Reignite

For those of you who don't know me personally and wonder what I look and sound like: here I am: Well done to the DUWIT folks for getting us some good videos on YouTube at last.

"Religious people have so often pretended to have all the answers. They have seen their mission as being to persuade, to enforce, to level differences and perhaps even to impose uniformity. There is really something of the Grand Inquisitor in most religious people. But when religion begins to bully or to insinuate, it has become unspiritual because the first gift of the Spirit, creatively moving in [human] nature, is freedom and frankness; in Biblical language, liberty and truth. The modern Christian's mission is to resensitize [their] contempories to the presence of a spirit within themselves. [They are] not a teacher in the sense of that [they are] providing answers that [they] has looked up in the back of a book. [They are] truly a teacher, when, having found [their] own spirit, [they] can inspire others to accept the responsibility of their own being, to undergo the challenge of their own innate longing for the Absolute, to find their own spirit." John Main (1926-1982...

We often talk about "Unitarian beliefs" when we talk about Unitarianism, which is somewhat ironic given we're non-creedal. I often think we're not entirely sure what non-creedalism means. Anyway I'm starting to think that it's the wrong sort of question. I'm more interested right now in what techniques Unitarianism offers for spiritual transformation. There are different ways of asking this: How does Unitarianism help me to walk closer with my God? How does Unitarianism liberate me from my suffering? How does Unitarianism dissolve the illusions I have built up in my head and help me confront the Really Real? These are the deep questions a religion must eventually deal with, and I worry we're not very good at dealing with them, which is the reason for our failure. Yet the Unitarian tradition I believe does offer some spiritual guidance on going deeper. I've identified a few of these ways below, in no particular order. These techniques may not be uni...