Free-Religion—Millpond Practice, Whitewater Living

White water rafting on the Arkansas River (Photo Redmarkviolinist) 

 

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)

—o0o—

This week I want to consider with you a threshold concept that had a profound impact on me when I first came across it in 2008. In case you don’t know the term, a threshold concept is any transformative idea within a discipline that, once understood, fundamentally and irreversibly shifts a learner’s perspective, allowing them to unlock new—previously inaccessible—ways of thinking and acting in the world.

The threshold concept I want to explore today is the “static paddle”. Its relevance to this local, free-religious gathering will, I hope, become clear in a moment.

I was introduced to it by a whitewater rafter and canoeist, Richard Procter, while I was contributing to a project on threshold concepts run by CARET (Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies) here in Cambridge.

Richard told me how his students often felt disappointed when they discovered that, having signed up to learn whitewater rafting or canoeing, their first session involved going out on water that was as still as a millpond. Why start there? Well, it was because he needed them to grasp one absolutely key idea in a safe environment before taking them out onto whitewater for the first time.

When a beginner makes a forward stroke, they put the paddle in the water ahead of them, and it feels as though they are pulling the paddle back towards themselves. But what is really happening is that the paddler is pulling themselves—and the boat—past the paddle blade, which is held (more or less) fixed against the water.

Richard then placed this concept in the context of a whitewater rapid. In that environment, unlike on a millpond, everything looks unstable: nothing seems fixed; nothing seems trustworthy. A beginner can feel utterly out of control, as though what they do makes no real difference. But one thing is stable (relatively speaking): namely, the planted “static” paddle. A skilled paddler, who has properly understood this idea, can use that one comparatively steady, static point to help steer through dangerous water. This doesn’t mean they will come through entirely unscathed; but, amidst the chaos, they discover they do have a real—if limited—measure of control.

So now let’s turn to us. The disciplined practice we are engaged in is not whitewater rafting, but liberal, free-religion. The millpond is akin to our Sunday morning service of mindful meditation, music, and conversation, and also our weekly Kiitsu Kyōkai meetings; our threshold concept—the static paddle—is formed by Imaoka Shin’ichirō’s Principles of Living and Norbert Fabián Čapek’s Ten Advices; and the whitewater rapids are the current social, political, and religious turmoils that are beginning to crash about us wherever we turn.

We have little choice, in our daily lives, but to venture out now and then into those rapids, into that whitewater. It’s an environment where, once upon a time, most of the things we took for granted—the church in general, Parliament, the Monarchy, banks, local government, NATO, social democracy, and the international rules-based order more generally—they all seemed to flow together, rather like the calm, gently moving waters of the River Cam as it passes through the city to the millpond by Silver Street bridge. In truth, the waters we moved upon were never as smooth and millpond-like as they seemed, but today I’ll let that point pass. However, one thing is clear: our once apparently smoothly flowing river is now getting very turbulent, and it suggests to many of us that dangerous whitewater rapids lie ahead.

Some of us, including me, have reached the point where we strongly feel that, if we are to have a chance of negotiating these rapids—and of surviving the journey through them—we will need to develop whitewater skills grounded in the concept of the static paddle.

And, as I have said, for us, in this local, liberal, free-religious gathering, the static paddle is formed by Imaoka-sensei’s Principles of Living and Čapek’s Ten Advices, and what we are doing on a Sunday morning is learning how that static paddle works, just as Richard Procter’s students learnt it on a millpond. By honing our basic free-religious skills together each week, in a safe and supportive environment, we are doing the necessary work of ensuring that our free-religion is not something merely abstract, but something deeply embedded in our whole way of being. We need to do this because, as we go out into an increasingly turbulent world, our Sunday morning practice will help us become better and better able to understand how our free-religious static paddle can genuinely help us negotiate the whitewater around us.

Now, my job as a free-religious minister is less to “teach” you this from the perspective of an expert than it is to hold open a safe space—a temporary millpond, if you like—in which we can all return, week by week, to explore and share our experiences of using this paddle in our daily lives. Indeed, to reinforce that sharing of experience, as you now know, the last Sunday of the month is a chance for members of the congregation to share a thought for the day about what they’re learning, and what they’re finding helpful.

I am aware that my strong encouragement actively to adopt Imaoka-sensei’s Principles of Living and Čapek’s Ten Advices has sometimes been heard as a way to smuggle a “creed” into our gathering. But that is absolutely not the case. Taken together, they do not form a fixed creed telling you what to believe; instead, together, they form a practical tool—a kind of static paddle—which you can plant confidently into the surrounding whitewater, and use to help you improvise your own free-religious journey through the maelstrom. They offer you a liberative, creative free-religious tool, not a restrictive creed.

Sometimes you’ll find yourself using this paddle alone, like a canoeist; sometimes you’ll be using it with others in a gathering such as our own, like a crew on a raft. But in all cases, the threshold concept—the tool—you’ll be using is this static paddle.

In the end, I’m doing this because I remain certain that, whilst no fixed creed will ever save us, a good, strong, liberal, free-religious static paddle—properly and freely deployed—just might.