Conversation in free-religion—how to claim the freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today
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| An open place for free-religious conversation – the Cambridge Unitarian Church awaiting the Sunday morning gathering of mindful mediation, music and conversation |
(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)
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It was on Sunday 11th January 2009 (read the original post here) that I first introduced into our morning gathering the ‘time of conversation’ that follows the thought for the day (then still called an address). Also, on the order of service, I started to include a quote from the journals of the American transcendentalist philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott:
‘Conversation as the natural organ communicating, mind with mind, . . . is the method of human culture and by it we come nearer to those whom we shall address than by any other means.’
Today, seventeen years later, I want to explore certain aspects and consequences of that major change in the way we meet together.
Well, by 2009, I had realised that the quintessential quality of our four-and-a-half-century-old Unitarian tradition was never found in a closed system of propositions, but only through an historically extended way of thinking and acting. This realisation was reinforced in 2013 when I read a 1920 essay by the great Unitarian historian Earl Morse Wilbur called The Meaning and Lessons of Unitarian History. He noted that if our history was purely about winning the world to a specific doctrine, the movement was finished. Instead, he saw doctrine as merely a by-product of a larger quest for ‘complete spiritual freedom’. Writing in 1920, Wilbur concluded that we had barely begun clearing the decks of dogma for the ‘great action to follow’.
As a consequence of this, in my own writing, I have come to feel that central to who we are as a religious community is our willingness to claim ‘the freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today’, which became the title of the lecture I gave at the Sea of Faith conference in 2016.
But this kind of freedom is only accessible – and, therefore, claimable – through a community-wide conversation truly open to a multitude of voices that can continually bring with them new perspectives, insights, experiences and knowledge.
Importantly, however, it cannot simply be the kind of specialist, technical conversation required in a scientific or theological community. While our congregation has always included scientists and theologians, we also need voices talking about philosophy, poetry, art and history, as well as more everyday things like holidays, pets, gardening, good food and wine. In this highly diverse context, our kind of conversation, its acceptable terminology and its aims are inevitably going to be significantly different from those practised in a strictly scientific or theological setting.
So, how to describe the kind of conversation that has developed among us over the last seventeen years?
Well, the best general description I have ever come across is the one given in Michael Oakeshott’s 1959 essay, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind. I highly recommend reading the whole essay, but here is the spirit of what he says there, rewritten in my own voice for our free-religious gathering:
In our conversations, we are not engaged in a debate or a rigid inquiry. We aren’t trying to hammer out a final ‘truth’, prove a proposition, or march towards a settled conclusion. Because we don’t force everyone to speak in the exact same idiom, we can differ profoundly without ever actually disagreeing.
Naturally, there may be moments of robust argument, but cold reasoning is not sovereign. Instead, our so-called ‘facts’ are gently dissolved back into the realm of open possibility from which they came. Our rigid ‘certainties’ become combustible – not by being attacked with doubt, but by being kindled by ideas of another order.
Thoughts of different species take wing and play around one another. Nobody demands to know where these ideas came from, or worries about what will become of them. There is no ultimate arbiter at the head of the table, and no doorkeeper checking our intellectual credentials. Every entrant is taken at face value.
Crucially, the voices form no hierarchy. We aren't trying to extract utilitarian profit from the exchange; rather, it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. Like a game of chance, its significance lies not in winning or losing, but in the very act of wagering – i.e. in finding the courage to risk trying out one’s own authentic voice in the shared space. Ultimately, this exchange relies on a diversity of voices.
And the place where these voices meet, this free-religious church, is a rare, beautiful and holy space where different universes of discourse can meet and acknowledge each other, without demanding they be assimilated into a single, uniform worldview. In all this, we see the essence of free-religion in which we are returning to one within diversity (kiitsu) and the endless pursuit of universal truth.
So, has this experiment, this ideal of open, unrehearsed, creative conversation, actually survived contact with real life? I obviously think so, but you shouldn’t just take my word for it. As some of you already know, a few years ago, the Welsh poet and writer Grahame Davies came to one of our Sunday gatherings and he wrote about the experience in his 2021 guidebook, Real Cambridge:
Davies came expecting to find a conventional Nonconformist type of Unitarian service, but he stumbled into something far more unusual and radical. By simply passing around the microphone, we showed that Amos Bronson Alcott was right: conversation really is the very best way to understand and draw nearer to one another. True enough, our time together might not leave us with a unified set of final beliefs and unshakable certainties about God, the divine and the sacred. But for us, I think that is just as well. Why? Well, because we are the kind of religious seekers who resonate strongly with the words of the Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing:
‘If God were to appear now, holding all truth in his right hand and the passionate quest for truth in his left, and asked me which I would choose, I would humbly cling to God’s left hand and answer: “Please give me the seeking spirit”’ (Paraphrased by Imaoka Shin’ichirō from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Anti-Goetze: Eine Duplik (1778)).
The practice of open conversation, along with some kind of meditative practice, are the central disciplines of people with a seeking spirit. These free-religious disciplines, these practices, may not deliver the final possession of truth, but they give us, I think, something infinitely more precious — a community of seekers brave enough to claim the sacred freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today.
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