A trip to Unity Villiage
We took a trip out to the Unity Villiage (about 20 minutes from Overland Park, KC) with some family who attend Unity Church in Minesotta. I had never even heard of Unity Church before now, although it has quite a following (I couldn’t find an estimate of numbers on their main website but there are Unity Churches throughout the entire US and internationally).
When we first parked at the villiage I was surprised to see a labrynth painted on the ground. From my limited knowledge of labrynths, they are based on early Greek mythology and we used for hundreds of years for private meditation (basically meditating while you begin walking through the lines along the path to the centre). So seeing one at a Christian based faith headquarters made me very curious - as I am not used to associating such foreign forms of meditation to Christianity. However, I started to understand their world view a little more while walking through their bookstore (which even had a Starbucks!). I encountered books on yoga, meditation, prayer flags (from the Buddishself help, save the planet etc. I also spoke to a Unity member and from what I understand, the faith is open to all different paths to the one recognised universal truth, yet their teachings are primarily based on Jesus.
The faith has been around for about 100 years, founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore. As quoted from their website, the founders “studied the Bible as history and allegory and interpreted it as a metaphysical representation of humankind’s evolutionary journey toward spiritual awakening.”
All in all, I found it an extremely interesting tour, and was surprised to find such an expansion of the teachings of Jesus. I also enjoyed one Unity member’s feeling about the faith - “It’s the type of faith that is relevant on Thursday afternoon”, which reflects the focus on providing practical spiritual support for anyone seeking spritiual growth.
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