You Can Take the Girl Out of the Fundamentalism...

Good Morning!

I grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian home. My parents are Pentecostal. My mom had been born and raised in the Church in a time of tent revival meetings, speaking in tongues and getting filled with the Holy Spirit. My Dad however, was raised quite the opposite. He wasn’t “born again” until he was a young man in his twenties. When they married in 1964, they sought to create a perfect home where their children would be raised to serve God and go on to save more souls.

From the time I was a young child I always knew I didn’t fit in. Things didn’t make sense to me. In Sunday school we were told that the only people who were going to heaven were those who were born again. Being the obnoxious thinker child, in my head, I went back in time to the time before Jesus was born and wondered what had happened to all the people who had lived prior to the time of Jesus or those who lived on another continent. Through the bad luck of timing or geography, they were going to hell? When I asked questions like these I was flatly told to stop thinking about those things. The devil himself was putting those thoughts in my head and I had to stop allowing him to do so. HUH? I’m a little kid and the devil is putting evil thoughts in my head? This blew my mind and terrified me. How would I ever be able to tell which thoughts were my own and which were the devil’s? There was no logical or reasonable way to do this. This conflict would stay with me for many years. But even at that young age I was already thinking like a Unitarian.

For those of you who are new to Unitarianism, from its roots in the 16th century, what set Unitarians apart from other Christian religions of the time was their use of reason in philosophical and spiritual matters. The name, Unitarian, comes from their belief that God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit could not be three separate individual entities and one entity both at the same time.

Fast forward to my early twenties. I moved away from my small town home to the big city. I am away from the influence of my parents for the first time. I am meeting people with many different ideas, from many different spiritual ideas and practices. In Theatre School I had a friend who practiced martial arts and shared with me authors like Dan Millman, Carlos Castenada. Books like The Tao of Pooh, and even Jonathon Livingstone Seagull. This was the first time I was exposed to spiritual ideas outside of my parents’ religion. Many of the books I read struck a chord with me. As a kid, I had always been very curious about other religions and asked questions of my friends, attended the services of other Churches, but my small town was decidedly Christian. While we had a number of Churches they were all from Christian roots.

One time while I was at college I was going through a particularly rough time and I was trying to make an important decision about something. I honestly don’t remember what the problem was but it doesn’t even matter. In my parents faith when you need help you seek out God’s advice through prayer. Well, I wasn’t going to pray, because God never had never helped me much in the past but that notion of seeking outside help was still a strong gut reaction. My friend had given me a small jade Buddha figure (which I prominently displayed on a shelf to deliberately provoke my parents) and while I wasn’t exactly praying to the Buddha I guess I was engaged in some form of meditation or something, because suddenly the answer to my dilemma suddenly just came to me. But it came to me in the form of a voice from outside of my own head. Or at least it seemed to. But then my logical brain kicks in and thinks, no, these are your own thoughts you’ve just had an epiphany that’s all. So I actually asked this “voice” inside my head are you really Buddha or are you just me talking to myself and the voice answered “Does it really matter? As long as you have the answer you need does it matter where it came from?” That smacked me down on my butt. The real epiphany I had that day was that it isn’t the religion that matters it is the wisdom that we derive from it. What is the purpose of religion, of prayer, of mediation? It is what allows us time in our hectic lives to pause, to stop, to allow us time to reflect and ponder. And it doesn’t matter if I pray to Buddha or to God, to Allah, or just simply meditate on my own. The purpose of it is the same no matter what I call it or what trappings it is wrapped up in. All religions at their very core are the same. I think that is the moment that I became Unitarian, but I didn’t know it yet.

Fast forward again, my fiancé Owen and I are engaged to be married and we are trying to decide who will marry us. Now I had been married before and my first husband and I were married in my parent’s Church by their minister and really the ceremony had little or no meaning for me and I wasn’t interested in a religious wedding again. However, Owen really wanted to be married in a real Church by a real minister. While we both considered ourselves spiritual people neither of us practiced a religion and his family wasn’t particularly religious. Where on Earth would we go to get married? Owen suggested the Unitarian Church of Edmonton. His family had been members there when he was a teenager, he had really enjoyed it and John Marsh was still the minister there. This is one of those times when your fundamentalist baggage catches up with you. I didn’t know anything about these guys. What did they believe in? I wasn’t going to get married in a church that espoused bizarre ideas. What sort of Fringe lunatics were these guys? Owen suggested that we start attending on Sunday mornings to get a feel for what the church was all about and as luck would have it they were about to start a newcomers series. At first I loved the principles and purposes and thought, oh yeah, I can get on board with this. However, I was waiting for the dogma of the church. The principles and purposes were nice, but vague. What did they believe in? I began to find myself getting very frustrated that they were avoiding giving us the goods. Finally at one session, one member of our group asked the leader straight out, but what does this church believe in? And we were stunned to learn that that was not set out by the church but by each person individually, each person was solely responsible for his or her own spiritual journey. Now I was angry. What kind of a church is this? What do you mean you’re not going to tell me what to believe in? What do you mean I can think whatever I want to? What do you mean I don’t have to agree with the next guy? What do you mean it’s okay if we engage in respectful debate about our ideas, Wait…

You mean this is a Church that allows me to have my own ideas, this is a church that actually encourages me and expects me to seek out information and learn more about spiritual matters, this is a church where I am free to learn about other religions and other ways of thinking and doing things? I haven’t looked back since.

My fundamentalist foundation does sometimes come back to haunt me. I am sometimes frustrated that we aren’t more evangelical. But I do find myself remaining quiet about my religion when talking about religion with non-UU friends. I want the world to know about us and what a great thing we have here, but I don’t want to be like “them.” I was inspired by Dawn N.'s service last year and her idea about re-pamphleting. When someone gives you a pamphlet about their religion you respond with one about ours. I even picked up a few to carry in my purse. I have yet to hand one out though.

We aren’t as inclusive as we like to think we are. We say we are open to all religions, creeds, genders, sexual orientations, ages and incomes but yet we are the Church of the intellectual elite. (Or as my good friend Kerry says the church of the smarty-pants) I doubt that there are many of us here that do not have some form of post-secondary education, and even if you don’t you are still likely quite well read. Where are the Unitarian churches in Boyle-McCauley, East Hastings, Queen and Dufferin delivering the good word the masses? While we do do a lot of good work in Social Justice making money, food, clothing or blankets available at the same time we aren’t making our ideas available. We aren’t offering a counterpoint to the Christian ideas that permeate all the Christian missions in the inner city. To be a Unitarian Universalist in the modern age you need to be able to read, you need to have the luxury of time to sit and ponder the great mysteries of the universe. Something that is very difficult to do when you are scrambling to find food and shelter. We don’t offer easy answers, we don’t spell it out for our members, and while this is what I treasure most about our faith, this is the edge that Christian Churches have over us in the global perspective. Right or Wrong, they have more to offer the average person on the street who wants it easy, who wants it spelled out for them, who can’t or don’t want to think about life’s bigger questions. Or maybe it is a little kernal of fundamentalism still buried deep inside me somewhere that says “But we are right and they are wrong and everyone needs to think like we do!!!” I don’t know. I’m still on my journey. Thank you.

We believe that everyone has the right to seek truth and meaning for themselves. The fundamental tools for doing this are your own life experience, your reflection upon it, your intuitive understanding and the promptings of your own conscience.

added May 22, 2008