I Am Still Working On My Understanding of Unitarian Universalism

I Am Still Working On My Understanding of Unitarian Universalism

Good Morning. My family and I joined the Unitarian Society of Hartford last year, so I speak to you as a relative newcomer. I am still working on my understanding of Unitarian Universalism and my own spirituality, and I am so glad that my family has found this place in which to make a spiritual home.

Throughout the course of my life thus far, I have not had the purest of motives in my spiritual pursuits. As a child, I came to church with my family because that was where we saw everyone that we knew-- every Christmas and every Easter.

When I got a little older and had the option of making my own decisions about going to church or sleeping late on Sunday mornings, I surprised everyone by asking my mother to drop me off at church every Sunday morning-- the sole representative of our family. I’m sure that I impressed many people there with what appeared to be great devotion to church and religion, but I can tell you all now… the thing that kept me going to church then was Doug Morris. Doug Morris was the most mysterious, handsome, intriguing fellow I’d ever laid eyes on and so I came Sunday after Sunday, in the hopes of catching a glimpse of Doug Morris.

And this devotion to Doug Morris sustained me through at least three years of church-going. Enough time to get me confirmed and to deliver me into my teen years when I decided to take a break from church going. Over the years of sitting in that church, though, I grew very familiar with the songs and the prayers and the order of the service. The cadence of the creed, the light through the windows, the smell of the wood and the echoes inside the stone building made me feel comforted and kept me coming. The knowledge that my parents and their parents and their parents had all been buried and married and celebrated in that same church, those things kept me coming there, too.

I’m somewhat embarrassed, especially in the company of such thoughtful and educated people as I now find myself, to admit that I did not take a particularly thoughtful or probing approach to religion or spirituality for a long, long time. The content of what we were saying was not the most important thing for me. In fact, when I stopped to listen to some of what we were saying, I found that I didn’t buy it, didn’t grasp it or didn’t believe that anyone, including me, could really mean what we were saying. I was applying a filter to what I heard, and that filter would hold tight to what resonated with me, while letting the rest fall past and out of my mind. I would explain away those things that didn’t resonate with me by thinking “Well, that’s just what we say, but we couldn’t possibly really mean that.” And the cadence of the creed and the familiarity of the songs and the light through stained glass windows comforted me wherever I was and kept me coming back, whether I was living in Seattle or England or Connecticut.

But then I had children and everything changed. I found it very hard to imagine how I was going to instruct my children in the filtering ways that I had developed in listening to what was being said in church. And, of course, how was I going to explain that they could apply this filter to the “word of God,” but NOT “the word of Mom or Dad”? The difficulties inherent in this were bound only to get worse and more complicated as my children grew older, I knew. Our family needed to find a place that could be our spiritual cornerstone. A place where we could feel some integrity between the things we are teaching our children at home and those that were being said on Sunday mornings. I must tell you that I despaired of finding such a place.

And, I can tell you that, when we walked into this place and there was no stained glass, no echoing stone architecture, no familiar anything to me, I found myself reverting to my old ways of navigating my search for a spiritual home and this place didn’t have any of the familiar markings that might indicate that this was IT. But then I began to listen, and I found that I didn’t need to apply my filters here. What I heard being said and being sung and being offered up for consideration was more or less right in line with those things that we have said our family is all about.

And so, that is what got us to join the Unitarian Meeting House. And that is, to a large extent, what keeps us coming. But there is more. There is a sense of something larger brewing here. There is a sense of energy that I take away from this place every Sunday that helps me get through my week. Now, what is that thing? I don’t have a name for it, but I think it has something to do with the thread that holds together that quilt that keeps popping up in BJ’s sermons and analogies.

Though I may not be able to name it, I catch glimpses of it and feel it distinctly every Sunday, knowing that we have all come here out of, to some degree, a shared longing for a spiritual cornerstone. I feel it every time I look around and see people from generations ahead of me and I guess that they’ve struggled with the same big questions I’m struggling with now, and the answers we’ve found so far have brought us together under the same roof. I feel it as I watch the honesty with which we share grief over people we have lost. I feel it as I watch families and single people and friends file into and out of the sanctuary. I feel it as I stand with you, hand in hand around the sanctuary and reaffirm our stance in the world, that we embrace social justice and that we genuinely welcome all people to come together here, regardless of who they love, how much money they make, where they come from or what their religious beliefs may be. I feel it as we grapple to define the outlines of what our religious education program will look like for our children. I feel it when I meet people who are interested in joining this community at the C-cubed events after the 11:00 services. I feel it every single week that I come here.

I live, as so many people in this mobile world do, far away from my family and the familiarity of home. I don’t attend the church that my parents and their parents and their parents did. And I am so grateful that, out of that difficult distance from the familiar, I have found what is truly, deeply familiar to me and deeply comforting. A place where I can share ideas and beliefs and where we can wonder about the bigger issues in life.

I know that as I leave this place each week, that quilt that BJ keeps referring to, the one held together with the thread that I’ve struggled to explain, has been readjusted around my shoulders. One of its sides falls around my husband and the other two over the shoulders of my sons, and there it stays for the whole of the week. And it allows me and my husband and our children do what must be done in our lives. - Wendy Avery

Let us know of any comments, errors and corrections - thanks (revised 05/11/07)