the beat and the borrowings / the song we become

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Alix Geard © 16 August 2026

Friends,

I invite you to begin with something so ordinary that we rarely notice it.

Take a breath.

Feel your heart.

Before we learn language, before we develop beliefs, before we choose identities or communities, we live inside rhythm. The pulse in the womb and the rise and fall of our lungs are among the first music we ever know.

We are rhythmic creatures.

Continue reading Music and Being Human →

Transcendence through the arts: what transports you?

Speaker & Worship Leader:- Rachel Mackintosh

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Rachel Mackintosh © 26 July 2026

If you look at the kinds of things we say about ourselves in this Unitarian faith, you will often find reference to the fact that we don’t offer easy answers, or certainty, or the promise that an interventionist god will look after us.

There is a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke that elegantly sets out this aspect of Unitarianism:

“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Today our topic is art and the ineffable.

By some irony, I will be using words to convey the ineffable: that which is too vast to be contained in words.

That’s okay.

Words have spaces between them.

Continue reading Art and the ineffable →