
Making Footprints Not Blueprints
Welcome to the Making Footprints Not Blueprints podcast. My name is Andrew James Brown, and I’m the Minister of the Unitarian Church in Cambridge, UK.
Knowing that full scope always eludes our grasp, that there is no finality of vision, that we have perceived nothing completely, and that, therefore, tomorrow a new walk is a new walk, I hope that, on occasion, you’ll find here some helpful expressions of a creative, inquiring, free and liberative spirituality that will help and encourage you to journey through life, making footprints rather than blueprints.
Making Footprints Not Blueprints
S10 #05 - A Portable Spirituality — Walking the Path of Free-Religion ( jiyū shūkyō) - A thought for the day
The full text of this podcast can be found in the transcript of this edition or at the following link:
https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-portable-spirituality-walking-path-of.html
Please feel free to post any comments you have about this episode there.
The Cambridge Unitarian Church's Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation can be found at this link:
https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/morning-service/
Music, "New Heaven", written by Andrew J. Brown and played by Chris Ingham (piano), Paul Higgs (trumpet), Russ Morgan (drums) and Andrew J. Brown (double bass)
Thanks for listening. Just to note that the texts of all these podcasts are available on my blog. You'll also find there a brief biography, info about my career as a musician, & some photography. Feel free to drop by & say hello. Email: caute.brown[at]gmail.com
A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation
—o0o—
So, given that it’s been incredibly hot this week in the UK, I could have written something for you about the climate emergency and the failure of our institutions — whether local, national, or international — to deal with it… a kind of political-theological analysis of the problem (see HERE and HERE, for example). And perhaps also, because we’re witnessing the Israeli government’s continuing genocidal actions against Palestinians in Gaza and the illegally occupied West Bank, I could have written another piece for you about the importance of challenging Israel’s actions whilst at the same time showing that this critique need not fall into anti-Semitism. In other words, to offer you another reminder that Israel and Judaism are not synonymous. Of course, there are many other topics — in fact, too many — that I might have chosen which are currently distressing and angering us.
But it’s apparent to me that most of you don’t really need me to offer that kind of analysis — or at least not every week — because most of you are as fully aware of the problems as am I. But it’s also clear that simply continuing ONLY to analyse these horrors is not going to help anyone. This is because it risks increasing our general sense of helplessness in the face of these seemingly intractable problems. It’s for this reason that in recent years — really only since the pandemic — that I’ve turned to trying to articulate for you a positive, free-religious and spiritual path that I think can truly help us navigate and weather these crises. But, as I have discovered, this is not an easy thing to do, because one of the things the Unitarian movement in the modern British context has failed to do for many, many decades is to offer people just such a clear teaching. I think that this has happened because it’s easy to slip into thinking that offering any kind of clear and distinctive teaching would be tantamount to stopping people thinking freely for themselves — which is, of course, a central tenet of the Unitarian tradition. But unless we, as a free-religious community, have some kind of centre of religious and spiritual gravity — a set of positive principles to live by that roots our free-thinking — then we’re not going to be clear about how we are to navigate the coming challenging decades as good, decent, compassionate, and loving human beings.
It’s this reason that has been the main driver behind my post-pandemic decision to begin actively to practise myself, and to offer to you, the spiritual path I discovered with increasing wonder and excitement, as I began to translate the writings of the Japanese Unitarian Imaoka Shin’ichirō, about what he calls jiyū shūkyō — which, as you know, can be translated as “free religion” but which is better rendered more discursively as “a dynamic, creative, inquiring, and free religion or spirituality.”
It’s a modern, profoundly insightful, and powerful weaving together of liberal Unitarian Christian insights, those of the Unitarian Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the scientifically informed process philosophy of Henri Bergson, with the Japanese traditions of Buddhism, Shintoism, and Confucian-inspired humanism. It offers, I believe, the positive liberal and free-religious teaching our modern tradition has long lacked — and which it so obviously and urgently needs if it is to have a meaningful future life. Naturally, I’ve been delighted that Imaoka-sensei’s “Principles of Living” have been adopted by us and now form the basis of our own statements of what we are about, as seen on our recently redesigned webpage, and which can be found at the back of our service booklet.
Even though I have just introduced Imaoka Shin’ichirō’s Unitarian-rooted jiyū shūkyō to the British General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, I fully realise I have so far singularly failed to persuade the wider British Unitarian movement to begin exploring its possibilities in any systematic, corporate fashion. But this is only to be expected. Indeed, as Jesus once ironically noted, “A prophet is not dishonoured except in his native country and among his own kin and in his household” (Mark 6:4). Indeed, I’m finding that others outside the Unitarian tradition are currently more receptive to the possibilities of Imaoka-sensei’s message than those within it… but I still have hopes that this will slowly change. Not least of all because of the encounters I’ve been having when I’ve been teaching Imaoka-sensei’s ideas to the International Association for Religious Freedom, which has lots of international Unitarian involvement, and the reception has been positive.
But, be that as it may, it’s this fact that explains why I want properly to bring to your attention today the way Imaoka-sensei’s message is being heard in two settings other than here in Cambridge. The first is in the Philippines, where it has become a way for someone to move into a free and liberative religious and spiritual practice from out of the context of conservative Christianity and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The second is in the international context of an LGBT+ group called the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics.
One of the first people to see and begin to live the possibilities of jiyū shūkyō was Vince Imbat from the Philippines, a founding member of our own Cambridge community’s online Thursday morning and evening community, the Kiitsu Kyōkai — i.e. the “Returning-to-One Gathering” — which began exploring the possibilities of jiyū shūkyō and the associated benefits of Quiet Sitting, Seiza meditation, in February 2024.
In passing today — though not unimportantly — I need to say that since we are working in an international, linguistically and religiously diverse group of people, why should we privilege English translations of the terms jiyū shūkyō and Kiitsu Kyōkai over the original Japanese? Keeping the Japanese terms in play allows us to find creative ways to translate their rich original meanings into our own languages, whilst also sharing a common way to name them.
Anyway, Vince has wonderfully and creatively walked — quite literally, in his case — with the possibilities offered to him by jiyū shūkyō, and he has been recording his journey of spiritual liberation on his blog. This journey brought him into contact with many new and interesting people, including Brother Argel Tuason, Obl. O.S.B., a Roman Catholic Benedictine Oblate of the Monastery Without Walls, who now chairs the Spirituality and Faith Development Committee of the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics. Argel tells us that he first began to find real spiritual solace through a contemplative path, and in reading the work of John McNeill, S.J., a Jesuit priest who, as some of you may know, was an early champion of gay rights. Indeed, in 1976 Mcneill wrote the important book “The Church and the Homosexual”, one of the first works in the field of moral theology to argue that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality.
Argel was so intrigued by Vince’s way of talking about jiyū shūkyō, and its associated meditative practice of Seiza meditation — quiet sitting — which we practise in our Cambridge church’s online Kiitsu Kyōkai, that he invited Vince to give a talk to the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics. That talk was titled “Encountering a Creative, Free Spirituality (jiyū shūkyō 自由宗教) through Walking” and was given two weeks ago. Naturally, I can’t offer you the whole of Vince’s talk here — and I do encourage you to listen and/or read his original talk which is a very, very fine and interesting piece — but I do want to share here just a few lines from it:
“I attended my first Kiitsu Kyōkai meeting on February 8, 2024. The Kiitsu Kyōkai format was simple. It followed what Imaoka did for his group. We began with a seiza practice that lasted at most 20 minutes, followed by a short prompt shared by any volunteer from the group, then a short piece of music. All of this was followed by about an hour of free conversation. I’ve been with the group now for about a year and a half, and I’ve made real friendships with the people in the meetings. The Kiitsu Kyōkai community also helped me cautiously re-encounter my religious past to look for gems that I could re-integrate into the new religious life I’m building. Through the community’s help, I’ve started using religious words that I’d purposely avoided since leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses. For example, I’m now using the word ‘faith’ once more — not to refer to a strong conviction or belief in something, but to signify taking the next step and acting despite not knowing the entire picture. For a walker, this doesn’t just make complete sense — I also find it very beautiful. After more than a decade of wandering in spiritual wilderness, I can now say with a clean heart — and I don’t take this lightly, because it took a very, very long time for me to get here — that in Kiitsu Kyōkai, I’ve found a spiritual community I can call my own. In retrospect, one of the biggest things that attracted me to jiyū shūkyō was its minimalism. Why was this important to me? Remember that leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses made me a spiritual wanderer. Leaving in the way I did not only made it difficult — or impossible — to return, it also made it hard for me to trust religions or spiritual groups that resembled what I had left: communities with highly complex doctrines and hierarchical structures. If there is any real chance for me to express my spirituality and be part of a religious community of any sort, that platform has to be as minimal as possible — at least while I’m still discovering who I am as a free-religious person. In walking language, [it’s what] gives me a portable spirituality — something I can carry in my backpack as I continue my wandering; something that can continue to sustain me as I figure out more about how I want to proceed. Jiyū shūkyō has given me this minimal, portable sustenance in the form of Imaoka Shin’ichirō’s ‘Principles of Living’, which he repeatedly revised throughout his life to articulate the centre of gravity of what he calls jiyū shūkyō.”
The point I want to get across to you today here in Cambridge, is that this liberating, free-religious spirituality has reached the Philippines, and now also a international group of LGBT+ Roman Catholics with people from South America, from Hong Kong, from the Philippines of course, from across Europe, and in Canada and the USA, because of what’s happening here. We really have facilitated some real and exciting changes in people’s lives beyond these local walls. This is how free religion travels — not by decree, but by lives quietly transformed. We’ve really begun something here, so I hope we’re going to keep walking the path of jiyū shūkyō together, and let it powerfully inform how, with love and compassion, we continue to resist the many injustices we are daily seeing all around us.