Our final blog post from the Unitarian Renewal Group (URG) – from their session at the General Assembly 2023: “Renewing Our Faith”

At the Renewal Group’s presentation at the GA Annual Meetings, April 2023, members of the committee spoke in turn of what is re-newing and life-affirming for them. Here are two of the contributions:

What makes me come alive?

I have come late to gardening. It has always been the wild flowers of the Spring that have made me come alive. From celandine to lady’s smock to sweet cicely and the late hawkweed, each one is a delight as it appears. Each one quickens me. So my guerrilla gardening, for that’s what it is, in a patch of land near my house, includes anything that grows, wild or cultivated. As long as there is room and none is thuggish. They must learn to live with one another. Like congregations, really. As a gardener, at the end of a back-breaking day’s toil, I stand back and feel a deep satisfaction. The job will never be finished, but I’ll keep at it. Similarly, when we tend our congregation with care, planting here, making room there, enriching the soil, we come alive, each and all of us.

Celia Midgley

For me, it’s music. Mostly classical, but some jazz. This is strange because I am not a musician. I don’t read music or play an instrument or sing, other than in a congregation in a worship service. To me, music is a mystery bordering on a miracle. A mystery because all it amounts to is a person or a group, making vibrations with a strangely shaped piece of wood with strings attached, or a piece of bent metal tube, shaped and with a mouthpiece. Those vibrations can make sounds which lift my imagination, touch my feelings and open another dimension to life that is spiritually stimulating or refreshing or both, or much more.

The range of music is enormous, touching every possible emotion or story. And in our present world it is available at the touch of a button, all hours of the day or night. Music brings together the composer, the performer, whether alone or in a band or an orchestra; and the listener, whether alone or in an audience or a place of worship. I know what is meant by the expression, ‘The whole is more than the sum of its parts.’ And music refreshes my belief that a person is like that, and the human race is like that. More than the sum of its parts – with a spiritual dimension, a soul, which can come alive, nourished by music.

John Midgley

Some further thoughts, from members of the audience….

• To think that there is a God or the spirit in each person.
• To think that I can do better – ‘Don’t keep beating yourself up!’
• As a community… We need to find this, as a congregation, as a movement…
• Cooking, and ‘Incredible Edible’ gardening at Walmsley.
• Bearing witness to comradeship in a brain-injury group finding joy, peace & acceptance. Also, walking and playing the ukulele.
• A finance figures job that needs doing.
• Unitarianism! I’ve found a church I can belong to!
• Seeing Venus, as I walked along a river in pitch dark.
• Reuniting with some friends from years ago.
• An equation in mathematics.
• Twenty minutes of ‘me’ time each day.
• Appreciation of people, gardens, my congregation.
• Walks in the Yorkshire Dales.
• The Send a Child to Hucklow Fund – the volunteers and the children.