insisting on shaking his hand or embracing him. (Zastoupil, 2002: 215)

He addressed the Unitarian annual meeting in London, and was invited to Bristol by the Reverend Lant Carpenter, where he stayed at Mary Carpenter's home until his untimely death from meningitis on 27 September 1833. He was buried in Arnos Vale cemetery in Bristol, and an annual service is held at his tomb, conducted by the Unitarian minister of Bristol. The Brahmo Samaj are regular attenders at this event.A statue of Rammohun Roy (paid for by the Indian government) was erected in central Bristol in 1997.

Roy's visit also had political implications, in that there was some talk of him standing for Parliament, and his association with radical dissenters like the Unitarians was of considerable assistance in their agenda of reform and the disentanglement of church and state (Zastoupil, 2002: 220).

Roy's deist views, his struggles with Hindu orthodoxy and debates with Baptist missionaries over the doctrine of the Trinity and the nature of Christ, and the fact that his family was said to have disowned him for his views, all resonated strongly with the Unitarians of the 1820s and 1830s, who faced persecution by the authorities (the 1689 Toleration Act was not extended to them), legal disputes over chapels and endowments, frequent blasphemy charges, and public objections to their involvement in politics and campaigning (Zastoupil, 2002: 230).

Slide 7: Unitarians and Nature
Unitarians have often found Nature inspiring and viewed the Divine as immanent in Nature, perhaps drawing on Spinoza’s ideas of God as Nature (Deus sive Natura).

Slide 8: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge, the Romantic poet, was a Unitarian originally and preached in several Unitarian chapels. He also employed a lot of Nature imagery in his poems, and many of them were pantheist in tone.

He wrote about Liberty as a principle that ran through all Nature:

And there I felt thee!—on that sea-cliff’s verge,
Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above,
Had made one murmur with the distant surge!
Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare,
And shot my being through earth, sea, and air,
Possessing all things with intensest love,
O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there.

He writes about God incarnate in humanity, and in Nature, in his poem, Religious Musings: a Desultory Poem. The influence of his Unitarian mentor Joseph Priestley is apparent in these lines:

'Tis the sublime of man
Our noontide Majesty, to know ourselves
Parts and proportions of one wondrous Whole!
This fraternises man, this constitutes
Our charities and bearings. But 'tis God
Diffused through all, that doth make all one whole . . .

James Martineau spoke for many other Unitarians when he included the works of Coleridge in a short listing of his personal 'sacred guides'. And perhaps his famous view of the Incarnation could have been influenced by these Religious Musings.

“The incarnation is true, not of Christ exclusively, but of Man universally, and God everlastingly.”

Slide 9: Ralph Waldo Emerson and The Transcendentalists
The most obvious way in which Unitarianism has influenced contemporary Paganism is through the Transcendentalists (a group of Unitarians from New England). Ralph Waldo Emerson, who began the Transcendentalist movement, had read the writings of Rammohun Roy, and was deeply influenced by them.

The Transcendentalists argued that true religion and spirituality transcend the dogmatic cultural forms of religion; they took their name from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The key players in the Transcendentalist movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau (author of Walden, an account of his attempt to return to Nature by living in a small hut by Walden Pond), and Bronson Alcott, educator and father of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women.

Many of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s ideas fed into modern Paganism; for example the idea of polarity (on which Emerson wrote an essay) is very important in Wicca; and the idea of retreating to a simple hut, as Thoreau did, influenced Ross Nicholls, founder of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, to advocate retreating to a simple hut (perhaps he got the idea from the poem by WB Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, but that was inspired by Thoreau).

Emerson’s own writings were widely read, and he became friends with Walt Whitman, the gay poet of Nature, who corresponded with Edward Carpenter, a gay Pagan socialist vegetarian whose writings were influential in the Pagan movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is probably because of the Transcendentalists that Paganism has so often been referred to as a “Nature religion” according to Chas Clifton, an American scholar of Pagan Studies. Most Pagans and many Unitarians believe that the Divine (or deities) is/are immanent in the world; an important prerequisite for treating the planet with respect.

Slide 10: Unitarians and the Goddess
Another very important idea in the contemporary Pagan revival, and for many Unitarians, is the worship of the Goddess or of Goddesses.

Unitarian feminists were vital in the process of exposing the patriarchal nature of religion. Names such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of Theodore Parker’s congregation, who wrote The Woman’s Bible, and Frances Power Cobbe, who edited a 14 volume edition of his writings, are very important in feminist history.

The Goddess is immanent in the world, not transcendent.
She is not just an aspect of a male God, but a being in her own right. (If you want to be properly Unitarian about this, perhaps you could regard Her as an emanation of the Divine source.)
She is associated with Nature and the wilderness.
She is often seen as a mother who gives birth to the Universe and who also IS the Universe.
But she is also the wise crone and the wild maiden.
She is the embodiment of compassion and wisdom.
She is not interested in imposing laws from on high, but on the emergence of harmony at the grass roots level.
She is much more than a Virgin Mother - this is an image which has been very damaging to women by holding out an unattainable ideal and denying the validity of sexual pleasure.
Her worship includes sacred sexuality.

Before there was the Earth Spirit Network, there were the feminist theology activists in Unitarianism who campaigned for more inclusive language; they included Ann Peart.

Slide 11: Theodore Parker
Theodore Parker was a Transcendentalist minister who was shunned by the more conservative Unitarians in the Boston area, but eventually gathered a congregation of about 300 in an old theatre; they included Barbara Bodichon, feminist and later a Pre-Raphaelite artist; and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a famous American Unitarian feminist. Parker was a noted campaigner against slavery; but he also often referred to God as a Mother, and believed that God is immanent.

Slide 12: Norbert Čapek
Norbert Čapek also viewed the Divine as immanent in humanity, and wrote the famous and much-loved hymn, Mother Spirit, Father Spirit. He also designed the Flower Communion, which was a radical expression of what it meant to be Unitarian in a country occupied by the Nazis, and a celebration of individuality, as well as a form of communion that his congregation, many of whom had rejected conventional Christianity, could celebrate.

Slide 13: The flaming chalice
During the Second World War, the Unitarian Service Committee was rescuing Jews from the Nazis, and needed an official symbol to put in their passports to show that they were under the protection of the Unitarian Service Committee. Rev Charles Joy, the leader of the USC, commissioned Hans Deutsch to produce a symbol, and wrote to the General Assembly back in America, that it was like a Greek or Roman chalice.

Slide 14: Conclusion
So, pagan and pantheist ideas have been in circulation in Unitarianism since it began; they are not a recent introduction, but an integral part of Unitarian engagement with the world, because both Paganism and Unitarianism are world-affirming.

~ Yvonne Aburrow

From Natural Religion to Nature Religion: Pagan and Pantheist tendencies in Unitarianism by Yvonne Aburrow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Services

2011-04-01T16:29:00.001+01:00

Services that I am leading over the next few months:

11 am, 10 April 2011
"What is a Messiah?"
The word Messiah (anointed one) means different things in different spiritual traditions. The service will explore the Jewish, Christian, Gnostic and Unitarian meanings and implications of the concept of Messiah.
Bridport Unitarian Chapel

11am, 8 May 2011
Rammohun Roy and Rabindranath Tagore
These two spiritual leaders were educational and social reformers and their ideas are still inspiring and relevant today.
Golders Green Unitarians

11am, 5 June 2011
What is a Unitarian?
Exploring the spiritual and historical significance of being a Unitarian.
Crewkerne Unitarian Chapel

6pm, 21 August 2011
Introduction to Taoism
Taoism is one of the three great religions of China. I have always found the Tao Te Ching, the foundational text of Taoism, inspiring, and the religion or philosophy which arose from it is also fascinating, and gave rise to alchemy, a spiritual practice which spread across Asia and into Europe.
Trowbridge Unitarians

11am, 2 October 2011
Harvest
Exploring time and cyclicity in relation to Harvest.
Trowbridge Unitarians

10.45, 13 November 2011
Remembrance Sunday
Oxford Unitarians

Spiritual practices workshops

2011-04-01T15:52:00.003+01:00

Wednesday 20 April, 7-9 pm: Meditation workshop
We will start with some simple meditation techniques for relaxation, such as relaxing the body, mindfulness of breathing, and simple visualisations to assist with focusing on the breath.

Wednesday 18 May, 7-9 pm: Metta Bhavana
This is a Buddhist meditation practice which promotes loving kindness and a sense of peace and harmony. We will explore the variations on Metta Bhavana, the Buddhist ideas which gave rise to it, and spend some time practising it.

Wednesday 15 June, 7-9 pm: Visualisation
This is a practice used by many Pagans to explore and transform the inner self. We will try some simple visualisations, and look at some of the symbolism of the Pagan traditions which is used in visualisations, such as the four elements.

Wednesday 13 July, 7-9 pm: Chakras
These are an ancient Hindu concept of energy centres in the body. They correspond to various glands in the body. We will look at their names and associated concepts, sounds and colours, and visualise opening and closing them.

Wednesday 17 August, 7-9 pm: Unitarian writers on spirituality
We will look at some of the Unitarian writers who have explored spiritual practices, especially those which cultivate a sense of the Divine as being immanent (involved and present) in the world. It would be helpful if participants could obtain a copy of The Unitarian Life: Voices from the Past and Present, edited by Stephen Lingwood (London: The Lindsey Press, 2008).

Wednesday 14 September, 7-9 pm: Communion
This is quite a difficult subject for many Unitarians, because most of us do not believe in salvation. What does communion mean to us? What Unitarian traditions of communion have emerged? How can it be re-imagined? We will look at three different Unitarian bread-and-wine communion services, the flower communion and the water communion, and their historical and theological contexts.

About the workshops

We welcome people regardless of ethnicity, ability, gender, or sexual orientation.
We welcome people of all ages except that a lower limit may be applied as appropriate.
We welcome new members and help them to feel at home.
We offer a safe space, characterised by acceptance and respect for all.
We make room for people of different beliefs, perspectives, and spiritual orientations.
We emphasize that there is no single answer to life's great questions, no one way of understanding the sacred element of life, and no one spiritual path that is right for everyone.
We offer opportunities for broad participation.

About the facilitator

Yvonne Aburrow has been a Unitarian since 2007 and a Wiccan since 1991. She has led numerous workshops and rituals, and studied MA Contemporary Religions and Spiritualities at Bath Spa University. She has written four books on the mythology and symbolism of trees, birds and animals, published by Capall Bann. She is a trade union activist and web developer, as well as a blogger and a poet.

Venue

The Trowbridge Unitarian Meeting House
'The Conigre' 45 Seymour Road
Trowbridge

BA14 8LX

Loving kindness meditation

2011-03-03T08:49:00.001Z

Many Buddhist traditions practice Metta Bhavana, or loving kindness meditation. (Metta means loving-kindness.)

The way I do it is as follows.

The meditation is in several stages (the classic version has five). At each stage I silently recite a mantra, linked to the breath. The first line is said on the inbreath, the second on the outbreath, and so on.

May you be happy
May you be well
May you be safe
and free from injury
May you be filled
with loving kindness.

This is a shortened version of the full mantra, and therefore easier to remember.

The first stage of the meditation is to wish yourself loving kindness (so the mantra is "May I be be happy, may I be well..." etc).

The second stage is to wish loving kindness to someone you love.

The third stage is to wish it for someone you like.

The third stage is to wish it to someone you are neutral towards.

The fourth stage is to wish it to someone you dislike, or who has hurt you. (Don't start this one by trying the most difficult person in your life, as it can be quite painful - start small and work upwards.)

The fifth stage is to wish loving kindness to a small group such as your immediate circle of friends (or you can imagine the previous four people together in a group).

The sixth stage is to wish loving kindness to your immediate community (place of work, spiritual community or neighbourhood). At this stage I send loving kindness to Wiccans and Unitarians everywhere.

The seventh stage is to wish loving kindness to everyone on the planet.

The eighth stage is to wish it to all sentient beings.

The benefits of this meditation are manifold. It is very calming and soothing; it allows you to focus on your breath, and relax into feelings of loving kindness and safety; it helps you to feel connected to all beings, and to expand your imaginative sympathy to encompass them; and it helps you to overcome negative feelings towards people you dislike, which can really improve your relationship with them, and help you to forgive them. It also has beneficial effects on the brain, as it has been shown to reduce the "fight or flight" instinct in situations where it is not needed.

Spirituality Workshops

2011-01-21T15:48:00.001Z

Contemplative Prayer
Wednesday 16 February 2011, 7 till 9 pm
Because many people do not believe in a personal God or in miraculous interventions, we find it difficult to pray. But prayer is not just about asking for things. It can be contemplative. It can be about communing silently with the universe, or self-examination, or holding loved ones in your thoughts, or increasing mindfulness. This workshop will look at different types of prayer, and invite you to create your own prayers, as well as spending some time practicing contemplative and centering prayer.

People of all faiths and none are welcome to this event. It is about how you develop your own ideas of prayer; it does not seek to impose any viewpoint.

Register for this event at UKSpirituality.org or Sign up for this event on Facebook

What do Lent and Easter mean to you?
Wednesday 16 March, 7 till 9 pm
We will examine what Lent and Easter have meant to Unitarians and Christians down the ages, and what they can mean for us now.

The workshop will include Jungian perspectives, ancient pagan mythological parallels, and Christian mystical ideas.

Unitarians have traditionally disbelieved in original sin, vicarious atonement and the resurrection, but it is interesting to view the Easter story as a piece of mythology, and compare it with Jungian views of the process of individuation, and with myths of dying-and-resurrecting vegetation gods from the ancient pagan Near East.

Modern Pagans celebrate the myths of Ishtar, Adonis, Attis and Baldr, all of which involve a similar journey to the underworld.

Christian mystics and heretics have also viewed the Easter story differently.

We will also look at traditions of fasting and preparation, and ask if they are still relevant, or whether some other practice would be more appropriate for Lent.

Register for this event at UKSpirituality.org or Sign up for this event on Facebook

Cost
Free, but donations for tea & coffee and chapel funds gratefully received

Where?

Trowbridge Unitarians

'The Conigre' , 45 Seymour Road

Trowbridge, United Kingdom, BA14 8LY

Pledge of Quality

In every UK Spirituality event, workshop, course, or retreat that I lead, I will do my utmost to:

Welcome people regardless of race, ability, sex, or sexual orientation.
Welcome people of all ages except that a lower limit may be applied as appropriate.
Welcome new members and help them to feel at home.
Offer a safe space, characterised by acceptance and respect for all.
Make room for people of different beliefs, perspectives, and spiritual orientations.
Emphasize that there is no single answer to life's great questions, no one way of understanding the sacred element of life, and no one spiritual path that is right for everyone.
Offer opportunities for broad participation.

Mother Spirit

2011-01-16T15:12:00.002Z

a prayer by Yvonne Aburrow

God our Mother: the source and origin of all life
Who is in both the starry heavens and the fruitful Earth
We sing to you of your beauty,
And we cry to you when we are in pain,
We whisper your many names into the night.
Your presence is everywhere
Your song is the music of creation, perpetually renewing itself,
Reflected in the patterns of Nature and the movements of the stars.
You feed us from the bounty of Nature’s store
And nurture us when we are in pain,
When we have hurt others,
And give us the strength to heal and forgive.
May we not harm the delicate web of existence,
But help to heal and strengthen it.
For yours is the beauty, present in everything,
The ever-changing beauty of Nature,
Throughout all existence
Amen.

Reason and rationality

2010-12-29T10:24:00.001Z

"There is as great a difference between rationality and rationalism as there is between spirituality and spiritualism, individuality and individualism, and community and communism."

~ Philip Hewett (1985), The Unitarian Way (quoted by Arthur Long in Unitarian Thought in the 20th Century, part 2

Words of inclusive love

2010-12-22T21:32:00.002Z

A prayer

Source of all life and love,
We give thanks for the beautiful diversity of love,
The glorious rainbow of sexuality,
and the myriad ways to give and receive love.
We give thanks for the love of lesbians, gays, heterosexuals, bisexuals, transgender, chosen celibates, whose souls are aflame with eros and agape.
We give thanks for the love of friends, families, companion animals, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts and second cousins once removed.
We give thanks for the random acts of kindness shown by strangers to each other.
We give thanks for our beloved community.
May all these loves be strengthened and renewed
by wisdom, patience, tolerance, forbearance, forgiveness and courtesy.
May all these loves recognise and rejoice in each other
as part of the great tapestry of love.
May all beings be filled with loving-kindness,
and may justice roll down like waters
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Amen.

A Benediction

Let us embody the values of the rainbow flag of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Red is the root of spirit, found in beloved community,
Orange is for Eros, the fire of spirit, the experience of erotic connection,
Yellow is for self-esteem, the strong core of spirit,
Green is for love, the heart of spirit, the verdant growth of the soul,
Blue is for self-expression, the voice of spirit, calling out for justice,
Purple is the eye of spirit, which sees inwardly with the eye of wisdom.
And all the colours together form the crown of spirit, the experience of spirituality.

(These could be used for a Bridge of Light celebration)

Sometimes we do not hear the call

2010-11-17T21:32:00.000Z

Sometimes we do not hear the call,
the still small voice that speaks to us
in the watches of the night.
Sometimes we do not recognise the messenger,
nor hear the message,
though reality patiently sends it over and over,
showing the way, opening the door.
O source of all wisdom,
help us to discern the subtle whispers
among the tumult of conflicting messages.
Help us to find the harmonious way
among the many branching possibilities.
Help us to recognise the messengers from the Divine
in their many forms.
Help us to hear the voice of love
calling us to community, to justice and to peace.
Amen.

Asparagus and religious liberty

2010-11-16T21:41:00.000Z

What is the connection between asparagus and religious liberty? The fact that for 200 years, the Midland Unitarian Association has held an asparagus lunch, initially as a cover for the meeting of Unitarian ministers when Unitarianism was still illegal, and subsequently to continue the tradition, and it must have helped that asparagus is really tasty. Ant Howe explains:

The tradition goes back at least 200 years - and you might wonder why on earth a group of Unitarian ministers would do such a thing! After all, whilst asparagus is lovely to eat, why would we go to such trouble to eat it?
Well, our group of Ministers in the Midlands have been meeting each month since 1782. Back then, Unitarianism was still illegal. If you professed Unitarian beliefs, you could not only face prosecution, but also persecution in your community. In fact, our churches which date back to that time had to be very careful as there was a very real risk. Unitarianism didn't finally become legal until 1813.
So, if you are a group of Ministers in the Midlands who belong to an illegal organisation, you'd have to be careful about where you meet. In fact, a disguise might be necessary. And so the idea came up of going to Evesham and meeting there when the Asparagus crop was harvested. There would've been lots of strangers in Evesham at that time: farmers selling their asparagus crop and many people there to buy. A group of Ministers could easily meet and pretend they were there to buy asparagus .... and so the Asparagus Lunch was born!
You might think that all this sounds rather a great deal of effort just to hold a meeting, but we have to remember what a risk it was to be a Unitarian minister in those days. Right up until 1813, if you were caught proclaiming Unitarian beliefs, you could be heavily fined, and if you did it a second time, you could go to prison for up to three years and lose all your civil rights permanently. Unitarians couldn't go to university or hold civil office, and many of our earliest churches and chapels were built to look like barns or houses, so that they didn't attract too much attention.

I discovered this because I was searching for the Unitarian toast, which I have heard mentioned by people from the Midlands, but which doesn't seem to be much used further south. The toast is to "Civil and Religious Liberty the World Over" - I'll certainly drink to that.

Embracing the shadow

2010-11-16T20:16:00.000Z

The human capacity for compassion and wisdom is in stark contrast to our capacity for cruelty and destruction. It is difficult to maintain an optimistic view of human nature in the face of the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Abu Ghreib, torture, murder and rape. The only explanation that I find helpful for the human capacity for evil is the Jungian idea that we project our shadow selves onto others, and seek to destroy the shadow side by destroying the other. If we accepted our shadow side and sought to integrate it into consciousness, we would not persecute others, regard them as less human, and seek to destroy them.

But where did the shadow come from? Initially it may have emerged as a defence mechanism, or a by-product of the emergence of consciousness. This is suggested by the myth of the Garden of Eden, when the serpent reveals the distinction between good and evil to Adam and Eve, and then Yahweh says that the woman shall crush the serpent beneath her heel. If the knowledge of good and evil is equated with consciousness, and what is allowed into the light of consciousness is regarded as good, then the serpent (which represents the shadow and the unconscious) must be crushed in order to retain a sense of the self as good.

We can break out of this vicious circle by embracing the shadow, and taming the beast rather than seeking to destroy it.

unity and diversity

2010-11-04T08:10:00.000Z

One of the many things I value about being Unitarian is the freedom to think about religion, and explore many different spiritual traditions: Unitarianism, Universalism, humanism, Buddhism, atheism, liberal Christianity, pantheism, Paganism, Judaism, Hinduism, and so on.

Occasionally someone says, but how can you be a Unitarian and an atheist (or one of the other traditions listed above? It's simple - you love and cherish your own tradition, but you respect and value the insights of others as a corrective to any blind-spots in your own tradition. When writing sermons / addresses, my approach is to use the insights of different religious traditions to illuminate my theme; so for instance if my address was about compassion, I would draw mainly on Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity; if it was about hospitality, I would draw mainly on Heathenry and Religio Romana; if it was about the concept of a Messiah, I would draw mainly on Judaism, Christianity and Gnosticism. If my address was about religion and science, I would draw on atheist spirituality, among other things.

I count myself as a non-theist, in that I do not think the Divine is an entity with a personality; rather it is an experience or an all-pervading quality, and we can experience it through many images and archetypes. But I wholeheartedly embrace the Unitarian ethos and tradition, and many other Unitarians before me have held this view; so I do not think it makes me any less of a Unitarian.

Epimenedes and Aratus

2010-10-27T22:41:00.003+01:00

I have always rather liked this quote about the immanence of the Divine, but had not realised that it was entirely lifted from Greek pagan poetry - hurrah! (thanks to my chum Gerardus for pointing this out).

For in Him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we are also His offspring'. (Acts 17:28)

But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,
For in thee we live and move and have our being. (Epimenides' Cretica)

Let us begin with Zeus, whom we mortals never leave unspoken.
For every street, every market-place is full of Zeus.
Even the sea and the harbour are full of this deity.
Everywhere everyone is indebted to Zeus.
For we are indeed his offspring... (Phaenomena 1-5).

Harvest

2010-10-03T14:19:00.003+01:00

Address given at Trowbridge, 3 October 2010

The Christian harvest festival seems to be a movable feast, but is generally celebrated at the end of harvest in any given region, and is associated with various harvest customs. Now that we rely less heavily on the outcome of our harvest, the thoughts of churches in the developed world have turned to people in the developing world for whom food production is less secure, and to those in our own society who do not know where the next meal is coming from.

In Jewish tradition, the festival of harvest is Shavuot, which was traditionally the end of the barley harvest and the beginning of the wheat harvest. It is also believed to be the day when the Jewish people received the Torah from Mount Sinai. Traditionally, the 49 days between Passover (Pesach) and Shavuot were a period of semi-mourning, and they are also counted in anticipation of the giving of the Torah. There are a number of theories for why Jews view this period with sadness, one of which refers to a plague that killed many students of the famed Talmudic sage, Rabbi Akiva. It is also a custom to stay awake and study the Torah the night before Shavuot, as it was believed that the Israelites mistakenly feel asleep the night before receiving the Ten Commandments.

One of the traditional readings for the festival of Shavuot is the story of Ruth and Naomi, which is why I chose it for our story today.

In Pagan tradition, there are three harvests; the corn harvest at Lammas; the fruit harvest at Autumn Equinox; and the harvest of meat at Samhain, when some of the cattle would have been slaughtered and preserved for the winter. Lammas commemorates the death of John Barleycorn, the dying-and-resurrecting vegetation god. The corn was believed to be inhabited by the corn-spirit, which was killed at every harvest and resurrected in the planting of the new corn. In Ireland, Lammas was celebrated with games in honour of the goddess Tailtiu, the mother of Lugh the sun god, and was called Lughnasadh.

Autumn Equinox was not celebrated everywhere in the ancient world, but it is regarded by contemporary Pagans as a point of balance, because it is the time when day and night are equal. It is also the fruit harvest and a time to celebrate Pomona, goddess of fruit, and her consort Vertumnus, god of change. In Jewish tradition, it is Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world, when God created everything.

Samhain or Hallowe’en is a much-misunderstood festival. To the ancient Celts it was a celebration of freedom from oppression; contemporary Pagans have adapted the Catholic festival of All Souls, and regard Samhain as a time when the veil between the worlds is thin, and people can commune with the ancestors and the beloved dead. Some Unitarian congregations have started to celebrate Samhain by commemorating their relatives and friends who have died.

People like customs and festivals because they mark transitions; the changing seasons, the tides of our lives. The Jewish tradition is particularly rich in seasonal customs, special foods, and symbolic actions, which help to connect the life of the individual to the great cosmic story. Similarly, contemporary Pagans have sought to re-create the richness of the seasonal festivals. Unitarians can draw from the festivals of many traditions; but I think we should be respectful of their original meaning and context.

But what is the inner meaning of harvest? I am reminded of Jesus’ saying: “As you sow, so shall ye reap.” Many of you are probably familiar with the film It’s a Wonderful Life, in which a man is just about to commit suicide because he has ceased to see meaning in his life, when an angel comes and shows him all the differences he has made to the lives of others, and what the world would be like without him in it. He is a bank manager, who has lent people money when they really needed it; he is a family man who has made his wife and children happy. He has carried out many small kindnesses, and that has made all the difference.

Each of our small acts of kindness can make a real difference in the lives of others; even a smile can make someone else happier, which means they are more likely to smile at others, or be kind to them – who knows how far the harvest of one small act of kindness may spread?

As Louis Macneice observed in his poem, Fanfare for the Makers (which was quoted recently in the TV comedy Rev), sometimes we plant trees but do not see them reaching their full height, and “sometimes one man’s kindness pervades / A room or house or village”, and “mothers sit up late night after night / Moulding a life”, so each act of kindness can “lend the passing moment words and wings”.

Sometimes we feel powerless in the face of all the suffering and oppression in the world, but we can each do our bit. Even signing internet petitions and donating to charity can make a real difference to the lives of others, and you don’t even have to leave your chair to do that.

Another saying of Jesus was “By their fruits ye shall know them”. I once attended a sermon by Ashley Hills where he told the story of a 19th century Unitarian tea merchant. Although his fellow-citizens deplored his choice of theology, they always bought their tea from him because they knew he was an honest fellow who always bought the best quality tea and never adulterated it with other things. They knew him by his fruits, or should that be by his tea? This seems to me to be harvest-related, too.

Harvest is a time when we count our blessings, and seek to share them with others less fortunate than ourselves. Just as Boaz shared the harvest of his fields with Ruth and Naomi, so we are sharing the harvest with the homeless. We are mindful of the gleaners at the margins of the fields. Ruth was a Moabite and not an Israelite, and was related to Ruth by marriage. She had decided to go with Naomi, her mother-in-law, after her husband had died, because of the great love she felt for her. If she gleaned the leavings of the harvesters in any other field, the book of Ruth implies that it was likely she would have been harmed by the harvesters, perhaps raped. So it was an act of radical hospitality on the part of Boaz to allow her to glean in his field. More recently, lesbian Christians have interpreted the story of Ruth and Naomi as an example of same-sex love, because Ruth said:

Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.

Ruth 1:16-17

This quote has often been used as a marriage vow, apparently. Whether or not they were actually lesbians in the modern sense is not important; the fact is they clearly loved each other a great deal, and their story is very inspiring to women who love women.

Unitarianism is also radically hospitable, since we were the first denomination to ordain women, the first to include lesbian and gay people as complete equals, and we have consistently sought to widen our circle of inclusivity. Why, then, are people not flocking to our door? The reasons could be many and varied; but one reason may be that we are hiding our light under a bushel, and not getting out there and showing people that they are welcome at our table. In order to reap the blessings of community, we need to be radically hospitable; and sometimes that can mean being open to change – change that might not be particularly comfortable to embrace.

There is also the problem that people generally do not understand liberal religion, because they think religion is all about what you believe, not about what you do. But it’s up to us (and other liberal religious groups) to show them that it doesn’t have to be like that. You can have a religion where you don’t have to leave your brain at the door; where symbols are resonant with many layers of meaning; where heart and mind can be fed; where we can live in beloved community with one another.
Amen.

Time and eternity

2010-10-03T09:45:00.000+01:00

I continued my practice of lectio divina with Dry Salvages, the third poem in Eliot's Four Quartets. I have always liked the first section, which begins "The river is a strong brown god". This section seems to be about the immanence of the Divine in Nature, and the multiplicity of spirits of place. In the second stanza, the rhythms of the sea could be seen as a metaphor for the Divine in which we live, move and have our being.

I found the rest of Dry Salvages quite difficult. Eliot contrasts cyclical time and linear time with Christian ideas of eternity, and the eternal now. I like the idea of cyclical time, with its tides of sowing, growing, reaping and resting, its shifts from outwardness to inwardness. I also like the idea of the eternal now, but Eliot seems to regard both past and future as rather dreary (which they are in linear time), and to regard cyclical time as an endless repeating of the same old stuff. In my experience, cyclical time is the repetition of stages, but each stage has similar elements and different elements, so the combinations of experience are always new.

I did enjoy the descriptions of the eternal now:

...to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement

Vast deep silence

2010-09-24T08:10:00.002+01:00

I have continued with the practice of Lectio Divina, using T S Eliot's Four Quartets, every day since my previous post about it. Here are some notes I made after some of the sessions.

17-9-10 (Stanzas 3 & 4 of Burnt Norton)
I've realised that these poems are about the experience of contemplative prayer - descending into the vast deep silence beneath everything. Reading them has also inspired some poetry in response.

Stillness and dancing
Centre and circumference
the stillness is everywhere
and the dance is everywhere
source welling up
eternally from the depths
the music to which we dance
the air we breathe
the life that lives us.

18-9-10 (Stanza 5 of Burnt Norton)

Stanza 5 seems to be about apophatic and paradoxical theology.

O living waters rise in me
Refresh the desert places
that cry out for rain.

23-9-10 (Stanza 4, East Coker)

This stanza uses Christian imagery to talk about the wounded healer archetype.

We are constantly slaying the image of God in each other:
That one walks too tall, looks too free and happy.
Each of us is wounded and inflicts wounds in our turn.
The only way to break free is to accept ourselves:
To feel the constant outpouring of divine love
From the depths of silence.
We must descend again and again into the abyss
To rescue the forgotten parts of ourselves.

24-9-10 (Stanza 5, East Coker)

The last stanza of East Coker seems to be about coinherence, the idea that we are all members of each other; but also that the now contains both the past and the future: "a lifetime burning in every moment".

The whole of East Coker is more melancholy than Burnt Norton - perhaps it represents the descent into the abyss, the dark night of the soul. But it concludes on a hopeful note: "We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion..."

I am finding it really helpful to read the poems as slowly as this (one stanza a day) and reflect on their meaning. Four Quartets is not the easiest poem to understand, but the meaning becomes more apparent after reflection.

Lectio Divina: Four Quartets

2010-09-15T08:38:00.001+01:00

I had been meaning to embark upon the practice of lectio divina for some time, but was unsure what text I wanted to contemplate. I had thought of the Tao Te Ching (and that will be next). This morning, I realised that my first effort would be with T S Eliot's wonderfully rich series of poems, Four Quartets, bits of which resonate very much with me.

So this morning, I began with the Buddhist practice of Metta Bhavana (loving kindness meditation) and then read the first stanza of Burnt Norton out loud, then contemplated its imagery, then engaged in wordless contemplation of the deep silence within, and the relationship of time and eternity, and then formulated a spoken prayer out of some of the imagery of the poem. It made me realise that one purpose of spoken prayer is to speak to one's own depths and make a statement of intent.

I did the steps in the wrong order for the classic form of lectio divina, but it felt like the right order at the time.

To be a pilgrim

2010-09-14T08:28:00.000+01:00

Richard Wiseman asks what your pilgrimage would be...

I consider all travel that involves engaging with the landscape, culture and/or people to be a form of pilgrimage.

Some of the more consciously pilgrimish travel I have done, though, included going to Down House where Darwin lived and walking along the gravel path where he thought about evolution, and having a conversation about evolution. I think the re-enactment element was important there.

Another example was going to Canterbury Cathedral. I am not a Christian but I find the story of Thomas a Becket moving, and I like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Jean Anouilh's play Becket.

Visiting stone circles always feels like a pilgrimage to me. They are beautiful and numinous places, and some archaeologists think they were made to represent a microcosm of the landscape.

Landscape itself - the wild places - is a place of pilgrimage for me; it is where I go to feel renewed and refreshed.

I also think that places where other people have made a connection with the numinous are special. As T S Eliot wrote in Little Gidding,

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

food blessings

2010-09-10T18:29:00.002+01:00

Rev Naomi started a conversation on Twitter about blessings for food. If you want to see it, the tag is #tablebless. It's a great idea for integrating spirituality with daily life, so I'm really interested in what people come up with.

I suggested the Pantheist Grace and a Pagan Grace by Isaac and Phaedra Bonewits. I also came up with a Lolcat blessing: "Hallowed be thy Noms".

Other offerings include:

"We thank every being that brought this food to our table. We are all a part of the web of life" (by me)
"Blessed be God who is our bread, may all the world be clothed and fed" (by chickpastor)
"Thanks for what we receive! With joy, may we give far more than we receive and bless the world." (by Rev Naomi)
"Rejoice in what gifts upon this table lay! Nourished here, may we go forth and feed the world." (by Rev Naomi)
"We give thanks for the life that sustains our life, and the web of which we are all a part." (by TrulySocial)
"For those who grew this food, those who made this meal, and for life that sustains us all, we give thanks!" (by Rev Naomi)

There's a collection of prayers before meals from various faith traditions at BeliefNet. Many traditions seem to have the impulse to honour where the food came from and to wish that everyone else will be fed too. For example, this Pagan prayer and this Buddhist prayer do that, and so does chickpastor's prayer (above).

Please add your ideas in the comments. Brevity is of the essence here - it needs to be easy to memorise and not make the food get cold!

Empiricism

2010-09-09T22:59:00.001+01:00

An address given to Golders Green Unitarians on 5 September 2010

Empiricism, according to Alister McGrath, is the idea that 'truth arises from reflection within the mind on what the human faculties experience through sense perception'. So we experience something through our senses, then we reflect upon it, and from this, truth arises.

According to Karen Armstrong, in The Case for God (which should really be called the case for religion), belief and faith both originally meant loyalty to an evolving tradition; first you did the ritual, and then the teachings were revealed – and they only made sense in the context of the ritual. The ritual was experienced through the senses, and then its symbolism made sense.

In the eighteenth century, rationalists and empiricists sharply disagreed about the nature of truth. For rationalists, the power to reason was an innate quality of the human mind. But for empiricists, babies were born as a “blank slate” for experience to write upon – with no innate qualities or faculties. The conflict continued well into the twentieth century, with the nature versus nurture debate in psychology, which was an argument about whether hereditary traits were more important in the development of the personality, or whether your environment could override your genetic inheritance.

But as far as I can see, it is not a case of either / or – it’s a case of both / and. We need reason to work things out logically, and to ensure our ideas are consistent with reality. But we also need experiment and experience. We do not sit isolated in our ivory towers formulating an abstract theology or philosophy. We derive our understandings of the world from our experience, the stimuli that come in through our senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight and proprioception (the sense of your location in space, which is governed by your inner ear, and enables you to stay upright and balanced). We can then compare our experiences with those of others, and reflect upon them. And we learn new things by experimenting, hopefully in a safe space. The first time you do a new thing is an experiment – you are testing an aspect of your environment. And it is by experimenting that we gain experience. Interestingly in the French language, the word for both experiment and experience is expérience.

Charles Darwin had a long-running experiment with worms, where he put a millstone in his lawn and then measured how much it settled into the earth because it was being undermined by earthworms burrowing underneath it. I have seen the millstone set into his lawn at Down House in Kent; the experiment is still going on. Thanks to Darwin’s curiosity and imagination, a tiny puzzle about the way the world works is being solved.

They say that curiosity killed the cat; but on the other hand, fortunately the cat has nine lives. And in fact, curiosity is not generally fatal to cats. Curiosity is a good thing, as long as it is balanced with discernment and compassion. I am sure we can all think of scientific experiments that are not done with sufficient compassion; and of experiments that were not done with sufficient discernment (such as the development of atomic weapons or genetically modified crops). So we cannot allow curiosity a completely free rein; it must be tempered with wisdom. It’s not that any knowledge is forbidden to us by divine edict; knowledge must be tempered with wisdom. In Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy, he explores the ideas of Montaigne, who decried education that imparted facts but did not teach people how to live well. It is the great divorce of science and religion that has allowed this split in awareness to develop – the fact that fundamentalists continue to insist on literal interpretations which are contrary to reason and science, makes scientists dismiss the whole of religion as a waste of space. But Unitarians steadfastly maintain, and many other religions affirm, that religion is not about beliefs, doctrines and dogmas – it is about values, and about experiencing the world with a sense of awe and wonder and gratitude. It is about celebrating life, and experiencing it to the full; letting our imagination and creativity play over the vast panoply of nature.

Imagination is also an important quality; it enables us to imagine the world differently. And this is what liberal religions do, too. For my MA, I studied the relationship between Pagans and science, including their interest in science fiction. One of the reasons that Pagans like science fiction (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was true of Unitarians too) is that it dreams of worlds with different societies, different ethical systems, and different ways of interacting with the planet than our own. Science fiction is a thought experiment about how things might play out if you had a different set of starting conditions – for example, if people lived in caves with very little living space, how would that affect their sense of space? They would be agoraphobic and have no sense of personal space. And if there was another planet that was sparsely populated, they might be claustrophobic and get used to large amounts of personal space. Now imagine the dramatic possibilities if you transplant the inhabitant of the sparsely populated planet to the cave planet, or vice versa, and how that would affect them. This is the premise of Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel. The message of the novel is a hopeful one: that people can overcome the conditioning of their home environment – but they have to be willing to try.

It is the same with our spiritual life. If we always do the same old stuff, we might get stuck in a rut; but if we try new things, we might gain new insights. I don’t necessarily mean that the new thing has to be something scary or difficult – it could just be trying again at something you have failed at in the past. I thought I was rubbish at meditation until I tried again in a morning meditation session at Great Hucklow Summer School, and something that was said – that you can begin again each moment, and that if thoughts arise, do not follow them – gave me the key to learning to relax and just do it. Sometimes trying something with a different person in a different context can give a different perspective on it.

Similarly with prayer: I didn’t really understand prayer until I read a book about it by a Russian Orthodox monk called Staretz Silouan. I would never have come across this book unless I had tried Orthodoxy and been lent the book by an Orthodox nun called Mother Sarah. So doing something outside one’s comfort zone can sometimes be beneficial. Ultimately Orthodoxy wasn’t for me, but I learnt a lot while I was involved in it, especially about the differences between Eastern and Western Christian doctrine, which enabled me to read the Gospels in a very different way, and look at the Christian tradition differently.

As the Quakers say, “Be open to new light, wherever it may come from” – a very wise saying, I feel.

Another aspect of an empirical approach to religion and spirituality is its pragmatism. We can try new things and persist with them for a while – but if they don’t work for us, we can stop doing them. I can’t imagine Unitarians persisting in doing something unpleasant or detrimental just because it was the custom to do it, or because tradition demanded it. (Come to think of it, this must be the case, because I can’t think of any Unitarian practices that are unpleasant.)

Of course human beings are always a bit reluctant to try new things – we like our safe comfortable ruts and grooves, our tried and tested ways of doing things. But remember when your mum and dad got you to try that new vegetable on your plate, and you actually liked it? Or when you first learnt to ride a bike, the feeling of exhilaration when you realised that your dad wasn’t holding on to the back of the bike any more? It can be pleasurable to experiment with new ways of doing things.

So let us approach the world with wonder and a willingness to experiment. Let’s be willing to try new things – even Brussels sprouts.

A syllogism

2010-09-01T17:27:00.000+01:00

God doesn't exist. (Many theologians have pointed this out, including John Scotus Eriugena, Paul Tillich, Karen Armstrong, and various thinkers from Judaism and Islam. This is because "God" is Being itself, or the Ground of All Being, or Nothing, or a process.)

God is love (according to various Christian commentators).

Love does not exist. (There's no thing you can point to and say it is love.)

Love is an experience shared between people.

God is an experience shared between people.

Norwich Pride Interfaith Service

2010-07-30T07:43:00.002+01:00

The Norwich Pride 2010 interfaith service will be held at the Octagon Unitarian Chapel in Colegate in Norwich city centre. The service is at 6pm on 31 July. The church's beautiful walled garden will be open to picnickers prior to the service.

Stephen Lingwood, an ordained Unitarian minister, will lead the service entitled 'Coming Out as a Spiritual Practice'. He also plans to march in the parade with the diversity banner. He said he is pleased to be involved with Norwich Pride.

Ooh I would very much like to go to that. Well done to all involved. I wrote some bits about coming out as a spiritual practice as part of my essay on LGBT Spirituality.

prayer for liberation

2010-07-22T23:14:00.000+01:00

O deep and ineffable Silence
That speaks from the depths
O space carved out by suffering
That is inexplicably filled with joy
You are the inspiration of our going forth
To connect with others
Move our hearts to compassion
That we may genuinely lift up the poor
Move our hands to action
That we may lift the burdens of the oppressed
Fill our heads with inspiration
That we may behold the vision of a just society
And work to bring it into being
Amen.

(inspired by liberation theology)

Labyrinth walk at GA

2010-06-18T08:37:00.003+01:00

The room was silent, the lighting subdued. Barefoot people waited meditatively to enter the labyrinth, which was surrounded by electric tealights. They stood on the threshold for a moment before embarking on the journey.

Each person’s journey was unique, although the labyrinth has a single pathway to the centre. We were all travelling on the same pathway, but each person was going at a different speed, travelling in a different way. Rather like life, the path twists and turns, in and out, and you never know how close to the centre you are. When the path appears to take you furthest away from the centre, you are nearer, and when you appear to be closest, you are actually further away.

The centre – the goal of the journey – can mean different things to different people. For me, it is a metaphor for the Divine: always present, always hidden. In Pagan labyrinths, the centre symbolises the underworld, the inner realm; in Christian labyrinths, it represents the goal of the pilgrim, Jerusalem, with Christ at the centre.

The centre is a place to meditate and reflect on the journey, connect with the Divine, or just look into yourself. The space at the centre is shaped like a flower, or like the rose window of a cathedral. Each of its petals represents one of six kingdoms: mineral, vegetable, animal, human, angelic and the unknown.

The journey back from the centre depicts bringing back the blessing and insight from the other realm to share with your community. On the way out from the centre, I felt like dancing, I was so full of energy. As you cross the threshold once more into the outer world, it is a good idea to meditate on the experience, and only gradually ease back into normal conversation.

Pagan labyrinths generally have the path winding through one quadrant at a time, possibly so the walker can meditate on each of the four elements in turn. Christian labyrinths have the path winding back and forth between the quadrants, so that you never know where you are. This is in many ways a more powerful experience, because you never know how close you are to the goal of the journey, so it is a revelation when you reach it. One such labyrinth is the one in Chartres Cathedral, which was constructed around 1200.

The oldest labyrinth design is the Cretan labyrinth, which is a very simple design and can be drawn quite quickly; it is easy to make out of pebbles in your garden or at a camp.

The labyrinth at GA was made of cloth, with the design of the Chartres labyrinth printed on it. It is owned by Danielle Wilson, an interfaith minister from London. If you did not get a chance to walk it at GA, you can attend one of the monthly walks at Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel.

It is a very ancient form of meditation, very relaxing, and it’s well worth giving it a try. It’s very personal and inwardly focussed, and yet shared with your fellow-travellers in a wordless communion.

More information from Danielle Wilson and Rosslyn Hill Chapel

A brief history of mazes and labyrinths

Mazes are recorded in Egypt, Rome, Scandinavia, England, India, and the American Southwest. They are generally believed to symbolise the soul’s journey through life, or the journey of the dead to the underworld.

There are two types of maze: the unicursal (single path) maze and the puzzle maze. Both of these are referred to as both a labyrinth and a maze. However, in the myth of the Minotaur, the labyrinth in which the Minotaur dwells is clearly a puzzle maze (i.e. having dead ends), as Theseus needs a thread to find his way through to the centre. Apparently the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur refers to the maze-like palace at Knossos, which burned to the ground in the 15th century BCE.

The Classical Maze comes in four types, the Serpentine, Spiral, Simple Meander, and Complex Meander. The Roman ones were usually square, but these designs work as circular mazes too.

The principle of the maze was probably discovered in the Neolithic. The earliest recorded mazes were in Crete, 4000 years ago. In Egypt, there was a huge palace complex on the shores of a lake seven days journey up the Nile from the pyramids in form of a labyrinth. This was built by pharaoh Amenemhet III in the 19th century BCE. It consisted of thousands of rooms and twelve large maze-like courtyards, which were probably intended to keep out unwelcome visitors. Amenemhet also created a maze inside his nearby pyramid to thwart tomb robbers. Most Roman labyrinths, on the other hand, were too small to have been walked, and are typically found on the floor near the entrances to houses and villas; many have small city walls (perhaps indicating the walls of Troy) drawn around them. This suggests they served a protective function, and were perhaps believed to have warded off evil influences or intruders — a common function of the labyrinth in many other cultures as well. The tomb of Lars Porsenna (an Etruscan king) at Chiusi in Italy was said to be surrounded by a labyrinth.

The turf mazes of Britain and Scandinavia may have served a similar purpose, but in the Middle Ages they acquired an additional association with May games; hence the name “Robin Hood’s Race” or “Julian’s Bower”. The Celtic name for a maze was Caer Droia, the place of turning, and this was transliterated into English as Troy Town. It was widely believed that England was founded by Brutus fleeing Troy, and the mazes were believed to represent Troy. Mazes in Finland were often called Jericho, referring to the legend that it was destroyed by the Israelite army marching around it seven times. A maze called ‘the walls of Jericho’ also appears in a Hebrew manuscript.

The Enlightenment

2010-04-18T10:29:00.002+01:00

A motion was proposed at the UK GA in defence of the Enlightenment. The author of the motion was sitting in front of me, and said that he just wanted to start a conversation about it. What a good idea, I said. So here goes.

The Enlightenment was a complex phenomenon with many strands. One of those strands was the origin of the Pagan revival. Another was the rise of rational religion in the form of Unitarianism, deism and humanism. A further strand was the rise of rationalism, which at the time was in opposition to the empiricism of Locke and others. The rationalists held that reason was a priori, God-given; the empiricists held that we are born with a blank slate (tabula rasa) and acquire reasoning skills by experience. It was only in the early 20th century that a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism was finally achieved. Another strand of the Enlightenment was the concept of the sublime - the experience of awe when confronted by natural phenomena such as mountains, waterfalls and wilderness. This represented a considerable shift in attitudes to nature, and it was out of this that Romanticism emerged. A further aspect of the Enlightenment was the rise of feminism, with the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and others. There had been previous feminist writings, but Wollstonecraft represents the beginnings of a movement as opposed to a few isolated individuals. Remember also that evolution by natural selection had not yet been discovered; hardly anyone was aware of the great age of the Earth; science was still called natural philosophy; Oxford and Cambridge were Anglican-only universities and generally not very science-focussed; if you wanted to study science, the best place to go was a Dissenting Academy, like Joseph Priestley.

So the Enlightenment was a multi-faceted phenomenon, a mixture of sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory discourses. It was an intellectual ferment, an explosion of interest in natural phenomena, history, and literature - an awakening.

The legacy of the Enlightenment is therefore also a mixed blessing. Pure rationalism has given rise to reductionism, logical positivism, behaviourism and other scientific dead-ends; but the idea that we should subject all impulses and beliefs to reason before acting on them seems to me an excellent idea. Empiricism - the primacy of experience and experiment - is also a good principle to work by. Always asking, "Yes but does it work? What are the consequences?" is a good test for most situations. And utilitarianism (another Enlightenment idea) is also useful if not carried to extremes. Seeking the greatest happiness of the greatest possible number of people is good, as long as the rights of the remaining few are not trampled.

Where the legacy of the Enlightenment has failed us is when we assume that science does not need to be tempered with other approaches. The worst excesses of industry, pollution, eugenics, behaviourist psychology and other extreme science should have been tempered with compassion and humanity.

A happy whale

2010-04-17T11:08:00.001+01:00

I just received this very touching story via email.

If you had read a recent front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle, you would have known about a female humpback whale that had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso, and a line tugging in her mouth.

A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the Golden Gate ) and radioed an environmental group for help.

Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so badly off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her.

They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her.

When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles.

She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around...as if thanking them.

Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives.

The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.

I found the original story in the SF Chronicle.

My GA UK experience

2010-04-14T12:05:00.002+01:00

At the weekend, I went to the Unitarian General Assembly event. It was a great opportunity to see old friends and make new ones, and find out more about other Unitarians and their spirituality. There were a number of business meetings with votes on various issues (none particularly ground-breaking this year, though they were important, and there have been some very important motions in the past). The sense of participating in the democratic process of the Unitarian movement is quite important to me - it means that there is a mechanism for change.

There was the opening ceremony (I am afraid the drumming in the opening ceremony was too loud for me, but I appreciated its energy); and the Anniversary Service, which was excellent and I experienced a genuine sense of the divine in it.

I also attended some of the fringe meetings. The Unitarian Earth Spirit Network meeting had Prudence Jones as its guest speaker (an excellent choice). Perhaps ironically, I see her Enlightenment-inspired version of Paganism as being much closer to Unitarianism than to the views expressed by most Pagans these days. But then that's why I am a Unitarian, because I agree with most of her views.

I also attended the Unitarian Christian Association session, which was holding a launch of a new book by David Doel, entitled The Man they called the Christ, which embraces the mythological view of Jesus, which regards the whole story as mythology along the lines of other dying-and-resurrecting Middle Eastern vegetation gods. This does not make the story any less valid; it just sets it in the context of other similar mythology and allows us to experience it as the death of the ego and the resurrection of the larger self as we turn towards the Divine in the experience of metanoia.

Another really great session was the Labyrinth Walk. The labyrinth is a metaphor for life's journey; it twists and turns towards the centre, but you never know how close you are to the centre until you get there. You meet people on the way, and pass people, but each journey is an unique experience, even though we're all travelling on the same path. This is the second time I have walked this labyrinth, which is based on the Chartres Labyrinth.

The Nottingham University campus, where the event was held, is lovely - lots of water and modern wooden buildings, and a very tame heron. The food was quite nice, the rooms comfortable, and the staff were very friendly and helpful.

It was fantastic to see old friends and make new ones, and I look forward to more of the same.

2010-03-31T13:33:00.002+01:00

Carl McColman's Quote for the Day:

It is common for those who argue for and against the existence of God to assume that the word God is used by believers to refer to something that we can point toward, distance ourselves from, and dispassionately reflect upon. However, one can reject this idea of God as nothing but a form of idolatry . . . This approach questions any expression that would reduce God to the realm of objects. Here no theistic rendering of God is allowed to lay claim to God, for God dwells above and beyond all names. God is rather approached as the ineffable source that is received but never conceived. God is thus not approached as an object, but rather encountered as an absolute subject who transforms our relationship with all objects. Just as the light in the room cannot be seen but rather allows us to see, so God is not directly experienced but rather is the name we give to a whole new way of experiencing . . . Hence, religious experience is not really experience as such but the opening into a different way of experiencing.

— Peter Rollins, The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales

Excellent. The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.

Beloved Community

2010-03-23T20:16:00.001Z

An address given at Frenchay Chapel on 7th March.

What exactly is a spiritual community? People have defined it differently in different circumstances and in different religious traditions. To me the word community suggests communing and commonality: sharing at a deep level and having or holding something in common.

The word congregation means a flock, implying that the members are sheep and the vicar, representing Christ, is the shepherd. I don’t think Unitarians make very good sheep, and rightly so. We are proud to be individuals. But we do have something in common: our values of freedom, reason and tolerance – or perhaps to couch these in slightly more modern parlance: individuality, thinking and inclusivity. We also have a shared passion for social justice (one of the many reasons that I was attracted to Unitarianism) and openness to new ideas. Many Unitarians are worried by the diversity among Unitarians, and wonder how the denomination can possibly hold together; but I see (from the perspective of a newish Unitarian) remarkable similarity in the views of most Unitarians. Because we value reasonable religion but do not shun mystery; because we enjoy listening to the ideas and stories of others and don’t feel threatened by them – the most Pagan Unitarian and the most Christian Unitarian still have a lot in common, even though the mythology that inspires them is different.

So we are not a congregation; what about a network? Well, networks tend to be small clusters of like-minded people of similar age, social class, and level of education; they form and dissolve; and they do not tend to gather in larger groups on a regular basis.

For me, the most appropriate word for what we are is a community. We share our spiritual journeys; we gather in the chapel and for social events, and gradually get to know each other; and everyone offers their unique gifts to the community in a spirit of loving service. Sometimes we don’t get to know each other, and that’s OK too; we are still aware of the other person, and would be there for them if they needed us. Sometimes we annoy each other, and this is the real test of the sense of community. I’ll never forget the first time I saw two Unitarians having an argument. I was so impressed at the way they didn’t shout at each other, or even raise their voices. They just both stated clearly what was getting on their nerves, and left it at that. And when I have rubbed people up the wrong way, which has happened occasionally, I appreciated the calmness and humour with which they let me know about it, and even if I disagreed with them, I hope I responded in kind. And it is the process of rubbing up against each other, like pebbles on the sea-shore, that rounds us and shapes us as human beings.

Traditionally, Protestant Christianity has promoted the idea of the ministry of all believers (which is also a key concept in Eastern Orthodoxy). The Quakers call it giving ministry when anyone gets up to speak in a meeting. But ministry can be something really simple like smiling at someone, or hugging them, or listening to their problem, or making them a cup of tea: all things that let the other person know that they are cared for and held in beloved community. Each of us is unique and special and has their own gifts and talents to bring to the table. You never know when something you say or do will change someone’s life for the better.

In Buddhism, the community is called the sangha, which means ‘refuge’. When a Buddhist takes their vows, it is known as ‘taking refuge in the Buddha’. This does not necessarily mean that they become disengaged from the world, because they still practice mindfulness and compassion; but they have a safe place to stand from which to practice these virtues.

I certainly do experience Unitarian life as a safe space: a place where, for the most part, you can say what you really think; where all of life is celebrated; and where there are people who hunger and thirst after righteousness – real righteousness, not the po-faced sex-starved nonsense that passes for it in mainstream Christianity. No, the righteousness that Unitarians hunger and thirst after is a world where everyone has enough to eat and the Earth is not ravaged by industrial pollution, and where the body is celebrated instead of being denied.

So we are a people with a shared vision, shared values, and a shared history, and for the most part, agreement that we should treat mythology as a life-giving metaphor, even if some of us prefer different mythologies. It is our shared values that unite us, as many Unitarian authors agree. But is this enough to create community, or do we need to work at it?

What is it that makes a beloved community? Surely it is learning more about each other, sharing our life stories and our insights, caring about each other. If the same bunch of people stands at the front each week, we are not doing that. Of course some people find it uncomfortable speaking in public, but that is why having a circular space can sometimes makes it easier – there isn’t the fear of standing up at the front to speak. As you will doubtless be aware, I am not backward in coming forward. I used to be a teacher, and I have been leading covens and spirituality groups for about a decade – but I still felt nervous doing services to start with – partly because there was such a high standard to live up to, and partly because it involved standing at the front facing everyone.

The small engagement groups that we have on weekday evenings are an excellent way of getting to know people and discussing some of the issues that arise from the spiritual journey, and certainly contribute to the sense of community. Safe space is created in them by starting off by agreeing a set of ground-rules, formulated by the group.

The pub group has been good for giving an opportunity to chat for a longer period of time. Of course we must also be careful not to create cliques of those who take part in activities like this and those who don’t. That’s why Bright Lights is such a great idea, because it’s inter-generational, and has included people who wouldn’t normally “do church”.

The thing that creates community is doing things together. One of the quickest ways of getting to know people at Pagan camps is to take part in digging the fire-pit: there’s something about shared physical work that really creates community. And of course doing ritual together creates community too. When I say ritual I mean any intentional gathering in a sacred place – when Unitarians say ritual they tend to mean doing something other than the hymn sandwich format – but the usual church service is a ritual too, just one of a different kind. Going to the pub together, washing the dishes together, being on committees, doing the garden, fixing the chapel door, the Women’s League, Bright Lights, chatting over coffee after the service – all of this creates community. There’s always more that we can do, but we’re doing pretty well – let’s not forget that.

One of the most moving expressions of Unitarian community is the flower communion, first devised by Norbert Capek in 1920s Czechoslovakia. At this point in time it was dangerous and radical to be a Unitarian, and by actually saying that you were one, you risked persecution. So taking part in the flower communion at that time meant that you were willing to risk persecution for the sake of the beloved community. (I would like to thank Andrew Brown for this insight, as I got the story of the origins of the flower communion from his blog.) The other significant and moving thing about the flower communion is that each person brings a different flower, and someone else takes that flower home with them. This symbolises celebrating diversity and learning to live with other people who are different from us – in other words, true community.

Spring Equinox

2010-03-22T10:27:00.001Z

(An address given at Notte Street Unitarian Church, Plymouth, 21 March 2010)

Many cultures celebrate the Spring Equinox. In the Jewish tradition, it is the moment when the presence of God, the Shekhinah, entered into creation. The Shekhinah is traditionally represented as feminine. According to the feminist Rabbi, Jill Hammer:

In the Jewish calendar, the first of the month of Nisan is the beginning to spring, and falls close to the spring equinox. It comes halfway between the playful holiday of Purim and the festival of Passover, when birds are beginning to sing and warmth and growth are beginning to take hold. The first of Nisan is one of the four new years of the Jewish calendar, marking the “first of the months” (rosh chadashim), or the beginning of time itself. Nisan is also the date when the Shekhinah first appeared within the mishkan (Divine dwelling-place. It is the moment of the descent of the Divine into the world—the budding of divinity within creation. If Tu B’Shevat represents the Divine sap flowing within the world, the 1st of Nisan is the moment when that sap bursts forth in new buds. The new revelation of the Divine is paired with the new life and beauty that appears in the spring. Within two weeks, the full moon festival of freedom, Passover, will arrive.

An important aspect of Shekhinah theology is the idea that the Shekhinah is separated from the Godhead, and it is human effort that will bring about their reunion. The human effort to reunite them involves all Jewish couples making love on the Sabbath eve, and the practice of Tikkun Olam, or repairing the world, and other mitzvot (commandments). The idea behind Tikkun Olam is that the world is damaged and must be repaired, and it is the exercise of human love (in all its forms) that will bring about this restoration, and the reunion of the immanent and transcendent aspects of the Divine. It is also about the restoration of harmony and balance.

Both Taoism and Paganism emphasise the dynamic balance in Nature between growth and decay, darkness and light, yin and yang, male and female, expansion and contraction. Balance is not just a steady-state, but a dynamic equilibrium. New birth is balanced by death; growth is balanced by decay, light and activity is balanced by darkness and rest. If everything grew and expanded all the time, there would eventually be no space in the world for new growth - the old growth would block out the light. So death and decay and darkness are not evil, but necessary components of the natural processes of life and change. The darkness is necessary for rest, growth, and regeneration. Death is not evil, but a necessary adjunct to life. If there was no death and dissolution, there could be no change or growth. The cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth is part of the dance. Suffering is also part of the process of growth; just as a tree is shaped by the wind, we are shaped by our experiences. It is only by experiencing suffering that we acquire sufficient depth to know the fullness of joy. It is then that the full light of consciousness dawns in us, and we achieve mystical communion with the divine. But we cannot connect with the divine by stressing about it, but rather by relaxing and finding the inner stillness and space that is already there. All we have to do is to remember who we really are; to reconnect with the ebb and flow of the cycles of life. Everything is cyclical – the seasons, the tides, the orbits of the planets – why not human life? But it is not just a ceaseless round of the same old things, repeated ad nauseam. Everything changes; everything is always becoming something else; nothing is ever lost.

With all this talk of balance being a natural thing, it might be easy to conclude that we can just go with the flow and all will be well. But what if the flow is out of balance? Then we might have to go against the flow. Andrew Pakula recently wrote:

There is also a big problem with going with the flow. The flow is all too often in the wrong direction. The flow may be away from our vision of how the world could and should be and against what is best for each of us. The flow is leading us toward selfishness. The flow is leading us toward a lonely detached kind of fierce individualism. The flow is leading us toward environmental catastrophe. The flow is leading us toward an increasing separation between the rich and the poor.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said "...there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted." He was reminding us that we can get accustomed to injustice and inequality. We can contribute to the negative things in our world just by 'going with the flow'.

Because human society is somewhat divorced from nature, we cannot assume that it functions in the same way as nature. Human society is constantly being tinkered with by people who do not necessarily have the best interests of people or the ecosystem at heart; they may be motivated by corporate greed, a desire for self-aggrandisement, or other murky motives. So the flow that is created by actions motivated by greed does not seem likely to create a just and humane society, or a society where everyone's rights are respected and diversity is celebrated.

Another aspect of balance is being able to see others' points of view. This is the Unitarian practice of tolerance: to try to enter into others' perspectives on life, even when we disagree with them. As Cliff Reed writes:

The values underpinning the Unitarian movement have to do with mutual caring and mutual respect. They involve a readiness to extend to each other a positive, involved and constructive tolerance. They are the values of a liberal religious community that honours individuality without idolising it; of a community that finds spiritual stimulation in the unique contribution of each person while feeling itself united by a bond too deep for words.

So here we have a balance between community and individuality; a way of understanding ourselves as part of a community without sacrificing our individuality. But what does tolerance mean? Does it mean putting up with other people's views, without challenging those we disagree with? Or does it mean entering into dialogue with them, and trying to understand where they are coming from? Real tolerance cannot mean just putting up with or ignoring someone else's views. It means, among other things, not removing the speck from someone else's eye while ignoring the plank in your own eye. If someone in the community holds views that I consider immoral (such as homophobia), I have a responsibility to engage them in dialogue, because if I remain silent, I am complicit in their prejudice; but my challenge to their views should be delivered in a compassionate way that takes into account their reasons for holding such a view; and I should also be prepared to be challenged by others on views that I hold.

Trying to achieve balance is also a fruitful way of resolving moral dilemmas. In his excellent book Godless Morality, Richard Holloway points out that moral dilemmas are not usually about a conflict between good and evil, but between two conflicting goods. The dilemma presented by the issue of abortion is a conflict between the need to prevent harm to the mother (who may have been raped, or whose quality of life could be significantly decreased by having a child) and the potential for the foetus to have a life. These two goods need to be weighed carefully to discover which takes priority at any given stage of the pregnancy.

Similarly, the rights of the individual are in balance with his or her responsibilities. The idea of inalienable human rights is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on 10 December, 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations. These rights include freedom of religion (a right dear to Unitarians, who only won it in 1813 in Britain); freedom of speech; freedom of association, and so on. But as citizens, we also have responsibilities: to vote, to resist tyranny, to live sustainably, and so on.

So we do need to be active in maintaining the balance, not merely passive. We need to engage in Tikkun Olam, the restoration of balance and the practice of social justice, which is an integral part of many religious traditions, and a perennial concern of Unitarians. It is a way of restoring balance – caring for the poor and the oppressed, protecting the environment, standing up for human rights, and promoting freedom, peace and justice. Indeed, we cannot really claim to be mystical or spiritual unless we put compassion into practice by helping others. The two aspects of religion go hand-in-hand: without a sense of connection to others, there is no basis for compassion, and without the expression of compassion in the form of caring, the mystical experience can be barren and unproductive.

Embracing darkness

2010-03-18T22:37:00.001Z

There's only one thing that annoys me about Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist theology. In fact, it really really bugs me. It is the use of light as a symbol for good, and darkness as a symbol for evil. Clearly Unitarians and UUs have inherited this from the Christian tradition, and failed to examine what's wrong with it.

In my hymn Freedom, Love, Reason, I wrote:

When reason sings in harmony
With intuition's tune
And light the darkness shall embrace
In deep soul alchemy
Then shall the Earth with freedom ring

The third line means, "when light shall embrace the darkness" but I had to invert it to fit the metre. It certainly does not mean that light will light the darkness. It means that the conscious mind will embrace and accept the Shadow, bringing unconscious and repressed aspects of the self to the surface and working with them. We descend into the darkness to find the lost treasure – creativity, and memory, and dreams.

In an address about Samhain and All Hallows, I wrote:

Pagans do not see darkness and death as evil, but as part of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. If there was no death, there would be no growth, no change, and no birth. If there was no darkness, the seeds could not gestate in the warm darkness of the earth; if there was no night, there would be no sleep, and no stars and moonlight. If there was no winter cold, there would be none of the beauty of autumn, the seeds would not germinate, and germs would not be killed by the frost. Darkness is the Yin spoken of by the Taoists – one half of the divine dance of the cosmos.

In another address on Darkness and Epiphany, I wrote:

Fear of the dark is civilisation's fear of the forest and the wilderness. The denigration of the dark is one of the foundation stones of Western civilisation and even the Enlightenment – so it is difficult to unravel it, to find out where it came from.

It is the connection of darkness with the feminine, nature, and wilderness that gives us the key to explain why it is so denigrated for most of Christian history. In patriarchal culture, the assertive female is regarded as dark, dangerous and malevolent, and characterised as a witch.

When we say that darkness is evil, we create a split in ourselves, for we consist of both light and dark aspects. Carl Gustav Jung (the psychoanalyst) said that the psyche consists of Anima, Animus, and Shadow – the Shadow being the unconscious aspect, the parts of ourselves that we fear and repress. We need to bring these into the light in order to transform them into healthy aspects of ourselves – not slaying the monsters, but harnessing their power to work for good.

When we say that darkness is evil, we project that idea onto others – the terrorist, the witch, the deviant, the stranger. Racism and sexism and homophobia have their roots in this fear of the other, the fear of our own unconscious impulses that we project onto others.

There are many positive things about darkness, and they are celebrated in many different spiritual traditions. Darkness is the time when contemplation and meditation are most effective; it is a time of intuition, inspiration and communing with the inner reality. The darkness of God is a metaphor frequently used by mystics to describe the unknowable and ineffable aspects of the Divine. So please, stop denigrating darkness!

Eden: the buried treasure

2010-02-16T18:37:00.006Z

This is the book that Peter Godfrey referred to in his sermon the other day - I want one.

The myth of Adam and Eve is of a rise into wisdom and not a fall into Original Sin. This is the theme of an excellent book by a Unitarian, Eve Wood-Langford, entitled Eden: The Buried Treasure. In 'A Free Religious Faith. The Report of a Unitarian Commission' [Lindsey Press 1945], Eve read a reference to the Eden myth as an account of a process 'out of which have arisen all the distinctive achievements and possibilities of human life.' Eve says that this 'was a revelation: buried in the garden was an inspirational meaning having nothing to do with original sin, or a fall into shame and disgrace, but something quite opposite. From that moment I wanted to know how, why, when, where and by whose actions this unforgettable myth became misinterpreted'. Eve's answers to these questions makes fascinating reading. Eden - The Buried Treasure may be obtained from Amazon.

What is liberal religion?

2010-02-15T23:21:00.001Z

What is liberal religion? Some have derived the word religion from the Latin word religare, to reconnect; others have derived it from relego, to re-read. I like both these meanings, as the first implies compassion and connection, and the second implies the living of the examined life, the interpretation of experience, and the pursuit of knowledge. Religions have been compared to languages, in that they are embedded in particular cultures; even when a religion claims to be universally applicable, it is still modified by each new culture that adopts it. A religion is a set of shared practices, values and narratives that make the world meaningful for its adherents. Most of the world’s religions are not based on shared beliefs in the same way as Christianity, but rather on a shared worldview.

Even in the traditions that have codified beliefs that their adherents are supposed to subscribe to, individual interpretations of their creeds can and do vary wildly. Many Liberal Jews are atheists. Also, Jews (Orthodox and Liberal & Reform) say that there are many different interpretations of the Torah - they really enjoy debating them in the schul / yeshiva attached to the synagogue. In Christianity, there are 17 different models of the Atonement, and in practice, individual believers do not all believe the same things, even if they pay lip service to the idea that they should do. Even though Islam has a fixed set of beliefs, there's still room for interpretation of the Qu'ran. Surprisingly, the word fatwa means an interpretation or an opinion. So if you are unsure about what to do about a particular thing, you go and ask a mullah or a qadi for an interpretation of the Koran. So it is not assumed by most Muslims (except Wahhabis) that there is only one possible interpretation of the Qu'ran. (Personally I'd just do as I saw fit.) Even in evangelical Christianity, there are a variety of opinions about being gay (there was a study of this by Kirsten Aune, a sociologist).

There is religion as it's officially supposed to be according to the doctrine of the tradition in question; and then there's the reassuringly messy, fuzzy and human way that people actually do it. The problem is that no-one apart from liberal religionists will actually admit that the fuzzy messy human way of doing it is actually the best way.

In liberal religion, where the "divine" is usually viewed as immanent in the world, or as so diffuse that it's not a person, the source of authority is viewed as the self (as in one's conscience) and not a "higher power". Fundamentalists and orthodox types believe that God is the source of moral commandments. I do not believe this. There's an excellent book by Richard Holloway called Godless Morality which explains exactly why God being the source of moral commandments can't possibly work even if you actually believe in God (which he doesn't). The reason is this: because we cannot be sure what "God" wants, or even if s/he exists, we cannot claim in our moral pronouncements to speak for God. If two people both claim to be doing what God wants, but do exactly the opposite, how do we decide between them? By using ordinary evidence, reason and compassion to decide.

Many Unitarians prefer to emphasise shared values as the basis of religion, rather than shared beliefs. I think this is an important feature of Unitarianism, and is what holds it together despite the diversity of beliefs within it. It is there from the earliest beginnings of Unitarianism, in Francis David’s famous saying “We need not think alike to love alike”, and the tolerance of different beliefs is the basis from which our core values of freedom, reason and tolerance gradually emerged.

For myself, I see liberal religion as spirituality practised in community. Spirituality is another concept that is difficult to define, but I regard it as a sense of mystical connection with the universe and all beings within it. In feeling this sense of connection, we experience compassion for the sufferings of other beings, and empathy with their joys. We can enhance this sense of connection by finding a community with whom we can practice compassion and mindfulness; if we don’t engage in spirituality in a community setting, it can become self-centred and shallow, disconnected from everyday reality. We need the experience of actually living and sharing with others to enable us to grow and become our authentic selves. This can be done by the creation of a community of shared values, which models in microcosm the desired qualities of human community. Of course there will be conflicts and tensions, but it is in how these are resolved that the real values of the community will be tested and refined. It is only by this kind of radical openness and humility that the beloved community can become strong and genuinely inclusive.

I believe that the religious life is a shared spiritual journey towards greater communion with the cosmos, where Spirit descends into matter rather than escaping from it – but this communion does not involve the effacement of individuality; rather it is the celebration of diversity and the quest for authenticity, because the "divine" (the vision of ultimate worth) is the potentiality of all life to share in mystical communion. But we must expand our compassion to all beings, not just to those whose values we share, and we do this by engaging in social action – caring for the poor and the oppressed, protecting the environment, standing up for human rights, and promoting freedom, peace and justice.

Fundamentalist religion is often the cause of compassion being withdrawn from people whose beliefs are not shared. My ethics trump religion every time. I left Christianity when I was 15 or 16 because huge swathes of it conflicted with my ethics (it was homophobic, sexist, anti-life and believed that the only way to salvation was through Jesus' death on the cross — there are huge ethical problems with all of that). I left Paganism when I realised that it was in conflict with my ethics. I would do the same with Unitarianism if it was in conflict with my ethics. I am sure that not everyone feels this way, but I know a lot of other people who do.

Indeed, we cannot really expect others to be convinced that we are "mystical" or "spiritual" unless we put compassion into practice by helping others. The two aspects of religion go hand-in-hand: without a sense of connection there is no basis for compassion, and without the expression of compassion in the form of caring, the life of a mystic can be barren and unproductive.

Note: By "mystical" and "spiritual", I do not mean anything supernatural - I mean a passionate, poetical sense of communion with all that is. I know that atheists are capable of mysticism - e.g. Richard Dawkins describes a mystical experience he had in the introduction to The God Delusion.

Season of nonviolence

2010-02-10T18:59:00.003Z

Patrick Murfin at Heretic, Rebel, a thing to flout, one of my favourite UU blogs, has posted a series of reflections on non-violence:

the beauty of the universe

2010-02-08T16:52:00.002Z

I have always loved this quote by Carl Sagan - it encapsulates my spirituality quite well, really, as I am fascinated by science (astronomy, botany, physics, chemistry, geology, and so on):

"A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge."
- Carl Sagan

(via witches and scientists)

Why reinterpret biblical stories?

2010-01-31T20:29:00.005Z

I attended an excellent sermon today on the meaning of the Garden of Eden myth. The minister, Peter Godfrey, talked about how the serpent is actually a symbol of wisdom, and the act of eating the fruit was an expansion of consciousness.

I was discussing this with someone on the phone just now, and they asked, since the story isn't literally true, why not just jettison it completely? Why bother reinterpreting it?

I think the answer to this is because we are taught these stories as children and they have a way of lodging in the psyche / being embedded in the subconscious (nasty infectious memes!) and if we reinterpret them, it helps the psyche to recover from the unpleasant results of them. Just telling yourself they are not true isn't enough - it works for the rational mind but not the irrational subconscious. The subconscious works in terms of stories and myths (that's why they're important) so if you want to re-educate the subconscious, you have to tell it new stories, or new interpretations of the old stories.

If you have been brought up with the idea that "Jesus died for your sins", or some other nasty, pernicious, insidious piece of mythology, and in the past you accepted it as a truth, your rational mind may have quite properly rejected it; you may have had an emotional reaction against it; but on some level, it may still be buried in your psyche, waiting to burst upon your consciousness when you least expect it.

Therefore, you need to tell your subconscious a new version of the story, with greater mythic power and resonance than the first version, and you need to show how and why the story was constructed in the first place, to get it to understand that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

Also, these stories are very powerful and speak directly to the subconscious, and they can actually be used as liberating and empowering myths.

Update: Oddly enough, after I had written this, I noticed that Andrew Brown has written on a similar theme.

Tikkun Olam

2010-01-26T21:19:00.002Z

Tikkun olam encompasses both the outer and the inner, both service to society by helping those in need and service to the Divine by liberating the spark within. As we are, the Divine spark lies hidden beneath our layers of egoistic self-centeredness. That spark is our conscience, through which the promptings of the Divine Will flow toward us. By pursuing spiritual inner work to strengthen our soul and purify our heart, we grow more able to bear that spark without shattering, more willing to act on what we know to be right, less willing to act in harmful or grasping ways, and more able to notice the quiet presence of conscience beneath the din of our chattering minds and reactive emotions. The work of transformation, of building a soul creates a proper vessel for the Divine spark, for our unique share of the Divine Will, returning that spark to the service of the One Who made it. By working to perfect ourselves, perfect our soul, and serve society, we each contribute in our own unique way to the perfecting of the world. This is our duty and our calling as human beings.

from Tikkun Olam: The Spiritual Purpose of Life

The phrase "tikkun olam" was first used to refer to social action work in the 1950s. In subsequent decades, many other organizations and thinkers have used the term to refer to social action programs; tzedakah (charitable giving) and gemilut hasadim (acts of kindness); and progressive Jewish approaches to social issues. It eventually became re-associated with kabbalah, and thus for some with deeper theological meaning.

Thus, over time tikkun olam went from being part of the religious technology of medieval mystics to a standard part of the vocabulary of contemporary North American Jews. Its goal shifted from dissolving history to advancing it.But the phrase “tikkun olam” remains connected with human responsibility for fixing what is wrong with the world. It also appears to respond to a profound sense of deep rupture in the universe, which speaks as much to the post-Holocaust era as it did in the wake of the expulsion from Spain and other medieval Jewish disasters.

from Tikkun Olam: Repairing the World (My Jewish Learning)

The most modern and broadly understood notion of tikkun olam is that of "repairing the world" through human actions. Humanity's responsibility to change, improve, and fix its earthly surroundings is powerful. It implies that each person has a hand in working towards the betterment of his or her own existence as well as the lives of future generations. Tikkun olam forces people to take ownership of their world. It is them, not G-d, who will bring the world back to its original state of holiness.

More simply, it is important for Jews to participate in repairing the world by participating in tzedakah (justice and righteousness) and g'milut hasadim (acts of loving kindness). Without their stake in the improvement of their environment, injustice and evil will continue to exist.

from Tikkun Olam by Jennifer Noparstak

Responses to tragedy

2010-01-18T18:18:00.001Z

It's always difficult to know how to think about tragedies like the Haiti earthquake or the tsunami, particularly if you believe in some omnipotent being that could have prevented it, or worse, caused it (I don't).

Andrew Brown points out that the only valid response is to do something to help the survivors — not to theologise about it.

Looking at the world with loving-regard we do not find an answer to a riddle but, if Edwards is right - and I'm inclined to agree with him - we are, instead, brought face to face with sheer acknowledgment. But such an acknowledgment is not merely an act of final and hopeless surrender to some brute, static, natural fact for remember in what Edwards thinks this acknowledgment consists: namely that the world so regarded offers us a kind of 'disclosure' that it and its constituent beings are a miracle, never to be comprehended, with depths never to be exhausted.

I agree — if you attempt some sort of theological explanation, you get either bad science, bad theology or bad ethics (or all three).

Similarly, Mark Morford in the San Francisco Chronicle compares the horror of the Haiti earthquake with the massacre in Mexico and struggles to comprehend it:

I struggle all the time with how to acknowledge and respect and even analyze the devastation and the horror that streams across the media wires every day without letting it turn my bones ashen gray.

I think we can only try to realize, as best we can, just how deeply tied into the tangled web of humanity we really are; all the wars and suffering, drugs and gangs, pain and loss, even as we try -- sometimes very weakly indeed, sometimes in the face of devastating counterevidence -- to remind ourselves that there really is an equal amount of beauty and joy, hope and positivism to be had in the world. Isn't there?

Now, on to the bad theology: Many Pagans' response to natural disasters is saying that it's Gaia shrugging off Her fleas:

I do believe that if something happens, that it will be the Earth shrugging off a lot of what is hurting it. I think all the disasters (earthquakes, floods, tsunamis), are the Earth's way of trying to heal the damage humankind has dealt to her. I just have this lingering belief that eventually it will be too much, and the world is just going to (for lack of a better term), purge much of its problems out the way it knows how.

I don't think everyone and everything will be destroyed or anything, but I do think that there will be much more natural disasters hitting many more places.

Oh yeah? Well if that's the case, how come a lot of these disasters hit the Third World, which isn't using more than its fair share of the Earth's resources? Bad theology, bad politics, and a failure of compassion of almost the same magnitude as that of saying that Haiti was somehow cursed.

Many Christians respond by saying that natural disasters are caused by the Fall; that the world, including Nature, became flawed as a consequence of the Fall, and that death was introduced as a result of the Fall. This is just bad science - though it can sometimes produce good theology, as in this article by David Bentley Hart:

Where was God? In and beyond all things, nearer to the essence of every creature than that creature itself, and infinitely outside the grasp of all finite things. ...

I found myself thinking again and again of a photograph I had seen in the Baltimore Sun. ... In the background of the photo was a scattering of huts constructed from crates and shreds of canvas, and on all sides barren earth; but in the foreground was a little girl, extremely pretty, dressed in tatters, but with her arms outspread, a look of delight upon her face, dancing. To me that was a heartbreaking picture, of course, but it was also an image of something amazing and glorious: the sheer ecstasy of innocence, the happiness of a child who can dance amid despair and desolation because her joy came with her into the world and prompts her to dance as if she were in the midst of paradise.

She became for me the perfect image of the deep indwelling truth of creation, the divine Wisdom or Sophia who resides in the very heart of the world, the stainless image of God, the unfallen. ... But that, I would say, is the nature of God’s presence in the fallen world: his image, his bride, the deep joy and longing of creation, called from nothingness to be joined to him. That child’s dance is nothing less than the eternal dance of divine Wisdom before God’s throne, the dance of David and the angels and saints before his glory; it is the true face of creation, which God came to restore and which he will not suffer to see corruption.

I do not see the world as fallen, but I like the way that Hart and other Chtristians emphasise compassion for others, and the way that Hart sees the Divine reflected in the world (and has got the gender and mythology right, too).

Some people refer to natural disasters as "natural evil" — I disagree with this, because evil requires intentionality, in my opinion.

Some atheists have stated that natural disasters show that the universe is a hostile place; but this is inconsistent with not believing in a deity; how can the universe be "hostile" if it has no mind, no intentionality? Hostility requires awareness.

And back to the good theology...

Andrew Brown points out that, in the face of disasters, we need to be ready to help the survivors to pick up the pieces — a loving response is the only one possible:

The horror remains before us all, and unimaginably so for all those in Haiti. My heart goes out to them and my love is sent - as will some of my money - and it goes, not because their plight presents me with an unanswerable riddle (the consequences of which I must assuage) but because I trust implicitly in those people who, by their commitment to loving-regard, will incarnate a Divine yet wholly natural love in the heart of our world.

Amen to that!

Some groups you could donate via:

Disasters Emergency Committee
Unicef UK
Medecins Sans Frontieres
International Red Cross
World Food Programme
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee / Unitarian Universalist Association Joint Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund
Rainbow World Fund, an LGBT organisation already working with CARE on the ground at Port-Au-Prince

Change

2010-01-18T07:52:00.000Z

(address given to Trowbridge Unitarians, 17 January 2010)

My favourite times of year are the transitional seasons of spring and autumn, when everything is changing rapidly. In spring there are new blossoms and new leaves emerging, and the days lengthen rapidly. In autumn, the leaves turn red and yellow and orange and are blown away in the wind. The smell of bonfires is in the air, symbolising the transformation of decay into the bright energy of fire.

Everything is always changing, transforming into something else; nothing is ever lost. The gathering of life experience is like the laying down of compost. The leaves of individual events fall onto the heap, fade and decay, and are transformed into memories, which feed our sense of identity, which gives rise to new experiences.

Change is constant in life; it is the one thing we can rely on. Some people find it difficult to embrace change; others enjoy it. Without change, there would be no growth, no seasons, no new life. There would also be no death, but just try to imagine what immortality would be like - a barren state of existence with no excitement.

The Buddhists like to point out that there is nothing constant about our bodies. Our cells are replaced so rapidly that every cell in our bodies is replaced by the end of seven years, so you are literally not physically the same person you were seven years ago. This is possibly the origin of the phrase, “the seven year itch”. Each day you acquire new experiences, new dreams, and lose old memories, so you are not the same person you were yesterday.

We constantly shape each other socially, giving approval or disapproval to certain characteristics, and each of us is a slightly different person in different social situations. We change our opinions as we hear new evidence, and this is a sign of flexibility and openness. A lack of willingness to change one’s opinion gives rise to the rigidity of fundamentalism. There’s a lovely quote by Alan Watts (an Episcopalian priest who became a Zen Buddhist in the 1960s) that explains the difference between the openness and trust of faith and the rigidity of belief:

"Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."

This openness and trust is an essential pre-requisite for the building of spiritual community. It is why many communities (such as Quakers and Pagans, and many Unitarians) like to do their rituals in a circle, which involves making eye contact with others, and emphasises the equality of participants.

The sociologist of religion, Emile Durkheim, said that the function of ritual is to manage changes in life, such as the transition from one state to another. Rites of passage (coming-of-age, coming out, initiation, marriage, divorce, birth, and death) are obvious examples; but in a sense all rituals are about managing change. When you come to chapel, you partake of the ritual of hymn-singing and prayer and listening to the address, and the structure of the ritual is a way of managing and enabling the change in consciousness that you experience as you make contact with the Divine by gradually relaxing into the service and entering into the altered state of prayerful awareness.

The major change enabled by participating in a service or a ritual is the building of community with others. As we share the celebration of ultimate worth, singing, praying, meditating, speaking and listening, we are focused on something other than our individual ego. We cease to worry about how we look, or whether we sing off-key, and focus on the experience of being together. The constant presence of the inner commentator is switched off. David Smail, a therapist who regards therapy with suspicion, writes in his book, Taking Care, that more therapeutic benefit is derived from participating in a communal activity than from hours of individual therapy. This is true even if it’s something apparently trivial like your local bridge club.

Being in a community of people sharing their spiritual journeys enables us to rub the corners off each other; to be aware of our own foibles and to tolerate those of others. That’s presumably why the prayer of Jesus emphasises that we are forgiven as we forgive those who trespass against us (or in the original Aramaic, “detach us from the fetters of the faults that bind us, as we let go the guilt of others”).

So change is both embracing and letting go, expansion and contraction. It is a dance of inner and outer, dark and light. It is a cycle of growth, death and rebirth. Everything is in constant flux. The plants grow, blossom, bear fruit and die. Stars and galaxies are born, expand, and then die as their energy is spent.

Sometimes change can be painful. The loss of loved ones, or the ending of relationships, are usually immensely painful, but they may also enable growth and renewal, and expand your capacity to feel. There’s a beautiful poem by Kahlil Gibran about joy and sorrow:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being,
The more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

Once the Baal Shem Tov commanded Rabbi Zev Kitzes to learn the secret meanings behind the blasts of the ram's-horn, because Rabbi Zev was to be his caller on Rosh Ha-Shanah. So Rabbi Zev learned the secret meanings and wrote them down on a slip of paper to look at during the service, and laid the slip of paper in his bosom. When the time came for the blowing of the ram’s-horn, he began to search everywhere for the slip of paper, but it was gone; and he did not know on what meanings to concentrate. He was greatly saddened. Broken-hearted, he wept bitter tears, and called the blasts of the ram's-horn without concentrating on the secret meanings behind them.

Afterward, the Baal Shem Tov said to him: "Lo, in the habitation of the king are to be found many rooms and apartments, and there are different keys for every lock, but the master key of all is the axe, whith which it is possible to open all the locks on all the gates. So it is with the ram's-horn: the secret meanings are the keys; every gate has another meaning, but the master key is the broken heart. When a man truthfully breaks his heart before God, he can enter into all the gates of the apartments of the King above all Kings, the Holy One, blessed be He." — Or Yesharim

When I reflect on the changes in my own life - the beginnings and endings of relationships, moving house, moving to a new city, meeting new friends, learning new ideas - these are always the times of greatest spiritual growth for me. Suddenly I experience a flood of creativity; poetry and prose pours onto the page in an unstoppable flood. Then there may be years of stagnation, until something comes along to shake me out of my rut and force me to move and grow. I should really try to find a way to make change constant in my life...

There could be no stories without change, because stories tell about the transition from one way of being to another - the discovery of spiritual treasure, a struggle for justice, falling in love, journeying from one place to another. The scientist Jack Cohen has suggested that we be renamed Pan narrans, the storytelling ape, because storytelling is a major aspect of our human nature. So let’s celebrate change as being the basis of all good stories, including the unique and special story you are each currently living.

What is the good news?

2010-01-15T00:21:00.002Z

Stephen Lingwood has a book review of a new book about evangelism by Bryan Stone.

Stephen writes:

I love the concentration on the community and not just the individual. I love the idea that evangelism is about people looking at my church and saying "can I see a distinctive way of life within this community that seems transforming and powerful?" I love the concentration on an entire way of life, not just intellectual doctrines. I love the insistence that evangelism has to come from a place of weakness, and never from a place of power and coercion.

What I still find difficult is that too little space is given for dialogue. This is hardly suprising as my theology of evangelism has always been about dialogue. Yes, it's true that evangelism should come from a deep connection to one's own tradition and it's life-transforming power, but it should also be about an openness to the other. It's true that Bryan Stone does say that evangelism should be about listening as well as speaking, and he does say that kingdom of God is bigger than the church. But for me he still does not acknowledge enough the possibility of the holy spirit working beyond the confines of the church, and that other communities may be building the kingdom of God too. Evangelism for me has to be open to the possibility of receiving something of the divine in the encounter with the other. We are not the sole possesors of God.

I'm reminded of several stories I heard about the Greek & Russian Orthodox style of evangelism, for instance the story of the first Orthodox missionary in Japan, who went and waited patiently, praying and studying Japanese culture, and after about twenty years a samurai came to kill him, but he just stood there praying and waiting for the sword to fall. The samurai was deeply impressed that this man was not afraid to die, so he didn't kill him, but asked why he was not afraid to die. He eventually became the missionary's first convert.

Whilst I disagree with trying to convert people of other religions to Christianity, I can't help but be impressed by this story.

The other story is how the Russians were looking for a new religion, and they went to various places to try out their religions, and then went to Byzantium and went into an Orthodox church there, and chose Orthodoxy as their religion because they felt that heaven had come down to earth in the Orthodox liturgy.

Again, not sure why they would want to make everyone follow the same religion, but still it's a good story.

Also, the Orthodox see salvation as being in the church and community, not an individual thing. There's a bit in the liturgy where they pray for everyone else to get to heaven first.

And I think Unitarians could do worse than look into the theology of theosis; a mystical doctrine that is very interesting and helpful.

Anyway, the Bryan Stone book sounds interesting. I'm a fan of dialogue too, but it sounds as if he is well on the way towards that view of evangelism.

I guess we could also try to articulate what the Unitarian "gospel" (good news) is: the Universe loves you as you are; you're already home; all you have to do is relax into the loving embrace of the Divine (no sacrifice necessary); faith and mysticism are not incompatible with reason; the Divine is everywhere, in us and in Nature, and revealed in all religions; practising our spirituality in community; we need not think alike to love alike.

Buddha Mind

2010-01-08T12:58:00.000Z

The Master said to me: All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists
This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible.
It is not green nor yellow, and has neither form nor appearance.
It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old.
It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces, and comparisons.
It is that which you see before you — begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.
It is like the boundless void which cannot be fathomed or measured.
The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and the sentient things, but that sentient beings are attached to forms and so seek externally for Buddhahood.
By their very seeking they lose it, for that is using the Buddha to seek for the Buddha and using mind to grasp Mind.
Even though they do their utmost for a full eon, they will not be able to attain to it.
They do not know that, if they put a stop to conceptual thought and forget their anxiety, the Buddha will appear before them, for this Mind is the Buddha and the Buddha is all living beings.
It is not the less for being manifested in ordinary beings, nor is it greater for being manifested in the Buddhas.

— from The Zen Teachings of Huang Po

a theory

2010-01-08T12:35:00.001Z

I first wrote this blogpost on 12 October 2007, but I wanted to repost it here (with very few amendments) because I still think it's a pretty good theory of what's going on. I borrowed some of the ideas from the SF novels of Julian May (Saga of the Exiles), and she borrowed them from Teilhard de Chardin.

There was no Fall, because there was never a Golden Age or a Garden of Eden to fall from. But there is an Arising. There was no Creator God or Divine Source, rather the universe and its inhabitants are becoming more conscious, more compassionate, more empathic, with the arising of the universal Mind (which proceeds from the unfolding of the Tao, the mysterious Way or emergent pattern). As we interact socially with the Universe, we increase its consciousness, just as we do for each other. First we awakened spirits of place, then gradually began to perceive the All and wonder at the glories of Nature and the Universe. We are part of the Arising of the universal Mind, as we become more conscious and more empathic. We are all Future Buddhas. As we become more empathically connected to the All, when we die we contribute part of our consciousness to the All (part is probably reincarnated), and it is in this process of connection that universal Mind arises. Those who mystically identify the All as a Thou and not an It contribute to the process of expanding awareness and continuing the process of making everything more conscious. The process of individuation and self-development is part of the process of becoming aware of the uniqueness and preciousness of all life in its glorious diversity. The golden age is in the future, not in the past. The genius of Buddhism and Unitarianism is that they are focussed on a future golden age, not a mythical one in the past from which we supposedly fell (and for which there is no evidence whatever). Bodhisattvas (such as Yeshua and Kwan Yin) so identified with the All that their compassion / karuna / empathy accelerated the arising of the universal Mind, and they are still there in some sense (possibly only in the collective memory), guiding humanity towards awakening. But the awakening will not be from the "illusion" of matter, but rather matter itself is becoming ever more conscious or ensouled - it is awakening. Only when the Mind of the Universe is fully conscious - when the kundalini of the Universe has arisen from the depths - only then will the Divine fully exist.

See also: God as Manifestation of Mind

Prayer

2010-01-06T19:08:00.000Z

An address given at Frenchay Chapel on 22nd November 2009.

There are many different types of prayer. Many people think of prayer as “asking God to give us things”. Most people rightly dismiss this sort of prayer as irrational and unspiritual. It’s well known that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. As one of our congregation once pointed out, many people in the First World War prayed for their loved ones to come back unharmed, but many young men were killed, and I am sure their families prayed just as hard for them to come back as the families of those who returned safely. The First World War (and subsequent genocides such as the Holocaust) ended many people’s faith in a personal God. This lack of a personal God obviously affects what we mean by prayer. When there is no person that we are talking to, prayer becomes a communing with the All.

At Summer School in Great Hucklow, I attended a workshop about prayer with Vernon Marshall, a Unitarian minister. He identified many different types of prayer: adoration, devotion, prayer of approach, invocation (asking the Divine to be present), bidding prayer, confession and penitence, words of reassurance, thanksgiving, intercession (asking for help for someone else), petition (asking for help for yourself), healing prayer, expressing aspiration, and reflection. There are also specific types of prayer for different bits of the service – blessing the elements of communion, for instance, or giving the closing blessing.

Prayer can also be simple and traditional. When his disciples asked him how to pray, Jesus gave them a simplified version of the traditional Hebrew Kaddish prayer, which today we know as the Lord’s Prayer or the Prayer of Jesus. This prayer contains hidden depths: it expresses many deep desires of the human heart – to be forgiven, to be loved, to be understood and to be nourished; and it expresses something about the nature of the Divine.

Informal and personal prayer is also valid; we tend to use written prayers in chapel, rather than extemporizing, but that is the nature of liturgical worship. There’s nothing wrong with informal prayer in private.

There are also different modes and techniques of prayer: centering prayer, contemplative prayer, and body prayer (using dance or other special movements in prayer). These are the ones I am developing in my personal spiritual practice, because I want to live in my whole body and not just in my head.

But what is prayer for? I don’t think it is really for God’s benefit (though She probably likes to be taken notice of). I think it is for our benefit. The practice of mindfulness, of cultivating awareness of the greater life of the universe, and of examining our own conscience, and being aware of the suffering and joy of others – these are beneficial for the soul. St Paul said, “In him we live, move and have our being” and “we are all members of each other”: we are part of the greater life of the universe.

In the Wiccan text The Charge of the Goddess, Doreen Valiente wrote,

“Arise and come unto me. For I am the soul of Nature, who gives life to the Universe. From me, all things proceed and unto me all things must return; and before my face, beloved of Gods and men, let thine innermost divine self be enfolded in the rapture of the infinite.”

To “be enfolded in the rapture of the infinite” expresses very well for me what prayer should be like.

Charles Williams, a Christian mystic who was also a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, believed that God is in everything and everything is in God, and that we are all part of each other. If this is true, then it has profound consequences for prayer, because when you pray, you are connecting with the entire cosmos and all beings within it, and so the healing of your own soul is also the healing of all other souls.

Mother Theresa was once asked about her prayer life, and she said that she didn’t talk to God, she just listened. The interviewer asked her what God did, and she replied “He just listens too.” Silent prayer and contemplation is probably the most powerful form of communication with the Divine, because we spend so much time focused on words that we lose touch with the more instinctual side of our nature.

Contemplative prayer is an age-old tradition of mystics. It is quite similar to centering prayer, but doesn’t involve a specific concept; it’s more of a wordless communion with the Divine. It is usually preceded by more verbal forms of prayer, which lead into contemplation or meditation.

In Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of Judaism, there are four worlds or stages of creation, and when we pray, we ascend through these worlds to come closer to God; they also correspond to psychological states. The closest world to the Divine Source is Emanation (Proximity in Hebrew); the next is Creation, then Formation, then Action. The soul in prayer ascends through the worlds of action (the body), formation (the ego), creation (the soul) and emanation (the Divine presence).

In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, there is a tradition called Hesychasm. Hagia Hesychia or Holy Silence is an aspect of Christ, and Hesychasm is the practice of silent prayer. In some ways it is similar to Quaker practice (which is interesting when you consider that there is no historical connection between them). Holy Silence is traditionally represented as female, and there is a lovely icon of her by William Hart McNicholls.

Staretz Silouan, a monk of Mt Athos, recommended praying for everyone you know and just holding them in your awareness and love. Similarly, a Buddhist meditation of Metta Bhavana (loving kindness) invites you to love yourself, then your partner, then your community, then someone you dislike, then the whole world.

Centering prayer was developed by an interfaith dialogue group of Christians and Buddhists. These Christians admired the technique of Buddhist meditation but didn’t want to cultivate the awareness of the Void recommended by Buddhist tradition; so instead they decided to choose a single concept and focus on it during the meditation, which they called “centering prayer”. So for instance you might choose the word “Love”, or “Peace” or “Joy” to focus on during the prayer. The technique is similar to that of meditation, in that you relax your breathing and focus on the body, but you hold the concept you wish to focus on in your heart for the duration of the prayer, perhaps repeating the chosen word. We tried this earlier.

Body prayer is where you involve your whole body in the act of prayer. This might be gardening and praying, or dancing and praying, or walking and praying. Walking a labyrinth can be a prayerful act, as you deliberately focus on the spiritual journey. Another example of body prayer is the Dances of Universal Peace, a dance tradition in their own right, designed to engender peace and love in the participants; another example is the Salute to the Sun found in Yoga (which is a sacred Hindu practice designed to stimulate spiritual growth); yet another example is the Muslim style of prayer, which was also used by many Christians in the Middle East (indeed in some places, Christians and Muslims used to pray side by side). Similarly, Taizé prayer is an ecstatic form of prayer involving the whole body.

So prayer can begin with words, and end with silent contemplation. There are many different kinds of prayer, using words, gestures, dance, and silence. All are beneficial to the spiritual practitioner, and to those around them, as they cultivate peace.

The other day a Catholic friend posted on his blog that Christian mysticism is more interested in the practice of compassion than in achieving rarefied spiritual states. This is probably true of all the world’s great mystical traditions; but I commented that the two approaches go hand in hand – you cannot practice compassion unless you are also at peace with yourself; and you cannot be at peace with yourself unless you practice compassion. You cannot separate the inner work from the outer work, because your inner state and the outer world are intimately connected. As D T Suzuki once said, “Our ego is just a swinging door between our outer and inner world.” And, I would add, it is prayer that opens the door between the two worlds.

Bridge of Light

2010-01-03T19:14:00.000Z

Bridge of Light is a new holiday honouring GLBT culture. You can celebrate Bridge of Light by lighting six candles, one for each colour of the rainbow flag, on New Year’s Eve — or one candle per day from 26 December to 1 January.

Each candle stands for a universal principle and its expression in the lives and history of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people:

1. Red - The Root of Spirit (Community)
2. Orange - The Fire of Spirit (Eros)
3. Yellow - The Core of Spirit (Self-Esteem)
4. Green - The Heart of Spirit (Love)
5. Blue - The Voice of Spirit (Self-Expression and Justice)
6. Purple - The Eye of Spirit (Wisdom)
7. All Candles - The Crown of Spirit (Spirituality)

They are also based on the chakras, and the idea was developed by Kittredge Cherry and Joe Perez. It is intended as an interfaith festival.

Joe Perez said:

Bridge of Light is an interfaith and omni-denominational cultural and spiritual tradition... The annual winter ritual (now in its fifth year) has helped to draw attention to the positive contributions made by members of the LGBT community in the areas of spiritual growth, inner transformation, and religious leadership.

What is a miracle?

2010-01-02T11:54:00.000Z

Steve Hayes over at the Khanya blog has asked the question "What is a miracle?" and answered it in terms of his own Orthodox Christian faith.

I tend not to use the word miracle very often, but when I do, I tend to mean something like “signs and wonders” rather than a supernatural thing (as I don't believe in the supernatural).

I find Jung’s concept of synchronicity more useful – “the acausal connecting principle” – where two events that have no connection nevertheless occur at the same time, thereby creating an apparent connection.

One example of synchronicity that I have experienced was the day I gave an address on the subject of gay rights, and a gay couple came to the chapel for their first time at a Unitarian service. The reason this was synchronicity, to my mind, was that I had been asked to do the service (Palm Sunday) at the last minute, and was sitting and racking my brains, thinking, argh, what do I know about Palm Sunday? So I went to read the Gospel accounts of it, and it reminded me of the downfall of celebrities, and then of the arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel. So I did the service about LGBT rights, but it wasn't premeditated, nor was the topic advertised in advance.

And then there’s the question of the difference between miracles and magic. (I know that the difference is clear in the Christian paradigm, where miracles come from God and magic comes from human or possibly even diabolic agency; but others use the words differently.) I was interested to note that various Orthodox saints are called Wonderworker, Thaumaturgos in Greek, and thaumaturgy was a branch of magic in the 16th century. Miracles are considered to be performed through these saints by God; not by the agency of the saint (though presumably their holiness makes them a fit channel for the miraculous energy of God).

To my mind, magic is a little-understood natural power or a property of nature that can be deliberately wielded by humans (like telepathy, healing, etc.), whereas miracles are events not caused by humans that are still inexplicable and full of wonder. I don’t believe in the supernatural (being a pantheist), so if miracles and magic exist, their source must be inside nature and not beyond it.

Aleister Crowley's definition of magic was "changing consciousness in accordance with Will" (he was quite scientifically-minded really) and various Pagan and occult writers have since defined it similarly. So, in Pagan and occult thinking, magic is a deliberate procedure such as meditation, prayer, healing, visualisation, invocation, evocation and so on, which will result in a change in consciousness. Miracles don't really come into Pagan thought much at all.

Unitarians tend to think of miracles as pretty unlikely - we celebrate the miracle of Hanukkah with emphasis on the renewal of freedom of religion that it entailed, and we celebrate the miracle of Christmas with emphasis on the miraculousness of every birth and the divinity within everyone.

Unitarians do practice meditation, prayer and sometimes visualisation, but it's not referred to as magic. Perhaps just as well, since (for everyone except Pagans) the word is so loaded with connotations of wielding supernatural powers.

There is also a problem with the magical mindset, in that everything comes to be seen as a sign or a portent, even when it isn't. People have forgotten the need for discernment - trying to work out if the apparent omen is actually an omen, or whether it's just a passing phenomenon. This is why we need reason, and to balance open-mindedness and scepticism. I always try to find a natural explanation for something first, and only if one cannot readily be found would I accept it as something magical or miraculous.

Arthur C Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And Larry Niven and others have turned this around and said "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." Either way, if science was less materialistic, it would undoubtedly be able to investigate and explain so-called magical phenomena. It has already been demonstrated that meditation works and is beneficial; why not other spiritual practices? There's nothing supernatural about these practices; they have demonstrable psychological and physical effects.

Holy agnosis

2009-12-28T14:28:00.000Z

Carl McColman has just posted an excellent reflection on the experience of grace in the Christian tradition. I really admire his honesty about his uncertainty, his 'holy agnosis'.

So I am enough of a “questioner” to be unable to accept the simple, literal story at face value, but I lack the intellectual prowess to really understand all of the issues that scholars and philosophers and theologians have raised in response to the Christ story. So, what am I left with? I’m left with what I have called on this blog, “holy agnosis.” In other words, I am comfortable with saying “I don’t know.” I don’t know if the Christ story is historically true or not; I do believe that at this late date it is not historically verifiable, so I know that only by faith can anyone accept it as true. Likewise, I don’t know if the Christ story is only “true” on a mythic or metaphorical level. It seems to me that those who object to the mythical or metaphorical reading of the Christ story fall into two camps: those who reject Christianity altogether, and those who believe that if you do not accept the Gospel as literal, historical fact, then you cannot be a Christian. Since I am in neither of those camps, I am perfectly happy if people find faith and meaning through a mythical or metaphorical approach.

Personally, if I thought that the resurrection was literally true (which I don't), then I would subscribe to Christus Victor theology rather than vicarious atonement, as it is much more humane; but I think that a physical resurrection from the dead is extremely unlikely. Therefore I regard it as a metaphor. Also, the story of Christ seems to draw on a number of similar stories about the death and resurrection of god-men (e.g. Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Orpheus), which clearly relate to the psychological aspects of the spiritual journey — the death of the ego and its rebirth in a new form that is more in balance with the rest of the psyche. On this level, the story is valuable; whereas, when taken literally, it seems quite harmful, especially when couched in terms of vicarious atonement or penal substitution. And, as Yeshua himself said, "By their fruits ye shall know them" — in other words, the consequences of a belief can be used to demonstrate its soundness or unsoundness.

The consequences of Carl's holy agnosis is that he can tolerate ambiguity and see others' points of view and tolerate difference, and these seems like good consequences to me.

Christmas songs

2009-12-27T17:10:00.000Z

My favourite Christmas songs (a post inspired by Jarred):

The Holly and the Ivy (preferably in a Pagan version as I don't agree with the theology of the Christian version). I love the evocation of the solstice fire and its connection with the holly berries.

The Holly and the Ivy
When they are both full-grown
Of all the trees that are in the wood
The Holly bears the crown

O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer...

Along the same lines, I also like The Sans Day Carol:

And the first tree in the greenwood, it is the holly.

But again I prefer a Pagan version written by a friend of mine, as I don't like the theology of the Christian version.

I also really like O Little Town of Bethlehem (though I prefer the Unitarian version). I love these lines:

O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight

It makes me think of the deep blue midnight and the shining golden light of the stable reflecting on the narrow stone streets of a Middle Eastern town.

It also perhaps implies that the miracle of the incarnation is endlessly repeated, and that the Divine child is reborn in each new birth, as John Andrew Storey's marvellous hymn, The Universal Incarnation, shows:

Each time a girl or boy is born,
Incarnate deity we find.

Another of my favourite carols is Silent Night, which always reminds me of the Christmas truce of 1914, when the British troops heard the German troops singing this carol, and joined in across No-man's Land. I find the story of the Christmas truce incredibly moving, and only wish that it could have been extended beyond Christmas.

Another favourite (written by a Unitarian) is It Came Upon the Midnight Clear, which is focused on the splendour and beauty of peace, and the angels as its messengers:

For lo! the days are hastening on,
By prophet-bards foretold,
When with the ever circling years
Comes round the age of gold;
When peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendours fling,
And the whole world send back the song
Which now the angels sing.

A new favourite, with which I was previously unfamiliar, but was introduced to me by Rev Lindy Latham, is People Look East by Eleanor Farjeon (who also wrote Morning Has Broken, apparently). I like People Look East because of its mystical and nature-inspired imagery. It is actually an Advent hymn, but it's beautiful anyway.

As an evocation of the compassion and giving associated with Christmas, I must include Good King Wenceslas. And this carol has just taken on a new meaning for me, as I was recently informed that Wenceslas was in a same-sex relationship with his page, Podiven. Both were martyred by Wenceslas' political opponents.

I also like the tune of Joy to the World (and the Unitarian version of the lyrics). Its author was Isaac Watts, the son of a Nonconformist (Independent) minister, and the music was written by George Frederick Handel (1685-1759). It's a very rousing tune.

After Christmas, it was traditional to wassail (wish health to) houses and apple trees. One of my favourite wassail songs is The Gower Wassail, which has the beautiful lines:

We know by the moon that we are not too soon
And we know by the sky that we are not too high
And we know by the stars that we are not too far
And we know by the ground that we are within sound

One of the things that I love about Christmas is the way that the Christian and Pagan elements of it are inextricably fused together. You can't really have one without the other, and they enhance and complement each other.

Prayer by Carol Ann Duffy

2009-12-27T15:41:00.000Z

What a beautiful poem - it expresses very well the sudden moments of gratitude for life and love and beauty; the moments when a pattern becomes apparent, even though we know that there is no pattern but the one that we weave out of the moments of beauty and despair and love.

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy

The Times Saturday Review, 1992

Thanks to monastico for the tip-off.

What is worship?

2009-12-17T13:34:00.000Z

Jarred at The Musings of a Confused Man got me thinking. What is worship, and when do we worship? What is worthy of worship?

I commented that, to me, worship is union with the Divine Beloved, or celebrating the thing we find to be of greatest worth. My concept of worship includes service to the community of life (including animals and the environment).

Worship is variously defined as deep love, reverence, adoration, and devotion.

The Congregation of Abraxas expanded and refined the UU understanding of worship in a 1976 essay, What does worship mean?

“Worship” is sometimes narrowly understood as bowing down to some supposed deity. The etymology of the word, however, leads us to a far more significant activity. The root of “worship” is worthship, considering things of worth. “Religion” (religare) means to bind up, to reconnect, to get it all together. Worship is thus the central activity of religion because through worship we reconnect with worth. Worship is a compelling vision of life in its fullness. Its scope, diversity, coherence and power engender the fundamental meanings, values and relations for our lives. Worship centers us. It gives us a perspective that orders the Void, the chaos of unconnected fragments of experience. Through worship we find our connections and take our place in society and the cosmos. Here beholding and becoming are the same.

By this definition, we are worshipping when we live most fully and truly. Worship doesn't only happen in organised religion; it happens in the midst of love-making, gardening, eating and creative activities. "All acts of love and pleasure are My rituals", as it says in The Charge of the Goddess. Or as the lovely Sarah over at Gospel Pagan is fond of saying, "pray without ceasing".

That which is worthy of worship is whatever causes us to live our highest values and our deepest integrity. Perhaps we could call worship a sort of focused attention or meditation as much as the reverence and devotion traditionally associated with it.

Of course, this also raises the question of what we are worshipping. When I worship (in the sense of deep devotion), I am connecting with the ultimate void, the Tao, the divine source; it is beyond personality, has no name, and is only love: a love that includes wisdom, balance, awe, wonder, light and darkness.

axial tilt

2009-12-01T19:38:00.000Z

Yes, Virginia, axial tilt is the reason for the season... and the perpetual mystery of the light being born from the darkness. The light of the sun, the darkness of night; the light of the divine spark in each one of us, born from the joyous mystery of flesh; the light of consciousness welling up from the dark waters of the unconscious.

One of the reasons why the celebration of the solstice runs so deep in the human psyche is that people feared, deep down, that the light of the sun might not return. It's also a moment of jollity and colour in the midst of the wet, cold, dark winter.

The winter solstice occurs exactly when the earth's axial tilt is farthest away from the sun at its maximum of 23° 26'. Just about every culture has a festival around the winter solstice.

One of my favourite sites about the winter solstice is Candlegrove, which has reflections on Solstice, Sacaea and Saturnalia, Yule and celebrating the solstice today.

"Shall we liken Christmas to the web in a loom? There are many weavers, who work into the pattern the experience of their lives. When one generation goes, another comes to take up the weft where it has been dropped. The pattern changes as the mind changes, yet never begins quite anew. At first, we are not sure that we discern the pattern, but at last we see that, unknown to the weavers themselves, something has taken shape before our eyes, and that they have made something very beautiful, something which compels our understanding."

--Earl W. Count, 4,000 Years of Christmas

Advent as coming out

2009-12-01T18:43:00.000Z

Kittredge Cherry has published a lovely Advent poem by Chris Glaser over at the Jesus in Love blog.

Out of dark soil sprouts new life,
from darkness springs embodied hope.
Both stretch for the illumination
of the cosmic landscape.

This reminds me of another Advent reflection by a gay Anglican priest, written in 1997, and still relevant today.

So I was in love with the dark; not a dark which was cold or menacing, not a dark in which nasty things lurked but rather a dark where I could begin to feel. The dark was nurturing, it was where, in church, I was connected to everyone else; living, dead, present or not, mentally disturbed, outcast, old, young, poor, rich, intelligent, of the establishment, or criminal - in fact, everyone gathered around that table. All Eucharists are like that for me but Advent held special mystery.

At the end of Advent the church plunges itself into a tiny stable and all the church throughout the world stands crowded into a small and dangerously revolutionary room in Bethlehem.

Advent

2009-12-01T15:18:00.000Z

Two excellent posts about Advent.
Advent – A Humanist Adventure (1984) from The Sermons and Musings of Carl J. Westman, DD.

Perhaps it is a cliché to remind ourselves that the reality is that Christmas celebrations are a blend of many customs, brought not only from the legends, music, poetry and theology of Christianity, but also from the evergreens of the German forests, the pagan celebrations of Rome, and other sources. Clichés may not be new, sparkling insights, but they are frequently repetitions of truth and folk wisdom. The winter solstice has always been a drama of the human adventure, a time of celebration of nature’s reliable cycles, a time to recall the trials and joys of human liberation, a time to confront justice unfulfilled, a time to meditate on the idea of the holy family and what makes it holy, a time to re-assert hope over fear.

Celebrating Advent without misrepresentation, sentimentalism or parody (and a couple of recommended books) by Andrew Brown

The issue with the word 'coming' in this religious context is that for anyone to 'come' there has to be a 'there' from which to come and an associated divine will or desire for that someone to make the journey to 'here'.

But in the radical and skeptical liberal religious tradition to which we belong are any of us *really* able to say there exists a transcendent 'there' (heaven) from which to come and an immanent 'here' (earth) to which God (or God's representative) may arrive?

Both these articles beautifully articulate the difficulties I have with Advent, and offer constructive ways to look at it - the first from a UU humanist perspective, the second from a liberal Christian one.

The quest continues

2009-11-29T22:00:00.000Z

The Bible in five statements thing is spreading. I tagged Carl McColman, who tagged five more people. It's worth reading the comments on these posts, too, as people have posted some lovely ones in the comments.

Carl's five statements
Zoecarnate's five statements

Also, Sally at Eternal Echoes has a nice one.

It appears the whole thing was started by clayboy, who has a curiously Arian Christology.

Tricky...

2009-11-27T10:38:00.000Z

The Bible in five statements challenge. I wasn't tagged but I was intrigued.

Summarise the Bible in five statements, the first one word long, the second two, the third three, the fourth four and the last five words long. Or possibly you could do this in descending order. Tag five people.

What aspect of this multivalent text to focus on? The liberal or the conservative interpretation? Western Christianity or Eastern Orthodoxy? A Kabbalistic or esoteric interpretation? The Arian and Unitarian views? Changing human perceptions of the divine – from tribal thunder god to all-embracing universal consciousness? How notions of justice changed from tribal codes apparently dictated from the top of Mount Sinai towards concepts of compassion and inner conscience (starting with Micah and Amos, and later promoted by Yeshua)? Very tricky to summarise all that in 15 words... but here goes.

Law
Prophetic conscience
Widening compassion, justice
Love is the key
Heaven around and within you

I tag Andrew Brown, Paul Oakley, Cat & Peter Carl McColman and Stephen Lingwood. You don't have to play but I thought you would enjoy this challenge. I think it would be quite fun to do this with haiku, too.

O Captain, my Captain

2009-11-21T21:31:00.001Z

So, what I was actually going to blog about before I got distracted was that I just watched the film Dead Poets Society (1989) directed by Peter Weir. I must admit that the first time I saw it (probably in 1989, because I think I watched it at the cinema), I didn't get all the references to the Transcendentalists, because you don't get to learn about Thoreau and Whitman and Emerson at school in England.

Even though the film ends tragically, I don't think it undermines the main message, that conformity is the death of the true self. It is a deeply moving and powerful film, with some great acting from both the boys and Robin Williams.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived … I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms..." (61) (Walden, 1854).

The blue god

2009-11-21T20:43:00.000Z

Just seen this: Hinduism Today: The Blue God of Judaism

Examination and discussion of biblical, talmudic, midrashic, and mystical texts reveal that the body of the Lord is blue. The fact that the Hebrew term used to describe the Lord’s blue body comes from Sanskrit, as do other Hebrew terms associated with him, is nothing short of amazing and invites further exploration of the many similarities between Judaism and Hinduism, particularly Shaivism.

That is so cool. I have thought for ages that there was a certain similarity between the symbolism of esoteric Judaism and Shaivism. Yahweh is separated from the Shekhinah, and they yearn to rejoin each other, and Shiva sits atop the world mountain, and Shakti is at its base, yearning for him. Both Shiva and Yahweh embody creativity and destruction. Yahweh was a storm god; Shiva got assimilated to Rudra, a storm god. I'd be surprised if they were culturally the same god, but they are certainly archetypally similar.

Hat-tip to Copper.

On a lighter note, it reminded me of this: SatireWire: Religious Merger Creates 900 Million HinJews: Attainment of Nirvana Still Goal, But Not So Important That You Should Miss Cousin Vijay's Bar Mitzvah - which isn't so far-fetched when you consider earth-based Judaism and Jewitches. Syncretism - what's not to like?

It also reminds me of the article Polytheism and nonduality by Jay Michaelson, in which the author had a fleeting vision of Ganesh whilst meditating on the Divine.

Stoicism & Epicureanism

2009-11-21T17:34:00.001Z

I've just been reading about the tenets of Stoicism, and realised that it broadly expresses my views on things. The idea of aligning one's will to that of the universe; the idea that both good and evil reside in the human soul, and are not intrinsic properties of matter; the focus on the here and now. I am not a determinist, but other than that, Stoicism makes a lot of sense to me.

Apparently Epicureanism, which also attracts me in some ways, was a rival school to Stoicism. Epicurus said that the highest pleasure (tranquility and freedom from fear) was obtained by knowledge, friendship and living a virtuous and temperate life. He lauded the enjoyment of simple pleasures - though these included refraining from bodily desires (well that's no fun at all).

Perhaps the opposition between the two schools was partly because Stoicism was rationalist and Epicureanism was empiricist.

Who was Yeshua?

2009-11-21T10:02:00.000Z

Who was Jesus really? Some scholars think he was an apocalyptic prophet of the end times who went around shouting at the liberals of the day (the Pharisees); others think he was a radical left-wing type. It's difficult to know now what he was really like, after so many centuries of obfuscation, interpretation and re-interpretation. Did he really say that people would go to hell, or was that a later insertion or mistranslation? Or were the liberal bits of the text a later insertion?

Maybe it doesn't matter who the historical Jesus was (it's quite possible that he didn't exist, like King Arthur, Robin Hood and Ned Ludd). One thing that is certain, is that if he existed, he was only human.

What matters more is how others of a liberal persuasion have interpreted his teachings and been inspired by them, and by each other: Francis of Assisi, Rammohun Roy, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and many more people who weren't famous but did their best.

What matters is the ideas of compassion, social justice, truth and love, and the people who put these ideas into practice. Something is good and true and right in and of itself, not just because a particular teacher endorsed it.

Classical paganism celebrated the virtues of compassion, justice and love; they weren't invented by Christianity. These ideas would have come to the fore no matter which religion happened to be promoting them. But it's a great tragedy that Christianity wiped out the great pagan traditions, and a shame that so many illiberal ideas appear in the New Testament.

atheist spirituality

2009-11-20T22:14:00.000Z

I just finished reading the excellent Book of Atheist Spirituality by André Comte-Sponville.

He defines God as a supernatural creator deity who is fully transcendent. He bases atheist spirituality on the awareness of humanity, love and truth in the universe. He makes an elegant and impassioned argument for immanence and the oceanic feeling as the basis of atheist spirituality.

Personally I have long since ceased to see the Divine/Deities as a Person or Persons, and certainly not as omnipotent, omniscient, transcendent, or creating the universe. Occasionally one has flashes of communion with the immanent energy, but these are not the same as communication.

It's also worth reading the excellent Richard Holloway, who has reached much the same conclusions from within the Christian tradition.

Arianism and Unitarianism

2009-11-18T22:23:00.000Z

The importance of the Arian heresy is that it makes Jesus either semi-divine, or divine by adoption, or divine by birth (rather than divine since the beginning of time). If this is the theological position one adopts, it means that he ceases to be seen as the sole means of access to the "Father" (the Divine Source in Neoplatonic terminology), because if he is a son of God, rather than the Son of God, then there are other sons and daughters. And this quickly leads to Unitarianism - the belief that the Divine is One and can be accessed by reason and intuition, and does not require revelation to be known. That's not to suggest we can fully know the nature of the Divine, but we can see it reflected in the world around us, in other people, and the beauty of the universe. It also means that if we are all children of God, then we all have the potential to develop our inner "Christ" / Messiah / Buddha / Enlightened One.

I wonder how different the world would be if the Arian heresy had won out at the Council of Nicaea.

More books

2009-11-17T16:53:00.000Z

I went on a shopping spree at lunchtime and bought:

The Book of Atheist Spirituality by André Comte-Sponville
It is obvious to non-theist mystics that you can have spirituality without God, but it needed re-stating. I disagree with Comte-Sponville's definition of religion, but he is refreshingly dismissive of the unpleasant dogmatism of New Atheism
Godless morality by Richard Holloway
I enjoyed his other books, so thought I would read more; and I certainly agree that you can have morality without any notion of a creator
The Book of Shadows by Don Paterson
No, it has nothing to do with Wicca - it's a book of aphorisms - a couple of them made me laugh out loud in the shop, so I had to buy it
A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland
This is all about the blessedness of silence, contemplation and the absence of noise in the lives of mystics, which sounds awesome.
Theatre Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
I really loved Ballet Shoes, and this appears to be a sequel, so I bought it for a childhood nostalgia trip and comfort reading.

Books I have loved

2009-11-17T10:38:00.000Z

Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran
Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach
The Telling - Ursula Le Guin
Illusions: the Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah - Richard Bach
The Tao Te Ching - Lao Tsu
The Fifth Sacred Thing - Starhawk
The Deptford Trilogy - Robertson Davies
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Taking Care - David Smail
Poems of Sylvia Plath
Poems of Ursula Fanthorpe
The Wild Girl - Michèle Roberts
The Gnostic Gospels - Elaine Pagels
Puck of Pook's Hill - Rudyard Kipling
The Art of Conversation with the Genius Loci - Barry Patterson

(these are in the order that I recalled them, rather than ranked by amount of influence on me)

Burne-Jones windows

2009-11-15T23:07:00.000Z

This morning I visited Rochdale Unitarian Church, met some lovely people, heard a lovely service about Jonathan Livingston Seagull (one of my favourite books), and saw the beautiful windows by Edward Burne-Jones (one of my favourite artists) there. They also sang some hymns from the new purple book, including the lovely Name Unnamed (one of my favourite hymns). So, all in all, a very satisfying experience.

The windows represent a series of Virtues: Truth, Justice, Liberty, Prudence, Knowledge, Love, Faith, Humility (all very Unitarian values). Burne-Jones wasn't a Unitarian, but another Pre-Raphaelite painter, Barbara Bodichon, was one.

Touching base

2009-11-05T10:33:00.000Z

Andrew Brown has posted an outline of the basis of Unitarianism. It is true that this is a very important part of our heritage and continuing tradition, but I would have to add the results of interfaith dialogue, namely an openness to insights from other religious traditions. The dialogue with other traditions began early on, and appears even in the writings of Servetus, who referred to "Hermetic" texts, according to Earl Morse Wilbur, historian of Unitarianism. The pantheist tendency (which Andrew Brown embraces) and the nature-loving tendency both began fairly early on, as I explored in my article Pagan tendencies in Unitarianism. Another very important factor was the encounter with Rammohun Roy and the continuing relationship with the Brahmo Samaj.

I have always thought that a tradition's theology (whatever it is) cannot exist meaningfully if it behaves as if there were no other possible understandings of the world, but must explain and celebrate the existence of other religions - as liberal traditions generally do. For instance, when a liberal polytheistic religion meets another tradition, it adds some of the gods, goddesses and heroes of that tradition to its own pantheon, or assumes them to be equivalents; when a liberal monotheistic tradition meets another tradition, it assumes that they are worshipping a different manifestation of the same Ultimate Reality.

Doing this does not have to undermine the coherence of the original tradition; in fact it should strengthen it, because it takes the other tradition as a confirmation that the Divine is everywhere and speaks to all humanity.

So yes, there are certain values and ideas which are outside the Unitarian tradition - for instance, I imagine that a hard polytheist would be most uncomfortable within it, as would political conservatives. But there is a broad range of ways in which we can interpret the Bible, and cross-reference it with other great spiritual texts in order to elucidate its meaning, as John Andrew Storey did. Because the Bible is part of our culture, we cannot understand our legal and moral system unless we engage with it (even if we want to change the system, it is important to understand what it is based on). And the Bible is too important a text to be left to conservatives.

I very much liked Stephen Lingwood's outline of Unitarianism and how it brings about spiritual transformation. This emphasises practices and values rather than beliefs.

Marcella Althaus-Reid

2009-10-09T09:57:00.000+01:00

The LGBT Religious Archives Network has posted a profile of one of my favourite theologians, Marcella Althaus-Reid.

Her first book, Indecent Theology (2000), received widespread recognition in the theological field and earned her self-described reputation as an "indecent, Latina, bisexual theologian." Her next book, Queer God (2004), was a bold and provocative challenge to the sexual oppression inherent in most Christian theologies and established her as a fresh, cutting-edge thinker.

Here's a quote from one of her books:

Our task and our joy is to find or simply recognise God sitting amongst us, at any time, in any gay bar or in the home of a camp friend who decorates her living room as a chapel and doesn’t leave her rosary at home when going to a salsa bar.
— Althaus-Reid, M. (2004) The Queer God. London: Routledge.

Community

2009-10-09T09:38:00.000+01:00

The useful thing about communities is that they can give rise to shared values and a consensus view of reality. This is also the dangerous thing about them: communities under stress can produce really scary norms and values (Jonestown, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under Pol Pot, etc). So we need individuals to balance this out sometimes, and produce new paradigms (it's a bit like Kuhn's theory of scientific advances). Examples of such individuals triggering paradigm shifts include the founders of religions and great collective surges of conscience (early Unitarians, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, early feminists, etc.)

But assuming for the moment that a community is going to tend towards sanity... whom should a community include? If it is going to call itself a community, should it exclude the "walking wounded"? If its collective values are strong enough, can't it include (and help to heal) the damaged people? OK, some people are too damaged and need professional help, but we ought to be able to help the "walking wounded".

How do we create and nurture community? By meeting regularly in large and small groups; sharing our feelings and thoughts. By discussing and negotiating our shared values. And by developing collective ways of putting those shared values into practice.

I've just been reading On Forgiveness: how can we forgive the unforgivable? by Richard Holloway. In it, he talks about the radical change that can be brought about by forgiveness (for example, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa). Forgiveness is one of the practices that a community needs if it is going to function effectively. It is not something that can be done lightly; it's not about just forgetting what has been done. It is a radical act, and not one that you can command people to do - but it can be developed as a spiritual practice. Another important factor in the development of community is compassion (for ourselves as well as others, and for all living things, not just humans). Compassion can include empathy, love, pity, and mercy. And finally, a certain amount of humility might be useful. Humility literally means "closeness to the Earth". By humility I mean a willingness to accept our own shortcomings. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." I do not mean that we should only focus on our shortcomings; compassion requires that we and the community should also celebrate our strengths; and if the community celebrates our strengths, it can also benefit from them.

Archetypal

2009-10-05T11:39:00.004+01:00

I saw this street entertainer yesterday doing a show that has been popular since the medieval period, and she reminded me of the classic Tarot card of The Magician.

Two overviews of Unitarianism

2009-10-01T11:02:00.000+01:00

In his excellent blog-post, How does Unitarianism bring about spiritual transformation? Stephen Lingwood outlines the main aspects of Unitarianism, and describes them as a coherent set of values and ideas. If you're confused about where Unitarianism is heading and what it stands for, I recommend reading it. He suggests the following as the key ideas:

Look within
Communion with Nature
Thinking
Loving the world around you
Wholeness
Dialogue

He is also the author of an excellent book, The Unitarian Life, which is an anthology of Unitarian writers past and present giving their views on aspects of life, values and issues. The book is organised thematically for ease of reference, and would be very useful for anyone preparing services to find relevant readings. I found the quotations excellent and inspiring, and agreed with about 99% of them.

Part one deals with Unitarian principles and values; part two deals with specific issues (the environment, sexuality, gender, etc.) and part three is about how to live Unitarianly. There's a good balance between male and female authors, and the various different perspectives from within Unitarianism are included - Christian Unitarians, Buddhist Unitarians, Earth Spirit / Pagan Unitarians, Humanist Unitarians, universalist (in both the modern and the older sense) Unitarians, and just plain Unitarians. It also includes voices from both sides of the Atlantic, and Unitarians and Universalists of both the past and the present. If you are wondering what all these diverse groups within Unitarianism have in common, it is the shared values of freedom, reason and tolerance (and all that stems from these three).