Learning How to Live

Reflection #108 (22nd June 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Last Sunday, after the service, a few of us were sitting in the back garden, and we got to talking about butterflies. I love wildlife of all varieties, and am always on the lookout for anything at all unusual, so I mentioned that I’d seen a tortoiseshell butterfly that week, not one I see very often. This was met with slightly blank and bemused faces and even a little shrug. I was reminded that not everybody is into the same stuff as I am; we can’t all tell our tortoiseshells from our painted ladies. And that’s OK! It’s not to puff myself up about my butterfly identification skills (which, in truth, are not that advanced) or to do anyone else down for not being interested in insect spotting. But as we move through the world we’re not all attuned to the same things – I’ve been looking out for butterflies (and birds) for years so I notice them – they take up more space in my mind and my life. And so every time I leave the house there’s a happy chance I will meet a creature that I ‘know’.

Reflection #107 (15th June 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Who knew that there were so many poems about strawberries? We’ve enjoyed several already in our service today (‘The Strawberry Poem’ by Keaton St. James, ‘Strawberries’ by Tamara Madison, and ‘What is Given’ by Ralph Murre). I only want to offer a very short reflection of my own to go along with them. And, as I said at the very top of the service, I want to acknowledge that it might seem a strange decision on my part to swerve at the last minute to this apparently whimsical theme, given the state of the world and all its terrors. I had been planning to talk about theological matters, but I didn’t have the heart for it, and then I chanced across the poem ‘Ye Tang Che’ by James Crews. Its closing lines seemed so perfect:

Reflection #106 (8th June 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

So today we’re exploring this concept of faith. This is a bit of a generalisation but over the years I’ve picked up the impression that a lot of us who end up in Unitarian congregations are a bit uncertain, or ambivalent – or even squeamish – about the very notion of faith (perhaps in large part because we’re not entirely sure what it means). Do we really want to call ourselves ‘people of faith’ collectively, or consider ourselves as ‘having faith’ personally, when the way the word is often used in common parlance gives it a number of connotations that we might not feel entirely at ease with?

Reflection #105 (1st June 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Questions, questions! We Unitarians tend to think of ourselves as people who love the questions – people who like to question everything – perhaps people who aren’t satisfied with easy answers. So I don’t imagine I’m going to have to do a particularly hard-sell on the virtue of asking questions! But our service today is focused on beautiful questions. What makes a question beautiful, I wonder?

Reflection #104 (27th April 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

It seems important, to me, that we take some time at least once a year to think about our purpose as a church – and to remind ourselves of the part we each play in fulfilling that purpose – all of us. As the Minister-with-a-capital-M I’m most often the one who’s standing up at the front, facilitating groups, or sending emails – and I’m delighted to be in a position to do so, to lead this congregation, to spend most of my waking hours thinking and writing and organising and furthering the cause of Unitarianism – but ministry is a collective effort. It has to be. I’m just one person. If the work of this church rested on my efforts alone then that would significantly limit what we can do and be. But just imagine what we might be able to create together if we harnessed more of our gifts! There is so much potential in this congregation for us to collectively dream something wonderful (or perhaps I should say even more wonderful!) into being. I’m pretty proud of what we’re doing already.

Reflection #103 (20th April 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

As I hinted at the top of the service, Easter can be a tricky day for Unitarians, as each of us is likely to sit in a different relation to the Christian tradition. And the Easter story is challenging in a lot of different ways at once. In the mainstream churches there will be much more of a sense of having gone on a journey of preparation through Lent, and the build-up through Holy Week, giving a lot more time and space to linger over the story of Jesus’ downfall and suffering in worldly terms, before arriving at Easter Day and the sense of triumph that goes with the story of his resurrection.

Reflection #102 (6th April 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

When I first started thinking about this theme as something we might want to explore in a service, I brought it up in conversation with a few friends, some of whom are religious types and others of whom are really not. At first, I was somewhat surprised to find that people seemed to struggle somewhat with the concept – what precisely does it mean, ‘The Sacred’? – but then as I tried to share my own sense of the sacred I realised… it’s quite a slippery idea. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, given that we often talk of sacred things as being ineffable, somehow beyond our human ability to express in words, too profound to speak of. Still, we try to find a way.

Reflection #101 (23rd March 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

As I said at the top of the service, this past week has been ‘Neurodiversity Celebration Week’, and so this morning we’re exploring the premise that is simply stated by the autistic author Temple Grandin in words that are on the front of your order of service: ‘The world needs all kinds of minds.’

Part of the impetus behind tackling this theme today was a conversation I had with a friend recently – and I should probably say upfront that this is going to be perhaps a more personal reflection than usual – I am hoping it will be useful for me to share a little of my own first-hand experience on this occasion. So I was speaking to my friend – a new friend, someone I haven’t known very long – and I mentioned in passing that I am autistic. And he replied ‘you don’t seem autistic, if you don’t mind me saying’.

Reflection #100 (2nd March 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

As I said at the top of today’s service, our exploration today is around the need to nurture meaningful connections, in a world where many are lonely, alienated and disconnected. Even in this densely populated city – we must be getting on towards 10 million Londoners now –though we bump up against each other every day it’s still so easy to feel anonymous and isolated. And in theory we’re very connected in a virtual sense too, to the whole world, via the internet. But despite this, I suspect most of us would acknowledge that true connection isn’t always easy to find.

Reflection #99 (23rd February 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I want to start my reflection (and I should say though this is listed as a mini-reflection in the OOS it turned out to be not-so-mini after all) with an echo of those words from the Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr: ‘All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain… If we don’t find a way to transform our pain, we will always transmit it to those around us or turn it against ourselves… If your religion is not teaching you how to recognize, hold, and transform suffering, it is junk religion.’