S11 #25 - Free-religion is bowing to each other - A thought for the day

The full text of this podcast with all the links mentioned in it can be found in the transcript of this edition, or at the following link:

https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2026/05/free-religion-is-bowing-to-each-other.html

Please feel free to post any comments you have about this episode there.

Opening 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 a reminder 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

Transcript

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Gathering of Mindful Meditation, Music & Conversation

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When I first became minister here in 2000, the standard greeting before the service was a handshake. But in 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic stopped that, and the practice of placing one’s hands together whilst bowing became the norm. Today, I primarily greet and say farewell with that gesture, and if you have attended the Cambridge Unitarian Church, you will have noticed, I also do this after the lighting of our candles, the thought for the day, and the final blessing.

At the time, most people in the UK then knew this practice from Yoga groups, where sessions finish with “Namaste” — “I bow to you”. But I was especially delighted because by 2019 I had learned that the practice has deep connections with free‑religion, in which the gesture is known as gassho [合掌] and raihai [礼拝]. In 1983 the Japanese Unitarian Imaoka Shin’ichirō went so far as to say that: “free‑religion is bowing to each other” ( “From Religious Freedom to Free‑Religion” [1983]). Now what did he mean by this?

Well, in Imaoka Shin’ichirō’s free‑religious faith as expressed in his Principles of Living, although there is no mention God, only faith in Self, Others, and Cooperative Community, he said clearly that if the word “God” were needed, then humanity, society, and the universe are to be thought of as God. Drawing on the founder of the liberal Shintō reform movement, Konkokyō, he notes that kami and ordinary people are interdependent: that is to say God depends on people as much as people depend on God. Imaoka-sensei felt that this mutual interdependence finds its simplest expression in the act of bowing to each other. This is why he writes:

“When you borrow something from somebody, you should bow. When you admire something, you should bow. No matter what you do, you should bow while you are doing it. In this way we bow and we are bowed to. […] People are very incomplete, but they have the capacity to show mutual respect by bowing to each other. Creative humanity manifesting universal freedom is God. We are trying to build a cooperative society in which we bow to such a God and bow to each other” ( “From Religious Freedom to Free‑Religion” [1983]).

It’s also worth noting that in 1926, in his capacity as Principal of Seisoku Middle School, he wrote:

“At the very same moment the students bow to the teacher, the teacher also truly bows to the student. One bows because one feels a sense of the sacred in the other” (“Advocating for the Great Principles of Seisoku” [1926]).

Anyway, for this reason I gratefully embraced this pandemic‑driven change of behaviour. And, although others were often primarily bowing because of a fear of catching or passing on Covid‑19 — a jolly good thing to do, I should add — I could also bow proactively as a positive expression of free‑religion. And now, six years later, I write this in part to make explicit that, for us, bowing is not to be thought of as a borrowed practice — because, remember, it is a universal human gesture — but a powerful expression of the free‑religious faith we espouse here.

But I’m also speaking about this today because of something that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. As some of you are aware, whenever I am working in or around this church and the doors are open, people drop in — sometimes they are curious about the building, sometimes they want to know about the Unitarian and free-religious tradition, occasionally it’s to tell me how wrong I am, and even to inform me I am going to hell. But, whatever the reason, for the most part I respond to all these encounters through an extended conversation, often over a cup of tea. But a couple of weeks ago I received a request that could not be answered with words alone.

Despite this, the encounter began with words in the usual fashion, and they clearly had some positive effect because, after half an hour of conversation, the person suddenly looked at me intently and asked me to lay hands on them, believing that by doing this I would bring them the healing they required. But I am at the highly sceptical end of the spectrum when it comes to “that sort of thing”, and anyway, I assuredly know I have no healing skills or powers; consequently, to have acceded to their request, even out of a misplaced kindness, would have been a terrible deception on my part. However, our conversation had made me feel sure that to have refused the request would have caused the person in front of me to feel the real, deep pain of yet another rejection from a religious figure. So what on earth was I to do?

Thankfully, I realised that I could say that, although the free‑religion which I practised did not have a tradition of laying on of hands, we did have our own way of doing something analogous, because, as Imaoka-sensei says — and as you now know — free‑religion is bowing to each other. I explained that as I bowed towards them, I was affirming the Divine Spirit, the Great Life of free and unobstructed creative evolution [自由で無碍な創造的進化の大生命] that existed in them, and that they, by bowing towards me, were affirming the same in me. In short, I said it was faith in this Divine Spirit or the Great Life that would bring a measure of healing to us both.

We duly bowed to each other and, to my complete surprise, the person suddenly began to cry and say quietly to themselves, with what sounded like genuine wonder, “I already have within me the power to be healed!” Now, I already knew that this person came from a Christian tradition, so when they had recovered somewhat, I reminded them of the beautiful story in the Gospel of Mark (5:25‑34) about the woman who had been suffering from severe bleeding for twelve years. According to Jewish Law, her condition made her unclean, so she could not join in festivals and ceremonies. As you may recall, being extremely ashamed about this, she tried secretly to touch Jesus’ cloak as he passed by, believing that by doing so she would be healed. We are told that Jesus became aware of this and asked who had touched him. It was then that the woman came tremblingly forward, full of fear and shame. But instead of castigating her and adding to her shame and sense of rejection and uncleanliness, Jesus gently replied, “Daughter, your faith has healed you; go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

I said that — at least from my perspective — this was, in fact, an example of mutual bowing: Jesus’ reply was effectively him bowing to the woman with a deep faith in the Divine Spirit and Great Life within her, just as her reaching for his cloak was a bow to that same indwelling presence in him. The healing — even if it were simply the healing of the fear and shame the woman felt — came not from Jesus as some special healer, but from their shared human faith in the Divine Spirit and Great Life they both embodied.

Looking back on this recent incident, I feel strongly that when I bowed to that person seeking healing, and they bowed to me, this shared act restored genuine agency to us both, and awakened us to the truth that there is no need to seek out a special person or church with access to exceptional healing powers. All we need to do, in any place in our lives, is daily bow to one another, affirming the deep interconnectedness of Self, Other, Cooperative Community, and the wider unity (kiitsu) of humanity and nature — the Cosmic Cooperative Community. 

In a nutshell, this is the faith of free‑religion: a faith expressed simply through the human act of respectful, thankful and grateful bowing to each other daily, a simple act that gently acknowledges the Divine Spirit, the Great Life of free and unobstructed creative evolution that always-already dwells in all people and all things. Free religion is, indeed, bowing to each other.