Complete spiritual freedom is the great action that follows the clearing of decks—A short thought for the day on the meaning and lessons of Unitarian history
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| Chinese protesters holding up blank sheets of paper |
In November of last year many of you will have read about and/or seen pictures of demonstrators in China holding up blank sheets of paper or placards. In doing this they were not only straightforwardly protesting about their Government’s Zero Covid strategy but were also specifically challenging the authorities with an unspoken, more general question, about their repressive tendencies, namely, “Are you going to arrest me for holding a sign saying nothing?”
But, as I hope is intuitively obvious to you, there was something on those placards, namely, an absence-of-words. In short, under certain circumstances absences can show up as presences.
Now, there are lots of interesting things one can say about this phenomenon but, for various reasons, as I thought about it during week I began to notice something about absences-as-presences related to the 467 year long history of the Unitarian tradition which may be said to have began on January 22, 1556, when Peter Gonesius (Piotr of Goniądz), a Polish student, spoke out against the doctrine of the Trinity during the general synod of the Reformed (Calvinist) churches of Poland held in the village of Secemin.
It’s important to know that from then until today one of our tradition’s most characteristic features has been a willingness to engage in continuous, radical reformation. In claiming the freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today, a great deal of our reforming activity has been centred on the need to free ourselves from, and then let go of, any practice or belief we felt had become dangerously problematic or had been shown to be just plain wrong.
Now this “clearing of the decks,” as our most important twentieth-century historian, Earl Morse Wilbur (1886-1956) called it in 1920 in an essay called “The Meaning and Lessons of Unitarian History”, was, for us, a central and necessary task. But today, 467 years down the line, it’s a strategy that’s clearly run into a serious problem. I can best reveal what that problem is by concentrating on the Christian symbol of the cross in the context of Unitarian churches and their place in the UK’s contemporary culture.
Most — but not all — Unitarian churches in the UK (and actually most Unitarian churches around the world), do not display a cross in their churches or halls. This is because one of our reforms was to clear our decks of this religious symbol which many Unitarians (including those who still define themselves in Christian terms) felt, and still feel, brought with it too much problematic baggage.
But it’s important to realise that this did not mean in any simple or straightforward sense that there simply weren’t crosses in our churches. This was because the absence of a cross on our communion or common tables functioned in a similar fashion to the absence of words on those blank sheets of paper in China. Here’s what I mean.
In the same way that in November last year most people here in the UK were immediately able to see that there was something on those blank sheets of paper in China — namely, an absence-of-words which was a visible challenge to the authority of the Chinese Government — until recently, on entering our churches most people here in the UK would have been able to see immediately that there was something on our empty communion or common tables, namely, the absence-of-a-cross which was a visible challenge to the authority of Christian orthodoxy.
But, as the recent UK census tells us, fewer and fewer people know anything about the Christian tradition at all and what kinds of things they might expect to find in a church. This means, in turn, that more and more of those who come into our churches for the first time simply cannot see the absence-of-the-cross and, thanks to that, neither can they see in an immediate and intuitive way through this absence-as-presence, our community’s continuing challenge to Christian orthodoxy.
What this suggests to me is that here in UK, when even our most long-lasting Christian absences-as-presences are close to being entirely cleared away, our decks may now be as empty as they are ever going to be.
If this is the case, and I fully realise it may not, then we are at a crucial, make or break moment in our history because, as Earl Morse Wilbur realised, our religious tradition’s radical reforms were never intended to be ends in themselves but were always designed to clear the decks for what he called “the great action to follow.” Inevitably, if our decks are as clear as they are even going to be, we are forced to confront head-on the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, namely, what is this “great action” to follow?
Now, if you read Wilbur’s essay upon which I have been drawing in this piece, you will find that he concluded it by framing this “great action” exclusively in liberal Christian terms. All of a sudden it becomes clear that in 1920, for all kinds of understandable reasons, Wilbur was simply not able to see that there remained a great deal of deck-clearing still to be done and this caused him, momentarily, to lose sight of what I still think is his greatest insight into the basic meaning and lessons of Unitarian history. What that meaning is he expresses at the very beginning of his essay:
“Let me at once say, then, that the keyword to our whole history, as I interpret it, is the word complete spiritual freedom. It is toward this that from the beginning until now our leaders have consciously or unconsciously struggled; and it is this that I take it we of to-day most earnestly wish to preserve unimpaired, and to hand on confirmed to those that shall come after us.”
Wilbur was unable to see that, as beautiful as it was, liberal Christianity was only a way station at which we stopped for a while on our long journey towards complete spiritual freedom. Seeing this helps me, and I hope helps you, better to understand that the great action to follow has for us always been our ongoing attempts to create a genuinely liberal, free religion, the only kind of religion that could ever guarantee something we can meaningfully call complete spiritual freedom. Indeed, I like to think that the Cambridge Unitarian Church’s Service of Mindful Meditation is our own, most recent, and perhaps most radical, attempt to do just this. But in claiming this I realise I could easily be as mistaken as was Wilbur . . .
Anyway, to conclude, if Wilbur’s basic insight in to the meaning and lessons of Unitarian history is right — and I think it is — then we find that our own church’s world-facing placards never need to be blank because upon them we can always confidently write three powerful words:
Complete spiritual freedom
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