Learning How to Live

Reflection #126 (28th June 2026 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

This idea we’re exploring today – the notion that modest, consistent, actions can bring about positive change, and enable us to achieve great things over the long term – it’s a well-worn idea. There are so many proverbs and sayings to remind us of the fact. Eric Zimmer reminded us of a few in that last reading we heard: Rome wasn’t built in a day. Slow and steady wins the race. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time (that one’s not my favourite – I feel sorry for the elephant!).

Reflection #125 (14th June 2026 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I feel some trepidation in setting out to speak on this subject! AI is a hot topic, in a developing area, which requires some degree of technical sophistication to grasp, and which people seem to have very strong and diverging opinions about! So I feel I’m stepping into a bit of a minefield here but I’ll give it my best shot… My one, flimsy, credential for speaking on such a topic is that I did take a module on AI and machine learning as part of my MSc in medical engineering down the road at Imperial – I even coded my own tiny little neural network! – but that was nearly 30 years ago. And the landscape has changed so much since then that it might as well have been 1000 years ago. (And I feel the need to say that though this was billed as a mini-reflection it’s turned into a maxi-reflection as it’s a big old subject with a lot of key points to mention)… But with all those caveats out of the way, let’s dive in.

Reflection #124 (30th May 2026 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Every week we say it – we pray it – ‘help us to live well each day, and be our best selves’. I wonder what that phrase means to you? How it lands? For me, it’s an important part of our purpose as a church – to aspire to better things for ourselves and for the world – to keep reminding each other, and encouraging each other, to learn and to grow, to engage in self-reflection, self-discipline perhaps, in service of our mutual flourishing.

Reflection #123 (24th May at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I’m not sure how many Unitarian churches will be marking Pentecost Sunday today – but it’s always been a story that has spoken to me – though I tend to focus on different aspects of it than are emphasised in more traditional interpretations. Many years ago, I read a sermon by the UU minister Robert Hardies, who makes that case that Pentecost is ‘the Creation Myth of Unitarianism’ because it describes ‘a diverse group of people, speaking about God in different languages’ who ‘come together with a… faith that though we speak many tongues, we will all be understood [and] we will all understand… [so] the Spirit is found in translation.’ That take really stuck with me, so I keep coming back to the story, though I want to take a different angle today, and use the story as a jumping-off point to talk about speaking up and speaking out.

Reflection #122 (26th April 2026 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

At the top of the service, I said that we’d reflect on the idea of belonging to each other, in both the universal sense and also the particular sense of belonging to this, our beloved community of Kensington Unitarians, aka Essex Church.

Last week I put a call out to members of the congregation and asked them to say, in just a sentence or two, what being a member means to them. Thanks to everyone who responded – I’ve put all those responses in the service text that is up on the website (scroll to the bottom of the page) – they’re more-or-less anonymised but some have identifying features! We’re just going to share a few fragments of those responses now – I’m going to ask Brian to help me read them out – to just give a sense of the variety of things people said about their sense of belonging as members of this community.

Reflection #121 (5th April 2026 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

We don’t know what happened. That reading from Daniel Budd, which Roy read for us earlier in the service, has become a fixture of our Easter services here at Essex Church because it feels like a necessary disclaimer for Unitarians. Our denomination emerged from the Christian tradition and we still celebrate – and wrestle with – its core festivals and stories. But some of us find Easter challenging.

As I mentioned earlier, last week at the GA, the annual meetings of Unitarians in the UK, a colleague commented that Unitarians sometimes want to rush to the happy ending of Easter Sunday without first facing the horrors of Good Friday. But I’m not sure that’s quite true.

Reflection #120 (15th February 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I wonder how you respond to the story of the devil tempting Jesus, or the story of Mara tempting the Buddha? On today’s hymn sheet I’ve included an image of the latter story – which we’ll also show on screen for a moment – it’s a fantastical picture, by a Buddhist artist called Aloka, of the Buddha sitting serene in this bubble of light and flowers while every kind of snarling demon gangs up on him! All manner of beasts and horrors closing in.

Reflection #119 (8th February 2026 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I feel I should issue a disclaimer before I get into my sermon – this might be a relief for some and a disappointment for others – but as I asked Sarah to warn you last week, despite the title ‘Free Love’, this sermon is not going to be as racy as you might have anticipated! I’m not talking about ‘free love’ in the euphemistic 1960s sense of sexual liberation and orgiastic revelries (though by all means go for it – in your own time! – if you’ve got the stamina and the full consent of everyone involved).

Reflection #118 (25th January 2026 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

‘Being fully alive requires both finding trusted others as well as being a trusted other. For trusting and being trusted allow us to blossom.’ Those words from Mark Nepo are at the heart of what today’s service is all about – and I believe his message, it rings true to me – we humans need to trust, and feel trusted, in order to be fully alive. Yet I guess most of us will have had experiences – some small incidents, some devastating – of having trusted a person, or an institution, and having that work out badly for us, when our trust was broken, or abused, or taken advantage of. We know, don’t we, that this troubled and often terrifying world is full of peril and risk. So it’s understandable that we might retreat into a state of being wary and defended to protect ourselves from harm.

Reflection #117 (11th January 2026 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

‘We live and learn’ – that’s how the saying goes – but do we? Do we always, inevitably, learn as we live? Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s entirely guaranteed… it seems to be perfectly possible for us poor humans to bumble our way through life in a fairly unreflective and oblivious manner, and miss a lot of the lessons that come our way. But by the very fact you’re here this morning, I guess that you aspire to lifelong learning – not primarily the sort that you might pick up by going to evening classes or the U3A – but the learning that comes by being open, attentive, and curious in the face of whatever new, potentially challenging, experiences life brings our way.