The Flight of the Phoenix: Finding Our Free-Religious Bearings in an Era of Crises

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

(A recorded version of the following piece will appear here sometime this coming week) 

—o0o—

A 1965 film utterly captivated me as a teenager, and I want to tell you its story. The Flight of the Phoenix, based on Elleston Trevor’s novel, follows Frank Towns (James Stewart), captain of a twin-engined cargo plane flying a dozen oil-industry workers across the Sahara towards Benghazi. Disastrously, a sudden sandstorm shuts down the engines, forcing them to crash-land deep in the desert.

The survivors confront a grim reality: despite a large cargo of dates, they have only enough water for a couple of weeks. Despair swiftly sets in, and when a desperate attempt by three men to walk to an oasis ends in tragedy, hope seems entirely lost.

Then an aeronautical engineer among them, Dorfmann (Hardy Krüger), proposes a seemingly crazy idea: dismantle the wreckage and build a smaller aircraft to fly themselves to safety. It is a desperate plan, yet it gives the survivors a powerful focus, channelling their remaining energy and limited resources into something both creative and positive.

Tension peaks when Towns discovers that Dorfmann actually designs model aeroplanes. Horrified that they are risking their lives on a machine designed by a man who works with ‘toys’, Towns nonetheless carries on with the plan, lacking any alternative. Having finished their makeshift, single-engined creation, they christen it The Phoenix, after the mythological bird rising from the ashes of its predecessor.

With the work finished, the crew tie themselves to the wings to start the engine. Of their seven starter cartridges, the first four fail. At last the engine catches, and—sliding down a steep sand dune to gather speed—the Phoenix takes flight. Astonishingly, they reach a nearby oasis, finding themselves almost overwhelmed by the ecstasy of survival and the joy of reconciliation.

Now, why do I tell you this story? Well, because I think it serves as a perfect parable for where the British Unitarian movement—and indeed our local community—finds itself today.

When I first wrote a version of this thought for the day in October 2020, amidst the unfolding pandemic, I noted that it would inevitably exacerbate the challenges we already faced: falling membership, shifting understandings of spirituality and religion, changing local demographics, and ageing infrastructure. Consequently, everything we had been doing as a liberal, free-religious movement for the previous century was going to be seriously affected. Six years on, our collective situation has grown even more precarious. To the pandemic’s lasting fallout we must now add disorientating concerns over artificial intelligence, the escalating climate emergency, the rapidly approaching El Niño, the devastating wars in Ukraine and Iran, and the weakening of liberal democracy—all of which will massively affect the cost of fuel, food, and transport. For Unitarian and Free Christian communities up and down the country, what once worked is either no longer working or soon won’t be. Remember, our national movement currently comprises only around 160 active chapels (about 170 congregations in total when including smaller fellowships and online communities) and 2,426 formal voting members, within a wider informal community of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 regular participants.

And it’s not just us. Only this morning on Radio 4’s Sunday programme, I heard that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Glasgow plans to halve its 80 parishes to around 40 over the next five to ten years, closing 24 church buildings—a 30 per cent drop.

Of course, I realise this sounds pretty miserable, but, as most of you know, I very much agree with something said by the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century British Idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley in his Appearance and Reality: ‘Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst’, and ‘Where all is rotten it is a man’s work to cry stinking fish.’

We have to be realistic in our assessment of the situation because only that will help us find genuinely creative and positive ways forward. That is why I began with The Flight of the Phoenix.

So, let’s now imagine the modern British Unitarian movement as a kind of aircraft—one we must candidly admit has crashed in recent years, scattering its surviving occupants and components across a remarkably inhospitable cultural and social landscape. In this situation, there are three vital lessons we can learn from the story.

The first lesson is that we can only use what is at hand. The Phoenix could only be made from materials actually scattered across the desert floor; nothing absent could be drawn upon, however much the crew desired this or that ideal part. For us, this means carefully surveying the scattered fragments of our movement’s once-vigorous form of life to see what remains genuinely serviceable. In my view, the shattering of our old aircraft has actually exposed hidden resources and undischarged energies we had largely forgotten about. Even so, we cannot rely on an ideal wish-list; we must build with what we hold in our hands today.

The second lesson is to prioritise only the essential payload. The new aircraft could carry only the most precious cargo: the crew themselves, along with their motivating stories, faith, hopes, and values. For our movement, beyond ourselves, that payload is our liberal, free-thinking tradition’s best motive powers. I argue that these centre upon the light, portable, practical guides inherited from the Japanese minister Imaoka Shin’ichirō’s Principles of Living and the Czech Unitarian minister Norbert Fabián Čapek’s Ten Advices. At their heart, these draw upon the still-practical wisdom of the human Jesus and Śākyamuni Buddha, the critical, ethical reasoning of Socrates and Confucius, and, of course, the teachings of many other great religious figures from other religious traditions. The Principles and Advices allow us to carry these inspiring figures aboard our Phoenix without the heavy doctrinal and dogmatic weight of the religions once founded in their name.

And the third lesson is to embrace a temporary pragmatism. Crucially, the Phoenix is not designed to be a shiny, futuristic, world-beating craft. It is an ad-hoc creation built for a short emergency flight to a temporary oasis where the crew can recover, regroup, and rethink—only then turning their thoughts to some grander project. In the present moment, our Phoenix likewise need only be a provisional craft. We are not tasked right now with building the final, post-crisis future of the British Unitarian movement, and recognising this should lift the weight of thinking we must immediately solve every difficulty the future may bring.

That is a job for when, and if, we make it to the oasis. Our job today is entirely pragmatic: assemble the available pieces, get the Phoenix into the air with ourselves, Imaoka-sensei’s Principles, and Čapek’s Advices on board, and set a powerful and sustainable ethical course of travel.

As to what may follow, only time and luck will tell. Yet as those survivors in the desert discovered, the very act of building the Phoenix together transformed their despair into shared purpose and creative hope. And I remain convinced that what happened to them can happen to us. 

So friends, we have a Phoenix to build, and a flight to make.