My Unitarian Mission
 I am on a mission!    It is a good time I think because I am at the right age so it doesn’t matter if I end up like Icarus.      I hope to persuade a few Unitarians - and if I can persuade a few Unitarians, who knows, I might change the world.
    My mission is to restore religion to our Movement.   Not just spirituality - we talk a lot about spirituality but to my mind that is just one part of religion - there is much more to it than that.     Spirituality is a given - it is how we use it that matters.
    Religion consists of a belief system, faith in the teachings of that system, and a feeling of belonging with something greater than ourselves.
    A religion can be for good or bad as we look at it.
    We assume that religion is always good and that it is about peace and love but there are many religions who have a belief system based on aggression and intolerance of all but their own members.   Fundamentalist Islam is as intolerant as fundamentalist Christianity or fundamentalist Hinduism, Sikhism etc
    And it is a challenge too because the word ‘religion’ itself has so many bad connotations.    It is because of that word ‘religion’ that there is so much upheaval and violence in the world at the moment.   In fact the word ‘religion’ tends to make people fearful for the future - rather than giving comfort for the future.   
    Religion in our part of the world is so often associated with bigotry, hypocrisy and bad practice.   It is mostly seen as simply being out of touch - especially by those who have rejected religion and who stand outside its organisation. 
    I have to say a word for Christianity because it is the religion of my culture.
    Christianity in its beginning was a belief system based on being a follower of Jesus, who was a revolutionary.   He challenged his own religion, saying their belief system was wrong.   He said that really God was not a punishing jealous God who gave one group of people a promised land and cared for no one other than the chosen race.   At best God would use others to teach lessons to his own people.   
    Jesus controversially taught that God was a God of Love whose love was for all people no matter what their race or gender or place in life.   He criticised the system that said you could only reach God by going to the Temple and paying the priest to say a prayer for you or make a sacrifice for you.   He criticised his religion because it insisted that the most important things was simply obeying the rules.   He had no time for putting the rules first nor for those people who who liked to say how pious and religious they were in following them.
         His belief system was based on healing the sick, welcoming  all who came and knocked at the door.    It was about eating together and it was about challenging hypocrisy.   It was about celebrating community and celebrating the self - - letting your light shine in the world.
    But much as I  want it part of my religion, this basic religion taught by Jesus is not quite enough.   To my mind the religion of Jesus was about relationships.   The relationship we should each have with God and the relationship we should have with one another.     It included the relationship we should have with ourselves - letting our light shine in the world.  Fighting our own demons and picking up our bed and walking.   Many of the healing stories we read in our New Testament can also be read as telling these home truths - to anyone who has eyes to see or ears to hear.
    Maybe because it was a revolutionary religion its message had to be narrowly focussed - maybe he had to focus on relationships to the exclusion of anything else.    To include more would have diluted that single message.
Or maybe there was more - but anything extra was never recorded or considered important.
    I would like to know how the disciples worshipped together.    Was it only about their leader?  Worshipping the hero whom they had lost.     It is common enough - even in these present times.   A personality cult develops around the memory of the leader - and slowly but surely the memories are rewritten in glorification.
    They disciples it seemed, did not break away from the authority of the priests or the rituals of the Temple.   When Paul came to Jerusalem with the large collection of money he had gathered for them on his travels - they wanted him to go to the Temple to be purified - and of course it was a trap to get rid of him.    Whatever was founded in Jerusalem by the followers of Jesus did not last.    It seems there were no more Jesus groups in Israel.  His life left no legacy for the Jewish religion he was trying to change.  There was to be no ‘Book of Jesus’ included in the Hebrew Bible.
    To my mind it was still a wonderful religion at that stage.   There  might have been more to it than  we shall ever know - because his religion was changed within a generation and became much more of a Greek mystical religion, based on the teachings of Paul - with Jesus the man becoming the unknown God revealed as the Christ.    Depending on your theology he was amalgamated, mixed or compounded into the Jewish God of his own faith who became the God also of the whole Christian faith. 
    That basic religion of Jesus became part of something much greater.   It was subsumed into an organisation with its own rules that had to be obeyed and its own high priests whose words became the law.     The Christian religion was satisfying enough for most of those who had faith in it.   There were many attempts by some groups during the centuries that followed to return to that simple religious way of prayer and human relationships - the Jesuits were a case in point.   But overall the Christian church became a huge institution and that basic religion was quietly submerged.    The focus was no longer on relationship but on personal sacrifice and atonement.
    What has always been missing, in my opinion, has been the relationship with life itself - with the mystery of creation and the interconnectedness of all living things.
    While we say that Christianity is the religion of our culture.    Beneath it is another culture - overwhelmed and sent into hiding by the Christian missionaries.    And that is the culture of the country dweller - the earth spirit centred culture that was close to nature and to light and intense darkness.   Darkness that held mysteries and the unknown.
    In the old religions there was worship of life itself.     Life itself was complicated, often irrational.   The old religions brought life into the worship of their Gods.    There were rituals to appease nature and the capricious gods; there was a sense that nature itself was sacred and had to be honoured.     People were aware of the vicissitudes and vagaries of nature - and the mysteries of its ways.     They too were part of its process and they tried through their religious practices to have nature unfold in their favour.
    To my mind that connection with nature has been lost.   Humankind has long since severed its sacred relationship with nature and the rituals that bound them together.   The Christian religion  focussed on the priority of humankind  and said that humankind was given authority over the earth - and all that lived on it. Consequently the earth is seen simply as a resource for humankind to take advantage of.     We are constantly looking at ways to exploit it - whether it is cutting down the tropical forests, destroying sacred mountains or scraping the life off the ocean floor to harvest precious  minerals.     I often think that humanity is nothing more than a parasite.   Its host is the earth.    It lives to create wealth for itself.   Its toxic waste is war, violence and starvation.    Its outcome will be the destruction of itself and the host.     My religion needs to restore the relationship with the earth.
    And finally my religion must restore  the purpose of worship.     Worship is celebrating the relationships we have with one another, celebrating the relationships with the natural world and celebrating a relationship with the mystery of life.   
    The relationship with mystery places us within the flow of the universe - but not at the centre of it.
    It takes us into a relationship with the unknown and the yet to be known.    It is a relationship that connects the spirit to what we feel is the divine spirit - the very energy and purpose of existence.  To the interface of dark and light. 
    And yes, let it be a celebration with symbols and stories, myths and legends, dreams and histories.
    This is the religion I feel we need to restore - a religion based on relationships - between ourselves, within ourselves, with the world we inhabit and with the mystery of life and existence itself.
    It should be a religion of celebration and a religion of joyfulness. A religion able to learn from the past but not be imprisoned by it; a religion that dares to look at the future and dares to move along with the flow of life.  Where each individual feels part of the divine purpose and enjoys contributing to it.