This is a danger we’re all acquainted with. Seneca also wrote on the shortness of life:

Just as travellers are beguiled by conversation or reading or some profound meditation, and  find that they have arrived at their destination before they knew they were approaching it; so it is with this unceasing and extremely fast-moving journey of life, which waking and sleeping we make at the same pace – the preoccupied become aware of it only when it is over.

The last few months of life have whizzed by and haven’t been at all bad, but part of me is conscious that I can’t – and certainly don’t want – to keep up this pace. There is, as the old Stoic would agree, more to life…

I’ve got a holiday coming up soon, after which I hope things will drop a gear or two. The book should also, finally, be coming out so that should be interesting. When I consulted the I Ching about its prospects, I ended up with the Trigram Opposition... which doesn't particularly bother me to be honest. Fortunately there is not one called "Indifference"!

So some things to look forward to, although, as I keep reminding myself, it’s not about the looking forward, but the here and now (which of course I’ll bear in mind when I receive my next outrageous deadline).

Contemplating the latest bout of politics at the office, I resolved that rather than get drawn in I would attempt to cultivate a more “religious” attitude. I imagined a more detached me; forgiving, unencumbered, quite possibly a bit smug too.

I warmed to the idea, wondered how practical it would be; realized the more I could afford to adopt a religious attitude essentially depended upon the less I needed to “care” about work.

By “care” I don’t mean doing a good job, or the work itself, which I care very much about, but the actual need to do so – in short how much I needed the job.

I realized that I was able to contemplate a more spiritual attitude because I was approaching a position financially where – partly due to savings, partly other possibilities – I did not need to rely on this particular job as my sole source of income. So I could afford to “care” less and thereby cultivate a better me.

It has always been thus, but it reminded me of the fundamental role financial security plays in our spiritual lives. Of course the poor are often among the most religious and spiritually generous, but equally I suspect there is a particular advantage in having reached the summit of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Gandhi’s poverty grew out of his life experience – built upon privilege. But would the man who did so much to champion the cause of the “untouchables” have chosen this asceticism had he been born of “untouchables”? More – had he been born of untouchables and somehow managed to improve his status, would he have chosen the trappings of poverty over wealth? Having laboured so hard, would he even have had the space to explore his spirituality? Instead would his truth be born of the grim realities of poverty and his determination never to return to them?

Not that I want to diss Gandhi (heaven forbid!) but I think we all have a tendency to underestimate the influence of wealth upon spirituality, and the implications of this – how economics can influence access to that higher aspect of ourselves. I believe Schopenhauer had this in mind when he wrote poverty is slavery. 

This for me is the key reason why religion is indivisible from social action – not out of pity, or even physical need, but because a life not fully lived is an inherently poor one. 

Politics matters, although office politics I will henceforth attempt to rise above.

While I can afford to.

Anyway, we were talking about writing, and I mentioned the “religious” book I have coming out this Spring (I did warn you about the plugs) and he wrote back

Religious?

Yes, I said, didn’t I tell you about my church…?

I could almost hear the claxon sound across the Gulf of Arabia.

Church….?! Gosh.

I felt the axis of our friendship lurch. Breaking the news to a friend (to my friends, anyway, and thankfully my faith does not encourage ridding oneself of the old) is always a sensitive moment. People have default settings about religion too, particularly those of that most irreligious nation, England.

It’s not necessarily what you think, I wrote hurriedly back. It was an authenticity thing… I came to the point whereby I could not deny I had a spiritual side. Actual proofs, like the existence in God for example, seemed largely irrelevant. The important thing was for me to be true to my experience, and the Unitarians are a non-creedal religious community that allow me to do that. Really, it’s not a cult, I added (few people in the UK having even heard of Unitarianism). Here’s a link, I said. Don’t worry, I added, attempting to knock down all his ducks in one go, it’s not as happy-clappy as it looks either.

I have yet to hear back.

But it got me thinking about what Unitarianism was, funnily enough a theme continued over at my old minister Andy Pakula’s new blog, which itself picks up on a thread over at Reignite worrying over the decline in Unitarianism in the UK.

Certainly I think many Unitarians have experienced frustration. Our religion is not like other faiths. It is in fact often the opposite – bottom-up rather than top-down, led by individual experience rather than doctrinal writ. To us it does appear to embody a kind of “truth” that perfectly fits the modern world… yet it is so damn hard to make people understand what it’s about.

Part of the reason I believe is because most people are raised from an early age to believe religion must be a set of rules. If it is not, then how can it be religion (more than once I have overheard my partner, brought up Catholic, “explain”: he calls it church, but it’s not really… they can believe anything...)?

I experience the same issues in my day job – social marketing – in which I use customer insight to try and drive behaviour change, usually around public health. A key principal is to shape one’s intervention not about how you expect the world to be, but how the world is actually experienced by the target audience.  This can take time – investment in research and testing – when the client often wants to jump to the solution. It’s obvious, after all, isn’t it? Can’t we just tell them? Well no, not if they not prepared to listen.

I think Unitarians face a similar challenge – we’ve got a great product, and its benefits are self-evident (to Unitarians, that is). Yet its definition as a religion does not fit the “rules” that most people – religious or not – carry from birth, no matter how much we may want things to be different.

I think the 2007 US advertising campaign Is God keeping you from going to church? tacitly acknowledged this problem and made a brave attempt to play the game according to their rules but ultimately came up short because, being Unitarian (Universalist), it could never really win. Its cognitive dissonance was too pronounced, its semantics kind of self-defeating: what’s the point of going to a church with no God? An atheist church? But surely that’s not a religion at all, and I’m religious, spiritual… I just don’t want to be bombarded with dogma. Even atheist dogma…

It was a brave attempt at selling the sense of “our secret”, but it seemed to have put the proverbial cart before horse, tried to use the language of other religions to explain our own.

Instead I think we should begin by facing up to the reality of what people want, then… take a deep breath… and actually define our faith, emphasizing what makes it special – it’s Unique Selling Point. We need to create our own set of rules before inviting people to come and play our game. Because like it or not, people need rules in a game, even in a game of no rules…

To me, Unitarianism acknowledges our unique experience of the divine and how our recognition of this uniqueness drives us to unity. This is why I’m a Unitarian, as is everyone I know (so far as I know). No other religion, to my knowledge, does this. This is our USP, but it tends to get lost in the rush to say what we’re not about, defending our goal in a game played by other religions’ rules, and thereby confusing the public, as well as ourselves.

We have to write our own rulebook rather than be judged by others’.

Just as the Buddhists are about “detachment”, the Muslims “submission under the Koran”, Christians, “love under the Bible”, we need to be “united by our unique experience of the truth” or some such.

We need to be about a religious method. There’s no getting away from it – committee-created catch-alls about “values” or bombastic over-compensation are not enough: we need to state our “rule”, even if it emphasizes our freedom, and more – we have to explicitly present it as our pathway to fulfillment.

We might not like it, but there’s no getting away from it: it’s what the public expects (and let’s face it, it’s what we believe, even though it might feel somewhat… vulgar to say so).

And from this theological kernel, begin to speak to people in a language they understand.

And nothing was more divine than his call to be humble. Humbleness is closest to holiness.

The saying that the meek shall inherit the earth is easily misunderstood from a human perspective. At times when brutality and power triumph over the “little person” it is hard to see the sense of it. But with respect to humbleness in the sight of God it makes perfect sense. It actually serves to remind us that we are human, not perfect. We are not Gods.

I was reminded of this when I read about the execution of two young men in Iran for their part in the protests against the state, the planned hanging of another nine, with the promise of more on the way.

There is something particularly chilling about judicial murder, the attempt of a regime not to hide its sordid crimes but to actually legitimize them. The show trials in Tehran echo those of Stalin and Hitler, and in particular bring to mind Sophie Scholl and her friends – the young German students who peacefully protested against the Nazi regime and were tried and guillotined in 1943.

Wikipedia notes Sophie’s firm Christian belief in God and in every human being's essential dignity formed her basis for resisting Nazi ideology.

Meanwhile in present-day Tehran Ayatollah Ahmad Janati commented: May God not have mercy on those who are lenient with the corrupt on earth. There is no room for clemency. It is time for severity.

Judicial murder characterizes Utopian politics. From The Terror of Revolutionary France there is clear line of sight to present day Iran.

Certainly on the surface the fundamentally atheist France of Robespierre bears little resemblance to the Islamist fundamentalism of Ahmadinejad, but both are borne of Utopianism – the belief heaven can be built upon the earth. Yet whether it is in the name of Reason or God makes no difference – the deed must always be done by human hands, with the inevitable blood-soaked consequences.

Jesus saw this danger clearly. Time and again he emphasized our imperfect humanity, fallibility; our need therefore to be humble, meek. Not to cast the first stone. His was the authentic voice of God. The vengeful pronouncements of priests and politicians in the name of a higher authority are human, all too human.  

A new study, described in Scotlands Sunday Herald, says that fully 50% of Europeans are no longer attached to a particular religious institution but continue to have a sincere interest in spirituality. The researchers are calling this the ‘Fuzzy Fidelity’ denomination - it is virtually the same group as that I might usually call ’spiritual but not religious.’ Clearly, there is a vast number of spiritually-oriented people who have found that traditional religious communities and institutions are not the right fit for them.

Established churches are panicking at the news and disparately seeking ways to get back their lost sheep! As though the building they hold services in is the only problem, they are taking their same old show to new venues

…some congregations are fighting back, holding services in shops and gyms in an effort to attract uncommitted believers into the church.

But they miss the point entirely.  The spiritual but not religious (can I please call them SBNRs?) are not interested in the same old story. As the researchers say, ‘this new denomination has only a vaguely defined notion of a “divine entity.”‘ In other words, they are not looking for a sense of the sacred that is portrayed as Jesus on a cross, Adonai in his throne, or any of the other traditional God images. Theirs is a less concrete - but more immediate and intimate divinity. Many SBNRs have a sense of the sacred all around them - in nature, in human hearts, in all beings, and especially in love. Many of them will identify with what the researchers term ‘Sheilaism’!

‘The term Sheilaists derives from an interview with a woman called Sheila who defined her religious conviction as: “Sheilaism: I just have a little voice in my head.”‘

Religion and spirituality are in a major upheaval. Sheliaists, SBNRs, and theFuzzy Fidelity denomination are not the minority - their way has become the norm.  The old ways no longer speak to the vast majority of Europeans, but the quest for meaning, connection, purpose, community, and acceptance that these institutions once met are still there. We have become a searching people - trying, testing, adopting, rejecting, moving on… And the religious institutions of the future will be those that support this ongoing personalised search.

This is why UKS is here. I hope that UKS programmes provide the kind of opportunities you need to carry on your search and provide you with a community to help. Do let us know if there ways in which we can more fully support your journey!