In the conscience

Is there a Unitarian faith, and if there is, is it a religion in its own right, or does it just borrow from other faiths?”

What hard questions to answer.  The starting answer is that there is no single faith for all Unitarians, so it would be meaningless to ask, “What is THE Unitarian faith?”   But it would be meaningful to ask, “What is the faith of Unitarians?” despite the fact that there will be many answers.

So here you will find just one Unitarian’s answer to: “Is there a Unitarian faith, and if there is, is it a religion in its own right, or does it just borrow from other faiths?”

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Many Unitarians would agree that a person is a unique meeting point within the universe.  A meeting point in time and space of the universal laws, the randomness of chance, the biologically inherited characteristics, the cultural upbringing, the body and its skills, the senses and emotions, the memory and  intellect, and the conscience.

Most of all, the conscience.

For each meeting point that we call a person, there is what might be described as a “calling”.  I guess it would be common for Unitarians to accept that each different person has a different calling.

As a result of that, Unitarians long ago rejected the idea that there should be one statement of belief, called a creed, for everyone who is in search of a fulfilled inner life to sign up to, either freely or under coercion.  In more recent centuries Unitarians have also rejected the idea that any single philosophy or religion framework is supreme over all others.  Many Unitarians investigate the frameworks of faith of a number of world religions, and find much of value in them, that speaks to their current position.

Unitarians do not declare any of the traditional faith systems to trump any other.  We do not accept the assertion from any adherents of the traditional world faiths that it has to be “all, or nothing”; we do not agree that a successful spiritual search depends on adoption of a single religion, to the exclusion of others.  We agree with many, however, that the search has to be disciplined and on-going over a whole lifetime if it is to yield fruit.

Many Unitarians would assert that the prime point where Essential Truths operate, the place within which the “bigger than daily life” Pure Life is lived, experienced and acted upon, is the conscience of each person.  We assert that, whilst it is possible to get glimpses of God or the Ultimate through relentless and dedicated application of a range of faith practices (and also secular practices), the Redeeming Truth – which everyone seeks as a remedy for restlessness – transcends ALL religions.

So let us say that for a while I soak myself in the learned wisdom of traditional Christianity, and I gain much.  And then, while I am struggling to understand how to apply Christianity in my life, say I am impacted upon by the Tibetan form of Buddhism: then, I may suffer the breaking of my mental models, my expectations, my sense of direction.   I may experience confusion as the icons I was becoming used to, my windows on the divine, are called into question, or wrenched from me.  A modern therapist might call this a “cognitive dissonance”.

Would that mean that my Christianity had somehow been “wrong”?  That the set of ideas new to me, Tibetan Buddhism, should be rejected as “wrong”?  Or that Buddhism is “right” or “better” and I should reject my attempt at Christianity?  Have I been “doing it wrong”?

The answer is “none of the above”.  A genuine Unitarian calling might, in fact, provide the strength and motivation to struggle through this cognitive dissonance and come out the other side, stronger.  A Unitarian view might be that there is no competition between well developed faith systems.  Unitarians might say that for many people, the well-developed faith systems are perfect callings, and those people would do well to adhere to them.  For instance, it is conceivable that a Unitarian would advise a wavering Muslim to go back to Islam and study Islam further; or suggest to a lapsed Catholic that they go and have a chat with their priest and see if they can uncover what has caused them to drift away from their faith and faith community – with a view to returning to it.  Whereas, for themselves, Unitarians may have a different calling altogether.

The thing about the Unitarian calling is that it also tends to be universalist in outlook.  By which I mean that, at heart, Unitarians may feel it to be true that what applies to ONE human being applies in some way at some level to ALL human beings, without exception – just like gravity, or the tides, the rise of the sun, or the fact that we all breathe oxygen.  So we are curious about what different faiths say that can be applied everywhere, to everyone.

People who – it turns out – are genuinely called to be Unitarians may study a wide range of world faiths and may notice that in some places there are not necessarily direct “translations” from (say) traditional Christianity into Buddhism; or Hinduism into Judaism; or Classical Greek Stoicism into Sikhism or Islam.  There are GAPS between the frameworks.  Something is missing from the universalist point of view.   Yet a Unitarian outlook would assert that Universal Laws and Unassailable Truth must nonetheless exist in those gaps.  For the Ultimate to be the Ultimate it must apply NOT ONLY in all frameworks and knowledge systems, in all pictures and metaphors we are able to imagine, BUT ALSO in the gaps between and beyond all these human-made constructs.  For the Ultimate to be the Ultimate, it must actually be Ultimate; it must transcend all human experience of religion.

The place where we meet the Ultimate is in our conscience.  And that is where the Ultimate meets us, too.   The Ultimate, aka “The Way Life (And Everything Beyond It) Is Turning Out”, experiences for Itself new combinations in each person that It brings into existence.  We see that it is in the conscience of each person that the exact and unique experience is felt, which we were brought into being expressly to manifest.  So if one day I am led along a wisdom path derived from one faith and the next day out of the blue I am fed a new wisdom: well, that is because the exact juxtaposition of these two wisdoms is what I was required to experience at this point in the universe, with who I am, right now.  Neither faith system is wrong (or less true), and neither is right (or more true).  Neither is supreme and neither is final.  What is right, and wanted, is the nexus of the two at that point in me as I am at that moment, all things considered.

This sort of view can be pooh-poohed by more traditional religions, as a half-hearted “pick and mix” approach to faith.  But I’m telling you, it’s not a barrel of laughs to be caught by these cognitive dissonances – they rock your whole being and it can take a long period of trust and re-learning to recover from them.  But if you have experienced one, and found it thrilling, and haunting – if you have followed me in this – perhaps your calling is to be Unitarian.