Free Connection

I'm not sure whether the author of this week's quotation had Unitarians in mind when she wrote it, but it is so appropriate for us: "To be connected without being bound - that is the art of living." Karin E. Leiter.

Because for me, the ability to be connected to my Unitarian community without being bound by a doctrinal creed is what makes it special. We share the values of respecting freedom of belief, based on an individual's reason, conscience and lived experience, and do our level best to not only tolerate, but also accept and respect, the beliefs of others. even when we do not share them (so long as they do not harm any person or living thing).

The majority of faith traditions require their members to sign up to a particular set of beliefs. Unitarians (and Quakers) are different.

For example, Quaker Advice number 5 says (in part): "While respecting the experiences and opinions of others, do not be afraid to say what you have found and what you value. Appreciate that doubt and questioning can also lead to spiritual growth and to a greater awareness of the Light that is in us all."

But my favourite advice about connection without binding is number 17:

"Do you respect that of God in everyone though it may be expressed in unfamiliar ways or be difficult to discern? Each of us has a particular experience of God and each must find the way to be true to it. When words are strange or disturbing to you, try to sense where they come from and what has nourished the lives of others. Listen patiently and seek the truth which other people's opinions may contain for you. Avoid hurtful criticism and provocative language. Do not allow the strength of your convictions to betray you into making statements or allegations that are unfair or untrue. Think it possible that you may be mistaken."

For me, this is a very civilised approach to living. It is about respect, patience and empathy. Which is how we connect with one another on a deep level.

Kahlil Gibran also has some wise advice about how to connect without binding, when the Prophet speaks of marriage:

"Let there be spaces in your togetherness.
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love.
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone.
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
for only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
for the pillars of the temple stand apart,
and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow."

Reason and Passion

I love the words of Kahlil Gibran, when he writes: "Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgement wage war against your passion and your appetite." I think that this is so true of all of us - at some times we are cool and logical and reasonable, and at others we are fiery and illogical and passionate. And that is as it should be.

In their early years, one of the names that Unitarians were known by was "Rational Dissenters". I looked this term up in Wikipaedia, and was interested to find the following description: " Like moderate Anglicans, they desired an educated ministry and an orderly church, but they based their opinions on reason and the Bible rather than on appeals to tradition and authority. They rejected doctrines such as the Trinity and original sin, arguing that they were irrational. Rational Dissenters believed that Christianity and faith could be dissected and evaluated using the newly emerging discipline of science, and that a stronger belief in God would be the result."

And I absolutely agree that what we believe and how we behave should be subject to our reason and conscience. Yes. But I also believe that there is more to life than being  perfectly reasonable and logical.  Yes, the final authority for an individual's faith should be their own conscience. But I think that this involves our hearts as well as our heads. When I first became a Unitarian, over 30 years ago, I was "converted", if you like, by reading the first section of Alfred Hall's book Beliefs of a Unitarian, when he wrote:

"But above all, it must be known and understood by Unitarianism is not a system of creeds or beliefs. It is more than anything else an attitude of mind. It is a fresh way of looking at life and religion ... It lays the stress on the reliability of the human mind to judge for itself ... Its method is that of appeal to reason, conscience and experience generally, and above all to elemental principles of truth and right which are implanted in the human heart at its noblest and embedded in the universe."

 



So Hall was saying that what is in our hearts is as important as what is in our heads. Yes. I also believe that there are some things in life that are beyond reason - how we love, how we feel compassion for others, and also, to some extent, what we believe, what gives our lives meaning. I think that both reason and passion are important - I am increasingly finding that while I can reject certain beliefs on the grounds of reason, there are some aspects of "doing religion" or having faith that are beyond reason. For example, I have a growing awareness of God or the Spirit at work in the world. This is on the basis of intuition, not reason, but I believe it is real.

Head and heart together, reason and passion. May we use all our faculties to find wholeness and completion and meaning in our lives.

 

 

 

 

A ship of thought

I have found a beautiful quotation by 19th century American Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, which sums up how I feel about books and reading:

Theodore Parker

"The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty."

Reading has always been a passion of mine, to the extent that it has occasionally got me into trouble, when I have been too deeply buried in a good book to pay attention to life going on around me. Yet few things give me greater delight than the discovery of a new book that makes me think; that makes me see the world and everything in it in a new light. In his introduction to Mister God, This is Anna, Vernon Sproxton speaks of Ah! Books, "those which induce a fundamental change in the reader's consciousness. They widen his sensibility in such a way that he is able to look upon familiar things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time. ... Ah! Books give you sentences which you can roll around in the mind, throw in the air, catch, tease out, analyse. But in whatever way you handle them, they widen your vision. For they are essentially Idea-creating, in the sense that Coleridge meant when he described the Idea as containing future thought - as opposed to the Epigram which encapsulates past thought. Ah! Books give the impression that you are opening a new account, not closing an old one down."

Everyone will have different Ah! Books. Mine include Beliefs of a Unitarian by Alfred Hall; Quaker Advices and Queries; Enough by John Naish; Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain; Rilke's Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke; The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong; The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran; Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life by Frederic and Mary-Ann Brussat and A Backdoor to Heaven by Rabbi Lionel Blue. And of course Mister God, This Is Anna. Each of these books has shown me the world in a different way, and made me think about myself in relation to it. They have influenced what I believe, and how I behave in very fundamental ways.

What are yours?

The rule of the last inch

Over the last few days, I have been indulging myself by watching the series of documentaries about how the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings films were made. And I have been struck, not for the first time, by the loving attention to the smallest detail of every aspect of the production - the ethos seems to have been "why make a good film when you could make a great film?" I have been awed by the trouble and time taken by everyone involved to go that extra mile, to ensure that every single aspect of the production was the best it could be - the art and design work is extraordinary, to give just one example. There must have been thousands of people involved in the work (including two poor souls who actually wore out their fingerprints making chain mail for two years!) and all of them seem to have been infected with the same desire. I think it is admirable and praiseworthy.

It reminded me of the Rule of the Last Inch, as propounded by one of the characters in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle:

"Now listen to the rule of the last inch. The realm of the last inch. The job is almost finished, the goal almost attained, everything possible seems to have been achieved, every difficulty overcome - and yet the quality is just not there. The work needs more finish, perhaps further research. In that moment of weariness and self-satisfaction, the temptation is greatest to give up, not to strive for the peak of quality. That's the realm of the last inch - here, the work is very, very complex, but it's also particularly valuable because it's done with the most perfect means. The rule of the last inch is simply this - not to leave it undone. And not to put it off - because otherwise your mind loses touch with that realm. And not to mind how much time you spend on it, because the aim is not to finish the job quickly, but to reach perfection."

None of us can work to that pitch, in the realm of the last inch, all the time. But we can surely strive to do the best job we can, whatever that is. And we can "put the thought of all that we love into all that we make" as Tolkien's Lothlorien Elves do. As Kahlil Gibran writes in The Prophet:

"Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night."