Learning How to Live

Reflection #81 (21st January 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

As I said at the top of the service, this theme of freedom and unfreedom is a big, big topic, and we might as well accept upfront that we are barely going to scratch the surface of it today – I hope it’s one we’ll return to again and again, and approach from different angles, in the months and years to come. After all, it’s a theme beloved of Unitarians – historically we’ve made a lot of ‘freedom, reason, and tolerance’ as our guiding values – we call ourselves ‘a free religious faith’.

And it’s a theme which means a lot to me personally too, though I tend to speak in terms of liberation more than freedom, as the two words have slightly different connotations for me. When I had my ordination service a few years ago I wrote a statement of my vision for my ministry – I tried to articulate my own sense of calling – and liberation was a big part of what I hoped my future ministry would be about (perhaps that’s why I picked this topic the week before our big induction service).

Reflection #80 (31st December 2023 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

At the end of another year, I thought it would be good for us to reflect on the theme of ‘retreat’, for a couple of reasons. In part it’s because we kicked off our new programme of mini-retreats this weekend, with a New Year’s mini-retreat yesterday afternoon, and we’re planning to hold these mini-retreats every other month this year (if you’ll permit me to include a plug here, the next one will be on the first weekend of March when we’ll focus on ‘The Stories of Our Lives’).

Another reason for today’s focus on retreat, though, was a sense that the turn of the year is often a good time for taking stock – taking a pause – in this slightly peculiar post-Christmas week, where time loses all meaning, and we don’t necessarily know what day it is. Whether or not you’re one for making new year’s resolutions, this is a time when many of us look back at the year just gone, and set our intentions, make plans, for the year to come. We take time for some sort of reflective pause.

Mini-Reflection #79 (17th December 2023 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

It’s an old, familiar, story – most of us have seen a good number of Christmases come and go – and the story of Jesus, born in a manger, is one that we know well. Or at least, we probably think we do. Various renderings of the story in popular culture – not least in school nativity plays – tend to play fast and loose with the details, everything gets mixed up, it drifts a bit from the original text. And that’s OK. We’re allowed to play with the story, the myth, and the archetypes it contains. This is a legitimate way of working with the text, and the tradition, to get at the deeper truth that it holds.

Each time we encounter the Christmas story, it will speak to us anew, if we let it. If we really listen, instead of setting our ears and our brain to auto-pilot, and open ourselves to what it has to say.

Reflection #78 (29th October 2023 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

We Unitarians don’t really make a big thing about Saints, do we, as a rule? Contrary to other denominations, it’s very rare to find a Unitarian church named after a saint – apparently the only one remaining in the UK is St. Mark’s in Edinburgh – though I recently read a blog post by Rev Dr David Steers (an expert in Unitarian history) which reckoned there were two others that had existed in the past: St. Michael’s in Selby, Yorkshire, and St. Thomas’ in Ringwood, Hampshire, two chapels which closed in the 60s and 70s respectively. This is quite a contrast to other denominations, in the wider Christian tradition (especially in Catholicism), where the significance of saints is much more evident in names, icons, and feast days. And, of course, saints are not just a Christian phenomenon, there are parallel roles in most faith traditions: Bodhisattvas in Buddhism come readily to mind. So I find myself wondering: are we missing out by shying away from the saints? What might we gain from engaging with them? And can we do so in a way that is in keeping with our tradition?

Reflection #77 (17th September 2023 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

‘Church is a place where you get to practice what it means to be human’.

These words, from the 20th century Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams, have long resonated with me. As Jeannene mentioned at the start of the service, we made a poster with that quote on it some years ago, and it was on the ‘wayside pulpit’ on the street outside the church building for a long time (we’ve still got the poster somewhere and perhaps we’ll dig it out and put it up again).

‘Church is a place where you get to practice what it means to be human’. What do you make of that saying, I wonder? Although the saying appeals to me I realise its meaning is really quite ambiguous. There are all sorts of connotations and associations I have with this notion of ‘being human’ and in this short reflection I thought I’d offer up a few of them – along with a few more quotes from wise souls on the subject – in hope of us getting a better grip on what Adams might have been on about.

Mini-Reflection #76 (17th September 2023 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

When we gather together each autumn for our little Harvest Festival here at church I get a sense of being part of a long line – a very very long line – of humans who have been doing something similar for many generations. It’s a tradition that transcends religious boundaries and national borders – after all, we all need to eat – and throughout history our ancestors will have been quite aware of the precariousness of their situation, and their dependence on a good harvest, in order to survive.

I don’t know about you, but for most of my life, I confess, I have somewhat taken it for granted that there would be food on the table. I’ve been very lucky to grow up in what felt, to me, like a time of plenty (living in one of the world’s richest countries and, until quite recently, in a time of relative political and economic stability, with a functioning social security system… and I’m not sure we can say that’s the case any more). Although my family were never rolling in it when I was growing up, not by any means, we were never in serious danger of going hungry either. I am used to a world where the supermarkets shelves are full of fresh produce, where an ever-increasing variety of new and unusual fruit and veg from around the world makes its way to our shores, where farmer’s markets and corner shops catering to all comers in our multicultural city have opened us up to new horizons. Which is, of course, all well and good if you can afford it. And, indeed, if the planet can afford it, in terms of the energy and pollution involved in the production and transport of produce.

Reflection #75 (10th September 2023 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

It seems to me that we don’t have to look very hard to find examples of either/or thinking; it sometimes seems to be the dominant mode of operation in the world around us and it is a habit that I’m sure most of us fall into at times. When faced with a complex and confusing world it’s hardly surprising that there’s a temptation to cope with it by simplifying, segregating, dividing everything up into neat categories, by polarising issues and debates, by identifying ‘them’ and ‘us’.

And it is very easy to divide the world into goodies versus baddies – this is temptation I give in to on a regular basis as I think of certain politicians and I despair at their actions and attitudes – but at the same time I’m aware that the consequences of such black-and-white thinking can be pretty grim. Just think of the words used many times throughout history, but most famously in our time by George W. Bush: ‘you’re either with us, or against us’. And think about where that sort of outlook tends to lead.

Reflection #74 (6th August 2023 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

The theme of this week’s service – the messy side of life – was inspired by something that happened to me last week (before I’d even changed out of my pyjamas). I was idly staring out of the kitchen window on Saturday morning, while cooking my dad’s porridge, and I noticed that the man who sweeps the street seemed to be lingering directly outside, just a couple of metres away. It was still quite early and it took me a moment to realise what was happening: the man from the council was roughly chopping off all the flowers that were billowing out through the garden fence and onto the street – Californian poppies, geraniums, salvia – all these soft frothy blooms from my little patch of cottage garden that weren’t causing any obstruction or getting in anybody’s way as far as I can tell. It’s more or less the only splash of colour and life on our street – most of the gardens have been concreted over to make space for cars – and it’s always alive with bees. I’m quietly proud of it. But it’s not exactly tidy. It’s (intentionally) left a little bit wild. It made me feel quite sad that someone felt that this little bit of wildness was not welcome on our street – it was too scruffy – and these few stray blooms breaching the boundary line should be unceremoniously lopped off. And I’ve heard many tales of verges being strimmed and hedges ripped up in the name of municipal ‘tidiness’.

Mini-Reflection #73 (25th June 2023 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I settled on ‘Discovering Delight’ for the title of our service today – mainly chosen for alliteration purposes, now I come to think of it – because to talk about ‘discovering’ delight isn’t quite right. Or at least it doesn’t tell the full story. For me, ‘Discovering’ suggests unexpectedly tripping over delight, happening upon it, chancing on delight almost accidentally. And of course that does happen.

But the core message of this service – and the thing I love most about Ross Gay’s approach – is that he speaks of developing a ‘delight radar’ and strengthening his ‘delight muscles’. It’s not a passive process. In making a practice of delight – committing to noticing one moment of delight each day and writing it down – he trains himself to become more sensitive to it. His ‘delight radar’ becomes ever more finely tuned. This makes sense from a neuroplasticity point of view too – we develop our neural circuits by repeatedly looking out for delightful happenings – and in time we’ll find them even easier to notice.

Reflection #72 (4th June 2023 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Prayer is, as I mentioned at the start of the service, a perennial topic of exploration at church. It’s a topic we keep coming back to, and rightly so, because the practice of prayer is central, foundational, in pretty much every spiritual tradition you care to name, which indicates it is something we ought to be paying attention to and engaging with, even if our collective relationship to prayer as Unitarians can be… a bit complicated. Prayer is something I’ve given a lot of thought to over the years – and a lot of shelf-space too! – I’ve got all my books about prayer lined up on a shelf over my bed and even if I only count the ones that have got ‘prayer’ in the title we’re looking at a stack of forty-nine books. This is not me trying to show off! Just an indication that (a) there’s a lot been written about the subject from a variety of perspectives and (b) prayer is something I am fascinated by and continue to wrestle with.

Of course we Unitarians do pray, collectively, in our services – especially those of us who attend our regular ‘Heart and Soul’ spiritual gatherings which are essentially a Unitarian prayer group in disguise – and I know that plenty of us do have our own personal prayer practices too – but it’s not something we seem to talk about all that much – not something we tend to foreground as a vital part of our shared religious life. It seems that sometimes our – laudable – commitment to reason leaves us reluctant to wholeheartedly enter into prayer when we’re not sure who it is we’re praying to, or what it is we’re even doing, or why. It can leave us praying-with-the-handbrake-on, emotionally speaking, and not fully engaged. If this sort of reservation resonates with your experience, you might appreciate the following words from Anne Lamott, taken from her slim volume on prayer, ‘Help! Thanks! Wow!’