UU Answers to Christian Questions
Comments By The Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
May 1, 2005
I think I was in the seventh or eighth grade when my friends found out that my father was a minister. It didn’t matter what religion we were, particularly. What mattered was that the word minister” translated into “goody-goody” and I was instantly shut out of the carefree conversations we used to have. Junior High is a period in life that is notorious for acting out, and my group of friends was borderline. Our way of acting out was to try out those shocking cuss words like “damn-it” and “Jesus” and “crap.” We hadn’t learned the “s” word or the “f” word, yet, and we might not even have used them, considering we were also Girl Scouts. Never-the-less, when I would walk up to my group of friends in those days immediately after their learning the amazing news, all would get quiet. “Don’t cuss in front of Susan,” someone would whisper. “Her father’s a minister!”
That was when I learned to cuss fluently. It didn’t last, just long enough to get the point across.
My friends were Jewish and fundamentalist Christian, before the word “fundamentalist” got coined. I went to Hebrew school with my friend Jana, and my friend Paula brought her Bible when she came to sleep over at my house, but we all got along somehow. I was born and raised a Unitarian Universalist, even before the merging of the two religious associations. My father was a Unitarian minister serving a Universalist congregation, so I really was born and raised Unitarian Universalist, or maybe I was a Universalist Unitarian. When my friends asked me what UU’s believed in, I would say, “Anything we want!” That answer led to consternation and required lots of discussion regarding how a religion can be a religion when it doesn’t tell you what to believe. Complicated conversation for a group of pre-teens, but we were bright and up for it.
My friends were curious about my faith, as I was of theirs. It wasn’t until a year or so later that I learned that UUs were considered evil by some religious communities. I was in the Liberal Religious Youth group at the Phoenix church; we called ourselves LRYer’s. Our religious education curriculum for the year was “The Church Across the Street,” in which we would visit other religious services on one Sunday and discuss our experiences the next, then do it again. I mainly remember two visits, one of which was to the Quakers, where we sat quietly for almost the entire hour until one woman leaped up nervously to speak and then sat down again. That was it.
The other visit was literally to the church across the street, which called itself The Church of All Christian Faiths. We sat in the front row, and the minister must have known we were there because he began to talk about those evil Unitarian Universalists across the street who didn’t believe in god, etc. etc. We were polite enough to get all the way back to our LRY room up above the sanctuary before we started laughing. We laughed, but we were also very shocked. We had no idea that ministers and churches could be so vindictive. And not just vindictive, but untruthful. That minister had no idea what we were really about. A number of years later, they changed the name of their church from The Church of All Christian Faiths to just The Church of Christian Faiths, taking out the “All.” We figured they found out that Unitarian Universalists were Christians and wanted to be sure we were excluded.
I’ve decided that the question, “Do you believe in God?” has become an in-group/out-group question. In other words, are you one of us, the in-group, the saved, the cherished, the chosen? This question is useful especially in weeding out friends on school playgrounds. My daughter encountered it probably in pre-school, but it didn’t carry meaning until kindergarten, and then, in first grade, it determined who would play with her, she discovered, if she gave the “wrong” answer, the honest answer, which for her was “no.” She came home one day when we still lived in Phoenix to tell me that her friend, whose father was also a minister, wouldn’t let her come over to their house anymore because we were Unitarian Universalists. I could hardly believe that such behavior still existed. I guess I thought that religious prejudice like that died out generationally, but that is not the case and this sort of prejudice, which is perpetuated by churches such as The Church of All but no longer All Christian Faiths, goes on down into eternity, so that people never truly learn to get along. At least, a big chunk of them never do.
There are people who really are curious about our faith, though, like my friends in Jr. High. Answers like, “We can believe anything we want,” don’t give much more than a clue as to who we are. We started to realize that as an association of congregations with Sophia Lyon Fahs’ help. Fahs worked for the Unitarian Association in Religious Education, and she wrote the reading which we have in our hymnal today, entitled “It Matters What We Believe.” Let’s read it together; it’s number 657:
Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.
Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.
Some beliefs are like shadows, clouding children’s days with fears of unknown calamities.
Other beliefs are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.
Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.
Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.
Some beliefs are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one’s own direction.
Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.
Some beliefs weaken a person’s selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness.
Other beliefs nurture self-confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.
Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.
Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.
When you think about it, it does matter what we believe. But how can an association of congregations, not even a “denomination” but an association of independent congregations, define what it is we believe. Could we ever find agreement?
We rose to the challenge in the late 1970’s and early ‘80’s to define our faith. We weren’t about telling people what to believe, but we do recognize values we hold in common. We are a values-based faith tradition. When people ask me what that is or how that can be, I remind them of the story of the Ten Commandments. Moses didn’t go up on the mountain to bring back a list of attributes of God, or even a list of “We believes.” He came back with a list of values, of ways we ought to behave in the world with each other: honor, love, don’t steal or covet, etc. etc. As UUs, we came up with a list which we call our Principles and Purposes, and instead of saying “we believe,” we say, “we affirm and promote,” action words. For we know that beliefs are not something we can force, but we can covenant with one another regarding values about which we care. Those Principles and Purposes are listed in the front of every hymnal.
Over the years, people have determined that those Principles and Purposes are too long and difficult for the children to be able to express when asked by their friends what it is they believe. Heck, I can barely quote them all. So someone came up with, amazingly, a translation which uses the words, “we believe.” It’s number 594 in the hymnal, which I’m not going to have us read but you can look at it some day. Children understand the words “we believe,” because that is the language of their school culture, their friendship culture. So, helping them to express their faith is also helping them to put into words what it is they actually do believe, if they know it.
Comfort with not knowing, though, is also important. Can we be comfortable with questions that have no answers? There’s a twist to that theme in “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” which just came out in the theaters. I haven’t seen it yet, but Curtiss and I used to listen to the radio version on PBS many years ago, which for us means the early eighties. I bring it up because the main character was searching the universe, not for the answer, which he already knew. The answer was “42.” Unfortunately, they had lost the question.
Whether you are comfortable with not-knowing, or need to search for answers to questions about the meaning of life, Christian or not, it still helps to have something to say, something that comes out of the integrity of your life. I hope you find those responses, be they answers or deeper questions.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson