Podcast

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

 

—o0o—

Greetings. 

So, I’ve been on a sabbatical break for the past few months but, on the first weekend of October 2025, I’ll be back at work as the minister for Cambridge Unitarians and producing a weekly podcast once again.  

During the break I’ve had the chance both to reflect upon the past 25 years of my work—a lot of it available via my blog, “Caute: Making Footprints Not Blueprints”—and also to deepen my dive into the twentieth-century liberal, free-religious thinking of Norbert Fabián Čapek from the Czech Unitarian tradition, and Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei from the Japanese Yuniterian (sic), free-religious tradition. 

This deep dive has inevitably reminded me that the central intuition of the Unitarian tradition across generations and geography is, not surprisingly, the idea of unity: that whatever “reality” is there is something about it that speaks of the “One”—despite the astonishing plural complexity of reality. 

Although historically those calling themselves Unitarians have not always understood the full implications of this, there is something about this “oneness” that depends, absolutely, on difference and movement and so on. And so there can never be found, made, or experienced, some single, identifiable thing as Unitarianism—notice the -ism. This can sound to some people something that really doesn’t make sense, but the “oneness” about which I am speaking refers to the intra-connectedness of reality, a reality that gifts us a dynamic and creative understanding of “oneness.” In other words “oneness” is something that’s always happening, it’s not something that’s already achieved—it’s a process not a thing; and, in a person, it’s a general disposition, a way of being-in-the world that’s possible to express in an unimaginably wide variety of ways and contexts, both religious and secular. 

And these words bring me directly to the new title of this podcast: “Kiitsu: Returning-to-One”. I’ve learnt this term from Imaoka-sensei who called his own, post-1948 community in Tokyo, Kiitsu Kyōkai [帰一教会 or 帰一教會]—that can be translated as Returning-to-One Gathering. But I also from the Ittōen [Grden of the One Light] community in Kyoto founded in 1904 by one of Imaoka-sensei’s greatest influences, Tenkō Nishida-san, who found kiitsu—returning-to-one, present not only in Buddhist and Shintō traditions, but also in Sermon on the Mount Christianity and various traditions within Islam (see particularly this link). 

So, kiitsu [帰一] means “returning-to-one,” and kyōkai [教会] means—sort of—“church” or “congregation.” In general—though not exclusively—in modern Japanese usage, kyōkai [教会] does indeed refer to a church, a Christian church. For these reasons, Kiitsu Kyōkai has often been translated as Unitarian (Kiitsu) Church (Kyōkai). However, a better translation is, Returning-to-One Gathering, because this gives us a sense of the active, dynamic and process-like, creative, inquiring, free and liberative religion/spirituality it aspired to teach called jiyū shūkyō. Now this matters because Imaoka-sensei’s Kiitsu Kyōkai was always more than simply a temple or church, even a Unitarian one. This is because it was also a “school” in which a person could learn about and study free-religion—jiyū shūkyō—alongside other free-religionists. In the Kiitsu Kyōkai, through the practise of Seiza Meditation (Quiet Sitting), talks, free and rational inquiry, mutual discovery, learning and conversation, Imaoka-sensei hoped to create a lay-led, cooperative community that would unite all its members (kiitsu) in the common cause of creating a more just, equitable, beautiful, and humane society (kyōkai), one that did not make a hard and fast distinction between the sacred the secular. In his manuscripts, and on their noticeboard outside the hall where they met in the Seisoku Academy (where he served as Principal from 1925 to 1973), Imaoka-sense attempted to indicate all this by using an older combination of Chinese characters for kyōkai (using 教會 rather than 教会 thus writing the name as 帰一教會). He chose to do this because, in Confucian contexts, which emphasised communal learning and moral/ethical cultivation, the older character for 會 (kai) was always used in terms that referred to gatherings concerned with the mutual exchange of ideas rather than the passing on of fixed doctrines.

But although Kiitsu Kyōkai doesn’t pass on any fixed doctrines, it is attempting to pass on something called jiyū shūkyō [自由宗教].

A perfectly acceptable translation of the Japanese term jiyū shūkyō [自由宗教] is “free-religion” (note the hyphen); and an individual practitioner of jiyū shūkyō—a “free-religionist” or “a free-religious person”—is called in Japanese, a jiyū shūkyōjin [自由宗教人]. However, whenever you hear or read the term “free-religion” (remember the hyphen) in this podcast, you should always understand it expansively to mean something like, “a dynamic and process-like, creative, inquiring, free and liberative religion/spirituality.” It was a term used by Imaoka-sensei to indicate something beyond conventional belief and religion, beyond Theism, Pantheism, Liberalism, Unitarianism, Humanism, Atheism or, indeed, any “-ism”—it was something that he thought had the power to transform a person into what he called an authentic “universal”—or, sometimes he used the world  “cosmic”—human being. 

It’s important to be aware that the kyō [教 teaching/faith] of jiyū shūkyō is the same kyō [教] of Kiitsu Kyōkai. In other words, free-religion was Kiitsu Kyōkai’s distinctive teaching/faith—one that gently bound (religio) the community together in their quest to become free, “universal” or “cosmic” human beings.
  
And lastly, I want to say that the theme of “making footprints not blueprints”—the old name of this podcast—remains fully in play, because kiitsu—Returning-to-One—requires us to be paying attention to the new things and situations that are always-already developing and emerging in reality, and which no predetermined ideological blueprint can ever hope to address. To paraphrase, in a wholly non-militaristic and peaceful way, Helmuth von Moltke’s famous words, this podcast is centred on the belief that no plan about how to proceed reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the complex movements of reality.

However, having no predetermined ideological blueprint doesn’t mean that in this podcast there is no central guiding thing in play which I affirm with a clean heart and full belief, faith and trust. That guiding thing is kiitsu, a constant, creative process of the returning-to-one of all things.