Address - Ullet Road 3 Sep 06
A long time ago - when I was in the halcyon days of my youth - and life seemed so easy, I went to live in London.
I didn’t know anyone but it was easy to get a job and it was easy to find a bed sit to live in. I found a bed sit in Clerkenwell, near to the city - it was in the the Priory Temperance Hotel - (it used to be a hotel) but you were never searched on the way in. though they wouldn’t let me have a front door key until I had been there three months. The door was opened by the owner who lived on the first floor and he used a contraption of chains and pulleys to operate the door handle to save himself coming downstairs.
I found a job nearby with a company who made corned beef and operated a meat importing business through Smithfield Market. My job was to track shipments of meat that were arriving by sea or which had got lost in transit by rail. Whole wagons used to go missing -they had mostly ended up shunted into sidings at West Drayton or Crewe. There was a whole industry involved in looking for things that were lost in the railway system.
I had to admit that I felt lost myself down there in the smoke. People were just not as friendly as I was used to - talk to someone in the pub and they thought you were trying to pick them up or something - everyone at work rushed home at the end of the day - most computer journeys into and out of London took an hour each way.
I would wander back to the Priory Temperance Hotel and wait for the clanking chain to open the door - and then sit in my bed sit with the usual tea of beans on toast - and wonder if there shouldn’t be more to life than this.
I failed to qualify for a key to the Priory Temperance Hotel and moved to Kilburn and for a bit of variety used to get off the underground at Euston and walk down to Smithfield. It was fresh air twice a day.
If I took a short cut from Euston to Russell Square, I went down Duke Street - and there tucked away was an army drill hall - a TA centre. Now I was used to the army and hadn’t long been out of it - so one day called in to see what was on offer.
Of course you can join, they said - but you will have to shave that beard off and you will have to prove that you are good enough for us. The shaving bit was easy but for all my soldierly skills, I had to go through the whole of their training programme before they would accept me.
But I loved it. I was back amongst like minded people (they did exist in London after all) and a whole new life of friendship and activity opened up for me. With them I always felt a somebody. I stayed a few years but eventually moved out of London. I kept in touch with the Regiment though and have given much more time to them recently through the Regimental Association.
Last month, in their magazine, there was an article about the rugby team which I played for in 1963 - and a photograph - with some of the names of the players under it - opposite my picture, it said ‘unknown’.
‘Unknown!!’ I don't like being unknown! At least I can do something about it - I can write to the letters page and tell them who I am.
But it took me back to those days of wandering home to the Priory Temperance Hotel and the clanking door opening but there being no one there.
Do you remember the words of a Bob Dylan song - ‘’How does it feel to be on your own -Like a rolling stone?’
It is against human nature to be on your own. Only a few go for it willingly - most want to be part of something - want to belong - want to be known for who they are - want to be known!
My TA Regiment was different from the regular army. The regular army put the fighting unit before anything else. You were a soldier first - a personality second. The colours, the uniform, the badges - were what identified us - and we were a family. Everybody became a somebody but really we were all the same - soldiers.
Many religions - perhaps particularly the Christian religion like to think of the followers as soldiers - united by the cross. There are so many hymns with themes of fighting and war - Onward Christian soldiers, Fight the Good fight.
Belong to an army and accept its discipline and accept its orders. There are Christian groups and sects that insist on obedience from their members - and we wonder what happened to that early religion which was supposed to be personal.
The Old Testament begins with the creation of the human race but it ends with the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem.
Most of the population of Jerusalem had been carried off into slavery by the two invasions - of the Persians and the Assyrians.
Israel was in danger of losing its identity. How could the leaders of the exiled people prevent the people - the whole nation and its religion from becoming ‘unknown’?
They did it really by recreating their religion - making it fit the new circumstances. They emphasised the supremacy of their God over all the local Gods. The God of the Israelites was the invisible presence that supported them all so long as they obeyed the rules of the religion.
In exile the people were urged to carry God in their heads and in their hearts. They were also given a dream - that of Jerusalem, the holy city. They were given the dream of rebuilding its great temple and restoring God’s presence in it - and they were given the dream of a saviour - a Messiah who would save them and there would never be conquest and exile ever again. They were made to feel special and members of a chosen race.
They were not nobodies and they were not unknown - because they were known to their God.
And if you think about the teachings of St Paul in the New Testament, he took the teachings of what was originally a small Jewish sect who were followers of Jesus and went global with it - as we would say now.
Jesus the teacher is transformed into Christ the God. The new religion was not about following the teaching of Jesus but about being transformed by the salvation from sin effected by the risen Christ.
His new faith was for everyone - not just the Jews, not just the slaves, not just the Greeks - but everyone. The laws of the Israelites are superseded by Christ he said. The religions of the Greeks are proved inferior.
The teachings are Paul's and are based on his letters to the churches he founded on his travels.
To belong to this new church, the people had to accept Christ as Lord and each other as members of one community. All Christians were somebody's in a world which did not value individuals.
Paul did expect the world to end shortly and Christ to return to sort out the wicked from the good.
It never happened. The Roman Emperor took over Christianity and modelled it on his empire - with Bishops, obedience and discipline. And that is how the Christian church still operates - with only a few exceptions.
And we of course are exceptions - the Unitarians. We are a strange lot, a religious anomaly.
We have no God - well, not one that all can believe in. We have no prophets. We have no single book of teachings and sayings that all accept unconditionally. We have no common cause - like the Quakers who all stand for ‘Peace’. We have no leader. We have no leaders that speak for all of us.
All we have are some local leaders who sometimes speak for some of us.
Is it any wonder that often we are ‘unknown’?
What do we have - that makes us a religion? That makes us more than ‘unknown’.
I think it begins in our small communities - our churches and fellowships and the unitarian societies that lie across them.
We are small communities of individuals who do not want too belong to an army but do each have a belief in that something out there which is called spiritual. It is that spiritual something which gives us grace; that gives us ideals and values and a personal code to live by.
It is a spiritual something which inspires to help our neighbours and care for the world we live in.
This small community attracts like minded people who share similar values. and who also need to be known.
Our strengths are that we care for one another; we care for our little community; we are like minded people with spiritual values.
As long as we do that, we are not lonely and we are not unknown. If we live the whole of our lives by the values in our community, we shall atract like minded people to us and many an unknown may be glad of it and become a somebody after all.
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