A Wider Fellowship — free-religion without borders of place or time . . . (and an Addendum on the importance of meditation)

George Williams and me working in Budapest on Imaoka Shin’ichirō (今岡信一良) (1881-1988)’s essays

A short talk offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation to let people know what I’ve been up to during the first half of my sabbatical.

—o0o—

Perhaps the most important thing about the first half of my sabbatical this year has been the chance to experience, first-hand, that the free-religious ministry we share here in the Cambridge Unitarian Church is part of a vibrant, global, dynamic, creative, inquiring, free, and liberative spiritual tradition.

As a minister of a small local congregation — itself part of a tiny and, alas, often demoralised denomination, facing the same sharp numerical decline as others in the UK’s secular context — I’m acutely aware how easy it is to feel that our experiment in free-religious community is eccentric and irrelevant, even, perhaps, something weird and alien spun out of my own, or own head. But the first half of my four-month sabbatical — April and May, with the second half to follow in August and September — has shown me how wrong that is. This change in perspective has come through three key experiences.

The first was a ten-day visit to Budapest to meet with George M. Williams, a retired US professor of Asian Religions, now President of the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF) and Director of their new Free Religion Institute. I went in order to work with him on refining my English translations of essays by the important twentieth-century Japanese Yuniterian and advocate of free religion, Imaoka Shin’ichirō (1881-1988), that I’ve been working on for the last two-and-a-half years. George knew Imaoka-sensei personally, so this was a precious opportunity to explore some of the finer details and nuances of his life and thought.

But Imaoka-sensei was not simply a major figure in Japanese liberal and free religion between the mid-1920s until his death, aged 106, in 1988, he was also a major figure in the IARF from 1948 onwards. But, alas, since the vast majority of his work remained untranslated into English, it has increasingly been in danger of being forgotten. Since English, for better or worse, remains the lingua franca of the IARF, George and I have both recognised that someone needed to take on this work. To my complete surprise, that person turned out to be me — this was possible because my existing knowledge of English texts on Japanese religion and philosophy could now be combined with the remarkable advances in online lexigraphical aids and powerful AI translation tools.

At first, I took on the task because of my personal interest in Japanese liberal thought. But as my translations began to circulate, I have been thrilled to see them begin to resonate, not only with us here in Cambridge, but also within wider liberal and free-religious circles around the world. This has led to several invitations to speak, and teach about Imaoka-sensei’s ideas for the Free Religion Institute (the next session is on 11 June), the UK Hindu-Unitarian Connections Group; the Annual Meetings of the GA of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches; the North American Unitarian Association, and also to participate in a couple of the IARF’s Japan Chapter’s gatherings to explore free religion within the context of Buddhism and Shinto.

Quite unexpectedly, these translations have also helped spark a modest revival of interest in Imaoka-sensei’s ideas in Japan itself. Indeed, the whole project has come to feel to me a little like a free-religious version of what happened in 1932 when the British gardener Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram reintroduced rare cherry varieties to Japan — most famously the Great White Cherry (Taihaku), believed extinct in Japan, using cuttings from a tree in his own garden. In my view, Imaoka-sensei’s work is as beautiful and inspiring as cherry blossom, and in all cases, I’m extremely happy to have been able to play a minor role in helping to reintroduce this nearly extinct free-religious cherry tree to our Japanese free-religious brothers and sisters (jiyū shūkyōjin).

I feel certain that Imaoka-sensei’s work is connecting with people in the way it is because, like all great liberal and free-religious ideas, his writings — especially his Principles of Living and his reflections on free religion (jiyū shūkyō) and free-religious community (Kiitsu Kyōkai) — speak across time, culture, and ethnicity. Translating his work into English and then teaching it to others, has revealed it to be a major contribution to the global heritage of Unitarian, liberal, and free religion. Imaoka-sensei is undoubtedly one of our tradition’s finest free-religious exemplars.

The second experience reinforcing my sense of connection to a global free-religious tradition relates to my long-standing interest in the Religious Society of Czech Unitarians (RSCU) and their founding figure, Norbert Fabián Čapek (1870–1942), who was another great, free-religious exemplar. Indeed, some of you may remember that in 2006 I presented a paper at an international conference here in Cambridge on “The Religious Roots of Contemporary European Identity” which was later published as “The Religious Society of Czech Unitarians (RSCU) and the Construction of Czech National Identity” in a volume edited by Lucia Faltin and Melanie Wright (Continuum, 2007).

Now, as with Imaoka-sensei, almost none of Čapek’s writings have ever been translated into English. So when I was preparing my talk, I relied heavily on secondary English sources and conversations with Czech speakers in order properly to understand Čapek’s liberal, free-religious, Unitarian thinking. The experience left me with a deep longing that someone would eventually translate his most important book, “To the Sunny Shore: A Guide to Living Joyfully” (K slunnému břehu: Průvodce do radostného života). But when I checked again late last year, alas, it still hadn’t happened.

However, emboldened by my experience of translating Imaoka-sensei’s work using AI-assisted tools alongside my pre-existing knowledge of Japanese religion and philosophy, I decided there was no choice but to begin the work myself. I should say that I undertook this, not simply because of personal interest, but because Čapek’s book — primarily about the conscious creation of mood — attempted to provide “an explanation of the principles of human life from a psychological point of view, practical directions for how to deal with daily problems, and how to improve readers’ lives in general, particularly from a religious perspective.” As most of you will know, by 1939, when the revised third edition of Čapek’s book was published, Hitler and the Nazis had already begun to annexe Czechoslovakia, and consequently, the book was consciously offered to people who were facing the immanent (if not, by then, actual) threat of fascism. As I sat in internal and external gloom on the 6th November, the day after Trump was elected, I strongly felt that Čapek’s book might say something helpful to me, and others, about how to develop a creative and liberative free-religious response to the new threat of fascism in our own times. And so I began to translate.

As with the Japanese project, I knew I’d eventually need help from native speakers, and, at the beginning of this year, after completing a first draft of the book, I began to reach out to some of my friends with Czech contacts. I’m delighted to say that, last month, after a couple of valuable meetings, the RSCU and the IARF agreed to partner together to enable Kristýna Ledererová Kolajová, the chair of the RSCU, and their translator, Ruth Jochanan Weiniger, to hone my first draft into final shape. We hope to publish it by the end of the year.

In passing today, but of vital importance to us here, both Imaoka-sensei and Čapek, and their respective communities, thought liberal, free-religion need to place the highest value on incorporating forms of meditation into its gatherings. They both realised that without such a living practice, liberal, free-religion would remain only half-formed. (See the addendum below).

And the third experience that helped renew my sense of global spiritual connection was the publication of my piece called, “A Secular Spiritual Pilgrimage around the Res publica” (read here) in the “AI and Society Journal”.

At the end of last year, I was invited to take part in a dialogue on ethics and the Res publica — the “public good” — at a University of Cambridge conference on Artificial Intelligence and Society. I was invited under the AI banner because of my use of new AI tools in my translation work, and under the “Society” heading because of a remarkable 1934 educational project led by Imaoka-sensei during his time as Principal of Seisoku Academy in Tokyo.

In dialogue with Dr Caterina Berbenni-Rehm about ideas concerning the Res publica developed by her brother, the Italian Franscican Capucin monk, Father Gianfranco Berbenni (1950-2024), I introduced the audience to the secular-spiritual pilgrimage Imaoka-sensei designed for his students, in which they not only visited and observed the working of key religious and secular institutions across the city, but also to meet and honour the actual people who maintained them — from government ministers, priests, and professors, to workers in factories, sewage plants, and crematoria. He wanted his students to see all these individuals as holy — all acting as something like secular Bodhisattvas of Compassion serving the Res publica. He had come to feel that a modern democratic society needs such a secular spiritual practice if its citizens are to be truly educated and committed to the public good. It’s important to add that this project was one of the ways Imaoka-sensei kept alive the idea of a liberal, free-religion during the dark days of Emperor Facism of the 1930s an early 1940s.  

Not surprisingly, the concerns of Imaoka-sensei’s project overlapped powerfully with the Fransciscan ideas of Father Berbenni. Anyway, after my session, three excited delegates — with no personal connection to liberal religion — approached me to say they were going to try something similar in Turkey, Portland (Oregan), and York (UK). To my surprise and delight, I was then also asked to write up my talk as a short paper, which has just been published. 

To me, all of the above helps confirm two very important things that have contemporary relevance. The first is that free-religion has a meaning and value not only within religious circles, but also beyond them. It speaks powerfully into secular spaces as well. The second is that free-religion has, and I think still does, have an important role to play in the resistance to right-wing, nationalist, and enthnonationalist religious and political projects — projects which, alas, are on the rise cross the globe as they were during the 1930s and 40s.  

So — in short — that’s what I’ve been doing for the past two months. And in August and September, I’ll continue to build on this work.

But let me begin to draw to a close by making this point: none of what I’ve shared here today would have been possible without your wonderful support and encouragement. This means that what I have been talking about is not simply my work — it is our work. As a local community, we have genuinely become a torch-bearer of a vibrant, global, creative, liberative, free-religious tradition, and you, and I, can take great comfort and encouragement from the fact that all sorts of people are beginning to take a helpful light from the work we are doing together here. So, thank you to you all. 

And, lastly, but not leastly, I hope, too, that you will now be encourged to reach out, alongside me, and gratefully receive helpful lights from our free-religious brothers and sisters in Japan and the Czech Republic, and elsewhere in the world. They have much to teach us. 

—o0o— 

ADDENDUM on the importance of meditation

“Meditation is the Source of Vitality” by Imaoka Shin’ichirō
From: “Selected Writings on Free Religion and Other Subjects”

A new year is here, and having aged one more year, I am now 105 years old. I feel that I would not mind dying any time. To speak of my health, I suffer from failing sight, hearing and, especially, the ability to walk. Several years ago I underwent a prostate operation and because of my age I am not completely cured. So I go to the hospital once a week.

These days I do not exercise or walk very much and I can say that my only good health regimen is that every day without fail since my youth I practise the meditation that I learned from Okada Torajiro-sensei (The Okada Method of Meditation). This is Zen meditation simplified and modernized. One sits erect, concentrating one’s strength in the lower belly and breathing deeply. It is only sitting and not thinking about anything. However, I do not try to prohibit all ideas and thoughts.

I try to do this every day for at least one hour. I can do this anytime, anywhere. When I go to the hospital, I wait my turn for thirty minutes or even an hour, and I do this meditation for that length of time. At first when I do it for 10 or 20 minutes, my arms and legs which had become cold as ice in no time warm up. Blood circulation improves.

However, meditation for me is not just a health practice. You can call it the source of the autonomous creative vitality for both my body and my spirit. Occasionally I can’t sleep, but I stay as I am and do the breathing in the correct manner, and I feel all right even if I don’t sleep for some time. When I meditate I feel that the heavens and earth are one with the universe.

In my house there is no Buddhist or Shinto altar. Also I do not read the Bible and pray as a daily routine the way I did as a Christian. However, I cannot stop doing meditation. I can say that meditation is the only religious life that I have. 

—o0o— 

On Meditation (Meditace), a piece found on the website of the Religious Society of Czech Unitarians
https://unitaria.cz/prameny/meditace.html

Meditation can be understood in various ways, and many definitions are available. Concentration, prayer, contemplation, verbal or silent meditation, meditation with music, while walking or engaged in other activity — all these are variations of meditation. From its beginnings, Czech Unitarianism has used the term “meditation” as a substitute for prayer, and it is likely that this originally served to distinguish it specifically from Christian forms of prayer. A fitting description of the Unitarian style of meditation is offered by F. O. Lexa, former minister of the Plzeň congregation:

“Meditation, in our understanding of the word, consists of a careful choice of words, which, in their phrasing, serve the purpose of initiating contact between the human soul and the Soul of the Whole. It is to be a ‘cry of the soul’ to the Unknown, and yet existent Spirit, which permeates all space, all creation, every root, blossom, and fruit of life. Even though meditation is directed toward the spiritual essence of the Universe, it should not awaken in us a sense of rejection of the world or of our life within it, but should rather lift us inwardly above all outward things, towards the dominant reality of the spiritual life, which we come to know through inward immersion, as divinity itself within us.”

When this description of Unitarian meditation is compared with a characterisation of prayer, these two spiritual techniques can easily appear to merge. But Unitarian meditation functions differently from Christian prayer — above all in its content, which theologically addresses an impersonal, higher creative principle of the world and universe, as opposed to the anthropomorphically conceived God of Christian prayer. The overall orientation of Unitarian meditation also differs: it is not about supplication, asking God to change something in our life or in the world around us. Rather, it can be either an affirmation of ideals we would like to realise, or a declaration of the kind of person we wish to become. Nonetheless, there is a shared foundation — and also shared is the idea that one should learn to use prayer (or meditation) practically, and learn to formulate it for oneself so that it may truly serve as a spiritually therapeutic tool. The point is not debate about technique, or reading and discussing texts. What truly matters is the ability to use the practice — to be able, spontaneously, to offer one’s own prayer, to express what lies on one’s heart, what burdens or delights us.