Permission to Explore

 “Unitarianism rightly understood is the Religion of the Larger Affirmation.” When I first read these words of Alfred Hall’s more than thirty years ago, it was a very liberating experience. At the age of 18, I had started to question the tenets of the Christianity of my childhood, and had realised with some reluctance that there were some things about it that I found incomprehensible. The concept of original sin, salvation by the death and resurrection of Jesus, the idea of the Trinity - the list went on.

I was searching for a religion that would not force me to subscribe to a particular set of beliefs, a more open and inclusive faith,  which would give me permission to explore the beliefs held by others, Christian initially, but subsequently the sacred texts and writings of other faiths.

Then my father gave me Alfred Hall’s book, Beliefs of a Unitarian, to read, and I realised that I was home. According to Hall, Unitarianism was an affirmative faith, with great scope for exploration and questioning. He explained that Unitarians hold (or at least held when the book was published in 1962, for our ideas and beliefs are not set in stone) that God is a loving deity, who loves all of humankind, regardless of their religious affiliations; that there is a spark of the divine in every person; and that salvation is universal, not just for those who hold the 'right' beliefs. Furthermore, that divinity can be recognised in all living things, and hence the whole universe can be thought of as sacramental. And that the signposts to the divine can be found not only in the Bible, but also in the sacred texts of other faith traditions, and in poetry and other spiritual and religious writing.

Reading these (then to me revolutionary) ideas, on the first page of the book, made me realise that I was a Unitarian, that this was where I belonged, that here was the place I had been looking for, a base from which I could set out on my spiritual journey, in the company of like-minded people, whom I could bounce ideas off, and with whom I could build my own theology.

Hall also claims that Unitarianism is a new way of approaching life and religion, based on an appeal to reason, conscience and your own life experience. And it is an ongoing process - you don't just experience a one-off conversion, and then rest on those fixed beliefs for the rest of your life; every Unitarian has a duty to approach all new ideas and concepts reverently and critically, and take from them what speaks to your own reason and conscience, and what makes sense in the context of your own life experience, in order to live out our lives in the best and truest way we can.