My family of origin contained very little in the way of religious observances. And except for a few little ritualistic things (a rosary hanging from the rear-view mirror, noticing Solstices, the first daffodil or robin, etc.), there wasn’t much that could have been considered spiritual. My parents came from different religious backgrounds, but they didn’t practice them. The family was basically secular.
As a child, I chose to go to church on my own. I don’t know what motivated me. I attended the church closest to where I lived. Something called Evangelical United Brethren. After some kind of merge, it became United Methodist. Basic Christian thing. By the time I attended high school, I had drifted away from that little church. I didn’t believe in much of anything at that point.
As a young adult, I heard a public-service announcement on the radio early one Saturday morning. The message resonated with me, and soon I became a card-carrying member of the American Humanist Association. For several years, I was so convinced that anything religious or spiritual was mere superstition. Science could (or someday would) explain everything.
But then, life became, uh, challenging. The idealism of my youth faded away. Not everything was possible. My childhood family had dissolved into seemingly unrelated fragments. I became aware of a sense of isolation and a need for community. I joined a Unitarian Universalist church. Oddly enough, there were many secular humanists in the congregation. I got a lot out of the teachings of UU in those early years, and I started to become more spiritual as I interacted with the religiously diverse membership. There were Pagans, Buddhists, Pantheists, Wiccans, and people into Earth-centered spirituality and/or Native American spirituality. I was changing, but I knew that I would probably never go back to the religion of my childhood.
At the same time however, the secular humanists and hard-core atheists in that UU congregation began to annoy me more and more. They complained that New Age beliefs were just as “bad” as the old-time Christian teachings. However, the congregation was changing, and they were becoming marginalized. Little by little, prominent secular humanist members started dropping out.
Twenty years later, I’m still a member at that same UU church. I’m not as gung-ho into it as I once was. I guess I keep showing up because I haven’t figured out where else to go on Sunday mornings. The congregation has continued to change, only now, it has morphed into something that seems to be marginalizing me (white, single, hetero-sexual males are becoming extinct there). It’s been said that a Unitarian Universalist church is the last church many people attend before they stop going to church altogether. Maybe I’m becoming one of those people and simply won’t admit it.
