Confessions of a New Unitarian

I had a mountaintop experience yesterday but it wasn't very good. Tracey and I were on a one-day tour of the Dolomites in northern Italy and after seven hours on a coach, we were finally given some free time for a cable car ride to the top of a mountain from where we were promised the most fantastic view the region had to offer. Our guide even gave us a guarantee that the experience would be spiritual but there was a catch. Our spiritual experience had to be completed at a pace because in just over an hour we needed to be back on the coach to travel back down the 27 hairpin bends that had taken us to this height. It's hard to have an authentic spiritual experience under this kind of time pressure and I haven't even mentioned the fact that I was in urgent need of a loo stop. Despite all this I had high hopes for the mountaintop. I recalled visiting the Rocky Mountains for the first time many years ago and getting this incredible sense of coming home in a place I'd n

In a recent service at Cheltenham, Cressida invited the congregation to take to the streets and be heard on an issue that matters to us. It was a good message until it became apparent that she meant that we should do it immediately. TODAY. Inspiration turned to perspiration because this wasn’t Selma in 1965 or even the London anti-war marches of 2003. This was Cheltenham in 2015 and people might see. In the course of the service we had explored that great idea of being the change you want to see in the world. Cressida’s point was that good deeds emerge not so much of their own volition but out of our ‘being.’  I thought of Martin Luther King and the non-violent philosophy through which demonstrators were not only supposed to submit to the violence of those who oppressed them, even when they were physically beaten, but confront evil with the power of love. Non-violence was not just about restraining your fists but training your mind and spirit in the ways of complete co

Today I have been thinking about missing the point. I read a news story this morning about some women who were prevented from breast-feeding in public at a conference about promoting breast feeding. Then someone tweeted a piece about a 12 year old boy who was refused admission to any screening of The Theory of Everything (a new film about Stephen Hawking) at Harrogate Odeon because he is a wheelchair user. At work, a frustrated student told me that she didn't understand how all this reading could possibly help her to teach literacy to children. I wonder, how much of life do we waste, how much energy do we spend, busily missing the point? An online Unitarian conversation this week focused on the bible with much of the attention devoted to those aspects people found offensive. Sexism, homophobia and slavery all reared their ugly heads. Fair enough. But even as I read these comments my thoughts wandered to some other sections - turn the other cheek, faith, hope and love in 1 Co