Why am I a UU?

[Joey Liberal]

Here's why:


Beliefs Within Our Faith
Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religion that encompasses many faith traditions. Unitarian Universalists include people who identify as Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Pagans, Atheists, Agnostics, Humanists, and others. As there is no official Unitarian Universalist creed, Unitarian Universalists are free to search for truth on many paths.

To quote the Rev. Marta Flanagan, "We uphold the free search for truth. We will not be bound by a statement of belief. We do not ask anyone to subscribe to a creed. We say ours is a non-creedal religion. Ours is a free faith."

Although we uphold shared principles, individual Unitarian Universalists have varied beliefs about everything from scripture to rituals to God.

http://www.uua.org/visitors/beliefswithin/index.shtml

[rainbow4321]

1. K&R for UUers!!!

[SoxFan]

2. -

A guy saves up for years and can finally afford a Mercedes with all the options. He wants to take care of it in every possible way so he goes to a priest and says, "Father, will you say a blessing over my Mercedes?" The priest says, "I'm sorry, I don't understand--what's a Mercedes?"

So he goes to a rabbi. Same thing: "I'm sorry--what's a Mercedes?"

So then he goes to a UU minister and says "Would you be willing to say a blessing over my Mercedes?" and the UU minister says, "I'm sorry, I don't understand--what's a blessing?"

[deutsey]

3. I'm a UU, too too

:hi:

Here's a link to a lay sermon I gave earlier this year:

http://uufe-dialogue.blogspot.com/search?q=hit+man+

[LiberalEsto]

29. That's awesome: Here's my sermon for next Sunday:

(Note: I'm a non-ordained or lay leader, not a minister)

Opening Words: “You can’t force simplicity; but you can invite it in by finding as much richness as possible in the few things at hand. Simplicity doesn’t mean meagerness but rather a certain kind of richness, the fullness that appears when we stop stuffing the world with things.” - Thomas Moore, The Re- Enchantment of Everyday Life, former Catholic monk

Opening Hymn #207 Earth Was Given as a Garden

Chalice Lighting

Simplicity comments by Sarah H.

Sharing Our Gifts/Offertory

Silent Meditation

Prayer: Spirit of Life, allow us to open ourselves to the season of celebrations in our own ways, both traditional and new. Let us be mindful and present in these moments.

Hymn #16 Simple Gifts

Sermon: Simple Gifts

I’d like to share with you a letter that I wrote three years ago to a friend who lives in Australia. Like me, she grew up in an Estonian immigrant family, and like me, she is a pagan, with a father and a son who want to celebrate Christmas. That year she sent me an e-mail saying how disappointed she felt about her holiday, and how hard it was to make everyone happy.

Hi Lea dear,

I share your feelings about Christmas. It’s a horribly difficult holiday. People have such high expectations for it. I don’t know what it’s like in Australia, but here we get bombarded with television commercials for weeks and weeks beforehand. We’re supposed to shop and spend, as if that’s what the whole holiday is about.

The commercials always show perfect families sitting around a tree with piles of perfect gifts. But since none of us is perfect, and since we can't control how other people behave, feel, and react, and since the media visions are just artificial images, we average folks often wind up bitterly disappointed.

The media urges us to spend and buy far more stuff than we can afford, because showering people with lots of expensive gifts is their recipe for that “perfect” Christmas. Too many folks end up in debt after the holidays.

I also believe that children don’t really need or appreciate the enormous piles of costly toys parents buy for them. I remember one childhood Christmas when something came in a huge cardboard box. My brother and I ignored our toys and spent days playing with that box. It was a fort, a spaceship, and whatever else we chose to imagine. It was the highlight of that holiday.

Some overworked parents in our culture end up giving piles of expensive presents to their children as guilt offerings for not spending more time with them. But wouldn’t it be better to skip an hour of shopping and go ice-skating with the kids instead? They will remember the skating time long after the gifts are forgotten.

People suffer from severe depressions at this time of year, and it's not surprising. We carry images in our hearts of remembered "perfect" Christmases of our childhoods. At Christmas we want everyone to love us, to love each other, to be perfect, be happy, be merry, give the perfect gifts, and receive gifts gracefully. But we’re human, not perfect.

This year Dave, our daughters and I had a very quiet and peaceful Christmas Day. Everyone was exhausted and fighting off various viruses. We had brunch, exchanged gifts and hugs and thank-yous, and basically took it easy for the rest of the day.

It turned out to be the most relaxing holiday I can remember. We simply gave up our expectations. The girls stayed in their pajamas all day, and everyone had new books or DVDs or CDs to enjoy.
The best part was that nobody argued or complained. And for once I don't feel disappointed, because I expected nothing special for the day.

Our "lowered expectations" holiday was a wonderful gift, because it showed that our frustrated expectations, not actual events, are what spoil Christmases.

So I decided to make a list of the basic elements I feel I must have during the holiday season.

I want a family Yule dinner on the Winter Solstice, with a nice vegetarian dinner and a small pagan ritual.

One of the highlights of the holiday season is touching base with friends near and far, so we send out many cards, printed Christmas letters, personal letters, and photos. I love reading letters and cards from friends and relatives.

Another important element is making cookies to eat at home and to share with family and friends.

I like going to the Unitarian Christmas Eve service. This usually involves a few readings and carols, but not excessively Christian ones. Instead of celebrating the virgin birth of Jesus, we celebrate life, family, friendship, and togetherness, creating light in the darkness of winter and in our hearts.

I always want to cook traditional Estonian food for dinner on Christmas Eve, like my mother used to do.

I want to hang up a few modest strings of outside lights to welcome back the sun, and burn a bayberry candle for luck. I want some fresh evergreen branches in the house. And a Yule tree, of course.

Most of all, I want to be with family.

Christmas Day means very little to me, because as a kid growing up in an Estonian-American family, we never celebrated it, only Christmas Eve. But because Dave and the girls have grown up in an American culture, we open gifts Christmas morning because that’s the way they like it. We usually give each other books or gift certificates to bookstores, because we are not into a lot of extravagant gift-giving. And we send checks to charities and contribute to food drives, because we want other people to have something for their holidays too.

The best Christmas gift I ever got in my life was something extremely simple and inexpensive: two jars of homemade jam from my Aunt Valli. I was a college student, and you can imagine how nice it was to have something homemade after months of dreary cafeteria food. She made the jam with raspberries and strawberries from her own garden. It brought back wonderful childhood memories of us kids picking tiny wild strawberries in the field next to her house.

I once read about a child in South America who expected Christmas to include a trip to the beach, and that sounded so strange to me, although I’m sure it’s a perfectly normal tradition in warmer places. There are people who don't consider Christmas "right" without tamales, or barbecue, or plum pudding, or midnight Mass. We all crave the things we enjoyed during happy holidays in our childhoods.

Some people love hosting huge open-house parties on Christmas Eve. Others want to be completely alone with a good book. Some of my friends take part in an annual Christmas Day bird count, running around in the freezing-cold woods with binoculars, counting the number of species they spot. Then there are people who prefer to go skiing or spend Christmas Day at the movies. Some spend the day in church praying, while others feel Christmas celebrations are too "pagan", and abstain from them entirely.

There are people who try to make you feel guilty for celebrating the holidays if you're not a churchgoing Christian, even though Yule and the Winter Solstice were around long before the birth of Jesus.

These people also love to pile guilt on little kids. Our little Estonian-American community in New Jersey had a big holiday event every year at the Estonian Saturday School. There was a rather stern bearded Santa Claus who interrogated each kid in front of the gathering about whether we’d been good or bad.

Every kid was expected to recite or sing something in Estonian in front of all our parents, teachers and classmates. When we finished, Santa gave us paper bags of nuts, fruit and cookies. I was an extremely shy kid and it was absolute torture to recite in public. Every year I made mistakes or stopped and burst into tears. Santa would shake his head and grudgingly give me my bag, and my parents would scold me for embarrassing them. The message I got was that if you weren’t good and didn’t do things exactly right, you didn’t deserve Christmas.

As I grew up, I decided there was no place in my life for guilt about holidays. It doesn’t matter whether I’m celebrating Baby Jesus, who wasn’t really born December 25 anyway, or whether I’m celebrating the Goddess and the longest night of the year.

This time of year is first and foremost a time to celebrate family and friends, and to keep a few traditions alive. Kids love traditions, and to them, a tradition is anything special that you do more than once.

What matters is being with the people you love most, sharing a nice meal, and knowing you’ve done something to make other people’s holidays happier. It’s not about spending ourselves silly or buying and receiving piles of expensive gifts.

Lea dear, I hope you figure out the elements that matter most to you, your dad and your son, so that you can plan and have an absolutely wonderful Christmas and Yule next year.

And that was the end of the letter.

I would just add that there are numerous books and articles about simplifying your life and your holidays. Some members of this congregation are actively engaged in simplifying their lives, and there are simplicity circles devoted to this.

We are all creative individuals, and I’m sure we have many ideas on ways to make the holidays simpler and more meaningful. Does anyone have a comment they would like to share?

(invite comments for Talk-Back)

[alphafemale]

4. Well...We elected a black president years ago.

[Critters2]

5. Why do UUs do all this comparison stuff?

I was married to a UU, and got really tired of all the comparisons with other faiths. I'm proud of my faith because it makes my life meaningful, not because it won a series of contests.

But, just out of curiosity, when was this first black president? In 1976, the Rev. Joseph Evans was elected the first African-American president of the UCC.

Oh, and the President Elect is UCC, too.

[deutsey]

13. I don't encounter this attitude so much, but I do believe UUism

has its challenges.

The herding cats syndrome, the annoying anti-Christian hostility some UUs express, the lack of a clear identifying center (like a common shared faith document--Bible, Koran--a savior, a God, etc.). It's similar to modern political liberalism, in some ways.

I imagine this tendency to compare comes out of an insecurity related to a lack of a strong identifying center, and laziness maybe among some to actually learn our UU history (which has its roots in 1st century Christianity) and be secure in it.

Still, UUism is inclusive and diverse and I, for one, have had my faith experience deepened and enlivened by becoming a UU.

[Critters2]

14. I experienced the anti-Christian stuff so strongly, even before we were married

that one condition of our marriage was that, if we had had kids (we didn't, as it turned out), they would be raised UCC. The UCC teaches respect of other faiths, encourages inquiry into other faiths, but doesn't do the bashing that I found among UUs. I didn't want my children growing up in a faith that would be insulting of either parent's tradition. So, UUism was not an option.

Interestingly, my ex left the UUA to become Eastern Orthodox.

[FloridaJudy]

16. It's not just Christians

There's a strong dogmatic Humanist element in our UU congregation that gets huffy if any kind of mystical tradition is mentioned - Buddhists and Pagans included. Kind of weird that those of us who've found a Higher Power tend to be more tolerant of those who've found another than are those who deny one exists.

Militant agnostics? Yup. We got 'em.

[Critters2]

19. It's really sad. Made UUism really unattractive for me.

Apparently, there was a lot of conflict between the Humanists and pagans at my ex's church, too. BUt they seemed to have a special level of intolerance for Christians. I'll never understand this reputed connection between tolerance and the UUA. I just did not see it.

[deutsey]

21. It sounds to me that you and the other poster are confusing your UU experience

with a monolithic UU position.

There is no monolithic UU position. Each congregation develops its own identity...there are conservative UUs, Christian denominations, Humanist demoninations (which seem to be on the wane), theist, etc.

Sounds like you guys may need to open up your minds as much as some UUs need to, imo.

[Critters2]

22. My mind's fine, thanks. I got tired of being insulted by UUss, I chose not to participate further.

I've had the same reaction to fundies. Just don't want to be one.

[deutsey]

27. Good for you. Keep savoring your sweeping generalizations!

:shrug:

[FloridaJudy]

32. Unfortunately, unless one lives in a humongous city -

Think NYC, Chicago or Boston here - one's stuck with the congregation one gets. This town of 150,000 has one UU congregation. It's a minority religion, not like the Baptists that have a church on every other street corner, Okay, I exaggerate just a little, but there's easily a dozen Baptist churches near here, and at least two or three of most Protestant denominations. There's even three different Buddhist sanghas besides the UU ones. The closest other UU group to here is over forty miles away - neither a comfortable commute nor likely to encourage interaction between members.

Mind you, I'm not about to leave the congregation because a few members don't bother to conceal their contempt for us "fuzzy, weak-brained types" who find tremendous comfort and insight by contorting ourselves into pretzels and chanting "Om", reading the Beatitudes, or holding a fire-circle for Samhaim. I'm sure most churches don't take such a benign stance toward heretics like me. I just find it amusing that those who adhere to only "rational" beliefs can be as rigid and intolerant as any woo-woo mystic. It's a minority in the congregation and consists mostly of older members who are dying out or retiring and moving away, but I'll not deny it does exist.

[kwassa]

33. well, I don' t know about that.

I wouldn't describe UU as monolithic, on the other hand my experiences have been pretty much the same as mycritters and floridajudy.

I've been to services in about ten different UU congregations around the country, and have grown up in the church. In all of them, there was an anti-theistic and anti-Christian bias, and the word "god" would never be found in a sermon.

UUs believe they are diverse, but they are pretty much alike to me. I have never ever met either a Christian or (truly unbelievable) a conservative congregation. I visited a small one that was actually Marxist, but that is another story.

Racially they are not terribly diverse, either, consisting mostly of white middle-to-upper class parishioners who are refugees from other faiths. My current Episcopal church is wildly diverse, by comparison, mostly because of immigration, but with literally people of all groups from around the world.

There is what Unitarians say they are, and what they really are, and I think there is a big gap between the two.

[Odin2005]

31. LOL, THAT sounds familliar!

I'm in the Humanist crowd and don't get the uneasiness about the Buddhists. :banghead:

[Breeze54]

6. There's a church like that near me... I may go just to meet people.

:shrug:

I've been thinking about it lately.

[crispini]

9. I was thinking about that myself.

:hi:

[Breeze54]

11. Let's compare notes, if and when we actually do it!

:hi:

[FloridaJudy]

7. I'm a UU

Because the sign outside our church reads "Find us and you shall seek". Works for me.

[Joey Liberal]

10. Hey FloridaJudy

I love this quote from your profile:

"Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them".
The Dalai Lama

[FloridaJudy]

12. We have a shared ministry

In our congregation. A married couple - he's a Zen Buddhist, she's a Sufi. I came for the meditation classes and stayed for the fellowship. The service is as likely to focus on the teachings of the Dalai Lama or Rumi as on the New Testament.

This is not your average Southern church!

[Joey Liberal]

18. The church here offers meditation too

I really want to try the meditation. What's that like?

[Fire Walk With Me]

8. Recommending.

[mwooldri]

15. Oops I thought Ulster Unionist for a minute there...

But UU in this sense... a religion of religions. I likey the idea!

Mark.

[Critters2]

17. But, why are you Ulster Unionist? nt

[mwooldri]

25. I'm not. I'd identify with the Alliance Party first...

if I had to identify with a NI political party. I grew up in England, went to univeristy in Scotland. When politically active over there, I was a card carrying member of the Liberal Democrats.

Mark.

[Joey Liberal]

20. Not to change the subject, but.....

I think the British should leave Ireland. I love the Brits though.

[mwooldri]

24. Joey I wish it were that simple...

the Irish situation has been going on since 1300 and probably before that.

The rest of the UK would be OK with Northern Ireland being integrated into the Republic of Ireland. It's that at this time most of the people who live in NI want to be part of the UK, but this is like about 55-60% now... the other 40-45% want to be part of RoI. You also have as a result of centuries of division effectively two different communities living side by side with each other in a very uneasy peace, effectively under a system of self-apartheid. Peace walls? They have them.

Northern Ireland is simply put "one big mess", it took decades to get there, it'll take decades to get out of it.

At the end of the day it might all prove to be moot. We're all part of the European Union, and if things further integrate... then it won't matter anymore.

Mark.

[Joey Liberal]

26. Good points

I look at it from an Irish/Catholic (well, formerly Catholic) point of view. I grew up listening to my father and his Irish pals singing Danny Boy and denouncing the Brits. Me? I love the Brits. It's a tough situation.

I'm fascinated by the EU.

Looking forward to visiting Ireland someday and meeting relatives. I'm sure I'll find them in the pubs of County Tipperary. I base that on the legendary drinking (and bar room brawling) habits of my Irish relatives here:)..........

[mwooldri]

28. ehe I saw it from both sides...

a lot of people from NI come to university in Scotland, and I went to the University of Dundee...

Had two good friends, both from Northern Ireland. One Unionist, one Republican... their paths didn't cross that much. Both great people, just very diametrically opposite views on what's going on in their homeland.

Mark.

[Fire Walk With Me]

23. Hiding.

[Odin2005]

30. I'm an Atheist who is part of the the Fargo UU congregation.

Cute little place right in downtown. The people are wonderful and have very diverse beliefs. There is a Wiccan lady there who I often chat with who had a profound influence on my thinking, such as my belief that the notion of "god" is nothing but an anthropomorphic projection onto the cosmos that ultimately debases it by trying to fit it into human social reality. Our services are dominated by very interesting discussions on various topics by various speakers.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

34. Because that's what you are?

Same reason I'm a Catholic, or someone else is a Jew, a Baptist, a Lutheran, a Muslim, a Buddist, or an Atheist.

[JCMach1]

35. I am a lapsed UUer

:evilgrin: