The Hearth and the Fire: Finding a Supportive Holding, Structure & Truth in Free-Religion

The Cambridge Unitarian Church before the Sunday gathering of Mindful Meditation, Music and Conversation

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

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

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In a recent New Statesman article, “A new Christianity is spreading across Britain,” Jide Ehizele, a Christian thinker exploring identity and faith, offers an observation that demands our careful attention.

In his community work in southeast London, Ehizele encounters many people trying to work out how faith might speak into the ordinary pressures of life: relationships, friendships, and work. Interestingly, he finds that they are not, for the most part, looking for affirmation. In part, this is because they seem weary of the language of “be yourself” and “live your truth.” Instead, they desire something more demanding: a framework that offers moral clarity, and which also places limits on the self. Ehizele writes:

“What has caught me off guard is precisely this. The striking feature is not that they are coming [to church], but what they are looking for: constraint, structure, and truth.”

Ehizele is suggesting that liberal culture, and liberal religion, have placed such a premium on the freedom to construct our own meaning that this freedom has now become “for many, a quiet burden.”

I am completely in agreement. I can see why people are no longer attracted to old-style liberal religion. Its once-valued openness has often morphed into a “quiet burden” because everything it offers is too open, too amorphous, too ill-structured. In a world where former certainties are dissolving, it is no wonder that those newly considering religion—especially younger people—are looking for a tradition that offers constraint, structure, and truth.

Now, before I go on, I want to be clear that, from now onwards, I am going to be swapping out Ehizele’s word “constraint” and replacing it with something like “a gentle and supportive holding.” I’m doing this because I think that’s a better way of talking about the genuine need most people are feeling; “constraint” simply strikes me as being the wrong word to use.

However, while Ehizele addresses these needs in an explicitly Christian way, our project here within the Cambridge Unitarian community is explicitly free-religious, syncretic, and pluralist. These projects are, I wish to stress, not in competition—both are working for the common good—but they are distinct, and my task is to show how free-religion can offer the right kind of supportive holding, structure, and truth that will ultimately liberate us and prove to be, not a burden—quiet or otherwise—but a genuine spiritual support.

I’ll come to truth in a moment, but to understand how a free-religion provides supportive holding and structure, we must look not only at our Principles of Living, but also at our liturgy and meditation. From the Greek leitourgia, liturgy means “the work of the people,” and our liturgy and meditation are not a performance we watch; they are our collective work—the deliberate act of creating a space where the “quiet burden” of individual meaning-making is shared by the free-religious gathering.

Our liturgy and meditation are deliberately universalist in their intent and flavour. This is not a lack of conviction or a sterile neutrality, but a necessity: our words and our meditations must serve as a vessel suitable for a wide variety of people who come here from a variety of particular faiths. Our liturgy and meditation must hold open a common space that can support us all.

And, in our liturgy and meditation, we hold back from using our own personal, particular religious languages so the collective work remains as accessible as possible. This is the discipline of the free-religious gathering: holding open a universalist space so that as many people as possible can enter into the “work” with a clean heart and full, or at least full-enough, belief.

Now, this brings us to the tension between the universal and the particular. While our liturgy and meditation remain universalist, we do not exclude the language of particular religions—to do so would not be “free.” However, our free-religious project would fall apart were the language of one tradition ever allowed to dominate the shared work. Instead, our liturgy and meditation holds open a space in which members can safely share their personal expressions of faith in a way can benefit all—most notably this is done in the slot which we call our “Thought for the Day”, of which this piece is but one example.

In this gently, but firmly held space, we consciously encourage expressions of the diverse particular, personal faiths of our members—currently this includes those from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Humanist and Religious Naturalist backgrounds. We want to hear how different traditions share common, free-religious themes.

The languages of particular, personal faiths are needful and powerful, but we also know they can be divisive and are potentially very dangerous. They are, in this respect, like fire. Fire provides necessary warmth and light, but it is something that must be held within appropriate bounds. Imagine, then, if you will, our shared liturgy and meditation as a hearth, a stable and clearly defined structure in our midst that provides the fire with its appropriate “holding place.”

The “fire” here is, of course, the particular faith or philosophical conviction an individual brings to this free-religious gathering. Within the hearth, their fire is a blessing; it can warm and light the entire room without burning our house down. However, if the fire of one person’s particular personal faith were ever to leap out and consume the entirety of our liturgy and meditation, the space would no longer be safe for those carrying a different flame, having a different passion. By maintaining a universalist liturgy and meditation, we offer people the liberating discipline of the hearth, allowing each person to tend and share in turn their own fire and light without the danger of it burning those who have gathered around the hearth to be warmed and enlightened by the fire they find.

Finally, what kind of truth can a pluralist, free-religious gathering offer? I find the insights of the psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist incredibly helpful here. He reminds us that the word “truth” has a practical, vocational history. A carpenter says a surface is “true” when it fits, aligns, and is in right relationship with its surroundings. Just as with wood, so too with us: truth is for us about being in right relationship with each other and the world; it’s about how we fit together with others in the world.

In older English, we find this understanding of truth expressed in the term “plighting one’s troth.” “Truth” and “troth” share an origin of fidelity and commitment to one another, and so McGilchrist suggests the proper attitude for religion is not a list of truth-propositions—such as those found in complex creeds—but a truth-disposition. This is an understanding of truth as a process: never-ending, holistic, and profoundly relational. In our free-religious context, the “truth” we offer is exactly this: a truth-disposition towards one another and the world, a process of trying to fit together well with each other despite our differences in perspectives and belief. In short, we are a gathering that says, and shows that: “Yes, we are free to explore our own path, but at the same time, we are not free to ignore the path of our neighbours; what we are seeking is a good fit with them.”

This is the kind of supportive holding and fitting together—what Ehizele identified as “constraint”—that we try to offer here. It is a holding and fitting together that liberates us from the burden of always being our own, sole moral authority and maker of meaning. By plighting our troth to each other in the gentle process-discipline of a pluralistic, free-religious gathering, we find that freedom is no longer a burden to be carried alone. Instead, it becomes a precious gift that we can share within the sturdy, welcoming holding embrace of our common hearth, that is to say our liturgy and meditation; and of course, our Principles of Living.

In this way, I think we offer many people what they are seeking today. But we do this, not by returning to the “old religions” but by building a new kind of structure—a gentle and supportive free-religious gathering—where the fire of our own individual, particular faiths can burn brightly, safely, and for the common good, all with the intent of returning-us-to-one.