Confessions of a New Unitarian

I have neglected this blog in recent years and recently moved on to other technologies so the purpose of this post is just to test how well blogger can cope with embedded podcasts (or whether I can make them work). The name of the podcast is After Church Coffee. Hopefully you will be able to enjoy it below. Listen to "After Church Coffee" on Spreaker. Enjoy!

As I write this I am on holiday in Madeira, which sadly has made international news in the last few days because of the serious forest fires which have destroyed not only countryside areas but part of the largest town, Funchal. Now that the fires are subsiding, tourists are being encouraged to resume their gawping so today we went to Funchal and rode the cable car to visit the tropical gardens. The fifteen minute ride up the hill was a shocking experience for as we looked down we could see the blackened ruins of homes recently destroyed. The path of the fire, like so many negative experiences of life, defied logic - at one point we hovered over a house that seemed perfectly intact and could see a family sweeping the yard even though the entire neighbourhood around them was gone. It is an image that will stay with me for a long time and which, of course, can be read in many ways. Perhaps we might even see ourselves in this - the world around us seems a crazy, mad place but in our hom

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