Reflections by Rev. David Usher - District Minister

Right Belief

Oh, so you are a Unitarian, are you? What do you Unitarians believe about..? You fill in the blanks. What do you believe about Jesus. What do you believe about the Bible. The resurrection. Life after death.

A sixpence for every time I have been asked such a question in my lifetime as a Unitarian, and particularly as a Unitarian minister, and I would be a rich man. As would many of you, I suspect. And, if you are anything like me, you do a quick mental audit to see how much time and effort you want to invest in the conversation or whether you will just give a quick response and try to change the subject.

But, to be fair to the people who ask that question, What do Unitarians believe about... Or even, what do YOU believe about.. they are only following on from what has been the Christian orthodoxy for centuries. Because Christianity has, from its earliest days, defined itself according to right belief. Whether or not you are a Christian, whether or not you will be saved, and at some wretched times in Christian history, whether or not you will be burned at the stake or allowed to live, according to this orthodoxy, is decided by whether or not you subscribe to the correct doctrine, whether or not you believe the right things.

In many ways, it is understandable that Christianity should have evolved thus. The Jews had been expecting a Messiah, or political or a military leader to rescue them from the oppression of the Roman occupation. Instead, along had come Jesus, preaching his enigmatic teachings. And then, in spite of the enthusiasm with which he had so often been greeted, when he went up to Jerusalem, the centre of the Jewish faith and political centre of the Roman forces, it had all gone very wrong, and he had been crucified. Apparently he had not been the Messiah after all.

But then, curiously, miraculously, those first disciples began to interpret the whole Jesus event in a new way. To see victory in apparent defeat; triumph in apparent humiliation; power in apparent weakness. Perhaps, they wondered, Jesus had been the Messiah. But how? How to explain this paradox? And so it was that the early Christian fathers, the first theologians who set about explaining this great mystery, tried to square the circle. A man who had been God. Life which conquered death. Paul, the first theologian and emissary, began the process, which was then picked up by Justin Martyr, Origen, and many, many more. Influenced as they were by the disciplines of Greek philosophy, and trying to make this new Christianity appeal to the Hellenistic world, those first theologians philosophised. They argued with each other over endless detail. And then they held Councils, at Nicaea, at Chalcedon, and they agreed on what was to become the official doctrines of the church. Doctrines which have remained ossified ever since, creeds which have been repeated by the faithful, word for word, Sunday by Sunday, ever since.

What do you believe?

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only begotten Son of God,
begotten of the Father before all ages,
God from God, Light from Light, of one being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven.

And so it goes. Now, I suspect, most modern day Christians don't actually believe it. Their saying of the creed is not really a statement of belief, it is a way of participating in and belonging to the community of the church, and none the worse for that. But the point is, Christianity is defined by what you say you believe. Not how you act, but what you say you believe.

The two other Abrahamic religions are quite different. Judaism is not a religion of beliefs. Judaism is a religion of traditions, of stories. You are a Jew essentially if you are part of retelling of those stories, the re-enactment of the traditions. Shabat. The Holy Days. And Islam is not a religion of beliefs either, it is a religion of practice. You are a Moslem if you perform the five necessary practices - if you declare Allah as One, and Mohammed as his prophet; if you say prayers five times a day, if you observe Ramadan, if you give alms, and if you go on the hajj to Mecca during your lifetime. Theology is very secondary to Islam, as it is to Judaism. Both are religions based on actions and rituals. Only Christianity is a religion based on beliefs.

So, it is not surprising that Unitarianism, arising as it did primarily from Christianity, should also have defined itself by its beliefs. Belief in the oneness of God. Belief in the humanity of Jesus. Belief in the importance of the use of reason, in the primacy of the individual conscience in matters of faith. The early Unitarian theologians, in Britain and in Transylvania and in North America, all thought their way to their positions, arguing for the rightness of their beliefs as opposed to the wrongness of the beliefs of others.

This emphasis on right belief is with us still in some Unitarian circles. The insistence on the same arid arguments - are we Christian, are we not? As if we should have our own Council of Nicaea, decide the question once and for all, and banish those who vote on the minority side. We might be rather more lenient on the losers than others have been before us, but the principle would be the same. Believe right, or you are not one of us.

And even those of us who shy away from such futile controversy, fall into the trap when we talk of ourselves by our beliefs. We believe whatever we like, some us say. No wonder people then are puzzled about us when we mislead them so.

Because here is the truth of the matter. Yes, folks, you heard it here first. The truth of the matter is that Unitarianism is not about Right Belief. Beliefs are important, as Sophia Lyon Fahs observes, because as we believe so do we act. But Unitarianism in not a faith of Right Belief. And the sooner we stop pretending that it is, the better. When it comes right down to it, I don't care what you believe as a Unitarian. And what is more, I don't even care what I believe as a Unitarian. Because Unitarianism is not about Right Belief.

So what is Unitarianism about?

True Experience
Each of us experiences the world, each in ways unique to us. Nobody else has the experiences we have. Each of us accumulates triumphs and troubles as we become the people we are. In the wonderful novel, The Poisonwood Bible, the Congolese natives amongst whom the main body of the book is set do not resent the scars, physical or emotional, which to the eyes of the American intruders are disfigurements to beauty. Because the scars are signs that they have lived. The scars tell the story of the life. Like the velveteen rabbit, it has become real as it has become worn. So it is that all experience, whether we deem it welcome or woeful at the time, becomes the grist out of which we are made. And it is the spirituality of maturity to welcome all guests who come to your door.

For the most part, our experience of life and the world remains superficial, shallow. We skate along. We waste our powers getting and spending. We keep our noses to the grindstone. We are happy, or not. We are productive, or not. We do what we do, and we do it without expending any great effort in going deeper. And that's fine.

However, that experience of life, whatever it is, is our life. We have no other. And religion is our collective reflection on experience.

I witness the miracle of a pink-blushed sunrise and I marvel at this awesome creation. And I am made to wonder. How did it come to be, how is it that there is anything at all, and most especially, how and why have I been graced with the gift of life. I encounter suffering, seemingly pointless, random suffering; and in my rage or my pain I try to make sense of it, I try to put it into a rational framework which will make it bearable. Or I betray my own best principles, and become aware of my own deficiencies, am exposed as the fraud I feared I was, and I have to acknowledge my need for forgiveness, by myself and by others. And others betray me, I am hurt and disappointed by the fickleness of others, and I am challenged to offer them same forgiveness I would want from them. And then I am confronted by injustice, and I am called upon the speak out for what I know in my mind is right, even if my heart trembles.

All of these experiences of life accumulate to make me who I am, and my religion is my attempt to make sense of it, it is my endeavour that these experiences should be the process of continuing creation as I open myself up to life, rather than my destruction as I close myself down to cynicism and despair. And I am not alone in the struggle. I am in the company of others, people like you, who are trying to make your own sense of this miraculous workaday world in which cruelty and kindness compete every moment for our favour. Religion is the business of turning ordinary experience into something which makes sense and bestows value. We are indeed looking through a glass darkly, barely discerning shadows of meaning, defying the siren temptations of faithlessness.

And then sometimes, just sometimes, the clouds part and we are given brief moments of insight and understanding. Epiphanies of revelation, when it does all make sense. Moments of true experience, experiences of momentary truth.

The late Sir Alister Hardy, noted biologist and former member of this very congregation, became fascinated by such moments of revelation, and he founded the Religious Experience Research Unit which was, during my time as a student here, housed in this college. The work of the Unit was to compile and analyse people's religious experiences, such as this one, from the book, The Original Vision.

And this one, by your own Catherine Robinson, from the recently published With Hearts and Minds.

Authentic Faith

Unitarianism might have evolved from Christianity's fascination with Right Belief, and we might still fall into the trap of describing ourselves according to beliefs, according to the rigorous use of reason to arrive at the right answer, but I put it to you that that no longer serves us well. Being a Unitarian today is not about having the right belief, it is about having an authentic faith.

What does it mean to have an authentic faith?

It means that you are permitted, encouraged, to take your own unique experience of life and to craft it into your own understanding which makes sense to you, which sustains you in your times of crisis, which inspires you in your moments of doubt, which challenges you out of your timidity. You might choose to do that using the prism of liberal Christianity because that is the prism through which you see most clearly, which casts the rainbow whose colours most closely match the silhouette of your soul. Or you might choose to do it through the ritualised traditions of earth-centered spirituality, or the rationalistic rigours of scientific humanism or the quiet contemplations of meditative mysticism. You don't have to conform your unique experience of life to the beliefs which someone else has articulated as a result of their unique experience of life. You may develop a system of beliefs, if that is your bent, or you may refrain from attending too closely to the beliefs of the mind, preferring instead to remain more with the experiences of the heart.

But that you do that within a community, the centripetal force of which is not conformity of belief but commonality of purpose, the purpose of making life holy by our attentiveness to it. We come together in worship not to recite stagnant creeds but to be in the presence of the divine, to cast our lives in the crucible of reverence, to be reminded of values the world would otherwise make us forget.

We do it within a community in which we may listen to the authentic experiences of others, that we may learn of the journeys others are travelling and in doing so, expand our own journey. Our friends return from their holidays and travels, and they show us their photographs and their souvenirs. Look at the experience I have had, the places I have visited. And in looking, we share in their experience, we learn something we would otherwise have not. We are made more aware that ours is not the only true experience. We are warned against the solipsism of thinking our experience defines all experience. Participation in community is the necessary safeguard against the narcissism of looking only at oneself.

And we do it within a community which is dedicated to the proposition that authentic faith is not only about introspective reflection on the self, but active involvement in the world. We come together not to escape the world and its wickedness, not to congratulate ourselves on enjoying the privileges of those exclusively saved, but to understand the role we must play in the world as active agents of its universal salvation.

Our identity as Unitarians is not to have right belief. It is to have authentic faith. Faith which is true to our experience of life, which makes sense of that life, and which sustains, challenges, inspires and comforts us in that life.