Reflections on my Migration to Unitarianism

Dave Hudson in a Panel Discussion - March 16, 2008

But my migration to Unitarianism has not simply been fueled by a desire to make up for this absence; it?s not been the case, in other words, that I?ve simply felt the need to sort of insert a faith tradition where one didn?t exist before. I?ve been drawn to this community in reaction, more powerfully, to something that I know I?ve felt all my life, but have only recently been able to start putting into words ? and that?s a feeling of profound spiritual dissatisfaction with, and alienation from, what we might called dominant ?Western? cultural values ? those values that have tended to be championed in our society. Now, to be sure, I was born, and have physically spent the vast majority of my life, in the so-called ?West? ? Edmonton, Peterborough, Ottawa, Guelph, Letchworth in England, and Wageningen in the Netherlands. And to a degree, I have been socialized by the dominant culture here. But my mother?s cultural background has also played a significant role in our upbringing, particularly the emphasis, again, on interconnectedness, interdependence, and interpersonal care.

And so, in spite of my socialization here, I?ve always felt alienated, it seems, by the dominant cultural frameworks that this society offers for making sense of, sort of, central life concepts ? concepts, for example, like freedom, productivity, empowerment, education, and so on. I?ve felt alienated, for one, by the emphasis on speed, immediacy, and newness, the pervasive idea that something is somehow valuable to the degree that it can be understood to be original. I?ve felt alienated by the idea that things are somehow only true if they can be explained with recourse to other tangible phenomena, other existing concrete things; that something is somehow only true if it can be directly witnessed and explained through existing words and concepts; that something is somehow only true if it can be linked to a clear cause and effect. Most acutely, perhaps, I?ve felt alienated by the way in which our society emphasizes separateness, by the well-worn assumption that things can somehow be classified as distinct from one another ? life as supposedly distinct from death, black as supposedly distinct from white, masculinity as supposedly distinct from femininity, peace from war, love from hate, humans from nature ? or, most significantly, humans as supposedly distinct from one another, the self as distinct from others, who you are as absolutely disconnected from who someone else is. What I?m talking about, then, is the fairly pervasive presumption that we are best understood as individuals, the assumption that strength is self-reliance, that strength means that you?re able to do things by yourself, that I am supposed to somehow feel empowered to the degree that I?m able to prove that I?m unique, distinct, and that I think ?for myself.? And the attendant idea is that I am weak to the degree that I show myself to be influenced by others, to the degree that I show myself to need others, to the degree that I practice interdependence. So, all these presumptions have been alienating, though I?m only now starting to be able to put them into words.

Now, these sorts of values are not without their contradictions in the practice of everyday life, but I have felt their pervasiveness in this culture. And part of what I?ve found so alienating about these sorts of dominant values ? independence, absolute truth, scientific reason, immediacy, speed, originality, and so on ? is that they have felt so spiritually limiting, that they have proved so deeply disabling as means through which to connect to the world around me. For example, concepts of independence and originality are quite limiting to me when it comes to making sense of the inspiration or hope that I feel when I see someone else standing up for something I believe in. These kinds of values have proved disabling when it comes my experiencing of the power ? the spirit ? of community, or even in my attempts to get my head around my experience of little things like how wonderful it feels to notice the influence of someone else on the way I speak. Even in these minute moments, the kinds of values I talking about prove limiting. But perhaps most significantly, I?ve found them limiting where my engagement with questions of social and environmental justice is concerned.

For my entirely adult life, I?ve been drawn to communities whose identities, practices, and traditions centre, in one way or another, around attempts to make the world a better place, to go about life differently, to actively challenge systemic injustice, to try to live ethically. I?ve spent a lot of the last 15 years as a member of communities made up of, sort of, younger ?activist-y? types and/or independent musicians and artists, particularly folks into punk rock and hardcore music. And such communities have been, and continue to be, exciting to me: there?s something profound hopeful about the feeling that a bunch of us can get together and work for change and make music and art in ways that make sense to us, that we can do so instead of giving up and sinking into despair, that we can do so instead of feeling the need to conform to the social, cultural and economic conventions that have excluded so many. But in spite of the feeling of hope it involved, my experience within the activist and punk rock communities of which I?ve been a part has nevertheless been one of spiritual limitation: you see, there tends to be a deep suspicion, if not an outright rejection, within such communities of formalized faith traditions; there tends to be a feeling that organized religion in general is just a bunch of fake stories used to stop people from thinking ?for themselves,? a bunch of stories used to stop us from expressing our individual capability to see the absolute truth. Now, to be sure, such a suspicion stems from a quite valid recognition of the ways in which organized religion has been, and continues to be, used to dominate people. However, the rejection of formalized faith traditions and practices in my communities ? the fact that it wasn?t particularly cool to say that you were going to church ? often meant that there was limited room to explore the value of communal expressions of spirituality.

And so I?ve found myself, quite recently, drawn here ? as a community that seems passionately committed to social and environmental justice, committed to openness and inclusiveness, a community that seems to value self-reflection, examinations of how we live our lives, questions about ethical living; I?ve come to Unitarianism as a community that seems to value these things, but comes at them from a place of interconnectedness. I?ve wanted to find a place where there?s room for consciously and communally
practicing recognition of interconnectedness, recognition of the fact that, in both a cultural sense and a biological sense, we only live how we live, think what we think, by the grace or pull of others. I wanted to find somewhere where there was room for considering our place in the world, but that also allowed for the possibility that some things can?t be put into words, the possibility that some things can?t be explained through cause-and-effect logic, the possibility that there is value in the seemingly contradictory. I wanted to find a place in which the power of communal ritual is not rejected as conformity, as an affront to so-called ?independence,? but embraced as something energizing and empowering.

And so I?ve come here because it seems to be a place that suggests that the dominate cultural values of individualism, reason, immediacy, newness, and so on are not the only ways of thinking in this society, that there is indeed space for spirit ? for exploring connection to the world in and around you ? in radically different terms. Now, as the convoluted style of my testimony here suggests, I?m not here without questions, without uncertain terms. But I think there?s space for such questions and I think they?re productive. And I hope, in the end, that I can continue to learn stuff from others in the community in asking them. So I?ll stop there for now, and hope that I can pick up this line of thought at another point.