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Friday, 3 June 05 ::
uu
on sunday i am scheduled to go with my candidate, and others, to the first unitarian church of portland. dennis kucinich is going to be there, and pete is going to be one of the featured speakers, along with the congressman.
growing up we were never members of a church. my father was raised in the episcopal church, and my mother was raised a christian, but not a hard core practicing one. both ended up good liberal democrats with a distaste for organized religion. and it was in that tradition that they raised my brother and i.
throughout my life i had searched and searched for a spiritual place that i belonged. for awhile i thought it was the episcopal church.. for a while i thought it was wicca. and then in my last 6 months of my first round of grad school i was introduced to uu-ism.
yes, the minute i walked into the unitarian universalist fellowship of athens i knew i'd found my home. here were a bunch of liberals talking about spirituality from their heads. it was a great thing, and i joined the fellowship.. just weeks or so before i left. uufa left an indellible mark on me and in the years since i've claimed myself as a uu, and finally, last november, joined the uu church here in eugene.
i don't go often to fellowship. in fact, every sunday morning i debate about whether to go, and lately, my bed has won out to the church.. but, i know that i am still a member, and i know that i will always be able to claim myself as a uu, and be able to talk about our love for our heads. yep.
i am alone amongst my close friends to be a member of an established church. many of them have rejected religion due to their childhood experiences with religion, others simply were not raised in a tradition and don't have the need to find it.
i guess i'm just starting to be able to feel the spiritual coat i put on 7 years ago, maybe i'll always find it unique that there are others out there in my community who have chosen organized religion, and who have chosen the one i have.. but i always take a bit of joy when i can refer to the fact that pete and i are both uu's, that we both belong to the church. i often think how great it would be to have a unitarian universalist governor, and i wonder how it could be used to play against pete. but most of all, i enjoy the fact that there is something similiar of mind between pete and i, that there are moments, like today, when i can joke with him about our chosen faith. yeah, its a coat i'm not used to wearing.
on sunday i'll get to walk into that uu church and know that although i'm not a member, i'm not an outsider and that i belong there.
posted by brooke at June 3, 2005 08:58 PM
