“Liberation is universal and is the inevitable destiny of all living creatures.”
Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), Indian Hindu monk, philosopher, author, religious teacher
 
“He [Jesus] dreamed a beautiful vision of a new man and a new society, which will finally realize the spiritual basis of existence and will no longer just come out of the dark caves of evil systems to gain food, but will pursue the most noble spheres.”
Karol Grycz-Śmiłowski (1885-1959), Polish Unitarian theologian and activist
 
Religion that Liberates. Handful of personal reflections.
 
Liberating power
 
Today I already understand that what I was experiencing at the time is not as special as I thought. In fact, my experiences can be considered quite representative of a certain time and a certain social group. For me, however, they were primarily my own, personal ones.
 
I was brought up with the conviction that human beings are supposed to develop as much as they are capable of, in order to become as useful as possible to their environment, to society. This development wasn’t presented to me so much as a chance but rather as a duty, a moral obligation. And this obligation simply had to be fulfilled, as a certain payback for being born in a relatively privileged position. This thinking characterized not only my parents or grandparents. In fact, it was typical for many generations of our ancestors. “You have been given so many talents, opportunities, skills, so you must put them all in the service of others, otherwise your life will have no meaning.” And for now, this meant getting the best grades in school, developing interests (but only the useful ones!) and, of course, meeting expectations, which were high. No, the goal was not to screw up my childhood! It really wasn’t! They really saw it like that, especially since they themselves were brought up in the same way, for generations, for years, for centuries…. This was the best thing that could happen to a person in life, and the best that this person could make of it.
 
But it wasn’t easy to live with it. It wasn’t easy to do what was expected. Especially since, in my case, a certain realization also came quite quickly, namely that due to my bisexual orientation, it could happen that at least one of the important expectations would not be met, namely that of establishing a classical family. Admittedly, my surroundings considered themselves quite progressive, but let’s not forget that we are talking about the 1970s and 1980s in communist Poland! And whoever thinks that Eastern European communists were progressive in terms of morals is wrong, to put it rather euphemistically. In many ways, their approach to this sphere was not so different from that of the conservative Catholic majority of society. After all, that very society brought them forth!
 
My upbringing may not have been definitely atheistic, but religion played a marginal role in it. Really religious were usually people from outside our circle and, although not always, it was treated with a certain disbelief and disregard. Yes, sometimes they were appreciated, but rather in spite of their religious beliefs and certainly not because of them. Religion was something of the past. Yes, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather may have been clergymen or lay preachers, but nowadays? No, it certainly wasn’t the most suitable life choice! Rather, a manifestation of some strange idiosyncrasy!
 
Yet to me, religion (or rather, as we call it today, spirituality) always appealed. Ever since I can remember. There was something fascinating, attractive in this sphere. The promise of a different life, a more profound, more meaningful life than the one envisioned by my upbringing. What did this difference consist of? I must confess that to this day I have a problem with the fact that people see religion as something that orders their lives and provides them with moral guidance. That is, over time I got used to it, but it is hard to imagine something more different from my personal experience. For me, the encounter with religion meant something completely different. Liberation! Liberation from pressure. Breaking the seemingly unbreakable connection between meeting expectations and being accepted. In the spiritual world you can just be, be yourself, be who you are. This was my most fundamental, foundational experience. You can be, you can live your life, you can make mistakes, you can also do things that are not useful at all, at least at first glance (after all, religion itself is also one of them!). Yes, develop yourself! But develop yourself not to become the best possible instrument to meet the demands of those around you, but to gradually become yourself, who, in the depths of your being, you already are! To discover and exercise your deepest identity…. This is what I experienced in the silence of the churches I was so eager to visit, in monasteries, chapels, in the encounter with icons that seemed to follow me with their eyes filled with love, with acceptance, with warm appreciation. So very human and exactly because of that being windows to the divine….
 
It was 1983 and Protestants were celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of the one who, rightly or wrongly (but that’s a topic for a completely different discussion!), was called the Father of the Protestant Reformation, a movement of Christian renewal in the spirit of returning to its origins, the German reformer Martin Luther. Being aware of my own Protestant family roots, I too began reading about him, studying his life and ideas. And then I discovered that at the root of these ideas was an experience similar to mine. The search for a ‘gracious God,’ a God who accepts you because of his grace, not because of your achievements. Probably if it weren’t for the fact that that anniversary coincided with the beginning of my own spiritual search, I might have focused on someone completely different, a different reformer, a different spiritual teacher, and therefore a different spiritual movement. Not necessarily a Christian one. But it was this coincidence that made me feel less alone in my search and in my liberating experience. And it pointed me more specifically toward Protestant Christianity. In full awareness, however, that this is at most one of the possible spiritual paths. One of the possible ways to discover the liberating power of religion….
 
Stand fast therefore in the liberty….
 
Just as I finished writing the above words, I briefly paused and looked at my phone. A reminder came that in 10 days I am to preach in the church of the ‘vrijzinnige’ (liberal) community of faith in Schiedam near Rotterdam. A beautiful building, even one of the most beautiful in which I preach. Above the entrance to it is an inscription (https://iarf.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/unnamed.png), which is a passage from one of the writings of the New Testament, a collection of writings that is part of the Bible, specifically the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Galatians, Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free…. However, this is not all the author had to convey, for the passage goes further, namely, …and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.
 
The Jesus Movement (in reference to this moment in history it is rather better to use this name rather than the term ‘Christianity’) was initially by no means a separate religion. Rather, it was a renewal movement within the bosom of the ancient Jewish religion. What was the point of that renewal? Much could, and should, be written about it, especially to avoid misunderstandings and simplifications. Much more than I have room for here. I would like to use for this purpose the words of Polish Unitarian theologian Karol Grycz-Śmiłowski, who in 1959 represented Polish Unitarians at the congress of the predecessor of the IARF International Association for Liberal Christianity and Religious Freedom in Chicago. His approach can also be considered a simplification. However, since we don’t have room for a sufficiently broad treatment of the subject anyway, let me choose at least the simplification with which I personally can most agree. According to Grycz-Śmiłowski, Jesus’ idea was to turn away from religious ceremonialism towards a religious deepening of people, thanks to which a thorough social transformation was supposed to take place as well.
 
Paul, who considered himself a follower of Jesus, was of the opinion that the community in Galatia had forgotten this. Instead of exercising the freedom that Jesus wanted, they had fallen back into customs, traditions and ceremonies of a purely outward and superficial nature. That’s why he exhorts the Galatians to stand firm in their freedom, so that they don’t become slaves to rules and traditions again. Whereby, for him, this in no way means breaking with the basic message of the Jewish religion! On the contrary! The religion of the Jews is the religion of the liberation of the people from slavery, and its regulations are only intended to confirm and protect liberty given to them.
 
However, the problem recurs because of the constant tendency of people to escape from freedom, as psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm once put it. We escape from it because freedom is not easy at all. Because it’s easier to find for ourselves a set of rules and regulations and live by them, while turning religion from a means of liberation into a handy container for them. ‘Religious deepening’? But after all, how many ‘dragons’ slumber in the depths of human souls, how many monstrosities, how many traps, how many dangers! Why awaken them, why confront them? Why start this, as Dag Hammarskjöld called it, ‘the longest journey at all, an inner journey’, when one can comfortably follow the paths once paved and even consider oneself ‘a particularly virtuous person’? Why search for something at all, when everything really important has long since been found and handed down to us in the form of tradition?
 
These are timeless questions, although each time they return they don a different, temporal form. The Reformation mentioned above also struggled with them. What’s more, like any movement, initially free and dynamic, it too underwent petrification very quickly. Reformers became afraid of the waves they themselves caused, communities that arose from it produced their own regulations, restrictions and dogmas, or clung to the old ones. But not everyone was ready to accept this. The history of the Church can be told from different perspectives. One can focus on the institutions and the teachings they promulgate. But one can also tell the same story from the perspective of those who refused to put either the institutions or the teachings in order for them. Then it will be the story of rebels, of free spirits. Sometimes militant and nothing less than revolutionary, sometimes much more peaceful and quiet, yet not less radical. Some of them were spiritual solitaries, but others sought the company of those who thought and felt similarly.
 
One of the communities that such free spirit people formed was the Nederlandsche Protestanten Bond (Dutch Protestant Association), founded in 1870 and now called Vrijzinnigen Nederland. They were the ones who built the church in Schiedam. Their name was also a program. They created a free association, not a church, because they associated the church with the very thing they didn’t want, a religion that enslaves instead of liberates. At the same time, at that time, most of them still had little doubt that they were Christians, followers of Jesus, because, according to the ‘Zeitgeist’ and their Eurocentrism, they considered Christianity the highest form of religion, the most suitable for modern, enlightened people. Admittedly, they no longer held the opinion that there was nothing valuable in other religions. On the contrary, one of their founders was even one of the most eminent religious scholars of the time, and they readily drew on the achievements of non-Christian traditions, but nevertheless Christianity was for most of them the pinnacle of the evolution of religion. If they doubted it, they longed for the creation of something new, a universal religion of mankind, combining humanism and the religious human instinct, but certainly at the time they would not yet have been ready to give up the Christian tradition in favor of another historical one. They would consider it a setback. A few decades later, this slowly began to change. As did their connection to Protestantism. For at the time of the NPB, if Christianity was for them the highest form of religion, its currents growing out of the Protestant Reformation were unquestionably the highest form of Christianity. And in fact the only ones worthy of consideration. They looked down on Catholicism and were usually unfamiliar with Eastern and Oriental Christianity. But this was not just an affirmation of the ideas of the Reformers. They were embroiled in a vigorous dispute with those heirs of the Reformation who had fallen into dogmatism. By choosing such a name, they said, ‘We are the true heirs of the church’s renewal of the 16th century. For we understand that this renewal never ended, that the Reformation continues, that we must explore new spiritual areas, dissect old prejudices, sometimes contradict old beliefs, in order to keep discovering what it was all about from the very beginning, “Stand firm in freedom!” For the fact that the Orthodox often repeat verbatim the formulas of the old Reformation writings does not at all mean that they are faithful to the SPIRIT OF RENEWAL. On the contrary! That’s exactly how they betray that spirit even more!’ And this dispute about the past, about heritage, has never been just a dispute about the past. In fact, it was a dispute about the essence of religion.
 
Gradually their horizon expanded. Gradually they saw that similar disputes were also taking place in other traditions: inside and outside Christianity. And that also outside its limits they could meet allies, people of the free spirit, people for whom their religion is a means of liberation. Therefore, it was only natural that in 1900 they were among the founders of the organization that is now called the IARF. Of course, they got rid of their Eurocentrism only step by step, slowly, and in fact they are still in the process of getting rid of it. Or should I rather say, since I’m writing such a personal text now, that it is I who’s still in this process? That would also be true….
 
What’s more, the encounter with other traditions and spiritual currents helped them see the liberating tendencies hidden in their own tradition! This can be perfectly seen in the example of two people whose quotes I have chosen as a motto for these reflections. Swami Vivekananda was a man who showed the rest of the world the richness of India’s religious heritage. Karol Grycz-Śmiłowski was originally a Lutheran pastor who gradually parted ways with confessional Lutheranism and discovered, both for himself and others, the Unitarian tradition of the Polish Brethren, one of the most important sources of free religion in Europe. But, interestingly enough, it was exactly his study of Vivekananda’s ideas that helped Grycz-Śmiłowski understand what treasure was hidden in the religious past of his own country! Thanks to a Hindu, he realized that Christianity could be something different than he had previously thought!
 
In my case, an encounter with the mystical traditions of the Jewish religion and Islam played a very similar role. They opened up a completely new perspective on the content of Master Jesus’ message. In this regard, I owe a lot to the Bektashi community, with which I had the opportunity to get acquainted thanks to the IARF. Sometimes I have difficulty calling myself a Christian. I actually don’t like the term, and I use it mainly because I don’t want it to be used (and often abused!) by all sorts of fundamentalists. And, at the same time, it was engraved in my memory with the words from a woman, a sheikh of a Sufi school, during a deep spiritual crisis, ‘The door of our meeting place will always be open to you, but, if you want to hear my opinion, your personal way is the way of Master Jesus.’ Look, what an interreligious meeting can become!
 
Please, enough of dealing with ourselves!
 
The view of an organization by someone whose life partner is its paid employee, taking care of more or less everything that happens in it, can be very insightful but also very distorted. Therefore, please do not take my opinion as an objective one. In fact, it is, like all of this text, extremely personal. In addition, it is the opinion of someone to whom this meme (https://iarf.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/unnamed-1.png) does not apply only because my congregation cannot afford to hire a secretary who can say something like that. Other than that, everything is correct!
 
Having said all this, however, I must confess that lately I am beginning to get tired of how much our organization focuses on itself and its organizational, legal and other problems. These constantly recurring questions about who we are, how we function, whether we function…. It’s not that I don’t see the need to clean up our own yard. But I am seriously afraid that soon it will be as clean and tidy as…. a graveyard. And this will be its function! A lovingly maintained graveyard of beautiful ideas!
 
Meanwhile, I am convinced that what the world needs right now are exactly these ideas! More and more lost in the maze of this world, people are looking for various beacons that would set the right direction. Free religion shows that these beacons are already there. Each of us carries them within ourselves. Yes, it is necessary to discover them. Yes, one must learn to listen to the voice of one’s conscience, for it is often the quietest of all the voices that sound within us. Yes, it is necessary to confront what we carry in ourselves, our inner light, with what others carry in themselves, with their inner light. And it is necessary that this confrontation take place on the largest possible scale! But the point is to trust what is within us. To trust our own humanity and the humanity of others. And, that we develop this humanity in the awareness of being a part of a greater whole. From our fears, illusions, our immaturity, no leader, no messiah, neither political nor religious, will liberate us. We can only liberate ourselves from them together, mutually.
 
The message of free religion is the message that liberation is possible, that we can become what we already are in the deepest sense, and make the world what it already is in its spiritual essence, although most often we do not see this. And that religion, which has done so much evil in this world as well, can nevertheless also help it (re)gain its true form. If it is itself a free religion, and therefore liberating. Free from coercion, free from fear, free from uncritical replication of prefabricated patterns and adherence to prefabricated rules, but certainly not free from responsibility for humanity, for the world, for every being.
 
Preaching this message, in word and deed, is the most important task of the IARF. Or perhaps actually the only one…