Contemplating the latest bout of politics at the office, I resolved that rather than get drawn in I would attempt to cultivate a more “religious” attitude. I imagined a more detached me; forgiving, unencumbered, quite possibly a bit smug too.

I warmed to the idea, wondered how practical it would be; realized the more I could afford to adopt a religious attitude essentially depended upon the less I needed to “care” about work.

By “care” I don’t mean doing a good job, or the work itself, which I care very much about, but the actual need to do so – in short how much I needed the job.

I realized that I was able to contemplate a more spiritual attitude because I was approaching a position financially where – partly due to savings, partly other possibilities – I did not need to rely on this particular job as my sole source of income. So I could afford to “care” less and thereby cultivate a better me.

It has always been thus, but it reminded me of the fundamental role financial security plays in our spiritual lives. Of course the poor are often among the most religious and spiritually generous, but equally I suspect there is a particular advantage in having reached the summit of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Gandhi’s poverty grew out of his life experience – built upon privilege. But would the man who did so much to champion the cause of the “untouchables” have chosen this asceticism had he been born of “untouchables”? More – had he been born of untouchables and somehow managed to improve his status, would he have chosen the trappings of poverty over wealth? Having laboured so hard, would he even have had the space to explore his spirituality? Instead would his truth be born of the grim realities of poverty and his determination never to return to them?

Not that I want to diss Gandhi (heaven forbid!) but I think we all have a tendency to underestimate the influence of wealth upon spirituality, and the implications of this – how economics can influence access to that higher aspect of ourselves. I believe Schopenhauer had this in mind when he wrote poverty is slavery. 

This for me is the key reason why religion is indivisible from social action – not out of pity, or even physical need, but because a life not fully lived is an inherently poor one. 

Politics matters, although office politics I will henceforth attempt to rise above.

While I can afford to.

Watching the blues haranguing the reds (or was it vice-versa?) got me thinking about our human need to take sides, to prefer unambiguous choices, more – our need to simply be in the right; that maybe being “right” in the competition of life places us a step higher on the podium, that bit closer to God.

Perhaps from an existential point-of-view being “right” is simply another way to avoid confronting death – being “right” gives us a taste of eternal truth, a kind of affirmation.

Equally, each time we are “wrong” our existence is nullified, we die a little. Bullcrap? Well consider rejection: by a partner, for a job, that proposal, book or poem you’ve just submitted and the feelings that can accompany it.

You didn’t make the grade, you were not good enough – in a way, you do not have value. You do not matter enough in the eyes of the other.

I’ve certainly mourned the end of a relationship before; quite literally because part of me expired with it – in the present, future and (the meaning of our) past, now tinged with what had been lost.

To be accepted on the other hand, is to belong. To belong is to live, which also makes evolutionary sense if you think about it.

It would be tough out there, alone in the wilderness. Rejected by the community, you wouldn’t stand much chance of survival. Get things wrong – take the wrong turn, misjudge a danger, and you wouldn’t last long either.

So we compensate, we rationalize: we tell ourselves the person who rejected us was the wrong one; actually it was our employer who was at fault; that in fact we are a misunderstood genius (look at Van Gogh!).

And little by little, we come to life again, resuscitating ourselves with life-affirming rightness.

But despite our human needs, right is rarely 100 per cent right, and wrong totally wrong. Nature is not black and white. Life is in Technicolor.

God is full spectrum; especially in the doubt, ambiguity, commonality that fills the space between: the crossing in Jericho where, during the last World Cup, the Israeli border guard checked my partner's passport and exclaimed “Italia! Football!”; the Arab kid who approached us after we had parked and went “England! Manchester United!”  For all their protestations to the contrary, the over-riding impression most of us are left of our politicians (and their politics) is probably the most accurate - they are all the same.

This week Islington and Newington Green Unitarians were featured in the national press for standing up for what they (we!) believe is right - marriage equality. But note that word - equality: perhaps it should help us discriminate between the kinds of truth, or rightness,  that contain values  I would call divine, and those based on more humble, human anxieties;  that invariably contain the kernel of inequality and division.

Anyway, we were talking about writing, and I mentioned the “religious” book I have coming out this Spring (I did warn you about the plugs) and he wrote back

Religious?

Yes, I said, didn’t I tell you about my church…?

I could almost hear the claxon sound across the Gulf of Arabia.

Church….?! Gosh.

I felt the axis of our friendship lurch. Breaking the news to a friend (to my friends, anyway, and thankfully my faith does not encourage ridding oneself of the old) is always a sensitive moment. People have default settings about religion too, particularly those of that most irreligious nation, England.

It’s not necessarily what you think, I wrote hurriedly back. It was an authenticity thing… I came to the point whereby I could not deny I had a spiritual side. Actual proofs, like the existence in God for example, seemed largely irrelevant. The important thing was for me to be true to my experience, and the Unitarians are a non-creedal religious community that allow me to do that. Really, it’s not a cult, I added (few people in the UK having even heard of Unitarianism). Here’s a link, I said. Don’t worry, I added, attempting to knock down all his ducks in one go, it’s not as happy-clappy as it looks either.

I have yet to hear back.

But it got me thinking about what Unitarianism was, funnily enough a theme continued over at my old minister Andy Pakula’s new blog, which itself picks up on a thread over at Reignite worrying over the decline in Unitarianism in the UK.

Certainly I think many Unitarians have experienced frustration. Our religion is not like other faiths. It is in fact often the opposite – bottom-up rather than top-down, led by individual experience rather than doctrinal writ. To us it does appear to embody a kind of “truth” that perfectly fits the modern world… yet it is so damn hard to make people understand what it’s about.

Part of the reason I believe is because most people are raised from an early age to believe religion must be a set of rules. If it is not, then how can it be religion (more than once I have overheard my partner, brought up Catholic, “explain”: he calls it church, but it’s not really… they can believe anything...)?

I experience the same issues in my day job – social marketing – in which I use customer insight to try and drive behaviour change, usually around public health. A key principal is to shape one’s intervention not about how you expect the world to be, but how the world is actually experienced by the target audience.  This can take time – investment in research and testing – when the client often wants to jump to the solution. It’s obvious, after all, isn’t it? Can’t we just tell them? Well no, not if they not prepared to listen.

I think Unitarians face a similar challenge – we’ve got a great product, and its benefits are self-evident (to Unitarians, that is). Yet its definition as a religion does not fit the “rules” that most people – religious or not – carry from birth, no matter how much we may want things to be different.

I think the 2007 US advertising campaign Is God keeping you from going to church? tacitly acknowledged this problem and made a brave attempt to play the game according to their rules but ultimately came up short because, being Unitarian (Universalist), it could never really win. Its cognitive dissonance was too pronounced, its semantics kind of self-defeating: what’s the point of going to a church with no God? An atheist church? But surely that’s not a religion at all, and I’m religious, spiritual… I just don’t want to be bombarded with dogma. Even atheist dogma…

It was a brave attempt at selling the sense of “our secret”, but it seemed to have put the proverbial cart before horse, tried to use the language of other religions to explain our own.

Instead I think we should begin by facing up to the reality of what people want, then… take a deep breath… and actually define our faith, emphasizing what makes it special – it’s Unique Selling Point. We need to create our own set of rules before inviting people to come and play our game. Because like it or not, people need rules in a game, even in a game of no rules…

To me, Unitarianism acknowledges our unique experience of the divine and how our recognition of this uniqueness drives us to unity. This is why I’m a Unitarian, as is everyone I know (so far as I know). No other religion, to my knowledge, does this. This is our USP, but it tends to get lost in the rush to say what we’re not about, defending our goal in a game played by other religions’ rules, and thereby confusing the public, as well as ourselves.

We have to write our own rulebook rather than be judged by others’.

Just as the Buddhists are about “detachment”, the Muslims “submission under the Koran”, Christians, “love under the Bible”, we need to be “united by our unique experience of the truth” or some such.

We need to be about a religious method. There’s no getting away from it – committee-created catch-alls about “values” or bombastic over-compensation are not enough: we need to state our “rule”, even if it emphasizes our freedom, and more – we have to explicitly present it as our pathway to fulfillment.

We might not like it, but there’s no getting away from it: it’s what the public expects (and let’s face it, it’s what we believe, even though it might feel somewhat… vulgar to say so).

And from this theological kernel, begin to speak to people in a language they understand.

And nothing was more divine than his call to be humble. Humbleness is closest to holiness.

The saying that the meek shall inherit the earth is easily misunderstood from a human perspective. At times when brutality and power triumph over the “little person” it is hard to see the sense of it. But with respect to humbleness in the sight of God it makes perfect sense. It actually serves to remind us that we are human, not perfect. We are not Gods.

I was reminded of this when I read about the execution of two young men in Iran for their part in the protests against the state, the planned hanging of another nine, with the promise of more on the way.

There is something particularly chilling about judicial murder, the attempt of a regime not to hide its sordid crimes but to actually legitimize them. The show trials in Tehran echo those of Stalin and Hitler, and in particular bring to mind Sophie Scholl and her friends – the young German students who peacefully protested against the Nazi regime and were tried and guillotined in 1943.

Wikipedia notes Sophie’s firm Christian belief in God and in every human being's essential dignity formed her basis for resisting Nazi ideology.

Meanwhile in present-day Tehran Ayatollah Ahmad Janati commented: May God not have mercy on those who are lenient with the corrupt on earth. There is no room for clemency. It is time for severity.

Judicial murder characterizes Utopian politics. From The Terror of Revolutionary France there is clear line of sight to present day Iran.

Certainly on the surface the fundamentally atheist France of Robespierre bears little resemblance to the Islamist fundamentalism of Ahmadinejad, but both are borne of Utopianism – the belief heaven can be built upon the earth. Yet whether it is in the name of Reason or God makes no difference – the deed must always be done by human hands, with the inevitable blood-soaked consequences.

Jesus saw this danger clearly. Time and again he emphasized our imperfect humanity, fallibility; our need therefore to be humble, meek. Not to cast the first stone. His was the authentic voice of God. The vengeful pronouncements of priests and politicians in the name of a higher authority are human, all too human.  

I was not surprised by Tony Blair’s performance at the Chilcot Enquiry into the war in Iraq, because there were no surprises – he was sad about the deaths, naturally, but he had few regrets and still believed history would consider him in the right.

I had a letter published in the press back in 2003 when he originally stated his faith in history, in which I wrote he was therefore likely to appear in a revised edition of Barbara L Tuchman’s The March of Folly, a seminal study of how states pursued polices contrary to their interest.

I’m no pacifist. I’d seen Blair’s wars at first hand – as an aid worker I’d gone to Sierra Leone and Kosovo alongside the British forces – and in Sierra Leone in particular I realized what an impact for good military intervention could have.  But Iraq was different. Different place, politics, world post-9/11. War is not like the movies… it is messy, unpredictable and cruel seen from the ground and I don’t think it’s much of a surprise to find the last people who invariably want it are the generals.

So I went on the marches, I signed the petitions, wrote to the papers, although at the time it felt as if my practical concerns placed me in something of a minority – many of the protesters appeared angry because they felt in their guts it was wrong, while the PM was going to war because he felt in his guts it was right – God was on his side, and, as he said, would be his judge.

It’s ironic that Tony Blair went on to convert to Catholicism because the then Pope John Paul was one of the war’s most ardent critics, a position I suspect would be supported by his successor, although not necessarily for the reasons one would immediately expect. 

Benedict is very keen to emphasize the dual Christian traditions of faith and logos – Reason. This sprung from the earliest requirement of Christianity to marry the “revelation” of Christ with the Greco-Roman philosophical heritage. It needed to do this if it was going to gain acceptance in Roman society. Historically of course, logos has ebbed and flowed, but the German Pope, having himself experienced the terrifying consequences of Utopian un-Reason growing up under Nazism is understandably keen to reaffirm this bond.

The God of Benedict would by definition not expect one to do something that was intrinsically unreasonable. For God embodies Reason and Reason is how we discriminate between what is truly divine and just our egos, emotions or whatever. For Benedict, as for me, faith alone is not enough. 

For Tony Blair and George Bush however, it is apparently all. Never mind that they call themselves Christians – their God has far more in common with the Jewish, Islamic or, dare I say it, Crusader God.

Seemingly relying upon faith alone, they believed they were acting in the name of God, and they reaped what they sowed.

I don’t believe in Heaven anywhere other than upon this earth. There are no pearly gates, palm-fringed vacation resorts beyond our mortal life. But I do have a sense that each moment has an eternal element to it – although we pass through the length of our lives in a chronological arc, every day resonates infinitely.

Tony Blair told the enquiry that not a single day passes by that I do not think about that responsibility... and I do not doubt that he does. I don't believe he is a liar. But as he reclines in the comforting embrace of his certain faith, that nagging question disturbing his rest is God too: logos judging him, each day and forever.

The lyrics from an Everything But The Girl song sprang to mind: Why does England call… when soon there’ll be nothing left at all?

Written during the height of Thatcherism in the 1980s it mourned, like many songs of that era, the passing of a certain kind of England. An England of strikes and industrial atrophy yes, but also a more collective England, a more socialist England if you like, where politicians on left and right believed in a kind of communal consensus. Things may have been more sluggish and relatively expensive, but there was a homogeneity that seems but a memory 20 years after that song was penned.

It was not, I think, what Margaret Thatcher intended. Despite her famous exclamation that there is no such thing [as society]! There are only individual men and women… she presumably expected her reforms to bring out the best of our culture – one of self-sufficiency, enterprise and sobriety. But the “blowback” of liberalization also resulted in a kind of cultural fragmentation… her victory, coinciding as it did with the end of the Cold War, was so comprehensive that the punch-drunk Left concluded individualism was the only way. After all, hadn’t their core working class vote deserted en masse for the party that let them buy their state-owned homes?

So when they came to government, New Labour bought in lock, stock and barrel to the Tories “choice” agenda, heedless to the warning of another Eighties band, the Blow Monkey’s, who’s lead singer Dr Robert memorably crooned: It’s your choice: there’s no choice at all…

In policy terms then, on Left and Right, we are all Thatcher’s children, politicians competing to offer us more “choice”. It is hard to understate how it has reshaped the dialectic: who would have imagined 30 years ago, for example, feminists ardently arguing in favour of a woman’s “choice” to adopt the full-face veil? Yet this is increasingly the default position, the concept of “false consciousness”, it seems, having been consigned to the dustbin of history along with much else. Choice trumps all.

Consciousness is shaped by environment. We remain collective creatures – pack animals – even in a culture of individuality. It is the context within which we perceive not just the world, but ourselves. As Laurens van der Post pointed out: We live not only our own lives, but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.

Decades of legislation, economic policy and cultural drift have promoted “me” over “you”.

Thirty years after Thatcher came to power, England’s only agreed commonality appears to be consumption, with citizens increasingly reduced to the status of “consumers”.

Indeed, the very concept of a wider community itself has fast become not a source of consolation but actual fear: how many youngsters are now allowed to walk to school alone as they did in my day? Yet little has actually changed, save perception.

It is therefore no coincidence that Britons are emigrating at record levels and a recent UN report identified the UK as the “worst place in the West” to be a child.

America of course shares similarities with the UK, not least in its Anglo Saxon heritage. But England is not America – from its outset, US individualism was married to community, embodied in church attendance rates of 50 per cent, compared to less than five in Britain.

England was traditionally a “tribal” society with no abiding ideology as in France or the US, but customs and practices that evolved uninterrupted over hundreds of years. The consensus politicians who preceded Thatcher represented a continuity that stretched back at least 50 years, maybe more.

The sense of displacement in England is therefore palpable, and cannot be salved by consumer durables or even necessarily “self-fulfillment” because disconnection from society, I believe, results in disconnection from spirit.

Many of us can feel lonely, cut off, afraid, not only because of an individualist culture, but because our own consciousness is shaped by that culture – we believe that this is just how the world is when in fact a Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim might have a very different perspective.

Connectivity is in fact our context, community its embodiment. We might sometimes be frustrated by the compromises it entails, but it is who we are, our totality. The individual is not our sum of being. Society makes us whole. I suspect even Margaret Hilda Thatcher, frail and subdued at her few recent public appearances, may have come to realize this by now.

Reading Robert Hellenga's novel Fall of a Sparrow about the effect of the Bologna Railway Bombing on an American family, I was impressed by the observation of his central character, a classics tutor, that history "began" when Aeneas, the mythical refugee of the Trojan War, arrived on Italian shores to establish Rome. I think the spirit of this observation was spot on: to the Greeks life was cyclical, psychological, mythical. Humanity was essentially subject to the whims of capricious Gods, and always would be.

Although the Romans too made obsequies to the Gods, there was no doubt about who was in charge. Everything came second to the will of Rome. The world would be shaped according to their vision, whatever the Gods might say. Hence Hellenga’s (character’s) observation that the modern era began with them.

I can't mention Aeneas without referring to my favourite opera (and not only because it is blessedly short) Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, which features the doomed love affair of our Trojan hero and the Queen of Carthage.

In the final stanza, as well as featuring some of the most beautiful music ever composed, there is the following exchange between the departing Aeneas and the Queen:

     [Cupids appear in the clouds o're her tomb]

     When I am laid in earth, May my wrongs create

                 Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

Great minds against themselves conspire, and shun the cure they most desire: Aeneas, brutal youth, presses on to Italy and the city he will build, leaving love behind.

But as I grow older the emotional sum of my life seems to count for more than my supposed accomplishments. When we are dust so too are our deeds, to us. Love, in its many guises, feels more important in the here and now.

We might fancy ourselves the builders of our lives but despite our grand designs we are only ever tenants.

While others may remember us, even benefit from our legacy, as individuals we leave life with nothing except our experience. In the end emotions are all we own.

This the Greeks understood, embodying our merry-go-round lives in their myths, which remain alive in modern drama and psychology.

The ancient world is our world, and we travel through it even if we’re not on the deck of a Mediterranean cruise liner.

Times are tough for moderates – we are being assailed from all sides

On the one hand we have secularists, with whom I have always harboured some sympathy, enforcing the will of atheist fundamentalists and over-turning centuries of tradition. For example in Italy, where I live, a Finnish-born mother recently won a ruling through the European Court of Human Rights to have crucifixes removed from all classes.

Soile Lautsi took her cause to court after failing to get crucifixes removed from the school at which her two children were being taught at a town in north-east Italy.

What a monumental example of egotism, if I may be so immoderate to opine.

Meanwhile, as I wrote last week, 125 Christian leaders have recently put their name to the pompously christened Declaration of Manhattan that calls on signatories to break laws that offend their moral sensibility.

God save us from those who know what is best. 

Fundamentalism is the opposite of God – it is a human thing, born of existential fear. It applies equally to religion and atheism, embodying a need for definitive answers where, in fact, there are none. The fundamentalist’s inherent sense of powerlessness is symbolized by their need to impose their personal power, or righteousness, over others. In their insistent certainty they expose how uncertain they really are. They doth protest altogether too much.

Quantum Mechanics illustrates how particles – the grains of life – appear and disappear with utter unpredictability.

The very fabric of existence is actually woven with uncertainty. In fact, Heisenberg coined the Uncertainty Principle to describe this process.

This, not Latin, Aramaic, English or Arabic, is the actual language of God (or Nogod, if you prefer); the lesson it teaches us is that only uncertainty is the rule.

Ani di Franco sums this up beautifully in her song Paradigm.

I was just a girl in a room full of women
Licking stamps and laughing
I remember the feeling of community brewing
Of democracy happening

But I suppose like anybody

I had to teach myself to see

All that stuff that got lost

On its way to church

All that stuff that got lost

On its way to school

All that stuff that got lost

On its way to the house of my family
All that stuff that was not lost on me
Teach myself to see each of us
Through the lens of forgiveness
Like we're stuck with each other (god forbid!)
Teach myself to smile and stop and talk
To a whole other color kid
Teach myself to be new in an instant
Like the truth is accessible at any time
Teach myself it's never really one or the other
There's a paradox in every paradigm

No one would accuse Ani of being a fuzzy relativist, a knock-kneed apologist. She is in fact a well-known radical. Actually, Ani strikes me as a militant moderate – a healthy skeptic with a keen grasp upon reality. As an artist, perhaps, she exists outside groupthink and perceives the complexities inherent in any absolute, that paradox in every paradigm. But this does not make her indecisive – on the contrary. Understanding, even of uncertainty, clarifies. The truth always illuminates.

Ani was married in a Unitarian Universalist church by the way.

First time around, at any rate. 

Merry Christmas.

Perhaps, just perhaps, this declaration might one day be ranked with the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, or at least raise Manhattan to the equivalent historic significance to that of Boston.

We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right—and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation—to speak and act in defense of these truths. We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.

We will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriage or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.

We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or otherwise immoral.

And there’s the rub, what makes this declaration by 125 Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox leaders, which Cranmer describes as quite possibly the most formidable ecumenical gathering in US history, consisting, as it does, of eminences, graces, archbishops, bishops, reverends (most and right), professors, doctors, pastors, presidents, CEOs, deans, directors, founders, editors, not to mention a 'TV Host' and the 'National Facilitator of Spiritual Unity so depressing.

Step back, if you will for a moment, spiritually-liberal reader. Although it sometimes feels like a lifetime, it is not nearly a decade since 9/11, yet how the psyche of society seems to have changed. Religion – organised, orthodox religion – rose phoenix-like from the ashes of the Twin Towers, and not just militant Islam. The totalitarians of all faiths were given a fillip by that ultimate act of impotence and rage.

Writing in the Jerusalem Post Neo-Conservative Daniel Pipes recently referred to the rise of what he termed “Islamism 1.5”, which he defined as an unholy alliance of hard-line preachers acting within the law abetted by terrorists, who they would be of course careful to distance themselves from.

We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or otherwise immoral.

The Declaration provides a green light to the abortion-clinic shooter.

It eggs on the homophobic killer; the gunman who recently murdered two at Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church and said he acted because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement… he would then target those that had voted them into office.