Learning to fly‏

In his book ‘The shortest Distance’, the Rev Bill Darlison tells the story of the eagle which grew up with chickens:

“He lived his whole life like a chicken because that’s what he’d been told he was, and that’s what he thought he was.”

 Who can relate to that? I know I can!

Isn’t it strange how sometimes, even many years later, the things that others have said to us or about us years ago can still hold us back?

How many of us here have carried into adulthood some of the negative things that we were told in our younger days?

That we weren’t clever enough… we didn’t look right… or speak well enough…

How many of us have lived our lives a certain way because others have told us that’s how we should live?

How many of us have never truly learnt to fly because we didn’t think we were capable of it?

Perhaps we’ve spent our lives wishing we could manage something but something or someone held us back….

In the Bible, in the book of Deuteronomy we find 2 verses which compare God to a mother eagle who helps her young to fly.

To me, that’s beautiful imagery.

But what does it mean to learn to fly? And what is stopping us doing it?

 For some of us it might firstly mean letting go of some of that baggage we have accumulated over so many years that is so heavy and that drags us down. How can we possibly learn to fly today if we’re still carrying so much weight from the past?

For others, it might mean daring to embrace a different view or image of God from the one that you were told was the only possible and acceptable one to believe in.

It might mean starting to believe in yourself a little more and realising that you are capable – that actually, you’re quite a nice person!

 Maybe you were brought up to believe that you were a miserable sinner and the only thing you could possibly do was crawl before the throne of God on the day of judgement and hope that he wouldn’t send you straight to hell because you’d believed enough.

 Thank God for the blessed truth we learn in Unitarianism! Our Unitarian forebears reasoned that if God is good and God is love then God would never cast someone aside for all eternity…

Now I realise that Unitarians have many different ideas about God but I believe, and I fully believe, that there is something of God in everyone; that we are all connected to God (even if sometimes it feels like we’re just hanging by a thread!).

I’m that when we really begin to understand that we are intimately connected with the Source of All Life, then we can start to fly… and nothing that anyone has said to us or about us can hold us back.

But what about learning to fly together?

Well, I’m no great expert but when – in the autumn – I look around at the flocks of birds circling around getting ready to migrate, I wonder: why don’t they crash into each other? Somehow they’ve learnt to fly together. They’re sensitive to the direction they need to go…

Now maybe what we do as religious community will never be as graceful as a flock of birds, but when we work together to get something done… when we worship together…when we’re really sensitive to each other….then surely we’re doing all the right things we need to do in order to be able to soar together as the mother eagle teaches her young to do.

Can we as Unitarians really learn to fly together given the variety of beliefs that exist in our movement?

Can we still learn to fly together if we don’t all think the same and believe the same thing?

Can we still learn to fly together if we have reached different conclusions?

Well, again I’m no expert – but it would seem to me that the learning to fly together is all about being sensitive to those around you. Still being an individual of course, but realising that you’re sharing the journey with others and that flying straight across another’s path with no thought for them or the journey that they might be on has the potential to bring you back down to earth with an almighty bump!

I’d much rather exist side by side with someone and travel in harmony rather than cutting straight across their ideas and beliefs and causing us both to crash!

So where does all this leave us? Well I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to look on my life and realise that I never learnt to fly. That I lived my life as a chicken because that’s what people told me I was and that’s what I thought I was! I don’t want to look up one day and realise that I’ve missed the blessings that God had for me because I was too scared to leave the ground.

At the same time, I don’t want to fly alone. I want my friends, my partners in faith to fly with me. I know it will take some practice and I know that it means being very aware of what’s going on around me! But if we CAN manage it then think of the distances we could cover! Think of the journeys we could go on!

Where will we go? Well who is to know where our journey might take us? I for one and not too worried about setting a destination yet… first let’s learn to fly!

I can’t deny that there are less Unitarians now than there were 50 years ago. I can’t deny that some of our churches have closed and that others are at risk of closing. Yet there is a sense of excitement within our movement that wasn’t there a few years ago. There’s a positive buzz in the air. Maybe we’re finally about to learn to fly….I pray it may be so.