Theme Talk delivered at Hucklow Summer School (17th August 2025)
This year we are marking 30 years of Hucklow Summer School – the first one was in 1995 – and my first one was in the year 2000 so (even my middle-aged brain can manage the maths on this one) I’ve been coming to summer school for 25 years now. And I turned 50 this year! So that’s half my life under the influence of summer school. And, latterly, influencing summer school, in turn, as I’ve been increasingly involved in running it for the last 20 years, and picking the themes.
When I think about the version of me that first turned up in Hucklow 25 years ago it is striking how much I have changed since then (and how much of that change was directly caused by meeting very special people – spiritually serious people – and being opened up to new ways of seeing, right here at summer school).
But I want to start by turning the clock back more than 25 years. This morning I’m going to tell you, in broad strokes, all about my religious journey – I think you could even call it my Unitarian conversion story! – a story which is slow and, in some sense, still ongoing. There’s no big flash bang wallop of a mystical experience to report, no burning bushes, just a dogged inner process that feels very Unitarian in character: years and years of slowly and repeatedly questioning all the assumptions and presumptions that my upbringing, and the world I grew up in, had lumbered me with, and using my head (and my heart) to discern what to keep and what to throw away.
Having owned up to the fact that I tend to pick the themes for summer school I feel I should also admit, in passing, to my reason for choosing this year’s theme of ‘Finding Our Religion’. I confess I am somewhat frustrated by the ambivalence I hear from many Unitarians towards religion. I often hear people speak of religion as if it were something they don’t want to be associated with – holding it at arm’s length like something with a bad smell. I’ve heard people who have been engaged in Unitarian activities for ages continue to speak of themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’. Today, I want to gently question that approach, encourage people to move beyond it.
At some level I do understand that religion is tainted in people’s minds for good reason – there are many dreadful things that have been done in the name of religion – many religious institutions that have abused their power – but religion is a powerful human invention that can absolutely be used for the good. My take is that we must positively claim our own progressive religious identity, harness the transformative power of religion in our own lives and the life of the world, rather than giving it up as a bad job, and conceding religion to the rotters and reactionaries. I’m hoping that this week will encourage us all to see ourselves, and our collective endeavours, through a an explicitly religious lens, and that this might open us up to some of the gifts that we have inadvertently cut ourselves off from, by rejecting religion and religiosity.
But that’s not always been my view. I’ve gone from being someone with an almost entirely non-religious upbringing – something of a blank canvas really – to someone who stands in front of you now as both a Unitarian minister and a spiritual director (someone who works happily with mainstream-ish Christians as well as Unitarians) and who is evangelical (with a small e) about embracing religion. So I want to share some of my thought processes, my religious reasoning – how it’s evolved over time – and indeed some of the little leaps of faith that were nothing to do with reason, and were more about feeling, intuition, relationships, and the need for a community – in hope that you might resonate with some of the stages I’ve been through along the way.
So, as I said, my upbringing was non-religious. My parents were nominally C of E, but we never went to church, and my junior school only had occasionally had visits from Father Rob and his Fuzzy Felt Bible characters. The teachers had all grown up in the sixties so we sang Beatles songs far more often than hymns. I was sent to a Catholic secondary school though – simply because it had a better educational reputation than the rather rough local comprehensive at the time – and this was a total culture shock to me. I remember at the end of the first day, when we stacked our chairs on the tables, and the form teacher started reciting the Hail Mary and pretty much everyone else knew all the words and joined in. I think at the time I found the prayers and rituals strange but not objectionable. My first RE teacher, Sister Maureen, was actively lovely, the best sort of religious, both compassionate and a little bit naughty.
However, over time, I came to associate religion with various views that were espoused by some of the teachers – views that I took to be anti-woman and anti-gay (that’s the language I would have used at the time) – and that was probably the key factor in my teenage self becoming actively hostile to religion. And of course, in a rather superficial teenage analysis, I merrily went around ‘debunking’ all the things in the Bible and the creeds that couldn’t possibly be literally true, and thought myself so much cleverer than the gullible, innocent, believers. My attitude at the time would have been ‘why would anyone want to join a bunch of people who base their lives around made-up stories that are patently false’. (Sigh). I’m not proud of it now but I guess it was a phase that I had to go through. Also I suppose I was thinking ‘if this religion makes you anti-woman and anti-gay it’s a bad thing’ and that analysis (of certain forms of religion) has got more going for it, there’s more of a case to answer.
At that time I would probably also have called myself ‘spiritual not religious’ too – I guess that phrase was doing the rounds by then – me and my mates would go to Covent Garden most Saturdays and hang around in ‘Mysteries’, the new-age-y store, and come home with crystals, and posters with inspirational quotes on, and occasionally useful books or meditation tapes, some of which I still have. Looking back on it now, this seems quite an individualistic approach to spirituality, the rejection of tradition, and the expectation that I could work it all out by myself, with no community and no wise elders to guide me to something deeper than pick-n-mix.
By the time I went to university I was calling myself an agnostic. I hadn’t closed myself off entirely to the possibility of God – some sort of God – existing and my strongest conviction on the matter was probably a conviction of its ultimate unknowability. And this thread of ultimately-not-knowing continues at some level. But I studied physics at college which at that time (in the 1990s) meant I was immersed in a culture where hostile – vitriolic – atheism seemed to be prevalent. Interestingly though – perhaps I’m a natural dissenter! – being in that scornful, anti-religious, environment had a paradoxical impact on me: I started to turn the other way. Once again, I was repelled by their certainty: how could they be so confident that God didn’t exist? It didn’t seem to me the sort of question you could apply scientific reasoning to. The two positions – religious fundamentalism and atheistic fundamentalism – seemed in some ways to be mirror images of each other.
I began to have this hunch that – surely – there must be something between those two violently opposed polarities. That it must be possible for a form of religion to exist that didn’t require you to hold literal beliefs in things that seemed impossible – that didn’t require you to disavow belief in evolution or otherwise be anti-science – but which did support people in living more morally virtuous lives – actively doing good works in the world, getting involved in social justice, particularly amongst the poorest people on this planet, really getting their hands dirty and doggedly doing the unglamorous work of helping to build the Kingdom of God. I did witness a lot of this sort of community-minded faith-in-action amongst the Catholics I went to school with and, despite all my other reservations, it made a lasting positive impression.
Most of the story so far is ‘in my head’ – it’s about reason – me working out, through my teens and my early twenties, what I did and didn’t believe in or agree with. This was very much a stage where I thought of belief as a cognitive assent to something: saying inwardly ‘yes, I have given this a lot of thought, and I agree that this thing or that is true and right and important in some way’. But over the years I’ve come to see belief slightly differently. My old understanding was too limited. I still don’t believe, and don’t want to believe, in anything that is clearly and demonstrably false, or to profess that something literally happened when it probably didn’t. But I don’t think that thinking is the only, or even the primary, route to belief anymore. Not for me. And my route to this way of thinking came via a bit of a personal crisis in the late 90s.
At the end of my degree I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I drifted into doing a master’s at the same college; I was eligible for funding, so it enabled me to defer any big life decisions for another year without consequence. But that year, within a couple of months, I had a catastrophic and permanent falling out with the whole gang of friends I’d had since school, then I split up with the person I’d been going out with for three years (btw that was amicable, we’re still friends). I did make some new friends on the masters, it was a very intense year, there were three of us who did very long days together in the lab and forged a close bond, but at the end of the academic year that ended very suddenly – they moved away – and I was alone. This threw me into a mental health crisis, of a sort that is hard to describe now, and I didn’t have access to any support – my parents were baffled by it – I was in freefall and I am not quite sure how I got through it. In the meantime I had got a place to do a PhD at Guy’s Hospital; again, I’m sorry to say, I did it because I didn’t have any better ideas, they had some money, and they were willing (surprisingly keen) to take me on. My memory is that for the first few months I was just turning up like a zombie. I tried to make the best of it but, in retrospect, I was ill-suited to the work and the culture (as a side-note: I am autistic, only diagnosed last year, and if I knew then what I know now, perhaps I could’ve asked for the support that might have enabled me to thrive). There was a lot of solitary mental suffering over those four years but I did get it done.
During that time I was lonely and drifting. I had no sense of meaning or purpose or direction. I always cared a lot about ‘being a good person’ and ‘doing the right thing’ but was quite vague and haphazard in my thinking about what this meant in practice. I was sad and anxious most of the time, I would say. And this is the point where my emotions got involved in my religious journey and it stopped being all about reason.
One of my fellow PhD students (a lovely chap, we’re still in touch) was an Evangelical Christian – at the time he was involved in one of the churches that was an offshoot of Holy Trinity Brompton in Kensington – and he invited me to go to an Alpha course. At this stage I was torn. Generally, I didn’t trust Evangelicals, as I associated them with objectionable social and political views, and a rigid and literal reading of the Bible. And yet. There was my friend, the nicest person in the department, who seemed to be living a good upright moral life, whose faith seemed to give him strength and purpose. And, I thought, ‘I could do with a bit of that’. I didn’t want to dismiss the invitation out of hand. So I did go on the Alpha course, including the brain-wash-y weekend away in Worthing, where after weeks of trying to convert us with reason we were suddenly ambushed with rather theatrical speaking in tongues and people falling to the floor. I found it deeply manipulative and I didn’t like it at all!
But it got me thinking more broadly: was there some other sort of religion out there that would give me access to the benefits I could see my colleague was getting – support, community, encouragement to live a good life, space to regularly explore life’s ultimate questions – but a religion that would allow me to do that without having to buy into all those things (be they theological, social, or political) that I couldn’t in all good conscience accept? My heart was being drawn towards religion, but warning lights were flashing, and my head was still putting the brakes on. Emotionally, I intuited that I had some sort of need or desire to engage in religious community, in order to live more deeply and meaningfully, but at some level my reason still had a veto, and had to make sure that it was intellectually permissible. Justifiable. That I could dip my toe in the water of religion without risking my integrity or sanity.
Thankfully, by that time, in 1999, we had access to the internet, so it wasn’t too hard to do a bit of research. Somewhere along the way I had picked up the notion that Quakers were the best sort of religion so I started by looking them up. But in nearly every place where Quakers were listed I also saw Unitarians mentioned in passing. ‘Unitarian? What’s That?’, I must have thought – and the rest is history! I guess I’m quite a wordy person and I liked the idea of the readings and the sermons – and the singing – and I was impressed by the track record on women ministers and gay rights. So on the 28th of April 1999 I summoned my courage and crossed London to give Essex Church – Kensington Unitarians – a try. And, for me, that changed everything.
Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t won over straight away. I approached with caution. Great caution. Still some residual suspicion, even. I wanted to suss out if this church was really as open and inclusive as it claimed to be. I used to get there early, go and sit in the back row, and look through the hymnbook to see what clues I could pick up. In those days we only had the green book, Hymns for Living, and that made quite a good impression, they’d made an effort to de-gender the God-language, and the words often spoke to my concerns about life and the need to build a better world. But in those early days what blew my mind was that every week I found myself hearing all these new ideas – wisdom tales, and spiritual readings, and top-drawer sermons full of insight and challenge and consolation – every week I would hear something I had never heard before which I could tuck away for future use. More than that though, all this stuff I was encountering afresh, it was shaping me. I was so ready for it, in such great need for something that would help me make sense of life, make meaning, that I took it really seriously, I internalised it, and I let it change me.
As an aside, while Mel and I were having preliminary conversations about what we were going to talk about today, Mel said something like ‘I know it’s your thing, but sermons don’t really do much for me’. And I replied, ‘well, it’s not so much my thing now, preaching rarely knocks me over in the way it did, but in the first few years the impact of all the things I heard in those sermons were immense. They were my way in, my on-ramp, to a whole new way of thinking and being in the world. And so now I’m the one in the pulpit, I try to remember that on any given Sunday there might be someone coming along for the first time, someone who needs to hear that stuff like I once did – there’s a risk that all the well-worn stories and readings and teachings and nuggets of wisdom might feel like old news to me now as a minister who has to find something to say each Sunday – but we have to keep repeating these key messages to “hold the door open” and make a way in for each new generation that comes along’. And we all need to hear them over and over anyway, to reinforce them (and because we and the world are ever changing, so we never hear them the same way twice).
When I first came to Summer School that ratcheted things up another level. In part because of the sheer intensity of the experience – which I relished – and because a significant number of the people who I met here were all-in on their religious life. For them, it was the centre of things, the principle they oriented their existence around. They were people I came to admire – and love – and I wanted to be like them. They were further along the religious path, they’d read and learned more, they knew how to pray, and lead worship, how to create these groups for deep spiritual exploration. I looked for clues, followed up on the references, it all helped me along the way. But it wasn’t just about what they did, it was who they were, that’s what I was drawn to. I had a sense of how they faced life’s struggles and tried to do good in the world.
And it gave me a little glimpse into how that wholehearted religious commitment might inspire and enable someone to live a better, more vibrant, life. To do things which seemed entirely out of reach, impossible, for the person I was then, aged 25. They were further along the path, I realised, and they were generously sharing their wisdom and encouragement with those of us who were coming along behind them. (I should also say that these Summer School Saints I’m thinking of were of course fallible and often-frustrating humans like the rest of us! But they changed my life).
Even then, in those early days, I was beginning to get the first inklings that I might have a call to ministry, but I also knew really early on that it would be a long road. I loved the church, and summer school, the preaching, and small groups, and I wanted these things to continue to exist – which requires enough passionate people in each new generation to step up to keep the line going – and even though I was only in my mid-20s I knew I wanted to help facilitate and shape them. But I was very shy (and, as we now know, autistic) and lacking confidence. There was a lot of inner work to do.
Eventually, I went back to college, to study Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics with the Jesuits at Heythrop, and that really made me get to grips with any residual issues I had around religious language, because they were teaching from a mainstream Christian perspective, and in order to properly engage with the material and the learning I had to find a way to understand that language – receive it with generosity, rather than being dismissive – and also to use that language myself with integrity.
There were two philosophical ideas I encountered in those years which helped me find my own way through: pragmatism (particularly as espoused by William James) and non-realism (most associated with Don Cupitt). I still worried about whether, by embracing religion, I was kidding myself into believing in something that wasn’t real. And the likes of James and Cupitt helped provide the philosophical foundations which eventually enabled me to stop worrying about it quite so much! James wrote a famous essay, titled ‘The Will to Believe’, in which he considered the question of God, and he took the view that there is insufficient evidence to say either way whether God really exists or not, which is the position of the agnostic. But he went on to argue that belief in God is what he calls a ‘genuine option’ because it is ‘live, forced, and momentous’: it hasn’t been conclusively disproven; we can’t really just opt out of the question because if you don’t act ‘as if’ God exists then you are effectively acting ‘as if’ God doesn’t exist; and if God does exist then responding to that represents an opportunity that would make a significant difference to our lives.
James concludes that we are better off in this life, in the here and now, to believe in God, regardless of whether or not our beliefs turn out to be true. And he argues this largely on the basis of psychological benefits to the individual and community. I haven’t done his argument justice in this summary – and I do realise his claim seems really modest – but it gave me permission to take a leap of faith. To start acting as if God existed, as if religion held something valuable, and just… see what happened. Maybe it contained ultimate truths, maybe it didn’t, but pragmatically – if it helped me to endure life’s suffering, find meaning and purpose, and do my bit to make the world a better place – it was philosophically/ethically permissible and… worth a try.
And I wouldn’t know unless I tried. You can’t wait until you have it all worked out before you commit (because you probably never will!) The UU minister Erik Walker Wikstrom wrote a great little book called ‘Simply Pray’ in which he essentially says ‘stop worrying about who or what you’re praying to, just do it!’ We have to throw caution to the wind at some point. With religion, it seems, you just have to dive in.
These days we hear a lot about deconstruction and reconstruction of faith and I suppose that’s what I was doing; I’d rejected religion as a teenager, I’d started to think I’d been a bit too hasty in my twenties, and in my thirties I began to rebuild. I’d realised that there were treasures in the religious traditions that I had been missing out on – that my previous analysis had been rather shallow, my rejection of it had been premature – and I needed to re-engage, and go deeper second time around. Later I read about Ricœur’s idea of ‘first and second naivete’ applied to religion (this is my very approximate and abbreviated take on what he said!) – the notion that we first approach religious stories in a child-like way and tend to take them very literally – and as we grow up we may come to reject them on the same very literal basis – but later in life, if we’re lucky, we might return to them in what he calls ‘second naivete’. This is a when we ‘purge ourselves of cynicism and contempt’, and encounter the same religious stories in a more playful, imaginative, and experimental way, allowing them to work on us, coming to them with an open mind and heart. This is not about abandoning rational thought, but going beyond it, understanding that symbolic and literal truths can fruitfully exist alongside each other, just like art and science can.
So: Where am I at now, at 50, what conclusions can I leave you with? Knowing that they will surely be provisional conclusions as I am still learning and growing (I hope). Still questioning, anyway. I find myself thinking of the supposed etymology of the word ‘religion’ – in fact two different suggested etymologies – why not? In the spirit of playfulness. The first one I remember encountering in one those very first sermons I heard at Essex Church 25 years ago: ‘religion’ as coming from ‘re-ligare’, ‘to bind’ or ‘to bind together’, or ‘to unite’. This one is especially meaningful to me – religion is a collective endeavour – we are bound together in a community of practice – we are part of, participating in, a continuous but evolving tradition, in an ongoing conversation with generations of people who came before us, and generations more who will follow. Religion binds us (in a positive sense!) to others who help to keep us honest, keep us on the path, provide challenge and accountability. They will also support us when times are tough, and encourage us to live well and be our best selves. To play our part in the healing of the world and building the Kingdom of God here on earth. But to really ‘feel the benefit’ of religious life we need to fully commit, show up, go all-in. The other suggested etymology of ‘religion’ comes from relegere, ‘to re-read’, or ‘to go over again’. And that makes sense to me too – the importance of repetition – of coming back, calling ourselves and each other back, to the wisdom and teachings, making a practice of regularly coming together to focus what’s most important in life.
I’ve shared my story – not to suggest that you should come to the same theological or philosophical conclusions that I have – but to encourage you to engage in your own process of scrutinising any religious ‘baggage’ or hang-ups you may be carrying. You may be theist, atheist, agnostic – you can be all those things and religious too! But when we are reactive to the very word ‘religion’, or to traditional religious language, imagery, or ritual, we might be cutting ourselves off from something very valuable, a great store of human wisdom and resources for making the best of the life we’ve got.
I’ve moved through indifference, to hostility, to curiosity, to openness, and now I’m actively engaged and embracing a religious life – and for me that has been liberating. Transformative, even. So, I wish you well on your own unfolding journeys, and I hope that embracing a religious life brings just as much juiciness and joy for you too. Amen.
Reflection by Jane Blackall