It matters what you believe (New Year address - Chester and Warrington)

A few years ago, I was doing some research on the Primitive Methodist movement in the United States and was amused by this rather serious editorial from the Primitive Methodist Journal:

With some of the readers of the Journal the morning of their existence is gone, with others the noon has passed, while with others the night is at hand. Spring time has gone, the summer sun is setting, autumn days are passing, and the white frosts of life's winter has covered some of our heads. We sincerely wish the readers of the Journal a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

There is something about this time of year that makes people serious and reflective. Christmas has now gone and any new year celebrations we had are behind us. Maybe that makes us sad or maybe we're relieved, maybe it was stressful. We have been through the indigestion of Christmas and we welcome the high-fibre, low-fat possibilities of a new year. I have long thought of January as a time of re-invention, a period when our thoughts naturally turn to how we can be better versions of ourselves than we were before. We make resolutions, we might even start a reflective journal, we are prone to reflecting more on who we are and what we are about perhaps than in the warmer days of summer.

With this in mind, I want to talk for a few minutes today about this idea of reinventing ourselves, particularly in terms of belief, our attitudes towards what we believe and some of the claims that are made about Unitarianism and belief by those who, for whatever reason, don't get it.

One of the anti-Unitarian arguments I have heard is that this is not a religious movement at all – there are no creeds and people can just believe what they want and what use is that? The charge is that because we don't have formal creeds, we don't take belief seriously enough.

The best defence against this charge is the stories of the people who identify themselves as Unitarian. As I have met people over the last couple of years I have been struck by how many, like me, started their spiritual journeys in another denomination but ended up calling Unitarianism home.  Sharing stories reveals that people are Unitarian BECAUSE they take belief seriously, not because they don't. Personally, I still have great respect for Methodism, a church I belonged to from birth to the age of 43 – it's a broad church with many people expressing the kind of beliefs I do – for example advocating gay marriage or, on a more abstract level, thinking of God not so much as a great supernatural being but as a concept of being unifying all that is. In the end, though, I left because I didn't feel I could quite say what I wanted to say when in the pulpit. Over the years I sat in Local Preachers' meetings and training sessions and heard people talking about the need to be wary of upsetting people. 'Don't upset people's simple faith,' was the message. 'Don't rock the boat.' I understood this point of view. It argued that Sunday worships was a time when people should have their faith reinforced not undermined, that we should be about building a community, not get tangled up over our differences. I understood but I wasn't comfortable with it and when controversial subjects came up as they so often do in a religion with writings that refer to a virgin birth, people coming back from the dead, eternal punishment and more, I found myself dancing around the edges, not quite saying what I meant, and avoiding issues that I thought were important.  In the end I left Methodism so I could do what I am doing today. I left Methodism so that I could speak as honestly and openly about belief as possible. I left Methodism because I longed for that ability to be as honest and open about my beliefs in the context of a Sunday service as I could be in a friend in a coffee shop and that is what Unitarianism is doing for me. It is helping me take belief seriously, to share my own beliefs and learn from the beliefs of others.

When I was planning what to say today I found it surprisingly easy to find a counter-argument to each of my points and if I was my own critic at this point I would charge that I am not consistent, that whilst I claim to be serious about belief, I keep changing what I think as I go. This is true. But in the course of a lifetime, everybody changes their beliefs. I found a strange little website the other week where people posted some of the things they used to believe when they were children and here are a few:

I used to think that those masks doctors wear during surgery was to prevent them from vomiting when they saw their patient's insides.

 In my childhood, I believed that when people fasted, it was forbidden for them to swallow their own saliva.

When I was a child, I would always let go of my balloons when I was outside. I was convinced I was sending them up to Heaven to be with my grandparents.

I used to think that as soon as the palms of your hands were together God could hear everything you say, sort of like a walkie-talkie button. I was afraid to say anything bad or stupid if my palms were touching in any way.

When I was little, I used to believe that whatever someone believed is what would happen to them after they died. If they believed in heaven and were a good person, then they'd go to heaven. If they believed in reincarnation, they would be reincarnated. If they didn't believe in any afterlife, than nothing would happen. Then, I grew up and people tried to convince me that one belief was correct above all others and that everyone who didn't believe like me would go to hell. I liked my childhood belief better.

www.iusedtobelieve.com

Belief is not a fixed phenomenon. It changes as we change. At this point, my inner critic would say, what about truth? Unitarians include people who draw heavily from many religious traditions. They can't all be right.

I could get very postmodern now and talk for ages about what we mean by truth and whether that is even a meaningful concept but I'd probably even bore myself so let me just say this. When it comes to the beliefs we have and our own faith journeys, maybe being right is not the most important thing. Maybe the most important thing about our beliefs is not whether they are right but what they do to us and how they shape what we do in the world.

Sophia Lyon Fahs was an American Unitarian who became a minster in the fifties, was a great champion of inter-cultural dialogue and racial reconciliation between different countries but also within the United States and someone who, in her day, became quite a controversial voice in children's religious education. She argued that children should learn about religion experientially and not be told what to think. Some of her critics misinterpreted what she was trying to achieve, portraying her work as some would still portray the Unitarian movement, as not being serious about belief but this is what she wrote on the subject:

Some beliefs are like walled gardens – they encourage exclusiveness, the feeling of being especially privileged. Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathy. Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies, other beliefs are bound in a world community – sincere differences beautify the pattern. Some beliefs are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one's own direction whilst other beliefs are like gateways opening up wide vistas for exploration. Some beliefs are rigid, like the body at death, impotent in a changing world while other beliefs are pliable like the young sapling ever growing with the upward thrust of life.

My conclusion from all of this is that what we believe matters because it shapes our ability to care for others, to demonstrate compassion for situations and people we don't know well, to be good people of the world community.

So I invite you in the cold, reflective time of a new year to spend time seriously thinking about what you believe or don't believe and how that affects the way you interact with others. May we each also continue to grow through the beliefs and stories of others. And let me conclude by recalling a line from a wonderful Methodist sermon I heard more than 20 years ago which you might find helpful in those times when the universe seems too complicated, you can't quite make sense of it all, and truth is an elusive thing. The preacher took as his text a beatitude that you won't find in the bible. He said, 'Blessed are the cracks for they let in the light.' His point was that when it comes to spiritual truth, spiritual experiences, spiritual insight, maybe we only get brief glimpses but if we are open to them, they can transform our whole being. You might not need to spend weeks and months researching in the library to have a transforming experience that changes your belief. Maybe at this time of year you just need a clear sky full of stars on a winter's night. Look up at those stars and let them fill you with warmth and wonder as they did when you were a child. Then take that warmth and wonder home with you and use it to make the world a better place.