Non-creative writing stuff
Mar. 20th, 2005 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
likethebeerRough draft of my feelings towards religion below. It needs work. Really, this is part of the writing that I've done as I've tried to encompass the reasons for why I began going to the Unitarian meeting house in Madison.
I've learned this (which is not in the piece): aside from 'Jesus', I have a negative response towards the words church, minister, and sermon. Aside from the other things I mention in this.
Oh, and this has 3,300 words. That's, well, it's a hell of a lot (13 pages).
Warning: This piece may offend Christians, especially Roman Catholics.
Losing—and getting—my religion
In early October 2004, an idea presented itself in my mind. An idea large and somewhat horrifying, just like the then-prospects to me of the upcoming US presidential election.
I nudged the idea around for a little while. A few days. A week. On the one hand, I thought I was entertaining a delusion. On the other hand, the idea stood out like a lifesaver thrown to me as I floundered in a sea of mental and emotional hopelessness.
I finally articulated the idea to my boyfriend one night over a couple of beers on our front step.
“No matter the outcome of this election, I’ve decided something,” I nodded up to him. “I gotta get religion.”
I often describe M as an agnostic and myself as a pantheist. He’s actually a sort of Nietszchian/Buddhist. He believes the best way to live life is to live it with the fullness of intention, and that Buddhism provides the best way to survive it.
“We all look for the larger self,” he later said. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing for you to want to explore religion.”
I’ve certainly wanted something, and for a long time. Since 9-11-2001, I have lived in a state of anxiety. Since August 2002, around the time that Dick Cheney first mentioned mushroom clouds as smoking guns, I have been in a state of incredulity. Since March 17, 2003, the night of George W. Bush’s “get out of Dodge” speech to Saddam, I have lived in a state of righteous anger. However, what finally tipped the plane towards religion for me were the near constant and seemingly unstoppable images in my head, beginning in August 2004, of death and mayhem directed towards the main players in the Bush Administration whenever I saw them or heard them.
I am not a New Ager, Buddhist or Hindu, but it didn’t take much for me to realize that blinding thoughts of violence towards fellow human beings is not a healthy way to live.
And I will be damned if I’m going to keep letting this administration have such a corrosive effect on my soul.
I do not write these words simply to turn a phrase. I believe that this administration has had a corrosive effect on my soul. My spirit feels as if it has been rubbed against a cheese grater. I can almost see the dents. It is causing me physical pain. I am raw. And I am so, so tired of feeling this way.
Still, thinking about organized religion is a momentous thing for either M or I, mainly because we were both raised Catholic. I use the words “raised Catholic” as opposed to “recovering Catholic,” or “lapsed Catholic,” because I believe that this better explains my position. “Lapsed Catholic” and “recovering Catholic” imply a belief in Catholicism by the absence of the thing. “Raised Catholic,” I believe, encompasses the circumstances, rituals and superstitions with which I grew up. It is shorthand for the peculiar culture, or subculture (white and middle class being others) from which I sprang. Catholicism as a type of branding—in the older, scarring definition of branding, not the newer, marketing definition of branding. Only other adults who were raised Catholic, and moreso those who went to Catholic school as I did, instinctively understand this, no matter which part of the country they come from.
Guilt and repressed sexuality are the qualities most of the masses (no pun intended) imagine when hearing the words Roman Catholic, but there are a host of other underlying neuroses I associate with this religion.
A fear of nuns.
An absence of understanding middle school culture (because Catholic schools run from first to eighth grade).
Exceptionally neat handwriting fostered by the Palmer method and learning to form the downstrokes of cursive letters by using a ruler.
Anxiety upon smelling sandalwood incense (which smells like church incense).
The understanding, from Confirmation, of what oil applied to the forehead of a twelve-year old does to the skin.
Occasional flashbacks to the sit-stand-kneel-kneel-sit-stand rituals that accompany mass.
And, not least, having an intensive exposure at a young age to human torture and maladies. This includes an understanding of the effects of leprosy on the human body from all of those grade school films they showed us in religion class, powerful internal images of hell, an existential angst surrounding the plight of all those aborted babies floating around the Virgin Mary’s feet in “limbo”, and the visualization of martyrdom due to required rote memorization.
Oh, and of course as a person who grew up Catholic, I belatedly came to realize that I have almost no practical understanding of the Bible whatsoever.
These circumstances surrounding my childhood are in part the reason why the contemplation of pursuing any type of organized religion fills me with what I can best describe as an inward flinch. Imagine someone were to through a dart at your head. You would flinch. Now imagine that you had to hide that flinch for fear of displaying a cultural rudeness. This is basically what hearing the word Jesus does to me. Not that I have a problem with Jesus. But he still gets this flinch.
I don’t fully understand where the flinch came from. Unlike some of my friends—D, who was yelled at by a priest during confession when she was 16; S, who is gay—I did not have one singular moment that made me walk away from my religion, thus engendering this Pavlovian response. Instead, my path away from that faith moved glacially throughout my teenage years. This is somewhat an ironic unintentional response to St. Augustine’s advice to use the questioning of faith to gain more faith: as I questioned more, I moved away more.
I asked: is this really the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic church? If you tell me that someone can get to heaven if they live a holy life but are not Catholic, why is this religion placed above all others? If someone is in a car accident and you come running along while they’re dying, and ask them if they want to say contrition, and they say yes, and then you ask, “Are you heartily sorry for all that you have done?” And they answer yes, and then they die and they don’t go to hell…. Well, why do I have to go to confession all the time, and why is a priest even necessary?
The poor boys at Vatican Council II. If they had only realized the final consequence of their opening up of Roman Catholicism, I may have grown up with priests saying Latin and nuns with three-sided rulers reserved for my knuckles.
And then, of course, there’s the whole sex issue (even before the rampant pedophilia scandals). I began to think: wasn’t the whole prohibition about pre-marital sex based on a lack of birth control and a fear of improperly distributed property rights? And, really (this was the one that got me when I was a 17-year old virgin), I understand that the church has my own best interests in mind by prohibiting pre-marital sex, but, as I was taught, Jesus was a virgin and, in theory, so are all the priests, Bishops, Cardinals and Popes today. So are these men really the best resource for advice about sexuality?
As I moved beyond high school, I began to learn the other history of the Roman Catholic Church. The one I was never taught in over a decade of religion classes. This history of the church is a more fleshy, greedy, bloody history, filled with murdered popes and purchased Bishoprics, bastard children, pogroms and misogyny. All of this left me profoundly disappointed. I was instructed in having faith by a church that has a long history of hypocrisy. I was taught to be truthful from a large institution that never told me the whole truth. The very values that I was taught made me begin to turn away from it.
In sum, by October of this past election year, I had not voluntarily stepped inside a church for over 18 years. Half my lifetime ago. What I have gone through during that lifetime, which I’ve not even touched upon here, continues to inform my unease and my defiance about approaching organized religion. I will not pretend to have faith in something that I do not. I will not mouth the words, I will not bow my head. While this sounds callous, my reaction is due in part to respect for other religions. I will not taint your pool with my sacreligion. I will not insult myself or you in such a way.
Despite these misgivings, I still realized this fall that I needed religion. Or at least I knew I had to submit to the realization that religion might just fill a yawning void.
Of course, any amount of stress and anger doesn’t guarantee anyone’s going to get closer to religion. Belief in god is usually a requirement (well, unless you’re a Unitarian). I must confess, however, that despite my outward protests, I have found myself giving little shout-outs to god—a god, any god—for over three years now. Little pleas. Like Piglet’s panicked squeaks as he runs around the hole where Winnie-the-Pooh sits with his head stuck in a honey pot: “Help! Help! A Heffalump!” Help. Help.
And while, for almost seven years, I’ve been gathering with M’s friends for solstice and equinox ceremonies (always with Candlemas, Feb. 2, along with occasionally other cross-quarter days, thrown in) I’ve needed “church” more than five-six times a year. I have thought about the Quakers, but the one thing I do not need is to solely sit in silence. I am afraid that this will not dispel the bloody, murderous images going through my head or soothe my tightening throat that wants to scream. Additionally, I have considered gettin’ religion in part because I need someone to lead my head, and my soul, in another direction.
All the while, my boyfriend and I have engaged in a number of conversations in which, at times, I have came to the conclusion that I do believe that there’s something out there. I do not know whether God created the universe, but I do believe that God may be in the universe. I do not know if God directly affects events, but I think there is something deeper that we may be able to call on. Something larger that seems in me and behind me like a scrim.
Of course, I also acknowledge that this belief may be a remnant of that childhood of mine. It could have easily been inserted into my superego before the age of two, when I was also being potty-trained and learning the rudiments of language. Besides, just thinking you know something doesn’t make it true. Ptolemy knew that the universe was composed of layers of crystal spheres.
So, after all this, it should come as no surprise that I began exploring the Unitarian Universalist church.
Actually, full disclosure is needed here. I work at Frank Lloyd Wright’s personal residence in Spring Green, Wisconsin begun by the architect in 1911. Wright was a Unitarian from a long line of them. His maternal grandfather and uncle were both Unitarian ministers, and he belonged to at least two Unitarian societies (and met the first future Mrs. Wright at a Unitarian youth social). I learned about his religion as I have learned so many other things about the man: when he was born (June 8, 1867), when he died (April 9, 1959), that he never graduated from high school, that one of his sons designed Lincoln Logs (John, from the first marriage—Wright was married three times), that he claimed he was 5’ 8 ½” tall, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum. Emerson was Unitarian and started Transcendentalism, which a lot of Unitarians hooked onto. Frank Lloyd Wright’s family was very interested in Emerson and Whitman as a result of this. Transcendentalism was closely aligned with the brand of Unitarianism that the Lloyd-Joneses had practiced in Wales in the first half of the 19th century. Wright proudly announced, and often, that he wrote nature with a capital “N” because it was, to him, the manifestation of god.
Nascent during the Protestant Reformation, proto-Unitarians came to the conclusion that the Bible contains no evidence of original sin or the Trinity (father-son-holy spirit in one). Hence, Unitarian as opposed to Trinitarian. With no original sin, Unitarian Universalists (UUs) believe that people are born essentially good. They also believe in the dignity and worth of every person. Today, you don’t need to believe in god to be a UU. Many UUs, especially in the US, don’t believe Jesus was god, but that he was an example of a person who finds the god, or light within, making that a possibility for anyone. UUs take inspiration from other faiths, cultures and belief systems. UUs believe in community action and civil rights. They were abolitionists and suffragettes. The Unitarian church had the first female minister for a western religion—in the 19th century. They were involved in the civil rights struggles of the ‘60s. They have gay ministers and perform gay weddings.
Knowing all this, I dreamily supposed even before the start of millenium that, if I ever needed to get religion, Unitarianism would probably fit the bill. I even knew of at least one Unitarian Universalist congregation near by: the First Unitarian Society in Madison. This was the same congregation that Wright belonged to, and he designed their Unitarian Meeting House (1947-52).
On November 12, 2004, I went to the Unitarian Universalist website (www.uua.org), found the website of the First Unitarian Society, and checked their service times. But I was a long way from submitting to religion. After all, Frank Lloyd Wright once said (probably more than once), “Religion is all very nice. Why do we need to organize it?”
For instance, I had contacted another Unitarian Universalist couple the Friday after the election to ask about their congregation in Sauk City, 35 minutes away from Spring Green. While talking to the husband on the phone, he mentioned weekly hymns. I inwardly flinched and almost considered hanging up the phone right then. I hadn’t even known that hymns would produce such a reaction. So, put hymns down as a Pavlovian response.
However, this need for something has been so strong, I determined to go through and at least check out the congregation in Madison. So, I woke up the second Sunday of November at 8:30, showered and dressed and, with my boyfriend still asleep, started the 50-minute drive to the Unitarian Meeting House.
I smoked too many cigarettes as I made my way along the road to Madison. I wondered if I were crazy. I promised myself that I could always just go to the nearest bookstore if I changed my mind. By the time I came into Madison at about 10:40, I kept visualizing my right hand making the sign of the Roman Catholic cross (forehead-stomach-left shoulder-right shoulder). “K,” I told myself, “Don’t be such an idiot. They’re not going to make you make the sign of the cross.” I hoped that there would be no reading from the Bible. They don’t usually, but it’s not unknown. The Bible, to UUs, is seen as one instructive text among others.
After finding a parking space, I sat in my car, gazing toward the entrance at people making their way inside. The thought of gathering with others in a “religious service” to hear a sermon (as much as I wanted to tell myself that this was a lecture) made me feel large and momentous. Finally, after a bit of sweating and full breaths, I made my way to the meeting room and got a seat.
When Wright designed the Meeting House, the congregation was much smaller and the back of the auditorium was intended to be a community gathering room. It has a low ceiling and is anchored by a large fireplace. However, the congregation has expanded to the point that this area, which Wright originally intended to be separated from the rest of the room by a curtain, is now an overflow seating area, usually filled with about five rows of folding chairs. It was here that I made my way on my first visit. Next to me on the chair was the UU hymnal.
Hope and politeness warred with fear of indoctrination during the beginning of that first service. I sweat—literally sweat—during its first 15 minutes, especially when an organist started playing before the service. I wondered what the hell I was doing there. I argued back and forth in my mind on whether I was doing this out of weakness. I stood awkwardly when the first hymn was sung, eyeing the words suspiciously and not opening my mouth.
Simultaneously, I witnessed the words said in the weekly lighting of the candle in front of the pulpit, a pulpit behind which stands no cross. The words during the candle lighting welcomed all, acknowledged a connection to the greater world, and a tie between people, nature, and light.
The pastor led us in a short meditation. This was not some wimpy half-assed meditation like I’ve been subjected to before. Where someone is talking so quickly that I’m supposed to have visualized a white flame in my chest while I’m still back trying to find my center. No, he led it slowly enough, and my anxiety finally began to retreat.
The pastor spoke about finding beauty in everyday things, enjoying the simplicity of existence, the joy in the ritual of the every day. I have been so outwardly focused for so long, that I needed someone to point to the small.
I needed this, desperately. I needed to be in a place filled with silence, general goodwill, and with other people who seemed to feel the same. I needed it, and I still need it. Desperately.
I’ve been back to the Unitarian Meeting House fairly regularly since then. By the time I’ve come home, M is usually standing newly showered with a cup of coffee. He sometimes tickles my psyche by asking, “How was church?” I’ll often tell him what went on, or how I felt. He takes it all with interest, assuring me that he isn’t afraid that I’m out to “convert” him.
I’m not so anxious anymore, but I’m still questioning every step of the way (which is very “UU” of me). I have not been asked to bow my head, but I know that if I were, I would not. I won’t say any words from the weekly program or sing anything from the hymnal that I don’t like. I vacillate on whether I would ever “sign the book” to the FUS (the first move to becoming a member of the congregation). But I go to catch a glimpse of my “larger self,” as M terms it. The larger self understands my greater possibility, greater strength, and greater generosity. The larger self gently rubs up against others. The connection between other people and a tentatively optimistic view towards nature, without the pessimism, for a blessed moment or two.
I have also found myself surprisingly vulnerable during and after these “sessions” at the meeting house that I cannot come to call church. Tears will come to my eyes as I read along while the candle is lit, or sing the UU “gender neutral, totally racially, ethnically and culturally inclusive” hymns. I often leave feeling emptied out. Raw, but a gentle rawness; a healing pain not a festering pain. I suppose if I were pre-disposed to be “saved,” these would be ripe times for me to be “filled with the light of Christ.” I have no desire to be filled with any outside force. I will settle, at the moment, with finding just a little of my own force right now.
I've learned this (which is not in the piece): aside from 'Jesus', I have a negative response towards the words church, minister, and sermon. Aside from the other things I mention in this.
Oh, and this has 3,300 words. That's, well, it's a hell of a lot (13 pages).
Warning: This piece may offend Christians, especially Roman Catholics.
Losing—and getting—my religion
In early October 2004, an idea presented itself in my mind. An idea large and somewhat horrifying, just like the then-prospects to me of the upcoming US presidential election.
I nudged the idea around for a little while. A few days. A week. On the one hand, I thought I was entertaining a delusion. On the other hand, the idea stood out like a lifesaver thrown to me as I floundered in a sea of mental and emotional hopelessness.
I finally articulated the idea to my boyfriend one night over a couple of beers on our front step.
“No matter the outcome of this election, I’ve decided something,” I nodded up to him. “I gotta get religion.”
I often describe M as an agnostic and myself as a pantheist. He’s actually a sort of Nietszchian/Buddhist. He believes the best way to live life is to live it with the fullness of intention, and that Buddhism provides the best way to survive it.
“We all look for the larger self,” he later said. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing for you to want to explore religion.”
I’ve certainly wanted something, and for a long time. Since 9-11-2001, I have lived in a state of anxiety. Since August 2002, around the time that Dick Cheney first mentioned mushroom clouds as smoking guns, I have been in a state of incredulity. Since March 17, 2003, the night of George W. Bush’s “get out of Dodge” speech to Saddam, I have lived in a state of righteous anger. However, what finally tipped the plane towards religion for me were the near constant and seemingly unstoppable images in my head, beginning in August 2004, of death and mayhem directed towards the main players in the Bush Administration whenever I saw them or heard them.
I am not a New Ager, Buddhist or Hindu, but it didn’t take much for me to realize that blinding thoughts of violence towards fellow human beings is not a healthy way to live.
And I will be damned if I’m going to keep letting this administration have such a corrosive effect on my soul.
I do not write these words simply to turn a phrase. I believe that this administration has had a corrosive effect on my soul. My spirit feels as if it has been rubbed against a cheese grater. I can almost see the dents. It is causing me physical pain. I am raw. And I am so, so tired of feeling this way.
Still, thinking about organized religion is a momentous thing for either M or I, mainly because we were both raised Catholic. I use the words “raised Catholic” as opposed to “recovering Catholic,” or “lapsed Catholic,” because I believe that this better explains my position. “Lapsed Catholic” and “recovering Catholic” imply a belief in Catholicism by the absence of the thing. “Raised Catholic,” I believe, encompasses the circumstances, rituals and superstitions with which I grew up. It is shorthand for the peculiar culture, or subculture (white and middle class being others) from which I sprang. Catholicism as a type of branding—in the older, scarring definition of branding, not the newer, marketing definition of branding. Only other adults who were raised Catholic, and moreso those who went to Catholic school as I did, instinctively understand this, no matter which part of the country they come from.
Guilt and repressed sexuality are the qualities most of the masses (no pun intended) imagine when hearing the words Roman Catholic, but there are a host of other underlying neuroses I associate with this religion.
A fear of nuns.
An absence of understanding middle school culture (because Catholic schools run from first to eighth grade).
Exceptionally neat handwriting fostered by the Palmer method and learning to form the downstrokes of cursive letters by using a ruler.
Anxiety upon smelling sandalwood incense (which smells like church incense).
The understanding, from Confirmation, of what oil applied to the forehead of a twelve-year old does to the skin.
Occasional flashbacks to the sit-stand-kneel-kneel-sit-stand rituals that accompany mass.
And, not least, having an intensive exposure at a young age to human torture and maladies. This includes an understanding of the effects of leprosy on the human body from all of those grade school films they showed us in religion class, powerful internal images of hell, an existential angst surrounding the plight of all those aborted babies floating around the Virgin Mary’s feet in “limbo”, and the visualization of martyrdom due to required rote memorization.
Oh, and of course as a person who grew up Catholic, I belatedly came to realize that I have almost no practical understanding of the Bible whatsoever.
These circumstances surrounding my childhood are in part the reason why the contemplation of pursuing any type of organized religion fills me with what I can best describe as an inward flinch. Imagine someone were to through a dart at your head. You would flinch. Now imagine that you had to hide that flinch for fear of displaying a cultural rudeness. This is basically what hearing the word Jesus does to me. Not that I have a problem with Jesus. But he still gets this flinch.
I don’t fully understand where the flinch came from. Unlike some of my friends—D, who was yelled at by a priest during confession when she was 16; S, who is gay—I did not have one singular moment that made me walk away from my religion, thus engendering this Pavlovian response. Instead, my path away from that faith moved glacially throughout my teenage years. This is somewhat an ironic unintentional response to St. Augustine’s advice to use the questioning of faith to gain more faith: as I questioned more, I moved away more.
I asked: is this really the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic church? If you tell me that someone can get to heaven if they live a holy life but are not Catholic, why is this religion placed above all others? If someone is in a car accident and you come running along while they’re dying, and ask them if they want to say contrition, and they say yes, and then you ask, “Are you heartily sorry for all that you have done?” And they answer yes, and then they die and they don’t go to hell…. Well, why do I have to go to confession all the time, and why is a priest even necessary?
The poor boys at Vatican Council II. If they had only realized the final consequence of their opening up of Roman Catholicism, I may have grown up with priests saying Latin and nuns with three-sided rulers reserved for my knuckles.
And then, of course, there’s the whole sex issue (even before the rampant pedophilia scandals). I began to think: wasn’t the whole prohibition about pre-marital sex based on a lack of birth control and a fear of improperly distributed property rights? And, really (this was the one that got me when I was a 17-year old virgin), I understand that the church has my own best interests in mind by prohibiting pre-marital sex, but, as I was taught, Jesus was a virgin and, in theory, so are all the priests, Bishops, Cardinals and Popes today. So are these men really the best resource for advice about sexuality?
As I moved beyond high school, I began to learn the other history of the Roman Catholic Church. The one I was never taught in over a decade of religion classes. This history of the church is a more fleshy, greedy, bloody history, filled with murdered popes and purchased Bishoprics, bastard children, pogroms and misogyny. All of this left me profoundly disappointed. I was instructed in having faith by a church that has a long history of hypocrisy. I was taught to be truthful from a large institution that never told me the whole truth. The very values that I was taught made me begin to turn away from it.
In sum, by October of this past election year, I had not voluntarily stepped inside a church for over 18 years. Half my lifetime ago. What I have gone through during that lifetime, which I’ve not even touched upon here, continues to inform my unease and my defiance about approaching organized religion. I will not pretend to have faith in something that I do not. I will not mouth the words, I will not bow my head. While this sounds callous, my reaction is due in part to respect for other religions. I will not taint your pool with my sacreligion. I will not insult myself or you in such a way.
Despite these misgivings, I still realized this fall that I needed religion. Or at least I knew I had to submit to the realization that religion might just fill a yawning void.
Of course, any amount of stress and anger doesn’t guarantee anyone’s going to get closer to religion. Belief in god is usually a requirement (well, unless you’re a Unitarian). I must confess, however, that despite my outward protests, I have found myself giving little shout-outs to god—a god, any god—for over three years now. Little pleas. Like Piglet’s panicked squeaks as he runs around the hole where Winnie-the-Pooh sits with his head stuck in a honey pot: “Help! Help! A Heffalump!” Help. Help.
And while, for almost seven years, I’ve been gathering with M’s friends for solstice and equinox ceremonies (always with Candlemas, Feb. 2, along with occasionally other cross-quarter days, thrown in) I’ve needed “church” more than five-six times a year. I have thought about the Quakers, but the one thing I do not need is to solely sit in silence. I am afraid that this will not dispel the bloody, murderous images going through my head or soothe my tightening throat that wants to scream. Additionally, I have considered gettin’ religion in part because I need someone to lead my head, and my soul, in another direction.
All the while, my boyfriend and I have engaged in a number of conversations in which, at times, I have came to the conclusion that I do believe that there’s something out there. I do not know whether God created the universe, but I do believe that God may be in the universe. I do not know if God directly affects events, but I think there is something deeper that we may be able to call on. Something larger that seems in me and behind me like a scrim.
Of course, I also acknowledge that this belief may be a remnant of that childhood of mine. It could have easily been inserted into my superego before the age of two, when I was also being potty-trained and learning the rudiments of language. Besides, just thinking you know something doesn’t make it true. Ptolemy knew that the universe was composed of layers of crystal spheres.
So, after all this, it should come as no surprise that I began exploring the Unitarian Universalist church.
Actually, full disclosure is needed here. I work at Frank Lloyd Wright’s personal residence in Spring Green, Wisconsin begun by the architect in 1911. Wright was a Unitarian from a long line of them. His maternal grandfather and uncle were both Unitarian ministers, and he belonged to at least two Unitarian societies (and met the first future Mrs. Wright at a Unitarian youth social). I learned about his religion as I have learned so many other things about the man: when he was born (June 8, 1867), when he died (April 9, 1959), that he never graduated from high school, that one of his sons designed Lincoln Logs (John, from the first marriage—Wright was married three times), that he claimed he was 5’ 8 ½” tall, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum. Emerson was Unitarian and started Transcendentalism, which a lot of Unitarians hooked onto. Frank Lloyd Wright’s family was very interested in Emerson and Whitman as a result of this. Transcendentalism was closely aligned with the brand of Unitarianism that the Lloyd-Joneses had practiced in Wales in the first half of the 19th century. Wright proudly announced, and often, that he wrote nature with a capital “N” because it was, to him, the manifestation of god.
Nascent during the Protestant Reformation, proto-Unitarians came to the conclusion that the Bible contains no evidence of original sin or the Trinity (father-son-holy spirit in one). Hence, Unitarian as opposed to Trinitarian. With no original sin, Unitarian Universalists (UUs) believe that people are born essentially good. They also believe in the dignity and worth of every person. Today, you don’t need to believe in god to be a UU. Many UUs, especially in the US, don’t believe Jesus was god, but that he was an example of a person who finds the god, or light within, making that a possibility for anyone. UUs take inspiration from other faiths, cultures and belief systems. UUs believe in community action and civil rights. They were abolitionists and suffragettes. The Unitarian church had the first female minister for a western religion—in the 19th century. They were involved in the civil rights struggles of the ‘60s. They have gay ministers and perform gay weddings.
Knowing all this, I dreamily supposed even before the start of millenium that, if I ever needed to get religion, Unitarianism would probably fit the bill. I even knew of at least one Unitarian Universalist congregation near by: the First Unitarian Society in Madison. This was the same congregation that Wright belonged to, and he designed their Unitarian Meeting House (1947-52).
On November 12, 2004, I went to the Unitarian Universalist website (www.uua.org), found the website of the First Unitarian Society, and checked their service times. But I was a long way from submitting to religion. After all, Frank Lloyd Wright once said (probably more than once), “Religion is all very nice. Why do we need to organize it?”
For instance, I had contacted another Unitarian Universalist couple the Friday after the election to ask about their congregation in Sauk City, 35 minutes away from Spring Green. While talking to the husband on the phone, he mentioned weekly hymns. I inwardly flinched and almost considered hanging up the phone right then. I hadn’t even known that hymns would produce such a reaction. So, put hymns down as a Pavlovian response.
However, this need for something has been so strong, I determined to go through and at least check out the congregation in Madison. So, I woke up the second Sunday of November at 8:30, showered and dressed and, with my boyfriend still asleep, started the 50-minute drive to the Unitarian Meeting House.
I smoked too many cigarettes as I made my way along the road to Madison. I wondered if I were crazy. I promised myself that I could always just go to the nearest bookstore if I changed my mind. By the time I came into Madison at about 10:40, I kept visualizing my right hand making the sign of the Roman Catholic cross (forehead-stomach-left shoulder-right shoulder). “K,” I told myself, “Don’t be such an idiot. They’re not going to make you make the sign of the cross.” I hoped that there would be no reading from the Bible. They don’t usually, but it’s not unknown. The Bible, to UUs, is seen as one instructive text among others.
After finding a parking space, I sat in my car, gazing toward the entrance at people making their way inside. The thought of gathering with others in a “religious service” to hear a sermon (as much as I wanted to tell myself that this was a lecture) made me feel large and momentous. Finally, after a bit of sweating and full breaths, I made my way to the meeting room and got a seat.
When Wright designed the Meeting House, the congregation was much smaller and the back of the auditorium was intended to be a community gathering room. It has a low ceiling and is anchored by a large fireplace. However, the congregation has expanded to the point that this area, which Wright originally intended to be separated from the rest of the room by a curtain, is now an overflow seating area, usually filled with about five rows of folding chairs. It was here that I made my way on my first visit. Next to me on the chair was the UU hymnal.
Hope and politeness warred with fear of indoctrination during the beginning of that first service. I sweat—literally sweat—during its first 15 minutes, especially when an organist started playing before the service. I wondered what the hell I was doing there. I argued back and forth in my mind on whether I was doing this out of weakness. I stood awkwardly when the first hymn was sung, eyeing the words suspiciously and not opening my mouth.
Simultaneously, I witnessed the words said in the weekly lighting of the candle in front of the pulpit, a pulpit behind which stands no cross. The words during the candle lighting welcomed all, acknowledged a connection to the greater world, and a tie between people, nature, and light.
The pastor led us in a short meditation. This was not some wimpy half-assed meditation like I’ve been subjected to before. Where someone is talking so quickly that I’m supposed to have visualized a white flame in my chest while I’m still back trying to find my center. No, he led it slowly enough, and my anxiety finally began to retreat.
The pastor spoke about finding beauty in everyday things, enjoying the simplicity of existence, the joy in the ritual of the every day. I have been so outwardly focused for so long, that I needed someone to point to the small.
I needed this, desperately. I needed to be in a place filled with silence, general goodwill, and with other people who seemed to feel the same. I needed it, and I still need it. Desperately.
I’ve been back to the Unitarian Meeting House fairly regularly since then. By the time I’ve come home, M is usually standing newly showered with a cup of coffee. He sometimes tickles my psyche by asking, “How was church?” I’ll often tell him what went on, or how I felt. He takes it all with interest, assuring me that he isn’t afraid that I’m out to “convert” him.
I’m not so anxious anymore, but I’m still questioning every step of the way (which is very “UU” of me). I have not been asked to bow my head, but I know that if I were, I would not. I won’t say any words from the weekly program or sing anything from the hymnal that I don’t like. I vacillate on whether I would ever “sign the book” to the FUS (the first move to becoming a member of the congregation). But I go to catch a glimpse of my “larger self,” as M terms it. The larger self understands my greater possibility, greater strength, and greater generosity. The larger self gently rubs up against others. The connection between other people and a tentatively optimistic view towards nature, without the pessimism, for a blessed moment or two.
I have also found myself surprisingly vulnerable during and after these “sessions” at the meeting house that I cannot come to call church. Tears will come to my eyes as I read along while the candle is lit, or sing the UU “gender neutral, totally racially, ethnically and culturally inclusive” hymns. I often leave feeling emptied out. Raw, but a gentle rawness; a healing pain not a festering pain. I suppose if I were pre-disposed to be “saved,” these would be ripe times for me to be “filled with the light of Christ.” I have no desire to be filled with any outside force. I will settle, at the moment, with finding just a little of my own force right now.
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no subject
Date: 2005-03-21 04:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-21 05:04 am (UTC)And so glad you made it through the d*****d thing!
no subject
Date: 2005-03-21 06:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-21 09:53 am (UTC)Having been raised as an atheist and never once believing in a higher power, I often find religion to be a bit strange. It's hard to understand or appreciate when you have no connection to it.
So, I'm wondering... why do you believe you need church rather that just a belief system? Does the community give you something that you cannot find independently of it?
What little I know about the UU does impress me. I recall my mother going to a few of their gatherings and studying the Koran, Bhagavad Gita, Torah, etc. I always thought that was rather cool. I wonder if they ever read Marx.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-21 02:25 pm (UTC)"I need professional help." I need/ed to go to a place where there was a professional minister giving thoughts and directions I wouldn't necessarily think of myself. I also needed to 'get' something, emotional, spiritual, whatever, b/c I was so sad about the world situation. And I wanted to be with other people. It didn't make me feel so alone.
Unfortunately, I've never heard Marx at a service. Then again, I've only been about 15 times.