I’ve titled today’s reflection ‘the Barefoot Unitarian’ as I would like us to focus on the simple humility and connection to this awesome world. We arrive ‘barefoot’. The simplest forms of living will always be ‘barefoot’. And we are more closely connected to nature and the all-that-is, if we are able to place our feet directly against the ground.
I could have called it ‘the Naked Unitarian’. This would have had the same meaning, to me, and I suspect it would have increased our website hits enormously.
However, I’m going to ask you all to do something now, which will relate to the ‘barefoot’ approach. And I think it’s best for all if we stick at being ‘barefoot’, rather than ‘naked’.
As you will no doubt already have guessed, what I would like you to do, if you are willing, is to take your shoes off.
Right now.
Shoes off. Leave socks, tights, whatever. But just slip your shoes off if you wish to.
I’m going to.
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Now, take a little time to place your feet firmly on the ground. Close your eyes, and feel the earth beneath your feet.
Feel the connection to the floor, to the ground, to the earth.
The Barefoot Unitarian. What might that mean?
Barefoot might imply a sense of awareness. To be barefoot is to know what is around you – certainly what it is you are stepping on or in. To be barefoot is to sense the physical world as it is.
Summer holidays often bring this example home to us. Sitting on a beach, we take our shoes off. We can feel the sans beneath our feet, soft and warm. Sometimes.
And as we walk on the sand, we really start to feel the contours of the world below us. We sink in a little here, we find a hard area here.
Walking to the edge of the sea, to the shoreline, the sensation changes. Wet sand feels very different to dry sand.
Sometimes a need to walk across some sharper stones, a frustrating line of spiky border between sand and sea. Then, onto the next line of sand.
There is that wonderful moment when you stand in that slightly squidgy wet sand, with your feet settling in. And then the next wave creeps up the beach. Just reaching your feet. It swishes over you, perhaps up to ankle height. Cool and refreshing.
Now, as the water pulls back into the sea, it rushes against the back of your foot. The sand shifts from under your foot, rushing back to the retreating sea.
You feel your foot has sunk a little. Sand now dragged onto the top of it. Your are rooted to the shoreline.
That feeling of wet sand under your feet. A connection. But more than that. An awareness of the world around you.
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Barefoot.
To feel, to experience, the world around us.
In the same way that shoes will iron out the bumps in the road, and on the sand, they will also remove those deeper experiences. That strange yet compelling draw of the waves, pulling your toes in, covering your feet. The tickle of feathers, the scratch of a dead leaf.
Only barefoot will we notice these things.
In our opening reading, Stephen Cherry talked of the need to be more open in the way in which we observe the world. He referred to the ‘wadding’ in our lives identified by George Eliot in Middlemarch, and the way it is that most of us rush through life, unaware of all the things taking place around us. Rushing through life, and missing out on the layers of complexity all around.
I’m not saying for one minute that we need to force ourselves to experience all the pain in the world – but we are often in danger of screening out too much.
We cocoon ourselves.
This does of course provide some protection. And we all need it. But does it perhaps also risk divorcing us from the reality of the world, and the part we can play in it.
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The Barefoot Unitarian, would, I suggest, be one who looks to experience as much of the world as possible.
We do, of course, already do this to some extent. We are the movement that welcomes the insights of many faith traditions. Whilst it is true that we emerged from the dissenting Christian traditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we are proud of our openness to the teachings and philosophies of other religions and cultures.
In talking to one of our visitors at a Heritage Day at our Sevenoaks Meeting House a few years back – a self-declared evangelical Christian - I received intrigued looks when I said we were happy to welcome insights from all faiths, and none, as well as inspiration from poetry and music.
‘Yes’, he said ‘but surely you must use Scripture each week’.
It was quite a long conversation.
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We welcome insights from other traditions. This is an approach to faith that must, I believe, be mirrored in our approach to other elements of life.
We must listen to political views we think we will find unpalatable.
We should read the news about countries other than our own.
We should care about the social conditions of all. Not just here, but across the world.
We need to be aware. As Barefoot Unitarians, we need to be able to feel the different elements of this world beneath our feet. As a movement that believes in openness, fairness and equality, we owe it to ourselves to stay connected.
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We need to feel the different shades of the world beneath our feet. We do of course, need to be careful of that imagery. The world is not beneath our feet; we are not on top of it. Rather we are finding the world through direct experience of it. We are using our feet as the metaphor, rather than the physical reality.
When writing this piece, I then was going to say that the exposure of our feet, the Barefoot Unitarian, was a metaphor for the exposure of our souls to the realities of the world. Feet for souls.
Too dreadful a pun, even if unintended. However, I’ve changed my mind on this. To help me remember my new aim to be a Barefoot Unitarian, I need to remember that placing my foot on the varied surfaces of the earth is in fact baring my soul to the differing facets of life. My life, and the lives of those near and far away.
To bare the soul, is to put a challenge to yourself on the world you see. To bare your soul is to try and empathise with those you meet – to try and understand. To bare your soul is to recognise the hurt and pain that is going on in the world – and to recognise a need to do something about it.
And we do. We are a congregation that has made a commitment to support those in need in the Dover area and more widely. We collect for the Foodbank, we promote Dover Pride, we have made tentative steps towards supporting the local mosque and refugee support. We have also engaged our local MP with our concerns.
And we are made aware of all these things by being aware to the world around us. Removing George Eliot’s ‘wadding’, and walking barefoot in the reality of this broken world.
And despite the good we have done, still the needs are there.
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The needs are still there. There is more to be done.
How does the Barefoot Unitarian find the strength, the energy, the ability to commit?
By going barefoot, of course. How else?
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Our second reading, RS Thomas’s ‘The Moor’.
‘It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.’
And towards the end:
‘there were no prayer said. But stillness’
and
‘the air crumbled and broke on me generously as bread’
As many of you will know, Thomas often writes of the experience of the divine in nature. Of the connections between the natural world and our experience of something greater. Our experience of what many will call God.
We used this poem in our poetry and mediation group for that very reason.
Our experience of the natural world can refresh and nourish us. And the memory – or experience – of walking barefoot on grass, or on the sand, as before, is something that, for me, brings a connectedness back into my life. To stop and feel the earth beneath me, through my feet, is to feel grounded and to be held. To be held in love by, and with, creation itself.
Cliff Reed, the former Unitarian Minister in Ipswich has written that the mythical story of Adam and Eve, with Adam being created from the ‘dust of the ground’, is a reminder of, and a metaphor for, our connectedness to the earth and everything on it. We are responsible for this planet – and we can also gain necessary strength and encouragement from the stillness and majesty of the world around us.
Picture yourself in RS Thomas’s poem. Standing barefoot on a moor. No other human sounds around. Just the stillness and the wind in the grass. Feeling the earthy nature of the ground under your feet. Again, your soul bared to nature.
Feel yourself as part of the moor.
And then, the air crumbles, and breaks on you generously as bread.
And there it is. The feeding of the body, the feeding of the soul by the majestic, yet simple, presence of the natural world.
Henry Beston, the American writer and naturalist put it well:
‘It is only when we are aware of the earth as poetry that we truly live’
This poetic understanding of the natural world. The beauty and rhythm of nature. The poetry of the world around us.
As Barefoot Unitarians, we would be, of course, ever closer to that earth. Feeling its ways. Its bumps and cracks. Its sharp points and its healing smoothness.
We also need to be aware of our commitment to maintaining the balance of the earth. And as Barefoot Unitarians we would be evermore aware of that responsibility.
Walt Whitman claimed
‘Where the earth is, we are’
and this connection, this literal grounding, is surely the way in which we can be more aware.
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I’m asking you today to join me in my quest as a Barefoot Unitarian.
By walking humbly and openly, with feet and souls open to the world, we will be better able to feel, to empathise and to challenge the injustice in this world.
By metaphorically walking barefoot, we will be more aware. With less ‘wadding’ between us and the harsh realities of this planet.
Furthermore, our Barefoot Unitarian approach to the earth will open our eyes to the need to defend and protect this precious planet. And this, in turn, will help us to feel the nourishing wetness and warmth we need from this earth to sustain us in our tasks.
The journey to a perfect and peaceful world is long, and the steps on the journey are many. If we walk it together, if we walk it barefoot, we will be both strengthened and refreshed.
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