Learning How to Live

Theme Talk delivered at Hucklow Summer School (17th August 2025)

This year we are marking 30 years of Hucklow Summer School – the first one was in 1995 – and my first one was in the year 2000 so (even my middle-aged brain can manage the maths on this one) I’ve been coming to summer school for 25 years now. And I turned 50 this year! So that’s half my life under the influence of summer school. And, latterly, influencing summer school, in turn, as I’ve been increasingly involved in running it for the last 20 years, and picking the themes.

Reflection #110 (20th July 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

The question at the heart of today’s service is this: “What does it mean – what could it mean – for religion to be ‘transformative’?” More specifically: “what might transformative religion look like for Unitarians? People like us?” What might it mean for you? For everyone joining us today?

According to the Centre for Philosophy of Religion at Notre Dame University: ‘A transformative experience is an enduring reorganization of a person’s thinking—for instance, their beliefs, attitudes, traits or emotions—that substantially alters life as they experience it or live it.’

Reflection #109 (6th July 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

I feel I should begin my reflection with a confession: I am the last person who should be talking to you about improvisation. The idea of being spontaneous, speaking off-the-cuff, or – God forbid! – doing a role-play has struck terror into my heart for most of my life. I like to have a script, or a plan, and (more-or-less) stick to it. I need time to think things through and at the very least sketch out contingency plans for all the most likely ways that a situation will unfold. I expect that will always be my preference, and I suspect I’m not alone, though I’m sure there are plenty of free-spirits amongst us this morning too, who tend to lean more the other way. So, if you’re anything like me, you might need a bit of convincing about the idea of embracing improvisation. But, the thing is, whether you – or I – would choose to improvise for fun, or not – over the course of our lives the need to improvise occasionally is pretty much unavoidable. We’re repeatedly going to find ourselves in situations where the unexpected happens and we need to respond creatively to whatever new reality we suddenly find ourselves in.

Reflection #108 (22nd June 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Last Sunday, after the service, a few of us were sitting in the back garden, and we got to talking about butterflies. I love wildlife of all varieties, and am always on the lookout for anything at all unusual, so I mentioned that I’d seen a tortoiseshell butterfly that week, not one I see very often. This was met with slightly blank and bemused faces and even a little shrug. I was reminded that not everybody is into the same stuff as I am; we can’t all tell our tortoiseshells from our painted ladies. And that’s OK! It’s not to puff myself up about my butterfly identification skills (which, in truth, are not that advanced) or to do anyone else down for not being interested in insect spotting. But as we move through the world we’re not all attuned to the same things – I’ve been looking out for butterflies (and birds) for years so I notice them – they take up more space in my mind and my life. And so every time I leave the house there’s a happy chance I will meet a creature that I ‘know’.

Reflection #107 (15th June 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Who knew that there were so many poems about strawberries? We’ve enjoyed several already in our service today (‘The Strawberry Poem’ by Keaton St. James, ‘Strawberries’ by Tamara Madison, and ‘What is Given’ by Ralph Murre). I only want to offer a very short reflection of my own to go along with them. And, as I said at the very top of the service, I want to acknowledge that it might seem a strange decision on my part to swerve at the last minute to this apparently whimsical theme, given the state of the world and all its terrors. I had been planning to talk about theological matters, but I didn’t have the heart for it, and then I chanced across the poem ‘Ye Tang Che’ by James Crews. Its closing lines seemed so perfect:

Reflection #106 (8th June 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

So today we’re exploring this concept of faith. This is a bit of a generalisation but over the years I’ve picked up the impression that a lot of us who end up in Unitarian congregations are a bit uncertain, or ambivalent – or even squeamish – about the very notion of faith (perhaps in large part because we’re not entirely sure what it means). Do we really want to call ourselves ‘people of faith’ collectively, or consider ourselves as ‘having faith’ personally, when the way the word is often used in common parlance gives it a number of connotations that we might not feel entirely at ease with?

Reflection #105 (1st June 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

Questions, questions! We Unitarians tend to think of ourselves as people who love the questions – people who like to question everything – perhaps people who aren’t satisfied with easy answers. So I don’t imagine I’m going to have to do a particularly hard-sell on the virtue of asking questions! But our service today is focused on beautiful questions. What makes a question beautiful, I wonder?

Reflection #104 (27th April 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

It seems important, to me, that we take some time at least once a year to think about our purpose as a church – and to remind ourselves of the part we each play in fulfilling that purpose – all of us. As the Minister-with-a-capital-M I’m most often the one who’s standing up at the front, facilitating groups, or sending emails – and I’m delighted to be in a position to do so, to lead this congregation, to spend most of my waking hours thinking and writing and organising and furthering the cause of Unitarianism – but ministry is a collective effort. It has to be. I’m just one person. If the work of this church rested on my efforts alone then that would significantly limit what we can do and be. But just imagine what we might be able to create together if we harnessed more of our gifts! There is so much potential in this congregation for us to collectively dream something wonderful (or perhaps I should say even more wonderful!) into being. I’m pretty proud of what we’re doing already.

Reflection #103 (20th April 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

As I hinted at the top of the service, Easter can be a tricky day for Unitarians, as each of us is likely to sit in a different relation to the Christian tradition. And the Easter story is challenging in a lot of different ways at once. In the mainstream churches there will be much more of a sense of having gone on a journey of preparation through Lent, and the build-up through Holy Week, giving a lot more time and space to linger over the story of Jesus’ downfall and suffering in worldly terms, before arriving at Easter Day and the sense of triumph that goes with the story of his resurrection.

Reflection #102 (6th April 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)

When I first started thinking about this theme as something we might want to explore in a service, I brought it up in conversation with a few friends, some of whom are religious types and others of whom are really not. At first, I was somewhat surprised to find that people seemed to struggle somewhat with the concept – what precisely does it mean, ‘The Sacred’? – but then as I tried to share my own sense of the sacred I realised… it’s quite a slippery idea. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, given that we often talk of sacred things as being ineffable, somehow beyond our human ability to express in words, too profound to speak of. Still, we try to find a way.