Trying to encourage the Unitarian Buridan's ass to eat a hearty and sustaining meal and, once again, come into a healthy, liberal religious fullness of being
Once upon a time, until the immediate post-WWII period, a British Unitarian minister was, in general, expected to promote and uphold a particular kind of liberal Christian, doctrinal position, namely, something called “Unitarianism,” i.e. a type of Christianity that believed God was one in some fashion (there were a variety of ways of understanding that) and that Jesus, Unitarianism’s central figure, was a human being like us, albeit a one perceived to be uniquely inspired in some fashion.
But, as the 1940s moved into the 1960s, alongside the increasing secularisation of our culture and the recognition that there existed many different kinds of religious philosophies and theologies, a certain form of bowdlerised, post-modernist thinking also began to become more and more influential. And, in response to this, many Unitarian churches and ministers began to take the view that the role of a Unitarian minister should be become more and more relativistic and non-committal, and that, therefore, they should no longer be offering-up any kind clear, substantive religious or spiritual teaching that could be said to be distinctly part of the Unitarian tradition.
I, alas, wasn’t aware of this situation when I began training for the ministry in 1996, and when, in August 2000, I became the minister at the Cambridge Unitarian Church, I was quite unprepared for the moment when the then President of congregation immediately made it clear to me — and these were his words — that my job on a Sunday was simply to provide people with as many religious or spiritual menus as possible, but that I must not, under any circumstances, go on to offer the congregation any kind of actual, distinctive, substantive, nourishing and sustaining religious or spiritual meal.
As a kind of self-defence mechanism to protect myself from this dispiriting state of affairs, I — as have many of my colleagues who have found themselves in similar situations — I consciously decided the only honest way I could proceed was by adopting something similar to the role played by a university lecturer, namely, becoming an as-neutral-and-as-dispassionate-as-possible religious studies’ teacher, whilst keeping my own religious and spiritual life, as far as was possible anyway, private. At the same time, I began to steel myself to the recognition that a Unitarian minister was, for the most part, now expected simply to act as a sort of stable lad charged with looking after a wider religious tradition that, from my perspective anyway, was increasingly resembling Buridan’s ass, namely, a creature standing confused and wholly undecided between equidistant piles of hay before eventually dying of hunger.
But, as the years have passed, and the Unitarian tradition has continued to fade away with spiritual hunger, I have more and more been forced to consider what it was that I might actually be prepared to do in an attempt to save it from expiring.
For me, the opportunity to think this through properly, and at considerable length, only came courtesy of the otherwise terrible COVID-19 pandemic. And, as we came back together in September 2021, after being closed for worship for 534 days, the result of this time of intense reflection was that I had reached the decision that the only way I could help save the Unitarian religious tradition to which I belonged, and which I still loved, was to risk radically changing my approach in order make an attempt to bounce the tradition — or at least a small part of it — out of its metastable, undecided and uncommitted, religious and spiritual Buridan’s ass-like situation by offering it, not many piles of possible religious and spiritual hay, but by offering it the one, actual, substantive and nourishing pile of spiritual hay to which I, with a clean heart and full belief (pathos), was personally was committed, and which I also thought might prove attractive enough to encourage the tradition once again to eat a hearty spiritual meal and so restore itself to good health and confident fullness of being in our increasingly illiberal and deeply challenging times.
As most of the regular readers of this blog will know, the single pile of hay I have been offering since then has been made our of a combination of the gentle, liberal religious discipline of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation, Music and Conversation, and the creative, inquiring, free and liberative spirituality I have gracefully inherited from the Japanese twentieth-century Unitarian and advocate of free-religion, Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei via his friend (and mine), George M. Williams, the current President of the International Association for Religious Freedom and retired professor of Asian religions.
But, before I finish this thought for the day, I need to point out one extremely important thing about this single pile of hay that makes it quite unlike the single pile of hay we offered to the world prior to the 1940s. The single pile of hay we offered back then — Unitarianism — was an old-school, doctrinal, belief-led thing. As I noted at the beginning, it was a type of liberal Christianity that believed God was one and that Jesus, Unitarianism’s central figure, was a human being like us, albeit a one perceived to be uniquely inspired.
But the single pile of hay on offer here in Cambridge today, is something very different indeed. “Jiyū shūkyō,” that’s the name Imaoka-sensei gave this creative, inquiring, free and liberative spirituality, jiyū shūkyō is a much broader conception of what the Unitarian tradition is, at heart, really about, namely complete spiritual freedom. It’s a way of being in the world that doesn’t, in fact cannot, collapse into a single doctrine, belief-led position or -ism, but which continually helps to open a person up, in a gently disciplined way, to a rich and profound understanding that we only become properly human in a living community that is consciously aware it has four dimensions, namely, the personal, local, national and international. And the underlying intuition in play here is that behind all four dimensions there exists in the universe a cosmic intra-dependence of all things, animate and inanimate. This is, of course, an intuition central to all iterations of the Unitarian tradition across the generations and geography.
Imaoka-sensei called the kind of community that offered this spirituality, “kiitsu kyōkai” (帰一教會), because it sought to unite (kiitsu 帰一) everyone in the common cause of achieving a better, more equitable, more beautiful, more just spiritual community (kyōkai 教會). It’s a community and a spirituality which encourages all the individuals involved with it always to be using their own complete spiritual freedom in collaboration with others in order to be, and remain free to, transform all life toward the good, the true and the beautiful. It is a personal and corporate expression of faith in the idea that, together, through a humanising ethics, we really can evolve toward becoming what Imaoka-sensei called universal or “cosmic human beings,” and that by meditating, learning and growing together, kiitsu kyōkai can be created as a unity of the religious and secular. As I hope you can see, the words we share together every week in our Sunday Morning Service of Mindful Meditation, Music and Conversation are all keyed towards making this kiitsu kyōkai come into being in ourselves, as individuals, and as members of a real, existent local community.
And, if you are puzzled or, perhaps, even irritated by my repeated use of the untranslated Japanese term kiitsu kyōkai here (and perhaps jiyū shūkyō earlier), it’s important to know that I’m doing this because we have discovered almost none of us here want to continue to use the word “church” because of its many problematic connotations and its limitation to only a Christian world-view. But there’s another reason, namely, that we simply haven’t got an English word that speaks properly of the breadth of Imaoka-sensei’s vision of liberal religion that, in addition to drawing on ideas found in liberal Buddhism, liberal Shintoism and liberal Hinduism, is also attempting to draw upon the liberal Christian meanings of the Greek word koinonia (i.e. fellowship, joint participation, partnership, the share which one has in anything, a gift jointly contributed, a collection, a contribution), and also the German word, gemeinshaft (i.e. a spontaneously arising organic social relationship characterized by strong reciprocal bonds of sentiment and kinship within a common tradition). Kiitsu kyōkai is the unique term for this vision of spiritual and religious community, so why not borrow it, just as once, many centuries ago, we borrowed the word church from the Greek kyriakon doma, meaning the “Lord’s (house)”?
So, in sum, the tasty pile of hay I’m offering up is one that I believe can truly help move the Unitarian tradition beyond “church,” and beyond any “-ism,” even Unitarianism, into a genuinely healthy way of being liberally religious and spiritually relevant to our more pluralistic, cosmopolitan and secular times.
But, in the end, I have to acknowledge that, even after deciding I, personally, have no choice but to continue my ministry by offering my beloved Unitarian Buridan’s ass the single pile of nourishing hay I’ve just spoken about, I simply cannot force it — that is to say force you — to eat from that pile; only you can decide to do that, just like Buridan’s ass of old.
But make no mistake about it, unless very soon the Unitarian Buridan’s ass starts eating some kind of hearty, spiritual meal suitable to its unique, liberal religious physiology, and which might also appeal to those many seekers out in the world with a desperate hunger to find a strong and healthy liberal spiritual path, its remaining time in the paddock of life is now very short.
So, go on, why not risk having a proper munch of the pile of hay on offer here, and let me know what you think.
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