Anyone who follows me on Facebook has likely noticed that I post quite a few memes, cartoons, and videos that I find on a website called Unitarian Universalist Hysterical Society. From that, one might assume that I am a Unitarian Universalist by faith. I'm not, or at least I wasn't. (More about that later.) I'm an active member of the Plainfield United Methodist Church here in the town where I live. I've been a Methodist since 6th grade, and just a plain old Christian before that. And I don't know why. It's complicated.
My family didn't consist of church-goers, except for my grandparents--my mother's folks who farmed 160 acres of prime Patrick's loam soil in north central Illinois. That old farm had been in the family for generations and was a mere fraction of property that my great-grandfather owned prior to the Great Depression. It was either he or my great-great-grandfather who helped to establish a little church with a parsonage next to it just two miles from the farm, in a "town" that was merely a cluster of a few houses near a grain elevator next to the railroad tracks. The town was called Ancona, and the tiny church (the sanctuary of which would hold 50 in theater seats instead of pews) was named the Ancona Church of Christ, which was not affiliated with the Disciples of Christ sect that now calls themselves The Church of Christ. The membership consisted of the local farmers and people in the immediate area. My grandparents were stalwart members of that church, largely because it was the closest place of worship, and also because of the family connection to its founding. It was just a simple Bible-preaching church, with Baptist overtones, that didn't belong to any conference or mainstream denomination. When we went to visit my grandparents, we went to church. Thus, my grandparents were my first introduction into religion. They weren't Bible-thumpers. The were proud, kind people, but the Bible was the rule for every moral question. If some belief wasn't based on Scripture, it wasn't real.
Through the Navy years when my father was on active duty, we were stationed in California and Hawaii when I was very young. We didn't attend church there. Then we were stationed in Danville, IL, where Dad was the C. O. of the Naval Reserve Training Center there. We were there for 3 1/2 years--long enough for me to actually make a couple of friends and start going to church with one of them. I attended Sunday School there--the Central Christian Church--and sometimes the actual worship service. It was there that I was baptized by emersion in a sort of conveyor-belt style that baptized a whole bunch of kids on the same Sunday. I think we were in the third grade. Baptism is a rite of passage to Christians. Back in those days, you couldn't become an actual member of any Christian church or take Holy Communion, or even get into Heaven when you died if you weren't baptized, so, to my family at least, it was a big deal. Of course, I had no knowledge that there was another form of baptism other than emersion. That, according to the grandparents was the only way to be properly baptized. That made me officially a Christian!
And oh, what a pious child I was! Seriously! To understand this, you have to also understand me. In my really young years, up to age ten, we were never in any one place more than two years. Sometimes we moved twice in one year in the same community just to find better rental homes to meet our needs. I had no place I could actually call home except where we were at the moment. My grandparents' farm became our home base, except we only visited there. I couldn't even make friends because we'd move with Dad's Navy orders and never return to the same place. We dared not ever look back. My parents (and grandparents by default) became my only security, along with my teachers at any given school. So many schools! My motivation currency was to keep my parents and teachers happy with me. I was a rule-follower and well-behaved, mostly, because to do less would mess up whatever security I had. Family became everything to me. Thankfully, I was a good student. Had I been a poor student for any number of reasons, I would have sunk into an abyss. Truth: I was already in an abyss, but didn't know it then.
All of this turned me into Super Christian. I prayed silently all day long. It was as if I were trying to put a magic bubble of protection around myself. Jesus would take care of me because I was good. I was good ALL the time...except when my little brother drove me nuts or my sister didn't appreciate how good I was. But I didn't smoke, drink, swear, take drugs, participate in risky behaviors, have sex out of marriage, or do anything that I thought God would disapprove of. And truth be known, all of that really seemed to grease my luck. Good things happened to me for which I didn't really have to work. I thought I was doing things right and that God was on my side. That was then. My early years, through high school. Then came life.
In college, I went through the regular questioning of what was real or not. It was the late 60's, complete with race riots and war protests. It was very confusing to me. I was a Hippie sympathizer but dared not participate for fear of dishonoring my father's sacrifices for our family through the years. I still couldn't rebel. I was too scared to act outside of my family security aura. But my brain was working overtime, as was my Fairness Gene.
After college, I married a Catholic. I took catechism just to see if I could convert to Catholicism to fit in with his family, but my spouse wasn't interested in attending Mass at all, so I figured I'd just stay a Methodist. He joined me in Methodist services. We divorced after five years with no children for a lot of reasons, many of which were on me.
A few years later, I married a man who claimed he was Christian but wouldn't attend church with me in our new community, so I couldn't coerce our daughter to go with me. I had failed in giving her a proper Christian education, largely because I didn't really believe half of what I was asking her to believe. I don't believe in Heaven or Hell, or even eternal life. So many Bible stories make no sense, and blindly believing in them denies science. I spent a lot of time finding ways to reconcile the two. I DO believe in faith and believing in something bigger than one's self. I DO believe in a universal energy that created life and the forces of nature. And I do believe in prayer as a source of focus. I long ago gave up the thought I was above the evils of the world because God would protect me. I'm just one lowly human being alone in the universe. My pastor tells me that God knows me by my name, and that gives me something to hang onto. In the Catholic Church, believers don't have a choice to decide what they believe or don't believe. In Protestant churches, I hope that there is a choice, but I'm not so sure.
This is where the UUs come in. My daughter and her family moved to Muncie, IN, when my grandchildren were still in cribs. It was 1 1/2 hours from me. I cried for three days. They gravitated to the Muncie Unitarian Universalist Church. My daughter and her then-husband even sang in the choir. Up until this time, the only exposure I had ever had with the UU faith was from one high school friend. Oak Park, IL, where we had settled after my dad went on inactive duty, was the location of a Frank Lloyd Wright creation called the Unity Temple. The only UU I knew was a fellow student named John Dove. When I asked him about his faith, he responded that the UUs take in everyone, no matter their faith. He quoted this poem by Edwin Markham:
“He drew a circle that shut me out. Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle and took him in!”
That was the long and short of everything I knew about the UUs. When I went to Muncie to visit my family, maybe twice a month, I attended church with them. At first, it was awkward for me. I mean, the UUs aren't Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or Shinto or Pagan or any single religion; they are all of them. Just like my own church, they have as part of their service, a part in which congregants are free to share their joys and concerns. People would stand and ask for others to send good thoughts for their issues. If we substitute the word "prayer" for "thoughts", we might as well be in my Christian church. The true focus of the UU fellowship is respect and inclusion for ALL people, and respect for the planet we live on: truly universal beliefs, unless I am mistaken. Yet neither God nor Jesus were mentioned in sermons, unless through quotes included in the text. That's why I felt awkward. Can't call that a "worship service" because nothing was being "worshipped" in any sense of religion. And that's where my brain scrambled. I have always been a student of other religions. Now, here I was in the presence of people who lived them all.
That Muncie UU Church building was quite interesting. One whole wall of the meeting room--to the right side if facing the pulpit--was all glass, facing woods. At the top of those windows, all along the length of the wall, were framed stained glass artworks representing symbols of all faiths. Pretty! One Sunday, as we sat waiting for the service to start, a deer grazed his way past those windows. It was so calming and beautiful. You can see pictures of the location if you search for the Muncie UU Church.
That particular church had a great children's program. My pre-school grandchildren loved it there. The church's children participated in the whatever religious occasion was being celebrated that day. They followed St. Lucia on St. Lucia's Day. (St. Lucia wore a robe and a wreath of real lit candles on her head, with the children following her. Someone baked traditional saffron buns to serve to the congregation during the social time after the service.) At Christmas, the children of the church sang just before Santa appeared. Something for everyone.
What is really, really stupid is that when my grandchildren were little, I was worried that they weren't getting a religious education. Then they were UUs...then they went to live with their father and stepmother and were sent to Catholic school because their stepmother was Catholic, baptized in the Catholic Church, and indoctrinated. Then they went back to live with their mother and eventually became UU again. They also attended Methodist services when they were visiting with me and their paternal grandparents since we attended the same UMC church. Not only did they get religious education, they were steeped in it!
My grandson decided that he didn't believe in the magic of religion. He joked that he was a Pastafarian, worshipping the Flying Spaghetti Monster. My granddaughter became very active in their now local UU fellowship in Washington. She was a youth leader. Went to conferences and meetings and camps. Was included in the adult leadership in the church. She also became a human rights activist well before the age of 18. It scared me to think of her in such risky situations, having lived through the terror of things that happened to the Freedom Riders, et. al., during the 60s and 70s, but the truth is that I totally admire her dedication and fortitude. I wish I'd had her courage and determination when I was her age!
In the mid-1990s, stuff happened at my workplace and at home that concerned me. The Moral Majority reared its ugly head. I received a mailing obviously not intended for me, asking for a financial donation to help Evangelicals to run for school boards. I have never espoused religion in schools or in school decisions. Then, too, there was a movement from the local Christians in my school district to get rid of something called OBE, Outcome Based Education. The roar was so loud that the Superintendent established a committee of ten to deal with their concerns. Three teachers and seven community members, with one expensive facilitator that was being paid $200/hr. One of the teachers chosen to represent the staff excused herself because of blood pressure problems, and I was elected. Maybe I should have refused, but I didn't. The committee met once a week in the evenings, and there were times when it got heated. I won't go into the gory details, but it totally soured me to the religious community who seemed to have an agenda that I didn't think was appropriate to a public school district. We met for months and months--at least seven--and prepared a conclusive document to deliver to the school board at the end of our determinations. It was delivered...and never heard about again. In the end, 13 teachers and virtually all of the administration left the district because of this big Evangelical push.
That whole experience took away from me something that I have never been able to get back: the belief that Christianity is good. On paper, it is...but so very many use their faith and the Scriptures to make excuses for their hypocritical behavior that I have backed down. I don't want to be associated with that, and some of it happens with friends in my church whom I love for their faith and not their politics. In fact, the United Methodist Church, my church home since 1958, is on the brink of a division over the issue of homosexuality. My local church, thank God, is inclusionary. If/When the rift comes, we will likely be on our own. I have begun to think that the UUs have something that Christians apparently don't have. And when I began to look at issues, one by one, I discovered that I am probably more UU than Christian. Still, I hang on. Why? I'm not sure. I could give up organized religion in a heartbeat, but I still consider myself a person who follows the example of Jesus. I still try to be good. I'm still not a risk-taker. I still work to make the world a better place for my being in it. But I won't reject gays because they are gay, or blacks because they are black, and I won't give lip service to those who do.
I don't know where to go from here, religiously. My church has been extremely supportive of me. The nearest UU fellowship is 15 miles from me. Heck, I don't even make it to my own church which is a scant 1/4th mile from my house. All I know is that, at the age of almost 74, I'm still a work in progress!
