Celebrate!
Happy July! And Happy Birthday to your country, if you live in the USA or Canada. Wherever you live, you might want to celebrate the Japanese star festival of Tanabata this month. Or let me know the special July or August celebration that your family has (re@clfuu.org) and I’ll put it up so other people can celebrate it to!
Click on the links below to find out more about these holidays from around the world and how you might celebrate them in your family.
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We Honor… |
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| July 4th. Independence Day for the US, happens this month, as does Canada Day, which celebrates the creation of Canada as a separate country from England. So I suppose it’s a month to celebrate independence from the rule of a king or queen. But did you know that there actually has been a Unitarian king? King John Sigismund was the one and only Unitarian king in history, back in 1561, in Transylvania, which is now part of the Eastern European country of Romania. John Sigismund was very interested in religion, partly because people in his country kept fighting about it. The Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Unitarians all argued about whose views about God and Jesus and how church services should be conducted were right.
Finally, King John decided that they should have a debate. He called the best speaker from each church to come to a place called Torda for an argument with rules: each person takes a turn to speak about his or her ideas. There is no quarreling because only one person speaks at a time. A judge decides who has the best ideas. The debate began each day at five in the morning and it lasted 10 days.
The speaker from the Unitarian church was a man named Francis David. He argued that no one has the right to force people to believe anything about God.
After 10 days, King John ordered the debate to end. But he did not announce a winner; he did not say that any of the four churches was the best. This probably surprised many people. King John did listen to the argument of Francis David though, that no one should be forced to believe in any religion but should be able to choose for himself or herself. Then, King John made an important announcement that was called the Edict of Torda. The edict told the people that from that time on, his subjects could debate about their ideas of religion, but they must not fight, punish, or kill each other about religion. Every church and every person would be free to follow their own beliefs. This was a new and strange idea for those times, and many people were angry with King John for this law, but he stuck to it. Unitarians especially remember King John, because his law made it safe for them to be Unitarians.
(Adapted from “Faith is the Gift of God,” available on the Between Sundays section of the CLF website.) |
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Act!
In honor of Independence Day, maybe there is something you can do to help a neighbor stay independent. Many elderly people live independent lives, taking care of themselves in their own homes. But there are often tasks that are too physically demanding for older people to do themselves, like mowing the lawn, or getting dead leaves out of their rain gutters. If you can give someone who lives near you a helping hand with a few tasks they’re not able to do by themselves, you can help them to be independent as long as possible. And you can remind yourself and the person that you’re helping, that we are all interdependent, all related to one another, all needing to be in relationship to other people.
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Nurturing Your Spirit
Tanabata is a Japanese holiday known as the “star festival.” But you don’t have to be Japanese to celebrate the stars. Stars belong equally to everyone and to no one, since they are visible at night all around the world, but no one can touch them or own them or use them. Stars look tiny, but we know that they are actually unimaginably huge and unimaginably far away, and that really, we are the ones who are tiny in comparison to the rest of the universe. Sometimes, when you’re feeling caught up in what you want, or not getting what you want, it’s a good idea to take some time to sit and look at stars and remember that although there are lots of things that seem incredibly important to us at the time, our whole lives are really not even the blink of an eye compared to the life cycle of a star. It helps for star gazing if you can get away from city lights, but even in most cities you can still see a few stars at night (using a pair of binoculars helps). You can search for constellations, groups of stars that have a name and story, using a star map, or you can make up your own groupings and stories, if you like. Or just look at the sky and take some deep breaths, and feel how you are a tiny speck on a little planet that is circling around an average-sized star that is just one of the uncountable number of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, which is just one of an uncountable number of galaxies spinning through space.
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Principles in Practice
Our fourth UU principle is the “Free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” That’s what King John Sigismund was doing when he sponsored the debates at Torda. He wanted to learn more, and wanted people to hear different sides of the story about how people should live their religious lives. A free search means that you can look anywhere and listen to anyone as you try to sort out what is right and true. A responsible search means both that you don’t tromp on other people’s opinions as you sort out your own, and that you take responsibility for finding out the facts, not just accepting that something is true because you like the idea, or the person who expressed it.
You could sponsor your own debate, as part of your own free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Do you have friends or siblings or parents who have different ideas about religion? You can ask people to share what they believe, giving each person a set amount of time (say, five minutes each) on any given question, like what they believe about God, or prayer, or what happens after you die. Of course, you can have a debate on plenty of other topics, not just religion. It’s all part of the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. |
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