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?

Be ye therefore perfect

I've just been writing my last essay for Regent's Park College, about Pelagius and St. Augustine. Pelagius was a late 4th century British monk, who acquired quite a following in the dying days of the Roman Empire for proclaiming that humankind had free will to choose to do right, and the responsibility to follow all the law and the teachings of the Gospel. And ran up against Augustine of Hippo, who believed that we are all rotten with the taint of original sin, totally unable to do anything right except through God's grace. Guess which one I am in sympathy with?

The thing I found very interesting is that both Pelagius and one of my all-time heroes, 19th century American Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, were both inspired by the same bit of Matthew's gospel: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." (Matt 5:48) Both men believed that humankind has the potential to be perfect, otherwise God would not have commanded us to strive for it. There is an absolutely beautiful passage in Theodore Parker's address The Transient and Permanent in Christianity, which goes like this:

"Christianity is a simple thing, very simple. It is absolute, pure morality; absolute, pure religion; the love of man; the love of God acting without let or hindrance. Its watchword is, Be perfect as your Father in heaven. The only form it demands is a divine life; doing the best thing in the best way, from the highest motives; perfect obedience to the great law of God."

What a challenge! And what an inspiration! Whenever I read those words, it makes me want to sit up straight, and do better.

One of the authors of the books on St Augustine that I was reading for the essay accused Pelagius of a sort of "icy Puritanism", in which there was no room for backsliders and ordinary, everyday, weak, sinful human beings. And I guess I see his point. The sort of church I want to belong to would have the high aims of Pelagius and Theodore Parker to inspire us to do the best we can in all the ways that we can, but also some cradling arms and listening ears to catch the broken and the fallen, and help them back up. Otherwise it could be terribly judgemental, and holier-than-thou, which is not what our inclusive, loving denomination is about.