This is a letter I've promised for months to the new minister at the Norwich UU church about why I stopped going to services after going for a year.
Bruce,
This is a hard note to write, mostly because there is so much to say about my sense of god, of my faith and why I stopped going to the UU services. I should start off by saying that I describe myself as a "recovering christian". By this I mean the following:
I was raised by two seekers with whom I visited several different types of services as I grew up. Catholic and Assembly of God are two of the churches I remember before my Mom settled on the local Methodist Church. She selected this one on the basis of it having a charismatic preacher, one who was friendly and inviting who grew the church to have two Sunday services instead of one and a Fellowship Hall added onto the church. I went to Sunday school and learned all the bible stories along with a sense of responsibility and guilt; I should feel grateful for someone I had never met who was a nice man in stories told to me at Sunday School, but not at home. It simply was not part of my life.
On the other hand, my father was a different kind of seeker from my mom. He sought outside the "normal channels" and inculcated in me a strong sense of making sure I did not lose control to a god or a church. He followed a more spiritual path, seeking more of a direct connection with the divine. But he did so in an iconoclastic manner, looking for the non-traditional path.
When I was a teenager, I was exposed to the evangelical wing of the Methodist Church where individuals or groups attempted to get me to join them. I remember distinctly at one youth fellowship meeting that was being led by a young couple, that when I questioned how one could believe, for instance, that there was a Jesus who was there to save us, I was told that I just had to have faith. This simply did not fly with me. All my family training had been in the rationalist mold; even my father's seeking was done in an experimental manner: if it worked, there was something to this or that technique; if no result was forthcoming, then that technique was not worth pursuing. There were other times I remember when evangelical youth groups would come to visit ours for a weekend. They would be singing "spontaneously" and giving the appearance of being so tight. But I had such a strong sense that to join such a group would mean giving up me and replacing it with something else.
While I attended the Methodist Church I made a lot of friends in the youth group and in the choir. I attended almost every Sunday and participated in lots of activities. However, when I was about 16, I started to dread going to church. I have a distinct memory of sitting in the pews one Sunday morning and looking up at a piece of stained glass high above the altar and my heart was just so heavy and I felt claustrophobic. When this experience was repeated almost everytime I went in I decided that it just was not for me. The Bible stories I heard seemed to be meant to reproach all of us in the chapel; we were supposed to learn that who we were was inherently bad (that old Original Sin) and this was a message I had been listening to for years at that time. The heaviness in my chest was the experience of my sense of who I was being suffocated.
Since that time in high school, I have had a number of different kinds of spiritual experiences. In the UU world, I attended some Fellowships that were pretty dry, more like clubs. At the other extreme I attended services in a beautiful cathedral in Oakland, CA where I shed tears just by sitting in the pews, as if I had come home. The part about UU life that I found most attractive and soul-satisfying was the eclectic nature of the services and the mostly non-denominational approach; by non-denominational I mean that whoever was leading the services brought in some aspect of spiritual life, Native American, Reiki, Buddhism, Sufism or Christian. But even the Christian view was given from a non-traditional viewpoint of the Gnostic Gospels.
In non-UU, I was involved with a group for a few years that felt like an American Zen or Zen Christianity. Emissaries of Divine Light was the name of the group. What I found refreshing about this group is that when I heard the same Bible stories I had heard as a child, a new perspective was presented that made much more sense. I guess that my sense of Christianity was based on some sort of a Technicolor and Sanitized officially sanctioned storyline where no questioning was allowed or even considered. So the idea that those really ancient stories could have some relevance just never was part of my world view. And as a teen, it seemed like the price of admission to even discussing that was to claim that I was a "born-again". Back to these Emissaries: I spent two winters living in one of their intentional communities in Colorado. I did experience a lack of division between my sacred life and my daily work that was wonderful. I really did hope that I might find this life to be ultimately satisfying (much more to that story), but in the end, I found that the people in this community were just as confused as I was about living a sacred life. I was back to relying on me.
It's late and I need to shower and bed to get ready for the week. I've still got a bit more to finish out. This turned out to be much longer that I expected!
Paul
