Learning How to Live

Reflection #86 (7th July 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Over the last few weeks – on those rare days when the weather’s been neither too hot nor too wet – I’ve been engaging in quite a bit of therapeutic gardening. As many of you know, the first half of this year has been quite full-on for me, and as a result my little garden has been sadly neglected – just at the time of year when it’s most important to keep on top of things. Everything was growing away so vigorously in springtime – and I didn’t have the capacity to give it the care and attention it needed – after a winter and spring of unusually wet weather the growth was especially rampant.

So, I found myself standing at the back door a few weeks ago, surveying the scene, and asking myself: where do I begin!? It was a bit of a mess. So many of my favourite plants were smothered in bindweed and looking very sorry for themselves. Others had been lost to frost, or waterlogged through the cold, rainy, winter months. An old hosepipe and a broken ladder had been left laying on the ‘lawn’ (I had to put ‘lawn’ in inverted commas as it has long consisted more of weeds than grass) and the grass had grown right over them. There were snails and slugs as far as the eye could see.

Reflection #85 (14th April 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Some years ago I read a paper written by my ministry colleague Stephen Lingwood, on Unitarian theology, and its opening premise has really stuck with me. It’s pertinent to the anniversary we’re celebrating today so I want to share a little excerpt from it with you now. Stephen Lingwood writes:

‘I am a Unitarian. That label, “Unitarian” was also used by Theophilus Lindsey when he started the first explicitly Unitarian church in Britain in 1774. What does it mean to make the claim that both he and I are Unitarians? What relationship do I have to Lindsey and to this thing called “Unitarian”? What is the relationship any Unitarian has with Unitarians of the past?… The language, practices, and beliefs of Lindsey seem to be radically different to mine… The Unitarian tradition has changed, sometimes quite rapidly. And its self-understanding is that it does change, and that it should do. But this does make the question seem even more pressing: in what sense do we claim religious continuity in a non-creedal tradition that allows the freedom of religious evolution? In what sense is the Unitarianism of the past the same thing as the Unitarianism of the present?’

Reflection #84 (17th March 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Friendship is one of those subjects that I’m endlessly interested in pondering, and one I’ve probably got too much to say about, which is why this is only part one of a two-part service (and next week we’ll be hearing varied perspectives from several members of the congregation).

If you’re at the church in person you may already have noticed that the picture on the front of your order of service today is of – Dave Myers and Si King – otherwise known as the Hairy Bikers. I know that many of you, like me, were very sad to hear of the recent death of Dave Myers – the Sunday after the news broke I lit a candle here not only for Dave and his family but also for Si – and I could see faces round the room nodding in sympathy. It was clear to see that theirs was a great friendship, and this would be a terrible loss to Si, who had written: ‘My best friend is on a journey that for now, I can’t follow. I will miss him every day and the bond and friendship we shared over half a lifetime.’

Mini-Reflection #83 (25th February 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

The theme of morning’s service was chosen in connection with this being the last Sunday in LGBTQ+ history month – this is a time for all of us to remember and celebrate the lives and achievements of our spiritual ancestors in the LGBTQ+ community – trailblazers and pioneers (or, to borrow a word that I first picked up from my friend and church member Gaynor – ‘qheroes’ – short for ‘queer heroes’). So, in that spirit, today’s service is titled ‘Learning from Lionel’ – we’re going to spend the next hour reflecting on what we might learn from the wit, the wisdom, and the marvellously messy life of one of my all-time spiritual qheroes, the Rabbi Lionel Blue.

I love Lionel Blue – I think that much is probably clear by this point – and he’s been a hugely influential figure in my own spiritual journey. It’s not so much his teachings, as such, though I enjoyed his Thoughts for the Day well enough. What really fascinates and inspires me is the story of his life and the way he lived it.

Reflection #82 (11th February 2024 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

So, as I said at the top of the service, today we’re looking at Lent as a season for Spiritual Strength Training. A time to focus on spiritual deepening and to develop disciplines that might help us to live in greater alignment with our values, to live lives of meaning and purpose, to bring us closer to God.

In order to get there, though, we probably ought to start by refreshing our memories about Lent as it is traditionally observed in the Christian faith. It’s a period of 40 days – from Ash Wednesday, next Wednesday, to Easter (not including Sundays) – a time of solemnity and self-reflection during which the faithful remember the events leading up to Jesus’s crucifixion. It is meant to parallel the 40 days which Jesus spent fasting and praying in the wilderness, when he was tempted and tested by Satan, but he resisted those temptations, held firm in his self-discipline, and stuck to what he set out to do. So in the traditional view, Lent is a time to draw closer to God, through prayer, reflection, perhaps making sacrifices which test our own self-discipline, and resolving to live a more Godly life by doing so.

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.