So another year starts.    I found it difficult to be swayed by all the new year celebrations this year.   The fireworks seemed a wasteful extravagance.   World leaders proclaimed messages not of optimism but of pessimism.     Money spent on the olympics and the Queens Jubilee are at the expense of vital services such as police and coast guards.     People are paying a high price for the extravagances to come - workers  paying with their jobs and the disabled paying with their care and the sick paying with closed hospital beds.  Savers paying with low interest rates.    The elderly paying with closed day centres.      The world is unequal.   Never been more unequal.   The gap between rich and poor never been greater - and that,  according to the author of the book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson, is the cause of it all.
I went to a talk he gave to the Greater Manchester Interfaith Forum and all the statistics he showed seemed to prove his point - the countries with the greatest gap have the most social and health problems - USA, Britain in the lead.   The countries with the smallest gap - Sweden, Japan have greater levels of personal happiness and less mental health problems.
So I started off the year on a bad note but what I forgot to do was to think about myself.   I have to live the coming year in this sea of pessimism.   I have to find a way of keeping going when it seems the country is slowly coming to rest and the engine is broken down.
I need a new years resolution that will see me through and keep me afloat -   I must cling to the values that I try to live by (not always successfully in the past - and probably there will be slip ups on the way).   I will not tread on the heads of others to keep myself afloat - we will all float together.    I will help others where I am able.
For the coming year I am going to be an unreasonable optimist and I am going to change the world for the better - not by meeting Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkosi - but by doing so in my own small world.
Yes I am going to protest about inequalities.   I am going to sign petitions.   I will give David Crausby MP a letter or two and try and persuade him to sign early day motions that will make things better for the people who need help and to stop helping the people who don’t need help.
I am also going to emphasise more the fact that I am a Unitarian.      Before Christmas I was talking to a friend who belongs to a congregation in Scotland.    She was disappointed in her congregation.   She had been the secretary for years but had given it all up - because she felt belonging to the church just frustrated her.     She said, I want to belong to a church that is doing something.   I want to belong to a church that stands for something.   A church that appeals to the movers and shakers.    I want to belong to a church where people outside say I want to be part of what that church is doing and what that church stands for - she was saying.    Don’t rely on the church I said to her - do it for yourself
Her frustration is felt by many Unitarians - because Unitarians do not have a label - say like the Quakers - Quakers stand for peace.  We all know that.   Church of England stands for solidity and civic stability -   and so do the other Christian denominations.   Methodists sing and Baptists pray, I  was told once.     Michael Cooke is a Roman Catholic Priest who sits on the Board of the Bolton Interfaith Council.  He  is a good friend and we often share banter about our different faiths.    He can end a talk by saying, ‘Well Tony is a Unitarian.   They don’t know what they believe!’    He always tells me that the Roman Catholic Church offers is certainty.     They tell you what Christianity is and you believe it and you accept it.
It can be very comforting to have an unquestioning certain faith.    It can be very comforting to have rules and boundaries.   Life is made more straightforward.    Unitarians long ago crossed those boundaries and abandoned those rules - and they have ended up in the land of uncertainty.    Maybe they have forgotten why they crossed those boundaries and why they abandoned those rules.
Nowadays we call ourselves pilgrims but we are not going to any place in particular.   We are milling about in the wastelands of faith - we are looking for something that seems elusive.     We pray to a God we no longer understand and care not to mention too often.  
We have an organisation that no one takes too much notice of.        They do not try to give direction or leadership but they do try very hard to discuss why we are in this wilderness and why no one is coming out to join us.     What we don’t do is tell anyone that we exist.   Lone pilgrims in the same wilderness usually find us by accident
I suppose we are like the Israelites without Moses and without a promised land.
But I can live with all this.    I can live with the uncertainty of faith - because it makes me always think about what I believe in.   I say to Michael Cooke that my uncertain faith is a dynamic faith.     My faith lives in the present day and faces the challenges of the present day.
My faith is not tied to any belief system.  My faith is not restricted by any rules and conventions.
Perhaps I am more aware of my faith because I have to write about it so often - sermons, prayers, articles for newsletters etc.
I came to the conclusion recently that I waste my time trying to understand God.    None of the definitions work properly - The God of the Old Testament is not my God - not for me fear and punishment and indiscriminate favours -  though I love the stories of the Old Testament.  I see the Old Testament as a great epic poem telling about the frailties of human beings who try to be good and mostly fail.   I particularly like the stories about Jacob - to me he is the anti hero.    Why is he so often blessed when most of his adventures involve cheating and skullduggery ?   But they make us think, these stories and they make us judge ourselves.
I prefer the God of the New Testament.     Jesus prays but what does he receive? - neither favours nor punishment.   God seems to be the voice behind the screen who never answers - but we need to speak and we need to pray - and when we do somehow we find the answer in ourselves and we find the strength in ourselves.   God has given nothing but somehow we have been given everything.
I have wasted my time as well trying to follow the arguments about Jesus - was he man, was he god?   Was he Christ?  Was he real?      It doesn’t matter because all those arguments distract from the stories about him and his teachings - about taking everyone on equal terms no matter whether they are man or woman, leper or Samaritan, Tax gatherer or Centurion.    It was about being filled with the light of love - love for others and above all else the light of love for yourself.     Being above self doubt.    It is a good new year resolution just to read the sermon on the mount and try to follow what it says.    It is also about taking time apart to go and pray.
What keeps the Unitarians together as they wander in the wilderness - without a common faith?       Three things I feel.    First they are social people - they like to be with like minded people, they enjoy one another’s company, they like to belong to their building; Second they are people with values - values about fairness and justice and the rights of people to do what they want (as long as it is not harming others) and thirdly they are people  who seek a spiritual connection to what is divine or other worldly or what is above the simple values of every day.   The spiritual world where God is and angels are.
That world is all around us.   We live in it.      Sometimes we connect to it and sometimes we don’t.     I think there are gateways to it.   Like Jacob’s Ladder suddenly descending from Heaven.Fr Michael will say his church is the only gateway.   I would say that all churches and all faiths are gateways to it - the connection can be found in any of them sometimes.    And often we find the gateway opens up when we are alone;  The natural world is filled with gateways - on mountain tops, on hillsides, by rivers and streams and in the meadows.     In any of these that ladder can descend in our minds.
    Unitarians are ordinary people like everyone else but they belong to their own tribe and each have their own faith and each knows of a gateway to the spiritual heights and its stairway to heaven.
This is my comfort in the world of 2012.     I belong to the right tribe - but my resolution is that I am going to do more than just belong.   I am going to be an optimist and I am going to be positive.   I am going to change the world - within my own small corner of it of course.