It’s not easy sharing your thoughts or feelings. It’s not easy exposing your sins, either. We feel awkward as it’s normal to keep it back. We don’t want to articulate the unsayable. It feels odd to do it. It’s natural to our respective walks of life.
There are those who find a faith or a friend who make them feel different. They can share and not be judged. It just makes it easier. It’s a different way of doing it. However, it might not sit well with others and misunderstanding can result.
A community is joined around a central feature such as a common philosophy, set of beliefs, or a meaningful lifestyle. This sort of emotional outlet can disturb its sense of settledness and rile people.
This is the backdrop to a group known as “Homeward”. It emerged in Europe after the Second World War and started because people needed to feel safe again. It turned into a strange philosophical cult that didn’t work out. It left people feeling sad, and bitter.
In its “centre”, as it were, people made “teachings” to attentive listeners. These were filled with sayings, slogans, and types of thinking that relieved people of ideas they had been lead to believe were incorrect. These were religious statements such as doctrines they remembered.
The thrust of the group was a trust in “new” teaching and not emotions because this was felt to be unreliable. Therefore they repeated and even created their own teachings to guide people away from confession or therapy sessions which relied on memory.
The group expanded but had to leave its disparate settled state. In other words the pressure against it made it come together in a more coherent state and it fractured the settled “circle” it was felt to be.
Their belief was in a constant motion “homeward” and its central practice was to maintain a state of believing in the journey. This entailed a focus and a consciousness of thought that was undisturbed. The opposition to it (due also to worries of abuse) led to difficulty in doing it.
Their key figures were scattered and had to reorientate their lives to restore unity to their movement. They tried in their different ways to either be religious to this end or set up their own groups to signal to each other they were ready to come back together.
There were a few who made it to establishing their own standing so they could begin to reform, but by that time former members were more proactive in making sure it didn’t happen. They had sufficient evidence to show it couldn’t come back together with those figures.
The existence of religion in its different forms helps us each to proactively find a way to share who we are without being told what it is we need to say, think, or do at times. There are rules and doctrines but there’s also freedom in it beyond the controlling authority of cult figures.