Why I Am a Member of USNF

I am going to speak today about how I became a Unitarian Universalist and why I am a member of the Unitarian Society of Northampton. As we heard here in church a few weeks ago, eighty to ninety percent of Unitarians were NOT raised in this faith. For most of us, Unitarianism is something we choose deliberately, as a grown person. This means our religion is rather different than most others, and it also means that most Unitarians have a story to tell, about how we got here. I love hearing these stories, I find them fascinating, and I hope you do, too, because I am about to tell mine now!

For me, like for most Unitarians, choosing UU also meant leaving something different behind. I myself was raised as part of a large Irish Catholic family. My dad is one of ten children, and they were raised strict Catholics who said the rosary every night after dinner; many of my uncles attended seminary any my oldest aunt became a nun. There is a wrinkle to the story though, in that my parents left the Catholic Church when I was a year old. So, although I was baptized Catholic, and the Catholic Church considers that I am still a Catholic, really I never was one. Yet I did grow up in that culture, sometimes attending mass with my grandparents, attending Catholic weddings, funerals, and baptisms, running around with dozens of Irish catholic cousins, and interestingly, only ever dating Catholic boys. I remember often attending mass with my first boyfriend, when I was 15, and feeling happy at the kiss we always shared when it was time to “pass the peace.”

But, as I said, I was not actually raised as a Catholic. When my sister and I got older, and began asking questions about God and religion, my mother found a Protestant Church for us to attend, the United Reformed Church in Somerville, New Jersey. We had 4 singing choirs and 5 hand bell choirs and music was a big part of our services there. I remember being amazed, when I joined this church, to find that UU’s had some of the same hymns, just with non-Christian words. When we sing the Old Hundredth each week, I always hear the words in my head “Praise God from whom all blessings flow…” because that is how we sang it at my old church.

This Protestant Church that I attended in middle childhood was a spiritual home for a few years….I enjoyed attending….and it did provide some religious education for me, but it was never a deeply felt connection for me, and it was easy enough, when I left for college, to leave this church behind and never look back.

For the next 10 or so years, I did not consciously follow any spiritual journey. I married one of the Irish Catholic boys, the nicest one, and but he left the Catholic Church after college, and was also uninterested in following any formal spirituality at the time. We got married, not in a church, but at The Atticus Albion bookstore in Amherst, where we met and where we both had worked while we were dating. If someone asked my religion, during these 10 years, I would answer offhandedly, that I was not a religious person and I didn’t have a religion at all.

Things changed, though, as things tend to do, when our daughter got older and began asking the same type of questions that had sent my parents to the Protestant Church in Somerville. She had a four year’s old spiritual crisis when she found a dead squirrel in the backyard and told me, tearfully, that she didn’t want to die. But we all do, I said. But what then, she asked??

I was muddling through this on my own, not too successfully, when we moved from NJ to Northampton. Nine days after we moved in to our new apartment in Northampton, September 11^th happened. And that Sunday I attended church here at the USNF for the very first time. I knew that I needed help, for her…and for me.

But why here? Why Unitarianism? Well, for that answer.we turn, surprisingly, to the United States Marine Corps. My brother-in-law has been in the Marines for the past 18 years and my sister has moved all around the country with him. Living mostly in the South, and mostly among Marines, she was a non-Christian in a very Christian environment. She wanted something different for herself and her family, and through systematic research, she settled on Unitarianism. When I would visit her, in Virginia and Texas and Florida and California and West Virginia, I would visit her local UU. I was always intrigued, and liked what I heard, but, like I said, it wasn’t until my own children and world events gave me a nudge that I became a UU myself.

OK, so that was a not very short version of how I got here. But what did I find when I arrived, and why did I decide to stay? Yes, it is partly, and importantly, for my children and the wonderful religious education programs we have here. The values here are a very good match for me, in fact they closely align with my own. And I am grateful, very grateful, that the Unitarian Society is here to help me make these values explicit to my children, and help me pass them on to them.

But it has also become so much more than that. Because once I parked my children downstairs, and wondered on up here –thinking, after all, where else was I going to go?- I found out something surprising.

No one was more surprised than I to find out that I am a religious person after all! The hymns, the readings, the sermons, the UU ideals...they were all new to me then, and all amazingly meaningful. They still are of course, but that first year it all so new to me, and I was actually rather amazed with it all, with the beauty and the *relevance* of it all. It resonated with me in a way my past experiences never had…. and truly it still does. John Nichols was our minister back then, and he had a beautiful tenor voice, and I moved to tears by almost every hymn- that’s how new it all was to me back then!

I have been here for 5 years now, so it’s not brand new me to any more. But honestly, I am still amazed with it. And enamored by it.

I love the way we blend the ancient and the modern here, honoring wisdom from ancient religions *AND* honoring the wisdom in our own hearts, and trying to make meaning of the world today. I love our beautiful building, and the quiet moments of reflection I spend here. I love being a part of this community of people who are striving to discover their own truth, who learn from the wisdom of many religions, and never try to claim theirs is the only true one…and who are actively trying to create social justice in matters large and small….and who truly are engaged in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. It is humbling, and inspiring.

I think I have been maybe less deeply bothered, than some other members, by our transitions and troubles. Of course I want to find a settled minister who is a wonderful match for us, and of course I want all members here to feel heard and valued, and of course I am interested in figuring out why we have had so much trouble accomplishing these tasks,

But, believe it or not, I approach these questions optimistically, with a lot of faith in the bigger picture, and the ability to love and enjoy our church, and respect and honor our faith, even as we go through these changes ….because I have found that, no matter who is in the pulpit, the other things that are important to me are always here: the religious education, the amazing community, the ideas about social justice, and the rituals and traditions that have become so meaningful to me.

I find that, every Sunday, our Unitarian ideas and ideals do come through: and I know that, each week, at some point in the service…. there will be a phrase that touches me…there will be an opportunity for service…there will be moments of silence…there will be something beautiful…and something sad…and something sacred. Thank you.