Missing the Point?


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 Corinthians 13, the recurring theme of rebirth and renewal following on from situations that seemed dead, the challenge of living well that is represented in the Sermon on the Mount. There may be aspects of the bible that cause offence and that is worth exploring but to write off all biblical texts as a result of this is surely to miss the point.

One of the strange things about many Unitarians is how much time many of them spend talking about the trinity. Personally, I have always perceived the doctrine as a human construct. It does not offend me in any way, I am neither for it or against it; for some people it is useful and for others limiting - if I said whatever floats your boat I might be accused of flippancy but it's late so I'll say it anyway and hope that anyone who reads this takes it in the right spirit. It does strike me though that for liberal thinkers there is sometimes a danger of putting so much effort into expressing what we don't believe that we neglect to focus on what we do believe.

Personally this leads me to Jesus. I am a Jesus Unitarian and I take a strange kind of comfort from the fact that a defining characteristic of Christianity is not allegiance to a book but relationship to a person. There's a lot that gets in the way. As I've said before, possibly in this very blog, separating the claims made for Jesus with his own actual teachings is a difficult job but it's surely worth a little effort. I can no longer get excited debating whether or not Jesus was divine, not least because my sense of what that even means is far removed from where it once was. However, Jesus is a person to whom I can relate, a radical whose example and teachings make him a character apart from the history to which he belongs, a voice of warmth, love and compassion in a cruel world. At the very least, he is to me the best example I have yet found of what (to borrow some trinitarian-echoing language) the 'spirit-filled' / holy / Godly / Divine / good life can be. Or am I missing the point?

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