When it was decided that I should take the service today I didn’t really have a subject to talk about in the address. But Paul solved the problem for me. In the September issue of Oscailt he gave the title of my address as ‘Unitarianism’ – no doubt thinking that it would be an appropriate topic in view of the fact that yesterday’s highly successful Open Day and last week’s splendid article in the Irish Times Magazine would generate some interest, and there might be newcomers in the church this morning eager to find out what Unitarianism is all about.
I agree with Paul. It is an appropriate topic. Even if there were no newcomers it is not a bad idea to remind the regulars about what this religious movement stands for. But there’s a problem. Where does one begin? The subject is vast. Should I talk about it historically, tracing Unitarianism’s development from the time of the Reformation to today, paying particular attention to its changing fortunes here in Ireland, and especially here in Dublin, where, some of you may be surprised to learn, it has been around in one form or another for three centuries? I decided against this approach, principally because I believe that the Unitarian spirit began a long time before the Reformation – even, strangely, a long time before Christianity. It started with the first person who said, ‘I want to think for myself,’ and that makes a historical synopsis even more complicated and even more daunting.
Perhaps I should talk about the great thinkers who have graced our movement down the centuries: poets like John Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sylvia Plath, and e.e. cummings; philosophers like John Locke and Ralph Waldo Emerson; scientists like Isaac Newton and Joseph Priestley; novelists like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Kurt Vonnegut. Then there are the celebrities like Paul Newman and the late Christopher Reeve of Superman fame. And maybe I should throw in the creator of the Simpsons, Matt Groening, and the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners Lee, just to show that we are not a spent force and that we still have some influence in the modern world. But I decided against this approach too. We really shouldn’t show off!
Maybe it would be a good idea to consider Unitarian theology by looking at our stained glass windows and at Paddy McElroy’s wonderful sculpture. How the north window shows that Jesus is in the centre but that he stands no higher than those who flank him, showing that, while we honour Jesus as a teacher, we do not worship him as a god. And Paddy’s sculpture shows the symbols of the major world faiths, indicating that we take our spiritual nourishment where we can find it, and that we don’t restrict ourselves to the Christian tradition, but take in the insights of all religious traditions as well as those of science.
But to talk about theology might give people the impression that we Unitarians share a common theology and to do that would be a mistake. We are very diverse in our theological views and, what’s more, it doesn’t seem to matter – we get along with each other just fine, probably because theological agreement and theological consistency are not top of our agenda, and we recognise that sincere people can come to sincerely different conclusions about theological matters. Uniquely among western religions, theology takes a secondary role with us.
And then I thought that maybe I could consider the role that Unitarians have played in the social and political spheres, how five American presidents were Unitarians, and how Unitarians have been at the forefront of the great movements of liberation and reform – the abolition of slavery, female emancipation – one of the pioneer feminists Mary Wollstencraft (the mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein) was a member of the Newington Green church in London, where our own Cathal Courtney is minister now) – and in more recent times, gay and lesbian rights. But, important though these things are, to dwell upon them might give the impression that we are not a religious movement at all, but a group of social activists and again, this would be to give an unbalanced picture.
The trouble with all these approaches is that they tend to encourage us to think that we stand at the end of a long and illustrious tradition, lamenting former glories. But I don’t like us to think of ourselves as being at the end of anything. We owe a great debt to the past, of that there is no doubt, but we stand at the beginning of something – a new way of being religious – a comprehensive, inclusive, person-centred, holistic, intellectually coherent way of being religious which the modern world needs so desperately that it would not be an exaggeration to say that without it we are doomed. In the Gospel of Matthew we read that the wise scribe takes from his store things that are old and things that are new. Religion – including Unitarianism – has tended to dwell on the old, looking backwards, revering dusty old tomes and mythological figures: now the time has come to look forward, conscious, as the American writer Annie Dillard has said, that the spirit of God is living in the present, that ‘there is no less holiness at this time than there was the day the Red Sea parted.....There is no whit less might in heaven and earth than there was the day Jesus said ‘Maid arise’ to Jairus’s daughter, or the day that Peter walked on water, or the night that Muhammed flew to heaven on a horse.....Each and every day the divine voice issues from Sinai, says the Talmud.’ ‘God is, not was’, says the great Unitarian philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. ‘God is the God of the living, not the dead,’ says Jesus.
Two recent articles in the British press underlined for me the uniquely valuable approach to religion that we Unitarians have. Neither of them mentions Unitarianism by name, but both of them suggest that an open, tolerant, and responsive religious movement such as ours could be an enormous force for good in the modern world.
The first appeared in last Monday’s Guardian and was written by Roy Hattersley, who, you may remember, used to be deputy leader of the British Labour Party under Neil Kinnock. Roy Hattersley rarely misses an opportunity to declare himself an atheist, and so I was surprised to find that in this particular article he was paying tribute to religion, and to the Salvation Army in particular. ‘The Salvation Army,’ he writes, ‘has been given special status as provider-in-chief of American disaster relief. But its work is being augmented by all sorts of other groups. Almost all of them have a religious origin and character. Notable by their absence are teams from rationalist societies, free thinkers’ clubs and atheists associations – the sort of people who not only scoff at religion’s intellectual absurdity but also regard it as a positive force for evil.’
Who can doubt the truth of what Hattersely says? My heart has been warmed over the years to see young Catholic women working on the front line whenever there has been a disaster or a famine. Mother Teresa and her nuns have inspired us all. The people who take blankets and food to the homeless throughout the major cities of the world are, almost invariably, from religious organisations. There are many reasons why this is so, but one of them is surely that, in their highest manifestations, religions teach that every human being is intrinsically valuable. The problem is that, along with this, they often teach some incredible and at times ludicrous and offensive dogmas which prevent people like Roy Hattersley from getting involved. But we have none of that dogmatic baggage and so we are uniquely placed to foster the humanitarian impulse, that sense of solidarity and unity, without which our societies are destined to fragment into isolated and defensive pockets of self-interest and greed. We can – and must – become a strong and vital force for unity in our world. In the past Unitarians were people who stressed the unity of God. In the future we must become people who stress and celebrate the unity of the human race.
The second article was by Karen Armstrong, who used to be a Roman Catholic nun, but who left the convent to become a writer and a journalist. She left the Catholic Church, too, and although she now belongs to no particular religious organisation, she has strong religious sympathies, and she recognises the central role religion has had – and still has – in promoting a healthy relationship between human beings and the natural world. ‘In the ancient world,’ she writes, ‘religion helped people to develop a holistic vision....Gods, humans, animals, plants and other natural phenomena all participated in the same divine life; all were subject to an overarching order that kept everything in being and shared the same predicament. Even the gods had to obey this order and work with humans to preserve the cosmic energies which were not inexhaustible and, if not replenished, could easily lapse into primal chaos. Humans offered sacrifices to recycle the energies that these deities expended in maintaining the order of the universe.’
All very primitive, no doubt, but it did give people what we seem to be in danger of losing:
1. an awareness that all of us, without exception, are in the same boat, and to destroy or maim a part endangers the whole;
2. an awareness that everyone is equally vulnerable;
3. an awareness that everyone is responsible for the cosmos and has to do his or her bit;
4. an awareness that the natural world is not just a resource to be exploited, it is sacred;
5. the conviction that human behaviour could affect the environment for good or ill, and that a society that does not respect the natural rhythms of the cosmos cannot survive.
In the past these things were inculcated powerfully by means of religious rituals; nowadays they are merely talked about as intellectual conundrums which we hope ‘they’ i.e. governments, will solve. But Karen Armstrong ends her article with a stark reminder that if we want to save our planet we must promote this sense of the interdependent web of existence by developing contemporary religious rituals which have the same power over the intellect and the imagination that the religions of the past exerted over our ancestors. This, not argument over the niceties of dogma, is the challenge to a religious movement such as ours which is not shackled by divisive and anachronistic attitudes and ceremonies.
What form these religious rituals might take, who would perform them, and where they would take place, I genuinely have no idea. This is where we need to pool our expertise, to make experiments, to make mistakes, but we can do it because we are a religious movement that is in a constant process of formation, perpetually opening itself to the influence of the spirit and the needs of the community.
So, we are on the threshold of something new, but one thing at least unites us with those who came before us. Unitarian throughout the ages have been people who have never been afraid to ask the question, ‘Why?’ We ask the big ‘why’ questions – Why does the world exist? Why do I exist? questions which we can never answer definitively, but which we keep on asking because it is human to ask them. And then there are those ‘why’ questions about which we can come to firmer conclusions – Why are people starving in a world of plenty? Why are people unhappy even though they are healthy and prosperous? And our aim, in so far as we have one aim, is not to convert people to any particular religious dogma, but, in the words of Helvecio Mendes which we heard earlier,
to wake up in the morning and hear
Everybody shouting
Why? Why? Why?
.....because until everybody does, the world will continue to be a very precarious place.

Bill Darlison 18th September 2005
Dublin Unitarian Church