Faith and Community

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With great joy, I've discovered my minister has begun recording her sermons.

How strange to type that sentence!  With a lifelong instinct to recoil against the notion of being "religious," the idea of not only attending a church sermon, but also regretting any day I miss a sermon just seems surreal.

After more than two years, I still feel like I am a strange fit with this church.  If atheists in my region organized and met frequently to talk about how to make the world a better place, I would gladly be a part of that community. *   But, despite the many atheists who will join volunteer groups with nonprofits, a mentality seems to exist that holds back many atheists from gathering to discuss ethics in a community setting.  This type of venue has a solid association with places of worship.

So, after learning to get by without any sort of community, I stumbled, at age twenty-nine, across this church called Unitarian Universalist that encompasses beliefs ranging from "God is Love," to "I don't know what God is," to "there are many gods," to "we are daughters of the Goddess."  Instead of following rules about belief, UU's follow a covenant, which is based on how we treat one another.  While God, or a version thereof, still plays an important part in many of the central ideas of the church, in sermons God often is spoken of in an undefined way, or represented by an anthropomorphized tortoise, the warming mother sun, or something similar.

The assumption by most who hear that I attend church (including many other UU's) is that I am "religious" and/or have faith in some sort of God.  I suppose no matter how open a group of people is, the instinct both to label and to assume everyone follows the majority beliefs of the group is too ingrained to be removed.  I contemplate what it would be like to live somewhere populous enough for atheists to get together. The fantasy is, well, fantastic.  I imagine a group of people, all with a sense of purpose, coming together to make the world a better place for everyone now, because it's all we have, and all they have. (And verging on breaking into songs by John Lennon.)

But of course, I know that's a fantasy: I know in any group, no matter on what our foundation is based, will disagree with some details and/or methods of implementation.  So instead of trying to find a group that exactly fits my values, I look for one with my core values in common and a good "people feel."  Because I found the minister and the congregation to be so casually accepting, I felt a sense of belonging in a group that, in the past, would have sent me running for the hills as soon as I saw the steeple.

As I've become more and more involved with my Parish, I've, of course, run across issues of disagreement between me and the majority, or me and a particular individual.  However, instead of the issue turning into a point of contention between us, we both were easily able to accept the difference of opinion and listen to the different point of view.  I can be honest about how I feel without being pressured or "preached to".  Because of this, my "faith" in my community grew stronger after finding an issue in dispute.

I don't feel pressured by the sermons because, to me, they feel more like attending a guest collegiate lecture than a sermon.  They lack the "do this or else," or "if you're doing this, you're going to burn" feeling that I associate with church.  Instead, the church reminds me a lot of the positive aspects I experienced during college: sermons are like attending a class and hearing wonderful ideas from my professor, and the groups are like the student organizations and social groups (minus frat/sorority parties).

Obviously I'm simplifying this a lot; there are many more aspects and depths to the church which I haven't experienced.  I'm translating my experience into a simile I can understand in secular terms in order to avoid the confusion of having an ever growing presence in a faith-based community.  I seize every opportunity to be involved with church programs for fundraisers, working to help those in need, and so on.

Ironically, the outcome of me being more involved with church is that I care ever more about the sermons, yet I miss more sermons while volunteering for church services than I did before I cared as much.  I try to look at the larger picture and be glad that I'm living the principals, but I still regret not hearing Reverend Hepler and Intern Minister Hall share their inspiring sermons.

The end result is me some evening, lounging on my EZ-chair, with headphones plugged into my laptop, listening to Reverend Hepler's sermons.  The scene seems apropos of an atheist-humanist-Unitarian-Universalist.  So yes, I can rejoice at the availability of sermons, and smile ironically, or genuinely, at my distanced intimacy with this community.

* note: yes, there is an atheist/secular humanism group in Boston, but one of the problems with living in the suburbs is you don't get to go to all the great things that happen in Boston, despite the 184,000 people who live here which should be enough to have our own events.