In five minutes or less

[rivka]

I don't remember whether I've mentioned here that Misha and I have started the process of becoming members of our local Unitarian Universalist church. Last week was our first "Beginners" class, where we'll be learning more about Unitarianism and about the history and practices of the congregation, and getting to know the ministers as well as our fellow "Beginners."

And also, apparently, where we will be telling the story of our spiritual journey in five minutes or less.

This was a task sprung on the group without warning. Apparently some people have a coherent spiritual journey, one they're actually capable of explaining on short notice and in five minutes or... well, more. (Apparently, keeping to a time schedule is not a Unitarian strong suit.) (I did notice that the spiritual journeys of the first few people who spoke were much, much shorter than the spiritual journeys of people who were sitting further along the circle and thus had more time to prepare.)

They didn't get to me (or Misha) before time was up, so we're supposed to go this week. That's given me a week to think about the question. Starting with, "Hey, wait a minute - doesn't 'journey' imply a destination?"

So maybe tomorrow night I'll say something like this:


What typically sets me apart from most of the social circles I move in is that I had a positive Christian upbringing, which I haven't felt the need to renounce. My family belongs to a liberal northern Protestant denomination - Congregationalist, or United Church of Christ. It's a church that ordains out gay and lesbian ministers and has a national Office of Social Justice, and - although they had their bad moments - the people I met there were generally good people who did their best to walk their talk. I ran across plenty of Christian hypocrisy later, but I never thought of hypocrisy and Christianity as synonymous, because of the example of my home church.

My family were pillars of the church. Church and Sunday School every week, singing in the choir, taking care of babies in the nursery, committees and church suppers and youth groups and retreats and all of the rest of it. But through all of this, I don't ever remember being taught that one religious group had a monopoly on the truth. I don't remember ever believing that, or even being encouraged to believe it. I went to synagogue with my best friend when I slept over on Friday nights. I took books out of the library on witchcraft and Buddhism and meditation. I sang in an Espiscopalian choral group and memorized most of the Latin mass. I liked the litanies and rituals and stories and metaphors of my religion, but I always sort of understood them as personal preferences.

I went off to college and found myself surrounded by people who were not religious at all - except when fundamentalists shouted at me as I escorted patients in to the abortion clinic or ate fire with the Lesbian Avengers. Everyone around me sort of took it for granted that religion was oppressive and bad, especially Christianity. At that time, in Oregon, liberals were battling with extremely well-organized fundamentalist Christians over, literally, issues of life and death. It was hard not to see my friends' point, although I always tried to get them to distinguish between Christianity and Christian extremism.

I never stopped having religious beliefs and thoughts, although they were mostly dormant for awhile. I never stopped shocking the hell out of people by saying that I was a Christian, but I continued to be uncomfortable about allying myself with a religion in whose name so many were doing great evil. I prayed, sporadically. The day that the doctor who did my hip replacement told me I could walk again, I found myself seeking out a church before going back to campus. I didn't have a religious community, but I always sort of expected that I'd have one someday.

I met Misha. He's an ex-Southern Baptist, and had enough animosity toward his religious upbringing to make me realize that any religious community we would join together wouldn't be Christian. Not even liberal Yankee Christian. We went to the Unitarian church in Iowa City a few times, because he'd been a Unitarian back in Memphis, but we didn't much care for the minister. I did like what I saw of how Unitarians work - especially in that they recognize that individual spiritual paths differ, but believe that people following different paths can support and learn from each other.

Over the past few years, I've found my interest in spirituality growing deeper. I've prayed more. I've spent a lot of time talking about religion with my HIV+ clients, who are mostly deeply Christian African Americans. I've celebrated the Sabbath with a couple of Jewish six-year-olds and attended Pagan circles and been deeply uncomfortable at a Southern Baptist funeral. I've been thinking more frequently about raising children, and how to teach them to see the world with love and respect.

I want to be part of a religious community because I want to join with others who are also thinking about spiritual matters and trying to put meaning to things. I still feel Christian in spirit, but I want my family to be able to go to church together. I like the idea that Misha and I can sit side by side, me thinking my Christian thoughts and him thinking his non-Christian thoughts, each of us fitting equally well into the Unitarian church. Besides, I don't think I could pick up on One True Wayism this late in life - I'd have a hard time picking a creed and sticking to it.

If I were required to come up with a comprehensive religious outlook, I'd say that it feels to me as though religions and philosophies are attempts to describe and encompass things that are essentially beyond description; that whatever spirit or God or the infinite is, it is beyond our human attempts to represent or approximate it. Like the cliched blind men and the cliched elephant. I'm not an absolute relativist - some belief systems seem to me to have a bigger piece of the truth than others. But I also think that some minds are best suited for particular paths, and that some people just have... personal preferences.


Heh. "That was never five minutes just now" ...I guess I'll have to edit out the unimportant parts before tomorrow evening. If I can figure out which those are.

Comments

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I'd find such pressure annoying.

what pressure are you referring to?

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

(Mary)

Re: what pressure are you referring to?

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

To come up with a 5 minute capsulation of a "spiritual journey in five minutes or less".

Ick.

Re: what pressure are you referring to?

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't consider it as pressure in the same way that I wouldn't consider being asked to climb Half Dome on Sunday to be pressure. If I know it's not something I can do, I can adapt it to my grasp.

I'd say something like what Rivka is pondering ("Doesn't that require a destination?"), then mention a couple of areas I'd paid attention to in the past, then perhaps say something to finish ("I'm fascinated to see what lies ahead"), then let the next person go.

I don't need to distill everything into five minutes. A brief, even incomplete survey would be fine by me. Folks who want to know more can ask afterwards.

[jenett]

Bleh. Five minutes.

My "Describe your religious background" comments tend to start with "Well, to actually include the important bits, I need to start with my great-grandfather...."

Thankfully, after that, it goes somewhat faster from the turn of the century or so through about 1988, and much of that I can condense into about 10 sentences.

Re:

[rivka.livejournal.com]

*laugh* Yeah. I've skipped over other bits that I think are important because they're more on the historical side - like my Dad being raised atheist in an ethnically/culturally Jewish family, and his stories about the casual anti-Semitism of the 40s and 50s. And my mother's grandparents' harsh joyless Presbyterianism.

Re: what pressure are you referring to?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Well, I think I've probably made it sound more ridiculous than it is - my sense of the absurd is what made me highlight the "everything you think and experience about spirituality in five minutes or less" aspect of it. I don't think it was lost on anyone there, especially the ministers who set the topic, that we were going to be hearing highlights and glancing over most of the details and complexities. But given that this class is seen as the beginning of an ongoing relationship, that's not necessarily a problem. I think we're all expecting these brief stories to be unfolded and elaborated in other contexts.

The stories people told (in five minutes or so) were often fascinating; I don't have the illusion that I know everything about them, but it wasn't too short a time to elicit interesting histories. There was a gay male couple, both children of fundamentalist preachers; a middle-aged woman who was raised Unitarian, spent much of the middle part of her life practicing Diannic paganism, and was now returning to the Unitarian church; a medical doctor turned New Age practitioner; a married couple, Jewish and Christian, who'd joined the Unitarian church 20 years ago because they wanted to raise their children "religious" and couldn't agree on which religion. Are these encapsulations complete? Of course not. But they're good thumbnail sketches.

You know, probably if I hadn't had a week to think about the question, the task would seem much less formidable... and absurd.

[bunyip.livejournal.com]

Very interesting journey, Rivka

Re: what pressure are you referring to?

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

FWIW, this seems to be a fairly standard exercise in church circles - I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked to do it. IME the journey metaphor has usually been used to imply the *opposite* of a destination: that there's always more exploration to be done, and that the divine often leads us in surprising directions.