I found myself in a bookshop recently looking at the books on a display counter near the door. I can never resist these ‘self-help’ books that you see in such places. I suppose I’m always on the lookout for tips on how best to live my life – you never know when I might come across some words of wisdom that might strike a chord or even prove to be of significant practical use in my day to day approach to things.
On this occasion I picked up a book more or less at random –I’m afraid I can remember neither the title nor the name of the author – and it proved to be accessible and interesting. It was composed of a series of wisdom-pieces, if you like to call them that, gleaned presumably from the author’s experience and reflection, and a double-page spread was given to each one. Perfect for thumbing through, and while I disagreed with several points there were a number that seemed to me to offer genuinely good advice.
One of the pages was about religious belief, and the argument was that people who have a belief system succeed rather better in life than those who don’t. Success as described here didn’t mean wealth or status– it meant reaching one’s inner potential, accessing and valuing the things in life that money can’t buy such as friendship, the ability to reflect and appreciate, the capacity for enjoyment, the honing of coping skills and the maintenance of self-esteem and general equilibrium in the ups and downs of life.
The author made no attempt to evaluate different belief systems. All he was saying was that someone who has a belief system manages his or her life better than someone who doesn’t. He did make the obvious caveat that the belief system has to be one that does no harm to anyone else – but beyond that he didn’t go into the merits or demerits of different ones. In fact he specifically said that, for the purposes of the point he was making, it didn’t matter which system you opted for. His message was that it’s just better for the individual to have a belief system than not to have one.
I found this interesting, and while I was standing there considering it, I began to wonder, if this is the case, then where does it leave us Unitarians? Unitarianism doesn’t offer a belief system. Almost all other religions are held together by codes of belief, by doctrines and dogmas that can be, and have been, written down and passed on from one generation to another for centuries, and which provide a systematic framework that offers reassurance and support to all those who subscribe to it.
Unitarianism is quite the opposite and has no such system. The question: ‘what do Unitarians believe?’ has no answer, because Unitarianism rejects any form of prescribed beliefs. On the contrary, the bond that unites a Unitarian community is the tacit agreement that every individual has the right, indeed the duty, of forging his or her own beliefs. In times past this was difficult if not impossible for orthodox communities to accept and many dissenting individuals suffered dearly, some with their life or with imprisonment or torture. Nowadays there is no overt penalty for being a Unitarian, although it can raise a few eyebrows if you say in the company of church-going members of orthodox denominations that you do not believe in a personal God, or the Trinity, or the divinity of Jesus, and it can lead, and indeed has led, to ostracism of the denomination by other Christian denominations. Within the Unitarian community there isn’t a problem. As Bill Darlison said of us once: ‘we all believe different things and it doesn’t seem to matter’.
But, as I stood in the bookshop, I began to wonder if, from the perspective of the individual, it does matter? By insisting on the importance of individual beliefs are we Unitarians shooting ourselves in the foot? Does the absence of a set belief system deprive us of security, of a sense of trust in the ultimate goodness of the universe, and so on? Are we putting ourselves at a disadvantage in the great stakes of life?
The answer to this question would seem to me to depend on each of us individually. If we claim the right to forge our individual belief system, then it is our responsibility to do just that, to do a bit of forging. It isn’t good enough, it seems to me, to sit back comfortably in a Unitarian congregation, free at last from all those imposed beliefs that we can’t accept, and decide that we have nothing further to do. I think we need to take a positive, pro-active role, not just by supporting the community in every way that we can so as to ensure its survival, but by undertaking a private and personal spiritual exploration, so as to discover where we stand on the paths we are all following. If we can ascertain what it is that nourishes us, and give space and value to that in our lives, then it would seem to me that we are establishing our own belief system in a way that strengthens the framework we need to uphold us in our journey. Jolted by this chance encounter with an - arguably - slightly superficial book, I decided that the price we pay for rejecting belief systems that other people have forged is the responsibility of working at our own.
Only each one of us can construct our belief system for ourselves, and it can seem a very solitary process. Ploughing one’s own religious furrow can be a lonely undertaking. But if you choose to embark on this task a Unitarian congregation will give you a safe space in which to do it. You will be surrounded by people who are all engaged with much the same thing and in much the same way, though each will be at a different stage of exploration and will have come from a different starting point. Progress can be jerky, and it doesn’t always follow a straight line. Thomas More, the contemporary writer and philosopher, suggests in fact that spiritual journeys, like people’s lives, follow musical patterns rather than a single linear progression, and have their own harmonies, discords, major and minor keys and recurring theme tunes.
Many of you will already be embarked on such a journey. Many of you may have deeply held beliefs that you have assembled over the years and which have stood the test of time. I would not wish to challenge any of this. I would merely suggest that the commitment of being a Unitarian is an ongoing one, that our very freedom from set beliefs can induce muddled or lazy thinking, and that to counteract this it can be helpful, from time to time, to examine where we find ourselves in the belief stakes. I suggest that some of us, myself included, may find it helpful to look positively at the formation of our individual belief system, not to regard it just as a demolition of orthodoxy, but to build it constructively with care and resolve and to test it constantly against experience.
There was a letter written to The Inquirer some years ago, by a Unitarian, describing this internal exploration process as it was for her. She said that on Monday she was a Hindu, on Tuesday a Buddhist, on Wednesday a Christian, and on Thursday, Friday Saturday and Sunday something else again. While I have a certain amount of sympathy with this approach it does seem to swing wildly from one compass point to another, and, although undeniably interesting, suggests a certain lack of focus and you could end up not knowing where you were. But the writer may not have meant us to take her too seriously and she did have a point in that all the belief systems she mentioned had something valid to offer her and she felt justified in turning to each of them in turn.
You could describe her solution as a rainbow coalition of beliefs. To describe anything as a rainbow coalition is usually taken to be dismissive, to describe something that has no centre or focus. But think for a moment what a rainbow actually is. It’s made up of particles of light, all of which come from the same source, sunlight, which is the source of all the colour in the world. If you pass a beam of sunlight through a glass prism, the light is broken up into its component colours, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Each colour is beautiful, and separated in such a way exists in its own right, but each is also only a component of the whole. When you pass your rainbow back through another prism the colours will merge together again and blend back into white light. So, for the purposes of this address, and to give you an example of what I mean, I decided I would have a critical and hopefully constructive look at my own belief system and pass it through just such a prism in order to have a look at the colours in my personal religious rainbow.
The first colour in the spectrum is red. Red is one of the three primary colours, and it is strong and vibrant. So it goes to the heart of the matter and represents the key component in my belief system – my concept of the existence of God. If you were to ask me whether or not I believe in God I would have to answer with another question: ‘what do you mean by God?’ If you mean an external being, I would have to answer no. I am unable to believe in an external all-powerful all-loving deity who intervenes – or not – in our lives and who, if we approach him correctly will, against all the evidence and against all the odds, somehow come to our rescue and put everything to rights in the end. Does this make me an atheist? Perhaps it does. If it does, so be it. But then again, perhaps it doesn’t.
I would suggest a parallel way of looking at this. Most people would say that they believe in beauty, and most people would agree that there is such a thing as beauty. Different cultures and different individuals have different ideas of beauty and different responses to it, and so we have come to say that beauty exists in the eye of the beholder. Could not the same apply to God? Could not God be said to exist in the eye of the mind? The English poet William Blake said that all the gods and all the devils of this world reside within the human breast. I’d buy that. My belief is that God exists as we form him, or her, or it, in our own image, and this is what cultures and civilizations have done since the beginning of time. In my view this theory does nothing to invalidate the existence of God. You may think I am squaring the circle here, but this is my belief and this concept underpins my faith.
The colour after red is orange. Think orange, think of the saffron robes worn by Tibetan and Burmese Buddhist monks. Orange represents the Buddhist element in my belief system. I could never become a fully-fledged Buddhist, for one thing I doubt if it’s possible to transplant oneself satisfactorily from one culture to another, and for another I know I wouldn’t have the self-discipline to follow the sevenfold path, or indeed the desire or the ability to practise the required detachment from the things of this world. But there are aspects of Buddhism that appeal to me greatly. Its quietness. Its meditative practices. Its deep respect for life in all its forms. Its emphasis on mindfulness, that is, completely focusing on the ‘now’, and cultivating the ability to live fully and completely in the moment. Sometimes indeed I think that if everyone in the world were Buddhists the world would be a better place, and you can’t say more for a religion that that. I think, too, of the words of the Dalai Lama when he said ‘My religion is kindness’. Just that. So simple, so all encompassing, and so impressive.
Orange blends into yellow. From Buddhism it’s a side step to Taoism, or Daoism, that philosophy which originated and developed in China during the fourth and third century BC and indeed was one of the big influences on Buddhism. It’s the completeness or wholeness of Daoism that resonates with me. Its symbol is a circle, the t’ai-chi, divided in half by a line that is not a straight diameter but has a double curve, which serves to separate each aspect of life from its complementary opposite. As I see it, the western view that opposites are necessarily in disagreement with each other and that the only possible outcome is conflict, leading to victory for one and defeat for the other, is pernicious, and everything in me rejects it totally. The Daoist view, that opposites are complementary, and an intrinsic and necessary part of the greater whole, seems to me to be infinitely wise, and resonates with me to such an extent that it seems to me that if there is such a thing as absolute truth, then this is it. This is part not just of my religious belief but of my entire world view, and colours how I look at everything there is.
Yellow merges into green. This one’s obvious. Green represents the earth and the natural world. I don’t know that I would describe myself as a pagan – though in fact that word originally meant only country dweller, just as heathen meant heath dweller. Both of those by implication rejected orthodoxy, so though I dwell neither in the country nor on the heath perhaps I qualify for the title in part. Be that as it may, the natural world has monumental importance for me; I feel ever more deeply rooted in it, and, increasingly, I find myself aware of and responding to its rhythms and cycles – the months, the seasons, the endless passage of the earth around the sun. The influences of weather, climate, atmosphere, seem to me to be critically important forces in all our lives, as is the relationship of landscape to the culture that formed us both on a societal and individual level. The cycle of growth, decay and death, followed by new growth, seem to me to be a more than convincing explanation of human passage through life. Nature holds such wonders – and offers them on a daily basis – that I feel I have no need to go looking for supernatural ones.
Blue comes next. Blue, perhaps because it is the colour traditionally used by artists for Mary’s cloak, represents Christianity. I was brought up in the Christian tradition and have been nourished all my life by the culture that it has inspired. I may, and I do, reject the orthodox doctrines that have straightjacketed it, but I could never relinquish the cultural inheritance that it has bequeathed to me – the Christianity-inspired stories, myths, poetry, art and music. The drama of the Christian story as it unfolds in the Gospels has a grip on my imagination that can never be released, and I continue to be endlessly fascinated by its central figure - that elusive, enigmatic, uncompromising preacher and healer who strode through the desert landscape two thousand years ago, turning received wisdom on its head and challenging his listeners to respond to parable and paradox in a way no one had ever done before.
The Christian message is ‘Love your neighbour’, and thus the blue of Christianity passes seamlessly into the deeper darker blue, the indigo, of humanism. We all contribute to, and are endlessly supported by, the human networks that surround us – family, friends, neighbours, wider communities, to whom we turn when in distress of body or mind just as – hopefully – they turn to us. A trouble shared may not be a trouble halved, but it is certainly reduced to more manageable proportions. And a joy shared with the right person can, as we all know, be a joy doubled. And as well as the individuals who are known to us, there is an extended human community whose experience is available to us and who can enrich our lives immeasurably – I speak of the writers, artists and musicians who have been here before us, experienced much the same things as we are experiencing now, and in an amazing and life-enhancing way can reach out across the years or the centuries and touch us closely. Such encounters – on whatever level they take place, whether intellectual, emotional or experiential - are powerful experiences, and, personally speaking, drawing deeply on sources as diverse as Mozart and Samuel Becket, Shakespeare and Jane Austen, I have found them to be more illuminating, more stabilizing and more reassuring than almost anything else life can offer.
My religious rainbow is nearly complete and there is only one colour left. Violet. Violet, perhaps because of the title of a book I once read (The Crown of Violet, by Geoffrey Trease, which was set in Athens), belongs to Greece, and so I feel it is appropriate to select as the final component of my sevenfold religious belief system the pantheon of the Greek gods. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I ‘believe’ in those twelve quarrelsome impulsive headstrong mythological deities who live on the twelve peaks of Mount Olympus in northern Greece. But, really, they do seem to me to offer as credible an explanation of the way the world works as any other. Motivated by irrational whims and jealousies, they interfere in human affairs, favouring some mortals and causing chaos to the lives of others. I have increasingly come to feel that they provide a surprisingly realistic rationale of a world where events happen randomly, inconsistently, and inexplicably. They also fulfill another deeper function. The Greek myths, centred on the stories about the gods, offer profound interpretations of universal human experience, and give insights into the human psyche that we do well to heed.
Finally I take these seven colours, pass them back through a prism and watch them revert to white light. This is where we started. This light is of course is my personal Unitarian faith that I have forged from the influences, experiences and insights that have resonated most deeply with me throughout my life. I wish you well with your explorations and your searching.

Jennifer Flegg
Cork, 11th May, 2008.
Dublin, 17th August, 2008.