Genesis 1: 25-31
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

So God created man in his image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat; and it was so.
And God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

God's Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Sacred Things

"I warrant you no certainty for whatever I say, except that it was indeed my thought at the time …….. my vacillating and disorderly thought. I will talk about anything by way of conversation, and nothing by way of counsel." – Montaigne

One of Morag's presents to me last Christmas was a little leather key-case. She had obviously been paying attention because I had been complaining for a few months that the case I had been using was threadbare, the whole thing hanging together by a few strands of yarn, and for some time perilously close to final collapse. Furthermore, the little hooks had lost their tension and would frequently link up with each other rather promiscuously, leaving my keys in a hopeless tangle. It was indeed useless, but when I had transferred my keys to my sturdy new case, I felt a slight pang of regret as I made to deposit the old one in the waste bin. After all, I'd carried it about my person for about five years, using it daily. Although it had begun to exasperate me I had developed the same kind of attachment to it that one has for comfortable shoes or well-worn baggy sweaters. To discard such things without a thought seems almost ungrateful and I sometimes feel that we should have a little religious ritual to help us dispose of them with some degree of solemnity, some acknowledgement of the small but important part they play in our lives. Perhaps those people are right who claim that the things we use become imbued with our own psychic energies and so, in some mysterious way, become part of us; and I am not opposed, in principle, to the idea of psychometry, by means of which certain people claim to be able to discover things about a person simply by hold something that has belonged to them (although I've never seen a convincing demonstration of it in practice). Maybe there is a transference of energy, and maybe this is why certain places become considered holy - they soak up the energies of holy people over a period of time.

Such thoughts were uppermost in my mind during my recent stay in England. Morag's mother's health is failing quite rapidly now and the time has come for her to move into our house in Pontefract so that Morag can keep an eye on her. Her move has necessitated converting my study into a sitting room and I have just spent a week sorting through the accumulated debris of thirteen years - papers, letters, old school books, newspaper clippings, photographs - plus the things I couldn't bear to throw away the last time we moved house. There was also an old tape recorder, an old radio, a battered briefcase and sundry other articles, which were beyond repair but which were still connected by some kind of invisible thread to my heart. "Be ruthless," Morag said (women are not nearly as sentimental as men over things), and I was, but it wasn't easy. We made five trips to the dump, and every black sack deposited in the skip contained something that I would have held on to had the circumstances been different.

One thing I didn't discard was a Christmas card that I'd made in school when I was about seven and given to my mother (why to my mother and not to my mother and father I don't know; perhaps Freud had it right about Oedipus). It resurfaced after my mother's death about twenty years ago among the things she preserved in a little tin, and the fact that she had valued it gave it an added value for me, and it is now among my most treasured possessions.

There is a school of thought within the religious traditions of the world, which tends to view this attachment to things as something of a distraction on our spiritual pilgrimage. According to this view, and it is a pervasive one, the material world is deceptive or illusory and we should steel ourselves to have as little contact with it as we can without risking our health or our sanity. In the Face to Faith column in yesterday's Guardian, for example, a Hindu priest, Krishna Dharma, writes: "As we are eternal souls, we do not belong in this world, which is ultimately only a place of suffering for everyone ……… The Bhagavad Gita teaches us to get out of the material world to enter the eternal spiritual atmosphere, where we really belong, and where suffering does not exist."·

Such a view is not restricted to the religions of the East. One of the prayers I was taught as a young Catholic was the Salve Regina - Hail Holy Queen - which asks the Virgin Mary to help us "poor banished children of Eve" as we endure our sojourn in this "vale of tears". Here is the ancient idea in a Catholic guise: this world is a place of exile.

Some of the Gnostic sects, which flourished at the beginning of the Christian era viewed the world itself as the creation of an imperfect deity - the Demiurgos, the Demiurge - which is why they could never accept the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation. How, they asked, could God become involved in something as despicable and sinful as human flesh? Even St. Paul with his famous declaration that "flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Corinthians 15:50) runs perilously close to this Gnostic viewpoint.

Within the Protestant tradition this tendency to shun the world and its illusory delights has been even more marked. Puritanism, out of which, to some extent, Unitarianism sprang, has ever sought purity of life by eschewing the things of the world, particularly the sensual and beautiful things. G.K. Chesterton, in his study of George Bernard Shaw·, defines Puritanism in a rather novel way: "A Puritan," he says, "is someone whose mind has no holidays", that is, someone for whom mental activity is identified with spiritual activity, and all sensual things are avoided as the temptations of the devil. As Chesterton says, the Puritan thinks that "we must not worship by dancing, drinking, building or singing; we can only worship by thinking. Our heads can praise God, but never our hands and feet"

In contrast to this rather bleak and cheerless philosophy stands another, and this, too transcends conventional religious divisions. It may for convenience be called the sacramental view, which holds that the physical world, far from being an unwelcome hindrance to our spiritual development is, instead, one means by which this very spiritual development is to be effected. The world, and the things of the world, can lead us to God. So, although renunciation of the flesh may inform a significant branch of Hinduism, the one espoused by Krishna Dharma in the piece I read earlier, we must not forget that the Kama Sutra, which we in the West regard as a sex manual for adolescents to snigger over, is, for some Hindus, a religious work, and the sculptures and paintings which are displayed quite prominently in some Hindu temples show none of the prudishness that we are accustomed to associate with places of worship. The Tantric tradition in Buddhism explicitly employs sexuality in order to approach the divine reality. Judaism and Islam are, for the most part, rooted in the physical world, which is why, at the time of Jesus, the Jews had only the vaguest notion of life after death, and why the Muslim picture of heaven is so unashamedly sensual.

Mainstream Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, has always been true to its Judaic roots in proclaiming that the world, and the things of the world, are vehicles by means of which we can approach God. The very first chapter of the Bible tells us that at each stage of creation God pronounced his handiwork "good", and Psalm 19 informs us that the heavens, the created stars and planets, "declare the glory of God". "The world", says the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, "is charged with the grandeur of God". Far from despising the human body, Christians of this school see it as a temple of the Holy Spirit, which will be gloriously transformed at the Resurrection but will still be tangible and substantial.

We may, as good Unitarians, have little time for what we perceive to be the excesses of Catholicism -holy water, bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ etc. - but, while maintaining our reservations, we should be careful not to ignore the insights which lie behind these things and which gives birth to them; that the world is not a place to be despised and feared, but is an expression of the very being of God; that ordinary things within our sensual experience can, if used rightly and viewed rightly, point beyond themselves to their Creator; in short, that things can be sacred. Pure intellectualism may be fine for the angels, but, as Whitman says, "How shall I know what the life is unless I see it in the flesh?"

And this is one of the great religious divides, more fundamental than any of the major religious labels we give ourselves. Ask yourself this: Do I believe that the world, with all its apparent shortcomings and problems is a way for me to experience the divine? Or do I believe that the world and the flesh are temptations and distractions, which hinder my spiritual progress? Your answer will determine your attitude to the little things that you accumulate and use - key cases and Christmas cards - but, more importantly perhaps, it will determine your attitude to worship, to ecology, to art, to poetry, to science, to sexuality, and, in fact, to virtually every significant issue in your life.

Bill Darlison