"Didymus" February 2014 Meeting

The Unitarian cause includes a challenge: the challenge to find – and live up to – what we are capable of believing, rather than what someone else says we should believe.

Although this may look like we have a choice about what we believe, if acted on properly, it’s not.

We are challenged to find what must be true for us, rather than what it might be easy to drift along with.

And having found what must be true for us, we are challenged to live up to it.

That’s hard.

And understanding that allows us to be kinder to everybody else.  Because everybody else is actually also living according to what they can believe.  

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There is a long tradition of understanding spiritual progress as having two tasks.  So essential are both these two aspects that without either one of them it is hard to move, indeed, it’s hard just to stand up.  So they are called the “two feet” of the spiritual task.

The one is the internal task.  Spending time examining how we feel, how we model the cosmos, our sense of balance and wholeness.  Sometimes this is called “God-consciousness”.

The other task is the external task.  Our behaviour with others, our responses, the things we are trying to put in place or fix.  Sometimes this has been called “servant-hood”.

We need to attend to both.  Sometimes, both of them at once.  Sometimes, paying more attention to one of them and leaving the other one aside for a bit.

But when you get down to it, the insight we got from both the readings we had today is that you only actually make your choice by doing.  Doing stuff in the world.  Whether it is God-consciousness or servant-hood, we need to use our bodies, right there in the daily world, to attend to both.