The creative, free spiritual tradition—a remarkable kind of existent
One of the things that is very hard for many people properly to understand about the creative, free-spiritual tradition in which a church like the Cambridge Unitarian Church stands, is its willingness, both for itself and its members, continually to claim the freedom to be tomorrow what it, or they, are not today. This radical openness to change inevitably cuts against most people’s idea of religion as expressing something stable and long-lasting, even eternal, and it can easily appear as if there is nothing at all that is stable and long-lasting about the creative, free-spiritual tradition. But contrary to first appearances there is something, and what that is is best understood with the help of an ancient insight expressed by the pre-Socratic, Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, some 2,500 years ago.
It was Heraclitus who insisted “everything flows” (panta rhei), that all things are in “flux” and, therefore, things are always-already “becoming”. This idea was summed up most famously in a saying of Heraclitus’ quoted by Plutarch:
“It is not possible to step twice into the same river” (B91[a]).
However, some scholars think the more authentic form of the saying has been preserved by Cleanthes which reads:
“On those stepping into rivers staying the same, other and other waters flow” (B12).
Although we are unable to know for sure which saying is more authentic I am willing to say it seems to me that, “On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow”, is the better of the two because it helps us see more clearly that any river can only continue to exist over time as the same river it has always has been, in so far as it consists of changing waters.
As Daniel W. Graham says [in the “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy” article on Heraclitus], “if the waters should cease to flow it would not be a river, but a lake or a dry streambed.” In turn, this means “There is a sense, then, in which a river is a remarkable kind of existent, one that remains what it is by changing what it contains.” With this in mind, Graham continues,
“[O]ne kind of long-lasting material reality exists by virtue of constant turnover in its constituent matter. Here constancy and change are not opposed but inextricably connected. A human body could be understood in precisely the same way, as living and continuing by virtue of constant metabolism”.
And, as Graham finally observes, on this reading,
“Heraclitus believes in flux, but not as destructive of constancy; rather it is, paradoxically, a necessary condition of constancy, at least in some cases (and arguably in all).”
As a group of people committed to a creative, free-spirituality, it’s important properly to understand, celebrate, and communicate to others the fact that our willingness to embrace change in ourselves and our community are not examples of indecision and woolly and sloppy thinking, as our detractors often claim, but instead, they are strong evidence that, like a river, we are in fact a remarkable kind of long-lasting religious existent, that, like a river, remains what it is by changing what it contains.
This freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today is, I think, one of the central, spiritual gifts we can offer our own world which, in so many ways, is in crisis as it struggles to find ways to change, politically, financially, religiously and environmentally. As the Italian philosopher, journalist and politician, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), famously put it in the 1930s, another time of great change:
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (Prison Notebooks, p. 276).
Well, our world is in crisis again and morbid symptoms are everywhere apparent. But it is my genuine conviction that the waters of our creative, free-spiritual river can play a modest role, both in easing the morbid symptoms around us, and helping to bring about the birth of a new way of being in the world.
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