Learning To Disagree

I am becoming more and more convinced that learning how to disagree well is the foundation for …well everything. Anyone who has been paying attention has seen the toxic effect of I'm-right-and-everyone-else-is-a-horrible-person on American politics, but it is not just politicians and pundits we can point fingers at; it is us, too.

Husband S and I got married when we were young, dumb, and brand new parents. With an eye on the odds, you probably wouldn’t recommend that young people take this route. Sixteen years later, he is still the love of my life and I shudder to imagine my life without him. Most of the time I am at a loss to explain how we beat the odds to make our marriage work when so many others who marry young do not. The one thing I come back to is we always try to fight fair. Whatever either of us is upset or angry about, the goal of the conversation has to be to fix the problem and heal the relationship, never to make the other person feel bad. We never call names when we fight. This is hard. Really hard sometimes, but it establishes a foundation of trust. I know that S is never out to get me. I know that I can count on him to listen to me and that my feelings are important to him. Always.

I thought about this yesterday and we need to apply that same standard in our congregations. Yesterday I attended some communication training at our Fellowship and during this session, it became very clear that there are deep divisions within the Fellowship that are still in the process of being healed. Some of these revolve around a specific experience, but I believe many others are part of our denominational dialogue at UU’s: theists vs. non-theist, those who want the church to be a mission to the world vs. those who are content with a liberal oasis, etc. Do any of us want to be in a Unitarian-Universalism where the only people left think just like us? Or do we want to continue as a faith with a rich dialogue of dissenting voices? If the latter, we need to focus on remembering or leaning how to disagree.

The thing about your church that totally annoys you, well that might be just the thing that keeps the person next to you coming to church. For non-theists it can be threatening when people keep bringing all their god-talk into your last bastion of rational safety, and I know there will always be tension there between these two camps. But surely our commitment to support each other in our own searches for meaning is bigger and more important than whether or not we involve a divinity in that search. Working together to make the here and now a better place takes precedence over what compels us to do so.

When I am mad at someone, I friend of mine is in the habit of asking me if I want to be right or be happy. The answer varies based on mood and circumstances. I want to apply this question to our congregations in a broader sense. Do we want to nurse our sense of righteousness or do we want to have a relationship with others in our church community, one which nourishes both of us? We say we want a big tent, so we have to build that tent with our individual everyday interactions with each other.

Ghosts of Protestants Past

Yesterday was a difficult Sunday at church. We are doing a series in which various members share those positive aspects of their childhood faiths that they brought with them into their UU practice and we started things off with Protestants. I was interested in the subject matter, but totally unaware of how it would hit me. I have been trying to put emphasis lately on moving forward into positive faith rather than dwelling on rebelling against the past. I don’t want to continue to define myself as a former anything. I thought I had made a lot of progress.

Sometimes we are not very honest with ourselves. I was so uncomfortable while people were sharing it was all I could do not to just get up and leave. I bolted out of there as soon as the service was over. I had a really strong emotional reaction and it wasn’t to what was being said; it was to my own response. I felt myself interpreting people through old filters. I didn’t like what I was showing myself about who I still am on the inside. I would like to be an open minded agnostic Unitarian Universalist, and part of me is. But the truth is that my base setting is that of a lapsed, disillusioned, and guilty Pentecostal. It made me question, whether or not I can really do Unitarian Universalism.

So I read Soul Seeds this morning. Anthony has a great post and this part in particular leapt off the screen at me.

Many books have been written recently about the Christian Right. One that does a particularly good job of getting inside the movement’s worldview, particularly that of its working-class members, is Spirit and Flesh: Life Inside a Fundamentalist Baptist Church by James M. Ault Jr…. Ault, like George Lakoff and several other authors, locates the heart of the Christian Right worldview in its overall vision of family life—not just in the positions it takes on a handful of specific “family values” issues like abortion or same-sex marriage.

[According to this overall vision of family life,] a child … is born into a network of mutual obligations and depends for its survival on the fulfillment of those obligations. As it grows, the child takes an ever more active role in upholding that network. At no point in the process is the individual in a position to stand outside the network and choose whether or not its obligations apply to him or her. The only choice the individual has is whether to fulfill his/her obligations or to renege on them. This is what fundamentalists mean when they say that moral values are “absolute” rather than “relative.”


Regular readers know that I struggle with relationships in my family and that second paragraph clarified things for me.

I feel like a bad daughter for leaving the faith.

I feel like I have betrayed my family and their sacrifices. I know it isn’t true, in my head that is. I know that I had to choose a different path. I can't live those values. Pretending to worship Christ to protect their feelings was eating at me. The dishonesty was toxic and it affected my children more than I realized at the time. I know leaving the church was the right thing for me. And still. And still I feel like I have let them down. I feel their disappointment. I often wonder why it is so hard for me to get over my former religion when I had so many positive experiences growing up in it. But it is this, it is so tied up with my family and my place in it. I don’t think I can get over one issue without the other.

I generally feel like I have my act together, but it is a times like these that I think maybe I am a lot more fucked up than I realize.

Out of the UU Closet

Well, frak.

I guess I am out now as a UU to my family. Here is the story. Since I informed my mother that I would no longer be attending church with them a few years ago, my family and I never discuss religion. In the past they politely invited me to various church events and I politely declined. It is the one subject we discuss even less often than politics and it sometimes hangs there in the air while none of us acknowledge it in our WASPy way. I know that my rejection of her religion and refusal to bring up my daughters in it is very painful for my mother. I wish there was some way around that, but there isn't. She did every thing she could to bring me up in a godly manner and it didn't work. My father sometimes worked two jobs so that my middle sister and I could go to Christian school, and still I left the flock. She is respectful enough of my choices not to browbeat me with that disappointment, but it is still there, obvious and unaddressed.

I am not ashamed of any of my spiritual beliefs, but I don't bring them up with the family because I believe it will just cause more pain. My personal beliefs are not any of their business. However, when my mother informs my daughter that she cannot have a trinket featuring a peace symbols because it is satanic - it can be tough.

The AUUF is starting an official Facebook page and I have volunteered to keep it up to date. This requires me to "like" the page. My personal Facebook page doesn't have a lot of details for reasons such as these. I figure if you know me, then you know I love the Beatles and Dune without me having to make it part of my profile.

So now my extremely devout Baptist sister is requesting an explanation about why I would "like" something like the Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. I guess being a "backslider" and skipping church was one thing, but at least I wasn't an out-and-out heathen. (Not the Odin & Freya kind of heathen, but more like the totally misguided and much to be pitied fallen one in need of rescue.)

I think I am going to ignore this request as Facebook does not seem like the best place to discuss theology. If she cares enough she will call. I love my sister, but she lives 3,000 miles away from me and has for over half my life. My choice of house of worship is not her business. If my family chooses to gossip about my fallen state, well, that won't be any worse than when I was 20 years old, single, and pregnant.

Thanks, blogosphere, for helping me to work some of this out. I feel a little better. The point of this blog was for me to chronicle my journey to UU and the experience of a new member. I guess this had to be one of the chapters eventually. Still, I am not looking forward to that phone call.

Atheism and the Goddess

Yesterday our Fellowship held a service with the theme of the Divine Feminine and one of the readings was an excerpt from “Atheism and the Goddess” by Margaret Pearce. This, for me, was the highlight of the service and it felt tailor made for someone like me.

I do not believe in a divine being and have not for quite some time. When I was a believer, I never felt any such being. I am perfectly happy in this state of unbelief. The world and the universe are so awesome and fascinating on their own. But. I have always felt engaged and inspired by images and stories of goddesses. I enjoy so many pagan practices and ideas and I want to engage with them, but my more rational side argues with me. Is it really honest to participate in rituals, etc. when you don’t actually believe in these deities? Is it any better than when I used to pretend in the Christian church in which I was raised?

It sounds like Pearce struggled with these same issues and that, in itself, was validating. I don’t need to believe in a literal divine being to think about or meditate on a deity who looks like me. The values of goddess worship are ones I hold dear and these practices are a good way to integrate them into my life. I am not being any more honest to pretend these archetypes don’t have a pull on me.

This balance is why I enjoy the women’s group I have found so much. As women, we come together to celebrate and strengthen aspects our lives through focus on various goddesses and the cycle of the year. No one requires me to check my brains at the door, but the ritualistic elements help me to involve other sides of myself as well. I don’t know if I mentioned it here, but I have pretty much given up the local CUUPS group. I don’t think I am in sync with what they are trying to do, so it is best for me to step back and allow them to enjoy their rituals as they want. CUUPS helped to bring me to both UU’ism and my women’s group and I am very grateful for that. I wish them all the best, but I don’t plan on joining them anymore.

I don’t remember who it was, but someone in Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon referred to his pagan practice as not irrational, but arational. This works for me and it provides an important balance so that I am not being so damn Apollonian all the time. A rational atheist and an arational pagan, that may just describe me.

What Is Wrong With UU the Way it Is?

Why are UU's so down with what is wrong with UU's?

I'm really puzzled by this one. I just found Unitarian Universalism and I like it. I still have trouble with the idea of being religious, but most of the time I feel at home here. It's a place and an idea where I fit and and I'm not judged. But frequently when I open UU blogs the subject seems to be what is wrong with UU's and UU churches and OMG-what-we-need-to-change-right-now-or-we-will-never-ever-grow. This does not fill one with confidence.

I understand that churches need to pay pastors and they must have sufficient members and revenue to do so, so I get the church growth thing from that angle. But, for cyin' out loud, what is so wrong with Unitarian Universalism?

Often it seems like the exact things that attracted me to UU fellowship are the things that desperately need to change and that makes me feel like maybe I'm not the kind of person you are trying to attract. I know that isn't true, but sometimes it make me feel unwelcome. I wish there were more people of color and people under 40 in our local fellowship and in the association as a whole, I do. But damn it, I am a white middle-class woman who listens to NPR, buys organic food, doesn't believe in God, and votes Democrat and I don't think I should have to apologize for that. This community sold me on what you had, but then the focus shifted how you should really be something different and you shouldn't want to appeal so much to me. I bought what you were selling because it means something to me.

For a long time, I pretended to be something I wasn't to fit in at my childhood church. I left that behind with great relief, sure that I would never attend a church again. Here I am a few years later finding a church that speaks to me. So why is everyone trying to change it and improve it to appeal to someone else? If I don't fit in as a UU, I can't imagine finding another church that fits.

I hope I didn't step on any toes here, but I wanted to get that off my chest. I really am asking the question, not just complaining. I'd be grateful for any polite arguments, agreements, enlightenment or information on the matter.