A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation.
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Today is Pentecost Sunday (or Whitsunday), the Sunday when the birth of the Christian tradition is said to have occurred at the mytho-poetic event recorded by Luke in the Book of Acts, when the Holy Spirit of God, in the form of tongues of fire, was believed to have descended dove-like upon the followers of Jesus, ensuring their continuity with the same Holy Spirit they felt they had witnessed in the teachings and actions of their recently executed teacher. Although it is vanishingly unlikely that there occurred a literal resurrection of Jesus, even amongst the most sceptical of parties genuinely interested in religion and matters of the spirit — of which I am assuredly one — can recognise that in the lives of Jesus’ disciples there undoubtedly occurred something we can call a resurrection of the, spirit, the Holy Spirit. And so, in consequence, we may say that thanks to the mytho-poetic event of Pentecost the disciples were initiated into what they felt was a new, living tradition that slowly became known as “Christianity.”
Now, in one way or another, this tradition has continued unbroken through the two millennia since that legendary day unto this very Sunday morning. But, in the liberal church tradition where I am minister, which promotes “a creative and inquiring, free or liberative religion or spirituality” — what the twentieth-century Japanese Yuniterian, Imaoka Shin’ichirō called “jiyū shūkyō” (自由宗教) — our understanding of in what consists this unbroken tradition is very, very, very different from how it is understood in more, so-called “orthodox” forms of Christianity.
In this later kind of Christianity there remains a strong belief that there exists some kind of single, linear, pure and unbroken procession which leads directly from Jesus, via the descent of the Holy Spirit, to themselves. But, it’s vital to understand that the Christian tradition — and, in fact, every tradition there has ever been, religious or otherwise, Christian or otherwise — every single tradition is never a single, linear one, but always rhizomatic, i.e., a root that is sent out into the world and which spreads in multiple directions simultaneously, continuously branching and self-replicating in what can be called a “nomadic” fashion.
Just consider the case of Christianity here. The single — if it can be said to be single, which I doubt — the single Holy Spirit descends upon the twelve disciples, now called apostles, and it is these twelve who take their new, transformed way of being out into the world. So, right from the beginning — if it can be said there was ever a single beginning, which I also doubt — right from the beginning the Christian tradition, or root, was rhizomatic not single. It’s then vital to see that each of those twelve new rhizomatic roots, the apostles, also then spread rhizomatically and, over two millennia, you can easily see why the Christian tradition is so complex and plural. In fact, it would make more sense always to be talking about Christianities not Christianity. The same is true, of course, of all other religious traditions, and so we should really only ever talk about Judaisms, varieties of Islam, Buddhisms, Hinduisms and so on.
But, remaining with Christianity for the moment, each of these apostles, these twelve new rhizomatic roots, were always learning new stuff about the world and incorporating it into their own being, just as roots take in water and minerals to help them grow. They also encountered and entangled themselves with the rhizomatic roots that spread out from the initiating events that began other religions and philosophies. Sometimes their own rhizomatic growth meant that the first apostles, and those who came after them, their followers, intertwined and entangled so closely with other traditions that they become something new again — think of how lichen is “a symbiosis between different organisms — a fungus and an algae or cyanobacterium,” A good example of this would be the Nestorian Christians in China who developed a symbiotic, syncretic religion as it intermingled with Buddhism. And, to use an image beloved of St Paul, think also of how trees can be grafted together to form new and fruitful trees (Romans 11:24). As many of you will know, in Paul’s mind Christianity was a kind of graft upon the tree of Judaism.
Anyway, the basic point I hope I am making clear is that, although in a certain, very loose and broad sense we can say there is a tradition which has led from the event of Pentecost to us today, at no time can it ever be considered to have been single, let alone pure. Through and through, it’s a huge, complex, ever-changing and developing mixture.
But, I hope you can also see that this would have been true way back on that mytho-poetic day of Christianity’s foundation or, indeed, the mytho-poetic founding day of any other religion. This is because there has never been a single pure tradition that led to any, apparently single, so-called “initiating event.” And let’s be clear about this, Jesus and the first disciples/apostles were shaped not only by Judaism but also by the local indigenous religions of first-century Palestine, as well as the philosophies of Rome and Greece, and those that came to their homeland from the near and far East thanks to the trade routes that abounded in that part of the world at the time. When you look at human history you will be able to find no single initiating event or person of any religious or philosophical tradition because the complex Spirit of Life itself, which makes any single event or person possible in the first place, is always-already plural, in fact, hyper-plural, and it comes to us from all directions simultaneously, and it goes from us in all directions simultaneously.
What this means for a creative and inquiring, free or liberative religious or spiritual community, is that Pentecost stands as a festival symbolic, not of the founding of Christianity per se, but symbolic of this rhizomatic way we learn about how the world is and our place in it, and of how we might then best pass this on to others. Given this, our own teaching must clearly be itself rhizomatic, through and through. And this is why I so highly value religious and spiritual exemplars such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Imaoka Shin’ichirō, who emerged from out of the Unitarian and Free/Liberal Christian tradition, because they so obviously understood this. And I think it’s no coincidence that both of them were extremely active in the field of education, Emerson as a freelance lecturer and essayist, and Imaoka-sensei as the principal of a very famous and influential school in Tokyo, the Seisoku Academy, for over fifty years.
This fact has meant I’ve long kept my eye on developments within educational circles, and only in the last couple of days have I come across the work of Dave Cormier who is a learning specialist for digital strategy and special projects at the Office of Open Learning at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. His work centres on rhizomatic teaching and learning, and I’d like to finish my thought for the day by quoting a couple of paragraphs relating to the theme of his brand new book, “Learning in a Time of Abundance: The Community Is the Curriculum” (John Hopkins University Press, 2024). Of course, he writes his words as a teacher in a secular university. But, on this Pentecost Sunday, I find I can read them to you here with a completely clean heart and full belief (pathos) as a practitioner and teacher of “jiyū shūkyō” (自由宗教), this “creative and inquiring, free or liberative religion and spirituality.”
“I refuse to accept that my role as a teacher is to take the knowledge in my head and put it in someone else’s. That would make for a pretty limited world :). Why then do we teach? Are we passing on social mores? I want my students to know more than me at the end of my course. I want them to make connections I would never make. I want them to be prepared to change. I think having a set curriculum of things people are supposed to know encourages passivity. I don’t want that. We should not be preparing people for factories. I teach to try and organize people’s learning journeys… to create a context for them to learn in.
“[So w]hat does successful learning look like? [Well, Deleuze and Guattari, once wrote:]
“’the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectible, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21).
“It is [this kind of] map that I think successful learning looks like. Not a series of remembered ideas, reproduced for testing, and quickly forgotten. But something flexible that is already integrated with the other things a learner knows. Most things that we value ‘knowing’ are not things that are easily pointed to. Knowing is a long process of becoming (think of it in the sense of ‘becoming an expert’) where you actually change the way you perceive the world based on new understandings. You change and grow as new learning becomes part of the things you know.” (Source).
Now, this wonderful way of proceeding is, I would argue, a true expression of the true spirit of Pentecost — freely, creatively and rhizomatically educational, always and everywhere. And I hope that today you, like me, will be set alight by its flame and so emboldened and impassioned to teach the next generation the joys and timeless value of “jiyū shūkyō” (自由宗教).