Finding the Like Hearted, through the Language of Love

Well this might shock you to hear. I have inadvertently become a “Swifty”. Well actually what has happened is that I have received a “Friendship bracelet”, a bit like one of those that Taylor Swift fans make. They swapped song titles with one another, written on the beads. It came through the post on Monday. The wooden beads did not spell out a “Swifty Song”, well at least as far as I am aware. Instead it spelt “Like Hearted”. Folk often say they seek the company of like minded people. I do not, what I seek are the like hearted. The lovely person who sent me this gift obviously realised this.

Earlier that day I had been out walking with Molly. We are not like minded, but I believe we are like hearted. It was one of those walks where I let her take the lead, to follow her nose. She led the way 95% of the time, I just occasionally made an adjustment so as not to end up down some mucky hole. We did finally end up in one of the local parks. I observed many interesting things. A couple who I see often approached me. One of them is somewhat cynical and is always trying to draw me into unpleasant conversations. At one point he muttered about a group of young children who were holding out a rainbow flag and singing “He’s got the whole world in his hands”, it was lovely to see, although he didn’t think so. I also spoke with a few other dog folk and those with children. A diverse bunch of people who talked about a variety of things. Most it seems were fairly like hearted, although one or two were certainly not.

I remember very early in my Unitarian journey I first heard the phrase “You need not think alike to love alike”. I think if there is a spirit that permeates our tradition that this might be it. It is certainly something we ought to aspire to. Of course we all fall short of this ideal. It has been attributed to Francis David who is seen as the father of established Unitarianism and was the spiritual advisor to King John Sigismund of Transylvanin, the Unitarian king who pronounced an act of religious toleration the Edit of Torda in 1568.

Now while “We need not think alike to love alike” is a beautiful sentiment and certainly fits in with the principles of religious toleration. It would appear that there is no real evidence that Francis David ever actually uttered the words. There are arguments as to the original source some claim it was the non-Trinitarian martyr Michael Servetus where as others suggest it was more likely the father of Methodism John Wesley, who asked in a sermon on “Catholic Spirit,” “Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike?”

I do not think it matters who first uttered the words, more the meaning behind them and what has grown and developed from them. What matters to me is the spiritual depth at the core of these simple words. “We need not think alike to love alike.” Or to put it another way we need not be like minded to be like hearted. To me this is essence the Unitarian free religious faith. We are none creedal we do not declare a statement of faith and yet we are held together by a sense of love and understanding. They used to say “Reason, Freedom and Tolerance” but as Rev Stephen Lingwood has said this is not enough.

“Freedom, reason, tolerance and pluralism aren’t enough, not on their own. We need a message to give to people, good News to preach. What good News can Unitarians give to the world? Just this: Love. A Holy Love that transforms, that is powerful and prophetic and justice-seeking. This message has always been at the heart of our faith.”

Of course this is an ideal and certainly not an easy one to live up to. We can rationally think, believe, in ways that uphold “Freedom, reason, tolerance and pluralism” but to truly love and radically accept someone who appears different can be much harder. This involves the heart and a fully exposed and open one at that. In some ways it requires a vulnerable heart and that aint easy. What if they hurt us?

My ministerial mantra is “Come as you, exactly as you are…but do not expect to leave in exactly the same condition” This is an invitation to all, whether you’ve been here forever or have just walked through the door. It is also an invitation to myself, because I know this aint easy. And just like everyone else I need to keep on leaving in a new condition.

It is hard to come as you truly are, to be who you truly are. Most folk fear that they will be rejected for being as they truly are. If they let others see the real them. No doubt it has happened to every single one of us at one time or another. It is hard to say this is who I am, will you still love me and accept me anyway. Well actually maybe here in lays part of the problem. By saying this is who I am are we really showing who we are in a truly open sense. I actually think when we make such statements a barrier is already being formed without us even realising it. Surely it is better to show who we really are and this is about the heart more than the mind, this is about love rather than belief or disbelief, this is about deeds rather than creeds.

Last Sunday afternoon I attended the “Altrincham Interfaith Group” Afternoon tea. It was a lovely occasion. Many people coming together who think differently about faith and belief but are inspired by a loving spirit. Several representatives from different traditions were invited to offer blessings at the commencement. I was one. I said something like the following, it is similar to my invitation at the commencement of worship. “Let us invite a loving presence, how ever we may understand it, to be amongst us and to awaken from deep down within us all. May we open our hearts, listen with the ears of our hearts and speak our truth in love, for the language of the heart is universal.”

There were several interesting speakers during the tea, they spoke of the work that they are engaged in the wider community. Such vital work in these divisive times. Councillor Eve Parker being one of them. Eve is the Community Cohesion Lead and in 2024 launched Trafford Faith Action Network. Dr Eve Parker is a theologian and on the faculty of the school of religion and theology at the University of Manchester. One thing she said really resonated with me, this was that tolerance alone is not enough. Something deeper was required. This is a sentiment I have felt myself, for some time. I feel something deeper is required, something rooted in loving understanding, a recognition that we are all formed from the same heart and spirit despite what are sometimes seen as our difference. Love and respect must be at the heart of things.

I was chatting with a young man on Tuesday morning. He is on a spiritual journey, exploring all kinds of things. He seems drawn particularly to Eastern Traditions. He asked me if I was a priest. I said well not exactly. I then attempted to explain the difference between a minister and a priest. He then said oh yes you a Unilateral minister aren’t you. I said well not exactly I am a Unitarian minister. I smiled as I remembered a conversation I had in the park recently when a man said “You are the Humanitarian” minister aren’t you. I quite like that description actually. I spoke with the young man a little about our free religious tradition, before I was distracted by Molly’s need to go for a poo in the grass area in front of the town hall.

It can be challenge attempting to articulate our faith. People no doubt come up with a variety of views. They used to say “Freedom, Reason and Tolerance.”, which was the simple nineteenth century position. I have over the years attempted to come up with my own, here are three elements I have identified in my time.

One is authority. We say that authority lays within the enlightened conscience of the individual, that we are not only free but encouraged to seek our own truth in matters of faith. That personal experience and reflection upon these experiences is our final authority that no one can tell us what we ought to believe. That does not mean that we can believe what we want, more what we must. We believe what our experiences teach us.

The second is respect and celebration of difference. Now some describe this as tolerance, but I don’t think that is enough. I am with Eve here. I’m not decrying tolerance, if only we human beings could be more tolerant of one another. That said I still hear judgement in the word tolerant. As if in claiming this word what people are saying is “I am tolerating you and your view, but I still think you are a crank.” I don’t see respect and celebration in this. If I accept that I have freedom to reach my own conclusions and believe that this is a wonderful thing, then to judge or merely tolerate another for the conclusions they reach is neither truly respecting or celebrating this approach. Also, such judgement seems to lack humility.

This leads me to the third aspect, which I see as humility and the openness that this breeds. This stems from the idea that whatever conclusions I have reached today I have not sealed this truth. Again, this is something to celebrate, the openness that true humility brings. That by rejoicing in the truth that others may reach I can myself experience a deeper revelation if I listen with an open mind, heart and soul. Truth is always subjective. I know myself that my view on faith and many things has shifted at times in my life. This is because my experiences have changed, as have my reflections upon them and my ability to listen to others experiences and their honest reflections upon them too.

These three “freedom, respect and humility” are key to my understanding of my chosen Unitarian faith. These three little words “freedom, respect & humility” just about sum up my understanding of my chosen free religious tradition.

People experience and understand the spiritual aspects of their lives in different ways and when they try to explain these experiences they often articulate them differently. They often use different words to describe the same thing. Or use the same words to talk about different things. The words themselves can often get in the way of describing the experiences that people all have. That said what else do we have to describe what often cannot be fully understood.

One of the great blessings of my job is that people, often complete strangers, tell me about experiences that they do not understand; often experiences that their rational minds don’t believe in and yet they have experienced them all the same. Experiences that have changed them for ever. I love these conversations, they are the language of the heart alive. Such conversations open up the ears of my heart.

There seems to be two common themes to these experiences. One has been the transformative nature of them and the second that they have never dared tell another soul about them, for fear of ridicule. It truly is a humbling blessing that they feel that they can speak to me about them.

I remember one such occasion a few years ago when I went to buy a new laptop computer. One thing I had to was my profession. This led to a very interesting conversation. He began to recount an experience that happened many years ago, that had totally transformed him and his experience of life. He made me smile as he insisted he wasn’t a religious man, as he couldn’t get along with dogma and the like but he experienced something that day that had transformed him and that he was now able to experience this in every aspect of his life. As he spoke I just smiled and listened and told him how many people have had similar experiences including myself and how the two characteristics he described were common, the fear of speaking about them and their transformative nature.

Now while there has been these two themes - the fear of speaking about them and the transformative nature of them - prevalent in many of the conversations I have had, I have also noticed many differences too. I suspect that this due primarily to each individuals religious backgrounds, which must influence the conclusions they have come too. What has struck me though has been the honesty and integrity in which what has been described has been recounted. I have never spoken to many of these people again and yet what they have said has been permanently etched on the soul of me. I have also noticed that each time I have listened to others and shared my own experiences something in me has opened up and I have felt that spirit once again. How many times have I smiled and been warmed and yet shivered at the same time? God only knows.

This to me is how the language of the heart operates, it has the capacity to transform our lives. I believe that we can all be transformed by the language of the heart. It begins by learning to listen with the ears of our hearts and to speak with the tongues of our hearts. For it is the language of the heart that carries the voice of transformation. It can bring about transformation not only in all lives who are touched by it, but also the lives that they themselves touch.

With this in heart and mind and in the spirit of freedom, respect and humility I believe that a new world can begin to be born. Let us not be held back by what we think we know. Let’s open all our senses to the spirit present in all life. Let our ears be opened to the language of the heart, spoken from every tongue and let us speak the language of the heart in our every interaction.

For the language of the heart is Universal it breaks down any and every barrier and touches and transform all who have ears to hear…

May we listen with the ears of our heart. May we speak our truth in love. For the language of the heart truly is universal.

Below is a video devotion based on the material in this "Blogspot"

Welcome to the House of Belonging

“Roots hold me close, wings set me free”. “Spirit of Life” by Carolyn McDade is a much loved hymn, I certainly love it. I wonder how many times I have sung it out and loud and proud in my life. I love that we sing of roots holding us close before wings that set us free. This makes sense because before you can fly free, express your full humanity, you must first feel that you belong, you need strong roots before you can be set free. This brings to my heart my understanding of our flaming chalice, the symbol of our free religious faith, rooted in belonging, in history, in tradition, but not held back by any of this. It is this sense of belonging though that enables us to fly free, to express our souls, to who knows where. Before we can know freedom, we must first feel secure where we are, that we belong. We can then begin to express who we truly are, without fear of rejection. Belonging must come before freedom. We need roots that will hold us close, love us unconditionally, before we can even attempt to fly free.

I remember when I was a young man I thought that freedom and the attainment of it were the things of the highest value in life; that liberation meant escaping the shackles that hold us back and stop us being all that we were meant to be. That I needed to escape where I had come from, the drudgery of my life. I sang songs about freedom as I left behind all that I saw as unimportant. When I look back now what I see is a man who was a slave to freedom.

Over the last few years I have learnt about belonging; and I have learnt that belonging is really about love; I have learnt something about what love actually is. I am not talking about romance here. No, I am talking about that unseen force that connects all life and that enables us to form deep and meaningful relationships with ourselves, with each other and with all life. I name this God, others may use different words. To me this is the essence of belonging, to live in and through love. To love who you are, the life that you have and the tasks that this life asks you to fulfil.

It is this love that allows me to belong, that enables me to connect with all that exists now, all that has been in the time before now and all that will be in the future. It is love that has become the roots that hold me close so that I can stretch out the wings that will set me free and allow me to glide in the wind. To know love is to know that you belong and it is this that is perhaps the ultimate freedom. Before you can be truly free, to express all that you were born to be, you must first believe that you belong; belong as you are, exactly as you are in this time and place. It is the roots of belonging that give us the freedom to stretch out our wings and fly in the wind, free. This is the highest form of love to me.

A sense of belonging is a deeply precious thing. It is belonging that helps us become who we are meant to be. It is a sense of being rooted and being held and loved by these roots that allows us to spread our wings and fly free; it is a sense of being rooted that enables us to not fear the wind, but to embrace it and to let ourselves go. When you feel that you do not belong you cannot thrive, you shrivel up and perhaps die.

Now of course we do not need to belong in exactly the same way; our roots need not, in fact should not, be identical in order for us to belong. Each root has to find its own way into the soil. To truly belong is to be welcomed exactly as you are warts and all and beauty spots too. Not every tree in the forest is rooted in an identical way, it is the same for folk in community. We do not have to try to be like those here, in order to truly belong, in fact we don’t want you to comply in order to belong here.

I am going to share with a favourite by a favourite. “The House of Belonging” by David Whyte

“The House of Belonging” by David Whyte

I awoke this morning in the gold light turning this way and that thinking for a moment it was one day like any other. But the veil had gone from my darkened heart and I thought it must have been the quiet candlelight that filled my room, it must have been the first easy rhythm with which I breathed myself to sleep, it must have been the prayer I said speaking to the otherness of the night. And I thought this is the good day you could meet your love, this is the black day someone close to you could die. This is the day you realize how easily the thread is broken between this world and the next and I found myself sitting up in the quiet pathway of light, the tawny close grained cedar burning round me like fire and all the angels of this housely heaven ascending through the first roof of light the sun has made. This is the bright home in which I live, this is where I ask my friends to come, this is where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to learn to love. This is the temple of my adult aloneness and I belong to that aloneness as I belong to my life. There is no house like the house of belonging.

A new life has recently come into my house of belonging, Molly the Havanese puppy. She has had no trouble finding a sense of belonging here. She has easily settled in. Everyone who meets her says how at ease she is with strangers, both human and dog like. She has a comfortable sense of herself. She feels a part of the community around the chapel and in the town too. Now fortunately she has had no bad experiences as of yet, thank God. She has never been hurt or rejected. I suspect that this isn’t the case with anyone else either within the chapel community or the wider community. I suspect that she thinks that the buildings and gardens are all a part of her house of belonging and all the people here a part of her family. Whenever we leave the house she goes looking for her family, she is so excited about who she will meet, particularly the familiar. She knows that she belongs here and thus feels free to express herself, if only it was so easy for we folk. It is not so easy for we to be ourselves, unlike Molly who is totally at ease were herself. I have never known a dog so in love with their own reflection. She stops at shop windows to admire herself and when she approaches my bedroom mirror she happily touches her nose against her own reflection, as she would when meeting another dog in the street. Molly is happily herself.

To belong you need to be yourself, while paradoxically in order to be yourself you must first of all feel that you belong. When you feel that you belong you will no longer feel the need to fit into, because you will be at ease with yourself.

Brene Brown has said

“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”

I like Brene Brown, I particularly like what she has to say about the difference between “Belonging” and “Fitting in” that they are not the same thing although they are often mistaken for one another.

Brene Brown explains that “Fitting in” is really about assessing situations and becoming the person that you believe you need to be in order to be accepted and acceptable. Whereas “Belonging” does not require us to change who we are, but to be who we really are.

Belonging is an innate desire to be a part of something larger than ourselves. This is a primal yearning, deep within the soul of us and thus we often try to acquire it by fitting in and seeking approval from others. Now not only does this not satisfy this yearning it actually becomes a barrier to it. In so doing we lose our identity and feel even more lost and lonely. True belonging you see only happens when we present our true, authentic, imperfect selves to the world, “warts and all” and beauty spots too. Unless we are at home within ourselves we will never feel that we belong anywhere. This is why Molly is such a good teacher to me, she feels that she belongs as she is, exactly as she is.

John O’Donohue’s in his wonderful book “Anam Cara”, relates belonging to longing and yearning. He suggests that we need to find a balance in belonging and that often our problems stem from not being truly at home with ourselves; that we should be our own longing; that the key is to be-long within ourselves. If we belong within ourselves then we will feel at ease and belong wherever we are. Therefore the sense of who we are, our identity will not be ruled by the need to fit in, to belong, externally.

The problem of trying to fit in and not belonging stems from a sense of being different, something I know I’ve experienced at times. This can be a real barrier. Now of course sometimes these barriers are put up by those who would exclude certain types of people for being different. We have seen horrific examples of this throughout human history. People exclude for racial, political, religious, gender and sexual identity. There still are barriers that exist, although thankfully many have come down.

That said it can still be difficult to join a group where you feel that you are different from the others.

Most people find it difficult to join something, to belong to something when they feel different to those already present. It’s the same with any group or community, including church and chapel communities. It is hard to walk into anything you have never been to before. I know it took me some time to pluck up the courage and explore religions community all those years ago

We say here that all are welcome, to come as you are regardless of who you are, where ever you have been and where ever you are going. You are welcome as you are exactly as you are in this moment. That said people are still reluctant to walk through the door and when they do they often find it hard to belong here, even amongst us. The reasons for this are many and varied and how we resolve it is not easy either. I think that the key is to be as open and welcoming as we can be. They key is to cultivate a true sense of belonging, which begins within ourselves. For if we belong we will not need to try to fit in and hopefully the stranger will more easily feel like the neighbour. As Philip L Bermoan wrote in “The Journey Home”

“Truly spiritual people are in the habit of cultivating the nearly forgotten art of basic hospitality, perhaps because they realize that when we are able to make others feel comfortable, the pleasures of belonging are close at hand.”

They key is to cultivate the pleasure of belonging.

The key is to bless one another with our presence and they will feel that they belong amongst we people who belong here as they are exactly as they are in this moment. For as Rachel Naomi Remen wrote in "My Grandfather's Blessings"

"A blessing is not something that one person gives another. A blessing is a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth, and strengthen what is whole in one another. By making a place for wholeness within our relationships, we offer others the opportunity to be whole without shame and become a place of refuge from everything in them that are not genuine. We enable people to remember who they are."

A sense of belonging is a deeply precious thing. It is belonging that helps us become who we are meant to be; it is sense of belonging that give us deep roots that will enable us to fly free; It is a sense of belonging that enables us to be ourselves, in whatever company we find ourselves without feeling the need to fit in; it is a sense of belonging that allows us to become good neighbours and to bless the whole world with our welcome.

Here I hope you find a place where you belong. Here I hope you find a house of belonging.

I’m going to end with a blessing by John O’Donohue “For Belonging”

“For Belonging” by John O'Donohue

May you listen to your longing to be free.

May the frames of your belonging be generous enough
for your dreams.

May you arise each day with a voice of blessing
whispering in your heart.

May you find a harmony between your soul and

your life.

May the sanctuary of your soul never become haunted.

May you know the eternal longing that lives at the heart of time.

May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.

May you never place walls between the light and yourself.

May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world

to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in

belonging.

Below is a video devotion based on the material in this "blogspot"

Free the Heart and the Mind Will Follow

Last Sunday was quite a day. I along with 31 other men had been called through to the Slimming World "Man of the Year" semi-final and finals day. It is quite an honour to be one of the 32 out of some 50,000 male members in this country.

There was a beautiful moment of synchronicity that I became aware of as I switched on my computer and logged on to Facebook before setting off that morning. It showed me a memory from exactly a year before of a journey I had taken with my brother and sister to Devon to attend our nephew Joe’s wedding. During the journey my sister spent several hours selling the merits of Slimming World to me. I listened, tried to evade, but I listened. She was speaking to me because she loves me; she spoke only in and through love. She spoke the language of the heart and I was able to listen with the ears of my heart. I believed that I was always going to be the way I was and to get to a physically healthier place was just too much for me. A price it would seem I was not willing to pay. I believed that the only way to achieve weight loss would be to starve myself. This has not been the case at all, Slimming World and its method of “Food Optimising” is about healthy eating, group support, healthy living and personal responsibility. At its its core is love, it speaks another language of the heart and that day I began to have ears that could hear once again. That weekend was the turning point and I loved reliving the memory of the journey to the wedding as I enjoyed the journey to Slimming World headquarters with my group consultant Janet Cullin. I also loved the synchronicity of it all…My whole life seems to be led by it and the more I am open to it the more it seems to speak to me, constantly drawing me on to endless possibilities. Synchronicity to me is the invisible voice of love always calling to those who have ears that can hear.

It was an amazing day listening to many inspirational men who had embarked on the same journey as myself and were now living amazing lives. I got through to the final and then waited for the final result…Of which I cannot yet reveal as they have asked the finalists to remain silent about the result for at least the next few days…So you will have to watch this space if you want to know who the winner is…

Now during the day the former professional footballer and current TV presenter Dion Dublin gave us an inspirational talk before the semi-finals began. I listened intently to what he said. What stood out was him talking about how every time he was injured and presented with disappointments he had to face and question his beliefs about his ability to overcome them and to carry on with his career. The pinnacle for him being when he finally played for England at Wembley. He compared this to the journeys we all had been on, something he couldn’t identify with as he had always been a fit athlete. That said he did suggest that our journeys must have begun with our own minds, with us challenging our beliefs about ourselves and lives and that it must have taken great courage to keep journeying on. As he said "If the mind is right, the body will follow."  He came across as warm and caring, I really liked him. More than that I believe that he understood exactly the journey we had been on, certainly mine.

As I shared my story in the semi-final and final I spoke about beliefs about myself that had been ingrained from a young age, beliefs that at the time had given me a certain amount of security and stability but had eventually tethered, tied me down, enslaved me. Over the years I have challenged many things that I believed about myself and life in general. I have changed my mind many times. This is never an easy task. It is amazing how these beliefs can cling and at times re-emerge seemingly from nowhere.

I am not done with my changes…Are any of us?

There is a poster in the small schoolroom at Dunham Road chapel that reads “Anyone who is a slave to anything is not free. The first step to freedom is to free the mind.”

It has been up there for a few years now and I have noticed many people comment on it on a number of occasions. A friend did so just the other day as he reflected on how he had been enslaved by his own thinking, even though he would consider himself quite a rational man. I identify with him strongly, as I have said many times before I have become enslaved many times by my own beliefs. The very things that I thought gave me security and the illusion of stability, that gave me an anchor on which I could depend, were actually chains that enslaved me, kept me trapped and stopped me flying free.

Bob Marley once sang “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.”

There is real truth in this statement. No one else can set us free from our own self-created mental slavery. If they could wouldn’t that be the worst kind of slavery? The enslavement of handing over responsibility for our own lives to another. There is no freedom in this. One of things I love about Slimming World is that while it offers you a simple method and there is a great deal of mutual support, in the end responsibility is with the individual. It is up to us to live this way, day by day. I see this as vital as it build genuine self-esteem. At its core is of course love and support, but also a development of true love for self also.

So how do we then free our minds from our own mental slavery and live the lives we are born to live? Well I actually believe it takes more than just questioning our thinking. Yes that is part of it, but it isn’t the full picture; yes discernment is a vital aspect, but it is not enough on its own. For me it begins with spirit and it comes alive in and through love.

Everything worthwhile in my life has to come through love. True religious community is built on love and lives through love. The 12 Step Fellowships I have belonged to have at their core the simple principle of love. Slimming World is about love. To me they are all about love, love for self, love for other, love for life; they are about love for self, love for neighbour and love for whatever it is that we experience is at the core of all life, God for me.

I have discovered that it is by living in and through love that one is then able to truly question ones beliefs, for love is about more than belief it is about faith, something deeper than belief and it is this that sets one free to live and be in love.

If my life has taught me anything it has taught me that in order to change your mind and therefore change your life requires first and foremost a change of heart, or perhaps more accurately an opening an awakening of the heart.

So how do we bring the heart alive, how do we live in love?

Well I believe it requires attention and application. Love is not soft and mushy. It is not about sentimentality. It requires discipline. It is about raising our heads and observing where love is present in life, rather than merely focusing on what is wrong with both ourselves and our world. It requires us to live in the solution, rather than the problem. It requires us to live fully open to the love out there as well as the love in here. It requires courage, which of course means heart, it means love, from the French word “Cour” meaning heart.

It requires spiritual discipline too. For me that means practising prayer and meditation each day and throughout  the day. It’s about taking sacred moments, so as to connect more fully to the love within each and every one of us and the love present in life.

It requires attention to one another. To support one another and encourage one another when it is needed, without taking over one another’s lives. This is because love requires responsibility for our own lives. For if we don’t we will not bring to life the love present deep within us and we will not be free.

Freedom begins in love and continues through love. To free the mind the first requirement is to live in and through love. Freedom does not begin in the mind, it is much deeper than that, although I was once a slave to the former belief. To free the mind you must first free the heart, this is the first step to freedom. Free to what? Well free to be love…

The key to freedom's gateway is love…Love for self, love for other and love for God…First and last and always love…Love is all that we need…We need it to begin and we need it to continue…

So keep on rocking in the free world all you groovers and shakers out there...It's the only way to be...Yeh, really free...May we always have ears to hear life's redemption songs...

"Sticktooativeness": Discipline, Freedom & The Spiritual Life

For reasons way beyond my understanding there’s a word that keeps on tapping on the window of my consciousness. The word is “Discipline”. It’s one of the words that makes me feel a little uncomfortable. There’s a part of me that doesn’t like it. Especially when I think of the spiritual life. I much prefer words like freedom and love.

Oh yes “discipline” is one of the words that makes me feel a little uncomfortable. I know I’m not alone. I heard a friend expressing the very same sentiment the other day. Yet strangely enough he is a disciplined man and has been for a quite a few years. Guess what as a result he enjoys greater spiritual freedom, joy and love than he has ever done before. As a result he is able to give himself fully to life, to enjoy all that blessings that come his way and to better deal with the many difficulties that also come his way. One thing about any life is that it is balanced, we all have our blessings and our curses. One day it rains and the next there is sunshine. Some days we get the perfect mixture of both and get a rainbow.

Now how is my friend able to live more fully than he has ever done before? You may well ask. Well through discipline. Through trying spiritual practices and sticking with them he has achieved freedom, joy and happiness. Simple!

One thing about my generation and those that have followed, I reckon, is that we want things easy. We want joy and love and freedom, but I am not convinced that we are always prepared to do the work required, well not consistently at least. Maybe this is one of the reasons that there is a growing spiritual vacuum in so many of our lives; maybe this is why so many of us live increasingly dissatisfied lives these days, even though we are more blessed materially than in previous generations. Maybe things come too easily these days, maybe they are not gained through striving, through effort. The truth is that all things of worth in life require effort, not just bursts of enthusiasm but consistent, daily, loving effort. What Dr Bob one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous described, when referring to what was required to achieve recovery, as “sticktooativeness”. The key was to stick with it, stick to it no matter what is going on around you.

Now of course to stick to anything requires discipline.

We want freedom, well who doesn’t. Freedom though requires discipline and also a sense of belonging. My own Unitarian tradition is often criticised as being wishy washy as lacking depth of having no real discipline. How often have I heard the critique, you Unitarians can believe whatever you want, that there is no commitment to anything, not even each other.

Is this true? No I don’t think so. We are about community, we are about commitment. We are about coming together in love.

This critique of the tradition that chose me brings to mind a story my brother loves to tell of a time when he and his wife were being driven around Dallas in a taxi and the driver pointing to a church and saying “That church is a Unitarian Universalist church and those folks can believe whatever they like”, my brother recounts that this was said in an utterly bemused tone. My brother’s response was oh yes “My brother is a Unitarian”. I think for the first time in his entire life the taxi driver went silent.

By the way as a kind of counter to this thought I have heard many Unitarians say "We don’t so much believe what we like, we believe what me must." I certainly believe what life compels me to believe. I once believed in nothing. These days I believe in everything and that little bit more than everything.

I remember once watching an episode of the cartoon series “The Simpsons” in which the church pastor Rev Lovejoy offers the Simpson children a bowl of Unitarian ice cream. When one of the children replies that the bowl is empty his response is that this is the point. The bowl is empty. He is saying there is nothing in it. It is an empty vessel which will not feed or sustain you.

Now I don’t believe and have certainly not found this to be true, but it is certainly how some view the Unitarian faith. They say anything goes, we lack the discipline of what some would consider a real faith. That our tradition asks so little of our members. I have not found this to be true. In many ways it is harder to be a Unitarian as we come together in love and be with people who come to faith in very different ways. I would say that this requires a special kind of loving discipline. To accept our neighbour exactly as they are and not as we would have them be, is not easy at all and yet this is what we celebrate, what we rejoice in.

One thing that we are about is “Belonging”. We say come as you are, exactly as you are. All are welcome here, you belong here. Belonging is a vital aspect of our tradition. In fact I would say that before you can be free you must first of all belong. To quote Galen Guengerich “Freedom comes when we find ourselves in a place that sustains us, and among people who nurture us. Life is, first and foremost, a collaborative endeavor.” The Unitarian tradition is about freedom of conscience and freedom of belief but is also about community and coming together in love. I know from personal experience that freedom only comes from a sense that you truly belong. To live freely you must first belong to life itself and the world and community in which you find yourself. In so doing you will truly come to belong to yourself and you will be free.

Now belonging requires discipline. I suspect that the reason people prefer to describe themselves as spiritual rather than religious today is linked to this dislike of discipline and belonging of becoming too involved in something. After all discipline is linked to disciple to one who follows. Many spiritually minded people these days do not like to be followers, they want to follow their own path and not blindly follow someone else’s. It doesn’t need to be like that. You can still be disciplined, you can still belong and yet retain your own sense of self. You can still be free. Discipline and belonging are not about blindly following someone or something. It is about consciously following a simple way that will enable us to live with a sense of connection and enable us to engage in this our shared world and contribute wholeheartedly in our shared mutuality.

Discipline, I have come to believe plays a vital role in spiritual freedom and spiritual community.

I am currently attempting to get fit, I mean properly fit. The reasons for this are many fold. Yes I’ve lost weight and this certainly took “sticktooativeness” and following a suggested plan. Now I feel it is time to develop my physical well being so I can be of maximum service to the people around me, so I can truly serve.

I have joined a gym and am working out most days. I am not doing it blindly though. I am working with a personal trainer who has developed a program for me and within a month I have already improved no end. So you could say I am kind of his disciple, if only for a short while, and when I feel confident enough I will be able to go my own way. I am not leaning or depending on him though. It is up to me. The work is mine to do and I am sticking with it.

Now some of the things I am engaging in seem a little odd to me, they don’t make sense. That said I trust and am engaging. I am reminded of one of my favourite childhood films each time I arrive at the gym. The film is “The Karate Kid?”

In the film a young lad named Daniel is beaten up by a gang of bullies. An old Japanese man named Mr Miyagi saves him from them and offers to help him to learn Karate, so he can defend himself. This he does and after many trials and tribulations Daniel not only learns Karate but becomes a champion.

The path to becoming a champion is by no means an easy one though and Daniel, or Daniel-San nearly gives up many times, but he does stick with it. My sisters fond nick name for me over the years has been “Daniel-San”...there are worse things to be called.

“The Karate Kid” is the classic hero’s tale; it is full of trials and tribulations. When Daniel first goes to Mr Miyagi he expects him to teach him how to fight immediately, but this does not happen. Instead he gets him to clean and wax his car, by practising specific motions “Wax on, wax off...wax on, wax off” He then gets him to paint a fence and polish a floor, all by hand, all applying simple hand motions. He also reminds him to breathe; he continues to remind him to breathe. After several days of this Daniel is worn out and decidedly unhappy. He thinks Mr Miyagi has taken him for a mug. After an argument he storms off, but Mr Miyagi calls him back and begins to perform some Karate moves which Daniel finds he can easily block.

Finally Daniel-San sees the purpose behind what he has been doing. He can see that all those seemingly meaningless hours polishing and painting etc have equipped him to block the punches and kicks when they come. He can see some tangible results to all his hard work. Daniel-San continues with his training and at the end of the film he becomes the hero as he beats the bullies in the competition and of course he also gets the girl.

It is the same with spiritual disciplines. They may not seem like an obvious aid to growing and developing as human beings and serving one another and life itself. They may also appear restrictive to our being, but they are essential. They are the key to freedom; they are the key to living with gratitude; they are key to truly belonging and welcoming one another in love.

Now the difficulty of course is perhaps in finding what works for each of us as individuals. What works for me, may not work for you. The key is to give things a go and see what comes from doing so. Spiritual discipline is an on-going adventure. It is a conscious means by which we examine, shape and care for our own lives and then serve one another and life itself and truly find a sense of belonging which allows gratitude to develop.

The key is to choose, then embody, a spiritual discipline that brings us a greater love of self of other and of life itself; a discipline that deepens our sense of belonging and gratitude for all that is life. Whether that discipline is simply prayer, or meditation, walking in woods, or star gazing, giving of your time for one another, reading inspirational or devotional books, martial arts, yoga, whatever it may be.

Whatever spiritual discipline we choose there is one quality that is required and that is “sticktooativeness”, consistent effort. To grow spiritually requires effort. It is not merely about achieving temporary highs or a sense of relief. I suppose it’s about being the tortoise and not the hare. It is about plodding on day by day and sticking to it, “waxing off and waxing on.

There are no short cuts or quick results. It’s about “sticktooativeness”

“Sticktooativeness”, spiritual discipline is an essential ingredient to living a truly free life. It allows us to connect to our deeper selves. It develops a sense of belonging and enables us to live with gratitude. It allows us to connect to one another, to all life and to the great mystery that brings all life into being and connects it all together. It is through spiritual discipline that I have found a sense of belonging and developed gratitude. It is through discipline that regardless of my doubts and questions I arise each day and do what I can. I recommend it to all I meet. If you “sticktooit” if you continue to “wax on and wax off” you will know a new freedom, a new joy, a new sense of connection, a deeper belonging than you ever dreamed was possible and a gratitude for simply being alive, for knowing the joy of living in all its mystery.

I offer this final little tale as a final example of "sticktooativeness"

Have you heard of Pablo Casals?

Pablo Casals was born in Vendrell, Spain to a Puerto Rican mother. He was thought to be the greatest cellist who ever lived. His recordings of the Bach Cello Suites, made between 1936 and 1939, are considered unsurpassed even to this day.

Casals’ prodigious musical talent became evident at an early age. By the age of four he could play the violin, piano, and flute, having being taught in church. At the age of eleven he heard the cello for the first time and decided to dedicate himself to that instrument, By the age of fourteen he gave a solo recital in Barcelona. By the age of nineteen he was on the faculty of the renowned Municipal School of Music in Barcelona and was principal cellist of the Barcelona Opera House. He gained international acclaim in a career of such length that he performed throughout the world and to all the great heads of state and other dignitaries.

Yet even having attained such unquestionable mastery of his instrument, throughout his entire life Casals maintained a disciplined regimen of practicing for five or six hours every day. On the day he died, at the age of 96, he had already put in several hours practicing his scales. A few years earlier, when he was 93, a friend asked him why, after all he had achieved, he was still practicing as hard as ever. To which Casals replied “Because, I think I’m making progress.”

So you see it’s never too late, there’s always room for progress. So let’s sticktooit folks, lets keep on practising, let’s keep “waxing on and waxing off”

Belonging: What is Your Song?

As regular readers of my blog will know my step-brother Allen is very close to the end of his life due to Pancreatic cancer. I recently visited him in the hospice where he is receiving care. As I sat with him other family members his father arrived and began to sing him lullabies that he sang him as a boy. It was one of the most beautiful moments of tenderness I have ever witnessed, it brings tears to my eyes as I write these words. I could see the comfort that our Allen felt as his father sang to him and I could see that his father was receiving comfort from the words as he sang. Song and the singing of our songs has the power to touch the special hard to reach places in all our hearts; the singing of our songs can bring healing and connection.

A few days later a friend sent me a copy of the meditation “Listening for Our Song” by David S Blanchard...it touched a place in my soul...

"On sabbatical in East Africa, I heard a story of a people who believe that we are each created with our own song. Their tradition as a community is to honor that song by singing it as welcome when a child is born, as comfort when the child is ill, in celebration when the child marries, and in affirmation and love when death comes. Most of us were not welcomed into the world in that way. Few of us seem to know our song.

It takes a while for many of us to figure out which is our song, and which is the song that others would like us to sing. Some of us are slow learners. I heard my song not necessarily from doing extraordinary things in exotic places, but also from doing some pretty ordinary things in some routine places. For every phrase I heard climbing Kilimanjaro, I learned another in a chair in a therapist’s office. For every measure I heard in the silence of a retreat, I heard another laughing with my girls. For every note I heard in the wind on the beach at Lamu, I gleaned more from spending time with a dying friend as her children sang her song back to her. What came to astound me was not that the song appeared, but that it was always there.

I figure that the only way I could have known it for my own was if I had heard it before, before memory went to work making sense and order of the mystery of our beginning. Our songs sing back to us something of our essence, something of our truth, something of our uniqueness. When our songs are sung back to us, it is not about approval, but about recognizing our being and our belonging in the human family.

It is good to know our songs by heart for those lonely times when the world is not singing them back to us. That’s usually a good time to start humming to yourself, that song that is most your own.

They can be heard as songs of love or of longing, songs of encouragement or of comfort, songs of struggle or of security. But most of all, they are the songs of life, giving testimony to what has been, giving praise for all we’re given, giving hope for all we strive for, giving voice to the great mystery that carries each of us in and out of this world."

Last Sunday I listened to the congregations I serve sing the following words “Roots hold me close, wings set me free” by Carolyn McDade last Sunday. They are beautiful words that touch those special hard to reach places at the core of my being. As I listened it dawned on me that the roots come before the wings, that we are held close before we can be set free. It got me thinking that in order to fly free we need roots that hold us close.

For much of my life I thought that freedom and the attainment of it were the things of the highest value in life; that liberation meant escaping the shackles that hold us back and stop us being all that we were meant to be. I sang songs about freedom as I left behind all that I saw as unimportant. When I look back now what I see is a man who was a slave to freedom.

Over the last few years I have learnt about love; I have learnt something about what love actually is. I am not talking about romance here. No, I am talking about that unseen force that connects all life and that enables us to form deep and meaningful relationships with ourselves, with each other and with all life. I name this God, others may use different words.

It is love that allows me to connect with all that exists now, all that has been in the time before now and all that will be in the future. It is love that has become the roots that hold me close and it is love that allows me to stretch out the wings that will set me free and allow me to glide in the wind. To know love is to know that you belong and it is this that is perhaps the ultimate freedom.

I have known and experienced a great deal of love these last few weeks as I have felt the pain of grief and loss. I felt it last Thursday as I attended and spoke at my my grandad's funeral, as I joined with others to celebrate the old lad's life and to say our final farewell. These last few weeks I have listened to my nearest and dearest and I have listened to those around me, I have listened to life too and to that transcendent voice that lives in the spaces between life. It has been a tiring time and a deeply emotional time and yet through it all there has been a deepening sense of connection and belonging. Something is changing as I feel those roots that hold me close entering deeper into life’s crust. Life has opened up and increased in meaning as I have felt the wings of life stretching and expanding.

I now know what matters more than anything is a sense that you belong, that you are a part of life. You see what I have learnt is that I was not really singing songs of freedom in the past. No they were not songs of freedom, they were songs of escape.

It is the roots of belonging that give me the freedom to stretch out the wings and fly in the wind, free...This is love...

We all belong somewhere, no one exists completely in a vacuum. Even those on the run, as I once was, are on the run from something. Even the loneliest of souls belong to something. Now this may well be our families of birth, our work and or community commitments or friendship circles our social and political networks. Even if you reject all of this you still belong to the community of rejection. We belong to cultures and nations and perhaps social class. We also belong to something more than all these things. We belong to whatever it is that holds and guides us. For me it is the love that I name God, for others it may be something different. We belong to what we experience at the core of life and what that compels us to believe.

One of the many things that makes me smile these days is that even when I believed in nothing I still belonged at least to some degree, even though I really didn’t want to. I belonged to nihilism.

A sense of belonging is a deeply precious thing. It is belonging that helps us become who we are meant to be. It is a sense of being rooted and being held and loved by these roots that allows us to spread our wings and fly free; it is a sense of being rooted that enables us to not fear the wind, but to embrace it and to let ourselves go. When you feel that you do not belong you cannot thrive, you shrivel up and stop living.

Now of course we do not need to belong in exactly the same way; our roots need not, in fact should not, be identical in order for us to belong. Each root has to find its own way into the soil. To truly belong is to be welcomed exactly as you are warts and all and beauty spots too.

How each person finds a sense of belonging may well be different too; people belong in different ways.

Some people find belonging through action; they belong through experiences and challenges. They are the kind of people who live for today, they are impulsive, spontaneous. Such people do not like to feel that they are constrained by their roots and focus more on the wings that can set them free. They need to experience their place of belonging as a play ground. That said they still need their roots that can hold them close even if it’s just within their own hearts and souls.

Some people find their belonging through improvement, whether it’s of themselves or the communities in which they belong. Such people really find their belonging in the future in what might or should be, on what can be built.

Some people belong through finding a sense of meaning. They exist through a sense of openness to possibilities and potentials. I suspect that I’m someone who belongs in this way. They too belong to some degree in the future in what might be in what is yet to come

Some people just need to belong, to be accepted by others. These people often live through the past. They are motivated by the fear of being rejected of being left out. They find their meaning through others. This ought not to be seen negatively, because once such a person feels that sense of belonging it is they who do most of the community building and it is they who enable others to fly free. They are often the foundation on which everything else thrives. They are the nest builders.

I am sure there are other ways in which we find a sense of belonging and most of us are probably a mixture of all these types. Everyone is a complex mixture of needs and wants. That said there is one thing that holds us together, that allows us to thrive as individuals, that is a sense of belonging.

To belong you need to be yourself, while paradoxically in order to be yourself you must first of all feel that you belong.

I love the idea that David Blanchard speaks of that we each have our own song and that we find this song in all aspects of our lives, whether in the seemingly sublime or mundane. He says that “Our songs sing back to us something of our essence, something of our truth, something of our uniqueness. When our songs are sung back to us, it is not about approval, but about recognizing our being and our belonging in the human family”...(he continues)...“They can be heard as songs of love or of longing, songs of encouragement or of comfort, songs of struggle or of security. But most of all, they are the songs of life, giving testimony to what has been, giving praise for all we’re given, giving hope for all we strive for, giving voice to the great mystery that carries each of us in and out of this world.”

He says that it is good to know our own songs and to learn them by heart. This is because there will be days when we do not feel like we belong and we will not perhaps hear life singing our songs back to us. So sometimes we will have to hum our own songs until we find our way back home to that place where we belong.

What are your songs? What is that you sing that makes you feel that you belong? Maybe that’s something to think about. This is something I am asking the congregations I serve to do as we step onwards into 2014. As I do I am reminding them that we don’t necessarily have to sing in unison; as I do I am reminding them that we are free to sing our own songs, but also that we need to sing them together and that sometimes we need others to remind us what are songs are. We all forget our own songs from time to time. We need to hear our songs from the lips of others from time to time, to remind us what our own songs are.

We need to hear every song by the way, not just one or two. Each voice has something to offer; each reveals something of the truth. Sometimes certain voices dominate and to allow this is a mistake. If we don't listen to every voice we will never hear the whole song.

I was chatting with one of my neighbours the other day. She asked how long I had lived in Altrincham. I told her it was nearly three and a half years. We both agreed that it seemed like only yesterday that I moved here. it is hard to believe that I have served the good people of Urmston and Altrincham for three and half years. I have attempted to build on what my predecessors have done to build a free religious community, open to all. I hope that have helped to create a space where those who come feel that they can belong. a place where visitors and those already present can feel loving roots that hold them close so that they can spread their wings and begin to fly free. A place where they can sing their own songs and if they haven’t yet discovered it, a place where they can find their song and take their first tentative steps to begin singing it; a place where they can hear the songs of others and perhaps begin to blend or harmonise with them; a place where we can discover new songs together.

My dream is create communities where the spiritual traveller can rest a while and find sustenance for their journey. My hope is that they find here a place where they belong, where they can can sing their song not only here but out their in the world for all to share and therefore encourage others to join in with them. My dream is to develop a community where all may feel that they belong; a place where the roots will hold us close so that we can begin to spread our wings and begin to fly free.

I will end this little chip of a blog with the following poem on belonging by John O'Donohue.

“For Belonging”

May you listen to your longing to be free.

May the frames of your belonging be generous enough
for your dreams.

My you arise each day with a voice of blessing
whispering in your heart.

May you find a harmony between your soul and

your life.

May the sanctuary of your soul never become haunted.

May you know the eternal longing that lives at the heart of time.

May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.

May you never place walls between the light and yourself.

May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world

to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in

belonging.

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free

Is freedom possible? Do we even know how to be free? Do we even know how it feels to be free?

Life does seem to put limits on our freedom. Society puts constraints on the way we act and communicate with one another. It would seem that there are even limits for the artist, although thank God they are constantly being broken down.

Creativity often flows from coming to terms with life’s challenges and through learning to communicate with a variety of people. For me this is becoming the key to ministry. It has taken me time to develop spiritual intimacy with the communities I serve and to learn how to communicate with the people I share worship with.

Unitarians claim freedom of the pulpit but we don’t have absolute freedom to do whatever we fancy, reason and tolerance are the counter balance to this.  We do need to push boundaries though at times. If our history had not been littered with folk who were prepared to do that then we would not exist today as a free religious community unconstrained by creed and dogma. That said I am not convinced that we enjoy total freedom, societal norms and human expectations constrain everyone at times. And there are positives to this as it gives people stability and a groundedness that any community needs.

I have shared the following story before in a previous blog (This version was written by Rev Darlison). I love it, it speaks powerfully to me. I believe that it is strikingly symbolic of Hindu spirituality.

While travelling alone through some rough terrain, a man called Mitali stayed the night in a wayside inn. Tired from his journey, he went to bed and was on the point of falling asleep when he heard a voice calling, Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free!” from the courtyard below his window.

“Someone must be trapped nearby, “ thought Mitali. “I’ll go see if I can help”

He descended to the courtyard and looked around, but he could see nobody. Thinking he must have imagined the voice, he was about to go back in the room when he heard it again: “Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free!” but it wasn’t coming from a person; it was coming from a parrot sitting in a golden cage.

“How cruel”, thought Mitali. “no bird should be imprisoned like that”. He walked over to the cage and opened the door. “off you go!” he said to the bird. “You can go free now”

The parrot sat on its perch, calling out “Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free”, but it didn’t move. Mitali put his hand in the cage, but the parrot cowered away, all the while calling for freedom but making no move towards the open door.

Gently taking hold of the parrot, Mitali tried to drag it through the caged door, but the parrot resisted mightily, pecking at his would-be liberator’s hand until the blood flowed copiously. Undaunted by the pain, Mitali finally released the bird and threw it up in the air. “Your free now my friend. Go off and enjoy your liberty!” The parrot flew off, and was soon lost to sight in the darkness of the moonless night.

Feeling very pleased with himself, Mitali went to bed. “Captivity is wrong for man or beast,” he thought. “Birds should be free to fly; they shouldn’t be forced to sit in cages for the entertainment of human beings. At least I’ve helped one creature to escape to freedom.”

He slept very soundly that night.

With the dawn he awoke, and he smiled as he remembered his good deed of a few hours before. But then he heard the voice once more. “Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free!” “The parrot hasn’t gone very far,” he thought. “He must have perched on a nearby tree or rock. Perhaps he is sitting on the roof of the inn.”

Mitali went down to the courtyard to have a look. But the parrot wasn’t perched on the roof of the building. Nor was he on a nearby tree, or on a rock. He was back in the cage, shouting for freedom, and the cage door was open.

In many religious traditions the soul is often symbolised by a bird and it’s the same in Hinduism. The Hindu term for what we understand as the soul is the Atman. The Atman refers to the eternal none material aspect of the self. It never changes and is distinct from the mind and body. This real self is beyond the temporary characteristics of race, gender and even species. Ideas about reincarnation are natural extension of this concept. For Hindu’s consciousness, in whatever way it may manifest, is merely a symptom of the soul. Therefore for the physical life to have awareness it requires the soul.

The story of the caged parrot is symbolic of the soul becoming trapped by the body and or the mind, it is crying out to be set free. It is offered freedom but fights against it. Finally it is set free, but does not like or want this freedom and therefore returns to the cage, crying out for freedom “Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free”

As Rousseau said “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”.

How can we free the soul? How do we attain this freedom? How do we set the soul free? How do we truly live as ourselves amongst others and with others? How do we escape the chains that bind us? How do we leave the cage behind? What can we do to stop ourselves from opening the cage door, climb back in, sit on the perch and squawk “freedom, freedom, I want to be free” How can spiritual freedom be attained?

For me the key to spiritual freedom has to be self transcendence. In my experience it is through self sacrifice that we truly find ourselves and we set our souls, minds and bodies free to live as we were born to live. This seems to go against the grain of much 21^st century thinking which seems to be all about me feeling good about me, right now. More, more, more, now, now, now!

The Rev Alex Bradley, the principle at Unitarian College Manchester, where I trained for the ministry suggests:

“People sacrifice themselves to others in various ways. In doing so, they find themselves. They give themselves in the lives they lead. They may be seemingly ordinary nameless people or ones whose names live on. Margeret Barr in lifelong self service, James Reeb in prophetic witness at the cost of his life. Real freedom is lived in relation to others: real freedom is found in community.

Real freedom is about choice, and sometimes it is found through the narrow gate. It is found in the true self and it is found in self denial. Jesus spoke of the kingdom as a great feast for all. He also said that those seeking to save their lives would lose them, and those who lost their lives would find them.

Here is the spiritual paradox that all the great faiths have taught. Here I believe is real freedom.”

Alex makes a very powerful point. Through self sacrifice, in community, the true self is revealed and we are set free from the cage, we stop squawking about freedom and begin to actually enjoy it.

The great twentieth century Hindu Gandhi saw Jesus as the great example of this. He held him up as the ideal Satyagraha, which is resistance to evil through soul force. Gandhi, a Hindu, studied the Bible everyday for years and was greatly impressed with the New Testament particularly “The sermon on the Mount”. Like many Hindu’s it was the gentle figure of Jesus that he admired, who taught his followers not to retaliate and to resist violence. For him it was not the historical event of Jesus that mattered, but what the example of the message of his life had to offer humanity.  For Gandhi Christ exemplified what it meant to serve your fellow humans and saw this as the guiding principle of his life. He saw the cross as being the perfect example of this sacrifice. He saw the cross as the perfect metaphor of self transcendence.

 

So is self transcendence the key to freedom? There are those who will say no to this and cry out “If I lose myself what will be left?”

Well self transcendence is not about destruction of “self” it is actually about the discovery of the “real self”. It is the key to “real freedom”. It is not a new idea and is a message found at the root of the great religious traditions, theistic and non-theistic. I like to call it the "Diamond principle". Through self transcendence our “real” nature is fully revealed; the “Great Reality”, deep down within every man, woman and child and all life for that matter. Some call this the “Cosmic Christ” or “Cosmic God”, what Matthew Fox has named as the “I am” in everything. It is a faith based on change, dare I say transformation, because this “I am” can reshape matter for ever. It is a change that is brought on by the spiritual activity of self giving love.

Self transcendence is “really” about delighting in our very being, by understanding that we exist beyond the confines of ourselves. Keith Ward has described it as “Non – egoist delight in being” Karen Armstrong suggests “For human beings transcendence is part of our experience of the world”. It not only changes how we are as individuals but how we relate to the world. It opens our eyes to a far more universal perspective. It enables us to see the world through the eyes of others and not just from our own narrow perspectives. This breeds compassion and leads to a “real freedom” that transforms the world for ever.

To be really free requires courage. It requires us to speak and be our truth and to do so in love. We need not be afraid to express who we are and where we are coming from; we need not be stifled by the fear of what others may or may not think of us. Freedom is not something to merely talk about as an abstract concept but something to be experienced and expressed, but I don’t believe that happens in isolation. It happens when we come together and meet and give of ourselves to each other. You see by dancing our dance and showing others they can do likewise, we encourage one another to know how it feels to be free.

It is no good merely squawking about freedom, “Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free” We need to show the world what it means to know how it feels to be free.