Are you a Ringwood Unitarian without knowing it?

There are Unitarians in Ringwood.  It's just that they don't yet call themselves Unitarians because they don't know the name "Unitarian".  Are you one of these?

Are you a person who likes to explore belief and how it affects how you live in the world, but who feels lonely and misses a community to be part of?

We are on your doorstep and we would like you to be with us, without telling you what you should believe.  Come and share your journey with us in 2015.

The thing about being a Unitarian is that there is no rule about what a Unitarian is.  Some say it's about hope, some say it's about systems of belief, some say it's about how you live.  Some say it's about freedom, reason and tolerance.  Some say it's about how you do a radically 21st century way of faith.  The national support team for Unitarians says it could be described as "nurturing faith, embracing life, celebrating difference".

All would agree that being a Unitarian is about exploring fundamental and searching questions, and not about preaching answers.  Unitarians also agree that the ultimate authority for anyone has to be their living, challenging, perplexing conscience, no matter what any other person says.  Behind all of this is the traditional Unitarian insistence on the oneness of God or the God idea, from which we get our name.  We set great store by any wisdom framework that points towards that oneness, without worrying about where that wisdom comes from.

Unitarians insist on the central call to love and typically care about right relationships such as

• equal rights and the ending of oppression
• being in touch with the Earth and its growing creatures and living lightly on the planet
• being in touch with how we have got to where we are now and what that means for our shared future
• being in balance in our inner life
• being human together and supporting strong communities

and about doing more than thinking about right relationships - Unitarians typically care about getting down and working for it, working for that better world now.

February meeting

With Valentine’s Day in mind, our 8 February service took the theme of love.  But a very particular form of love, known in Greek as eros.  Eros is not much spoken of these days and is often misunderstood.  It stands in contrast to philia (usually translated as "friendship" or affection) and agape (charity, warm-heartedness).  Eros is a kind of love that one would not feel for everyone, only for a few, and it should be understood in terms of a kind of longing for, a yearning, a desire for fusion with the beloved.

Two aspects of westernised life have all but eliminated eros from our awareness today.  The first is that we in UK are suffused in the light of a different sort of love, agape, which is written into the very fabric of our laws and our life through our historical Christian heritage.  In the demand that we treat our neighbour with dignity and respect, agape has now been so watered down from the intense idea of “God’s love for humanity and humanity’s love for God” that it has become replaced by a general wish for everyone’s well-being.  So watered down, that although we may wish people well, we seldom get round to actually doing anything truly compassionate for anyone.

The second modern aspect of life that has impacted on our awareness of eros is our capacity and appetite for immediate gratification.  There is no longer any need to long for anything while the latest app is available for download and Amazon can supply anything you might desire at the swipe of a credit card.  Many have all but forgotten the benefits that can come from remaining without the object of one’s desire for just a little while.

We had three readings from The Symposium by Plato, and two sonnets, one by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and one by William Shakespeare.  We enjoyed two hymns sung to traditional tunes, the first being about ever striving to become wiser and to overcome incompleteness, and the second about everyone being welcome.

Multi-lingual Unitarians

Consider these phrases:

In the struggle, there lies our growth

In the struggle, there lies our humanity

In the struggle, there lies our wholeness
In the struggle, there lies our despair
In the struggle, there lies our hope
In the struggle, there lies our salvation
In the struggle, there lies our learning
In the struggle, there lies our achievement
In the struggle, there lies our failure
In the struggle, there lies our loneliness
In the struggle, there lies companionship
In the struggle, there lies Tao
In the struggle, there lies a glimpse of entirety
In the struggle, there lies our emptiness
In the struggle, there lies All That Is
In the struggle, there lies our Saviour

Any or all of these phrases might be used to describe the same process and experience but from different perspectives.  Any or all of them might also be substituted by one or other of the hallowed names that people use for ‘God’.

Unitarians are religious liberals used to hearing many different words and using them without fear.  We are the religious translators of many different experiences, bringing them all together into the narrative of one community.

When you come to one of our meetings for reverence and worship, bring your own language with you, and respect that of other people, and you will feel right at home.