The therapeutic journey towards becoming free-spirits

Taken on Jesus Green, Cambridge, August 2022

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation.

(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)

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As a community now centring itself around the practice of a creative, inquiring, free, and liberative religion or spirituality — jiyū shūkyō, (自由宗教) to give it its Japanese name — it’s important to understand the process many people undergo to become free-spirits, and then, perhaps, advocates or practitioners of jiyū shūkyō.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) suggested that such free-spirits are made by following a therapeutic journey consisting of four phases. And I think that becoming aware of the outlines of this journey can both help us better to understand how we make, or have made, this journey ourselves, and also help to guide others as they begin to travel their own transformational, therapeutic journeys. (I wrote at length about this for a public lecture at the Sea of Faith Conference back in 2016 — and you can read that HERE).

Over my 24 years as your minister, I’ve seen that most people come to this church because they are beginning to realize, or have realized, that their former faith, whether religious or atheistic, no longer resonates with them, and they cannot any longer hold it with a clean heart. This loss of what Nietzsche calls “hearth health,” a belief system we inherited in childhood from family or early education, is what marks the end of the first phase of the journey. 

It is at this point that a person enters the second phase: the “sickness of nihilism.” This phase is felt as a sickness, one I might compare it to a kind of sea-sickness, because it is a time when everything that once seemed solid and comforting has melted away, and there is no longer a secure structure or objective order or horizon in the world. But this difficult phase is necessary to move through because it helps us properly to free ourselves from our hearth health and so be ready to move into the third phase: convalescence.

Convalescence, as Nietzsche described it, is a healing phase with alternating cool and warm periods. In the cool periods, we feel a certain detachment from the world, observing it at a chilly height as if from a great distance, much like a scientist will coolly analyse facts, or a certain kind of literary character can view the world with tender contempt. Everything seems flat, small and insignificant. But this perspective, despite being somewhat detached and chilly, is one in which we are beginning to find a way to re-engage with the world beyond the sickness of nihilism. 

In the warm phases, we descend from the chilly heights and return to the earth reconnecting, if only now and then, with life’s warmth and beauty.

However, just as recovery from a physical illness has good and bad days, so too does recovery from nihilism, it has its cool and warm days. It’s a slow process, and we must not be tempted to try to rush through this third phase too quickly. Nietzsche speaks about this movement from cold to warm and back again in the following, to me rather beautiful, way: 

“What happiness even in the weariness, the old sickness, the relapses of the convalescent! How he loves to sit sadly still, to spin out patience, to lie in the sun! Who understands as he does the happiness that comes in winter, the spots of sunlight on the wall! They are the most grateful animals in the world, also the most modest, these convalescents and lizards again half turned towards life.”

It is in this convalescent phase that we begin to understand we don’t need another supernatural world to give life meaning; instead, we begin to learn to find the meaning and worth of living in life — what the Japanese call “ikigai” — in the “close and closest things”, in the small, but profound, everyday joys of life.

Eventually, as we alternate between cold and warm, warm and cold, we begin to intuit the possibility of living more and more in what Nietzsche calls “the great health,” the fourth and final phase of the therapeutic journey. In this state, a person lives fully and freely, embracing life’s warmth, and without the need for the comfort of another, supernatural world. As Gordon Bearn explains in his book Waking to Wonder (Gordon Bearn: “Waking to Wonder”, SUNY Press, New York 1997), the great health allows us to live attuned to the present moment and what is near. And for those of you who read/listened to last week’s thought for the day, this is the place where I think we can begin to live by the newer testament, the gospel of the present moment, spoken of so beautifully by Henry David Thoreau. Nietzsche choses to expresses this idea with a quote from another of the great Transcendentalist philosophers, and one time Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson. And this quote Nietzsche placed on the title page of the first edition of his The Gay Science: “To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.”

So, to sum up four phases of becoming a free-spirit, they are:

1. Hearth health,
2. The sickness of nihilism,
3. The convalescent phase, alternating between cold and warm periods,
4. The great health.

However, it’s essential to remember that a community such as our own cannot solely be about reaching the great health and then resting content there. Not at all. This is because our community’s purpose is, I think, primarily to provide a supportive and welcoming space where people can journey toward becoming free-spirits at their own pace. Consequently, we must be open to people in all phases of the therapeutic journey. We must find ways to welcome those still connected in some fashion to their hearth health, those suffering from nihilism, those convalescing in both cold and warm phases, and, were they ever to grace us with their presence, someone who is able truly to live daily in the great health.

This is a challenging task, but I think it is our primary calling as a community of free-spirits who are trying to promote a creative, inquiring, free and liberative religion or spirituality. Our thoughts and teachings, including those I offer, must try to address, at one time or another, each phase of this therapeutic journey. This means, at times, our messages may seem slightly contradictory, because what is helpful to someone in one phase may not be relevant to someone in another. But the aim and hope is that when they are all viewed within the context of this entire therapeutic journey, these apparent contradictions will begin to make sense.

And, finally, I want to be as transparent as I can about this: and I need to say that I consider myself still to be very much a convalescent free-spirit, having both cold and warm periods in my life. I do not live wholly in the great health myself. But for all that, in the warm moments of my convalescence, I do find an ever deeper faith that it is possible that every person can be helped to undertake to the journey towards becoming free-spirits, and so advocates or practitioners of jiyū shūkyō, a creative, inquiring, free, and liberative religion or spirituality.