"Ten Portraits of Unitarian Universalists"

for Sunday the 14th of February 1999

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Sermon: Ten Portraits of Unitarian Universalists

Sermon: Ten Portraits of Unitarian Universalists [back to top]

I need to start this sermon off by going back a few years. All the way back to the late sixties and early seventies. All the way back to the end of my college days.

By the time I graduated from university, in 1971 at age 22, something significant had happened in my life. I had stopped going to church. This may not seem like a big thing for you. But for me, this was no small deal. You see, I had gone to church all of my life, sometimes, even, when I was a child attending a parochial school, five or six days a week. Church was part and parcel, of who I was as a human being, part of the rhythm of my life, like breathing …or a heartbeat.

The belief system of the church was not particularly central to me. It was the richness and familiarity of the ritual and music, and the depth of the metaphors, which brought me, back and back again. But even though the belief system was not central, it was also not something I could ignore. Classes and other learning experiences in college slowly but surely turned me from my ancestral religion, and transformed me into the most anti-religious of human beings.

I spent a time in my life hating all religions, every one of them I knew about. No, there could be no metaphysical traditions of any kind for me: no Christianities…. either liberal or conservative, …. neither silent like the Quakers nor noisy like the Pentecostals; And I wanted no Buddhisms, either, neither ritualistic nor meditative. And no forms of Hindu practice, either yoga, which hurt my knees, nor transcendental meditation, which Maharishi Mahesh Yogi presented way too much like a case of snake oil to quicken my sympathy for it very much.

And even though Sherwin Wine’s somewhat attractive Temple of Humanistic Judaism was not too far from where I lived, I just could not bring myself to go...I figured it seemed best to just make a clean break from all beliefs. And I mean all beliefs.

I wanted no secular “true-belief” systems either, like Lenin’s communism, or Ayn Rand’s capitalism, both of which had replaced conventional religion for many people on my university campus. No “true beliefs” whatsoever was my goal.

All in all, as you might suspect, I was not the most pleasant person to be around after giving the heave-ho to so many systems of meaning. I bristled easily in those days, and could peel an apple with my sharp sarcasm and sense of superiority faster than a Swiss Army Knife.

Yet even though I had given up all “true belief” systems, it slowly dawned on me that I still had a personal “true-belief” system of my own. I was convinced, you see, that all “true belief” systems ...save my own... were completely false.

Thankfully, it didn’t take long for me to realize what nonsense that self-serving idea was. I could offer no proofs that I was a whit better than all the folks I was dumping on daily with my scorn.

As time went on, I found myself growing more and more curious about the very nature of religion and all belief systems...both sacred and secular. It was around this time when I met Jane Ranney, the fiancée of my best friend from High School, Chuck Rzepka.

Jane had been raised a Unitarian Universalist in the Mentor Ohio congregation. It was a religious way I had never heard of in my whole life. Even when I was looking up the names of “religions” to reject out of hand back in my anger days, it was never included in any of the lists.

Unitarian Universalist? What a mouthful!

Within a year of meeting her, I came to love Jane, counting her as dear a friend as Chuck was to me. She seemed to me to be the least neurotic person I had ever met. She came at the world calmly, lovingly, with a sense of humor and a no-nonsense practical attitude that just wowed me. And, she often spoke of her church with great respect and love. So, it seemed reasonable to me to want to visit a church just like the one she had grown up in.

I did. I found a Unitarian Universalist church not far from my house. I went one Sunday. It was a horrible experience. I didn’t like it at all. I thought the service was boring, artless, shallow and trite. I thought the singing, what little there was, was pathetic.

And worst of all, during the coffee hour everyone looked through me as if I was The Invisible Man or something. They all chatted with each other loudly and with great animation. But no one even said hello to me.

I left, and noted as I did that the building was poorly cared for, as if they really didn’t take themselves very seriously. The floor was stained. The walls needed paint. I shut the door behind me and vowed never to return.

And I was convinced that Jane’s home church must simply have been some sort of unaccountable exception.

But fortunately, rational thought, which is the opposite of the ever-popular holier-than-thou-shock, returned to my little brain, and I sought out another Unitarian Universalist Church near-by. I figured out that I may have just gone to the first one on “an off-Sunday” And I also decided that every church has its own personality, and so I might like this one better.

This time, I connected immediately. The service was artful, the music was well crafted, well sung, The building looked like someone actually liked it enough to take care of it. The pews were freshly painted. The piano was tuned.|The sermon grabbed me. The minister was Jewish, very passionate, and spoke eloquently on Martin Buber that morning. And best of all someone chatted me up at coffee hour as if they actually wanted to know who I was personally.

I went back and back to that church, and eventually went to Seminary in California; and here I am now, a Unitarian Universalist 27 years, and a parish minister to boot.

I am not just telling you this story to acquaint you with me.What I am saying is that my story is unique, and yet I am here in the room with you, and that each of you was led here by stories unique as my own, even though they may be quite different.

In my particular story, friendship was important. I doubt I would be here right now preaching to you if I had not met Jane Rzepka, and learned about her upbringing in a Unitarian Universalist congregation.

Yeah, true, I may have found my way to a Unitarian Universalist church in some other way, but who can really speculate on such things? I may not have been so lucky after all. But I did find my way here.

And so have each of you, and many others in eleven hundred congregations around the world. Not many people, I have to say, come here cause they find our name so all-fired interesting.

Unitarian Universalist. What could that possibly mean?

And even when some folks read the sign in front of our church, they really don’t read it, they leap to conclusions. For example, some people even confuse us with the Unification Church, the so called Moonies.

I have no idea why they would do that. The first three letters of the words Unification and Unitarian and Universalist are the same, I admit: u, n, i; but could folks actually be so sloppy in their reading so as to mistake those words for each other?

They do, I tell you, and all the time. It amazes the heck out of me, I’ll tell you that right now. It’s as if folks mistook a Methodist Church for a Methadone clinic, just because they share the first four letters.

And of course, many people think that Unity and Unitarian are the same. In fact, some Unitarian Universalist Churches are called by the name Unity, like Unity Church in St. Paul Minnesota, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, studied by all who are interested in architecture at least, if not by all those interested in religion.

This overlapping of language makes the confusion of the two churches much more understandable to me. However, they are different, with different histories. Unity Churches root their history in the so-called New Thought movement that centered in Kansas City in the mid-1900’s. Unitarians and Universalists trace their history back to the radical Reformation in Europe and even beyond, through Puritan New England.

The two bodies have somewhat different approaches to worship and theology (although both might be called liberal.) And you won’t often hear the word “metaphysical” around a Unitarian Universalist church, although you will hear that word often enough in a Unity congregation.

We have been called many things in our history. For well over a thousand years we were called Arians...(spelled A-r-i-a-n, not with a Y, like that foolish and perverted Nazi word.) We were named after the preacher Arius, who lived in North Africa in the 300’s. And for hundreds of years we were called Socinians, after the Italian humanist anabaptist, Fausto Sozzini. We have been called Unitarians, Universalists, |Free Religionists, and now our name is Unitarian Universalist.

And we have been around for a while. But whereas this history is the common story we share now, each of us arrives here with a personal story, which is unique. I want to offer you a few of those stories now. For the record, these are all stories of real people. Just none in this particular congregation, so that no one here gets too self-conscious or gets caught up playing guessing games. I hope that you find some connections though. I know I do with a few of these stories. Oh, and the names have been mostly changed, too. That only seems fair.

1. Audrey is a 45 year old woman who started coming to a Unitarian Universalist congregation in a small town in Indiana some ten years ago. She and her husband Lamar had been raised without any religion in particular although she remembers her grandparents taking her and her brother to a candle light ceremony at Christmas Eve down at the Methodist Church in Terra Haute. Audrey and her husband have three children; and the main reason they started coming to church was because their children were coming home from public school asking them if they were “saved.” They were not sure how to even frame an answer.

They didn’t know much about Unitarian Universalism, except that Abigail Van Buren mentions them now and then in her column with respect. So they checked out the Yellow Pages and started attending the closest UU Congregation the very next Sunday.

In the last ten years, they still are not quite sure what the word “saved” means to their children’s peers, but at least now the question comes less often, because the kids can say they do attend church. And she can tell her children without feeling like some sort of heretic that Jesus was simply a good teacher who lived a long time ago and didn’t talk at all about anyone being “saved,” no, not once.

And Audrey in particular finds that she strangely looks forward to the tears that sometimes spill from her eyes when the church sings her favorite hymn, “For the Earth Forever Turning.”

2. Millie is 89 years old. She is widowed, and has been a widow for 22 years. Millie was raised in a Universalist Church in a small town in Pennsylvania. So was her mother. And her mother’s mother. In fact, she is a sixth generation Universalist, and proud of it. She even owns a copy of Mr. Ballou’s first hymnbook, dated all the way back to 1820.

She never quite understood the merger with the Unitarians in the early sixties. She used to tell her friend Mable “It’s OK I suppose, but they sure do think too much for their own good.” She sometimes muses to her young minister, who is not even a third of her age, that she thinks the Unitarians talk way too much about searching for truth.

“Truth? Who can really know anything about that? What about love, Reverend Tuttle, what about searching for deeper and better love?” She just can’t bring herself to call Rev. Tuttle by her first name, either. She thinks the younger set are just way too informal.

Millie only misses church on Sunday when her ordinary ride from the home, Mrs. Connelly, has a cold or a flu.

3. “Johnny” his mother called him when he was a kid, and he is still Johnny to all of his friends and family, even though he is 30 years old. Johnny grew up a Presbyterian, but his grandfather, the great Presbyterian divine Dr. Severence, used to whisper to his beloved grandson privately “You know, I am really just a Unitarian in Presbyterian clothing!” Then he would laugh at his little joke.

When Johnny went to high school, he looked up Unitarianism in the encyclopedia and found out that his grandfather meant that he didn’t believe Jesus was God, or that God was Three. When Johnny realized that he was gay, in his middle year in college, he also learned that the minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in town was also supposed to be gay...his friend Kerry told him that one day over lunch. So he decided to go to church the next Sunday, and see if it was true.

The minister indeed was gay...he sort of mentioned it cavalierly in his sermon; but he didn’t talk about either God or Jesus, so Johnny was disappointed. It was not the religion of his grandfather.

But nonetheless Johnny came to church again the next week, and the week after, and so on. And eventually he came to really like the sermons, the choir, and the social gatherings with the Interweave group and the First Sunday potlucks.

Within six months of attending, and taking courses in Unitarian Universalist history from the minister, he signed the Membership Book. Two weeks after that, he found himself chairing the grounds committee, because he said to someone once (Who was it?) in coffee hour that he loved to work in his yard, and preferred physical labor to, as he put it, “any fool committee meeting,” which the church seemed to have plenty of.

Today Johnny knows in his heart of hearts that his late grandfather would indeed have been proud of him, and that the Unitarian Universalist way was probably precisely the religion his grandfather was talking about all along.

4. Jonathan grew up on Long Island. His mother was Jewish, Reform but with Conservative roots. His father had been raised Jewish also, but only in a cultural way. He was one of those folks who grew up in a home where Socialism was the de-facto religion, a so-called “Red diaper baby.”

His father refused to enter a temple, or even to take his son to religious School. He did acknowledge, eventually, his wife’s concern that some religious education was probably better than no religious education.

So, when Jonathan’s Aunt Rachel started to go to the Unitarian Congregation down in the next town because at Passover “they threw the best seder in the whole NYC area!” Jonathan’s folks decided to start going to the same congregation...for their son’s sake only. The sermon that Sunday was on Economic Social Justice Work, and the choir sang a haunting piece by a modern but accessible composer that incorporated the majestic tune of the International in the body of the work.

Now Jonathan and his parents all call themselves Unitarian Universalists proudly to all their friends. Jonathan especially likes the Con Cons, the big Youth conferences, and his mother is especially thrilled with the quality of the sex education courses offered at the church.

They have even learned not to flinch too much when the Christmas tree is lit during December...as long as the Menorah is also lit...which it always is.

5. Shirley’s divorce was final a year ago, but it still seems like yesterday to her. Her heart is raw with rage, guilt, sorrow and loss. A 22-year marriage gone, just like that. She still cannot get over it.

Her friend Frances told her that there was a divorce support group down at the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House near the Town Square. She was afraid to go, at first, but eventually one Tuesday night she peeked in and was welcomed with open arms.

That’s where she first met Sally, Joanie, and Raytalda. They were all members of the church, and so, of course, she went with them one Sunday. She fell in love with the church right away, even though she had only been a Christmas and Easter Lutheran growing up. Immediately she realized that she loved the music, and that the music was as much a source of healing for her heart as the support group was. She loved the splendid strains of the huge pipe organ, the Yamaha piano, and the hand built harpsichord. And that brass quintet at Christmas! Pure bliss.

Within a month, she started taking new member courses, and found that the historic teachings of the church on freedom, reason and tolerance fit her just fine. And within two months, she was in the choir. When they sang the Dona Nobis Pacem of Ralph Vaughan Williams, she thought that whether or not there was a heaven, there should be, so that such music could be played forever and ever to her everlasting enjoyment. Six months after she signed the Membership Book, Shirley found out that her son Craig was also attending the Unitarian Universalist congregation over at State College where he was a sophomore majoring in physics.

6. Betty had never heard of the Unitarian Universalist church, and only went to one because, when her son’s partner in life died of AIDS, the minister at the Unitarian Universalist church was the only one they could find willing to do the ceremony and not disguise the facts of the relationship. They didn’t even try the priest at St. Margaret’s. Her son had stopped going to church there right after high school; and because she thought of herself as a modern mother, she never felt that she should pressure her son about something so personal as his religion. So she kept quiet.

Betty had to wrestle with her son’s sexual identity for many years, but had finally come to accept him with complete love.

And the minister at the memorial lifted up all the love in the young man’s life, including hers. No talk of hell or purgatory. No avoidance of the word “gay.” Just talk of love and support and courage and friendship and human grief and loss.

Betty didn’t stop going to mass all at once, but she found that she could not get that memorial service out of her head. Soon she started to go to the Unitarian Universalist congregation on Sundays. And within six months she came to think of it as her own church. It was not easy at first...there were some pretty brutal anti-Catholic remarks uttered at coffee hour now and then by disgruntled former Catholics who had experienced some sad situation or another in the church, but she resented their tone, and told them so often. She was no shrinking violet when it came to things like that.

But eventually she signed the Membership Book, and now, twenty years later, she is even thinking about running for the Board of Trustees at the next election.

7. Chiang Mai’s husband was a world-renowned physicist at Princeton. He said one Sunday morning that he thought that the whole family should all go the Unitarian Universalist Church in town, since that is where almost all the other members of his department went to church.

Chiang Mai had never been into any church before. Of any kind. She couldn’t even imagine what went on inside of one.But when she went, she immediately liked the choir and the wonderful building, with the light slanting in through the windows so perfectly.

Chiang Mai and her husband attended that church until they moved to California. There she and her husband and children continued to attend the Unitarian Universalist congregation out in Walnut Creek.

When her husband died, the minister there conducted a wonderful funeral that even her most critical uncle Lee would have been proud of had he been able to make it over here from Taiwan.

Chiang Mai herself died before her two mentally ill children did.

8. Ben was always a kind of mystic when he was a kid. He would walk out into the orchard at night, and stare at the stars through the peach branches, and be filled with such a sense of smallness against the vastness of the universe that he would quiver in near ecstasy about being alive. He knew even back then that when his friends talked about God, that at least some of them were giving that name to the kind of experience he had in the orchard all the time.

He was glad when he found the Unitarian Universalist Congregation down on Highway 12, because he figured out right away that a lot of folks there felt pretty much the way he did....it wasn’t the labels that counted as much as the experience itself.

9. Jeremy grew up in an atheist household. His parents attended the Unitarian Universalist church in town, because as atheists, they were welcome there, and they considered church social activities important.

As he grew up, Jeremy, too, called himself an atheist.Later, when he went to college, he wondered if he could be so sure about such things, and so he started calling himself an agnostic.

Within a few years, he decided that he wanted to serve his church in a more thorough way by studying for the parish ministry. After a few years in Seminary, however, he found himself easily using the word “spiritual” a lot more, and he found himself probing the gospels more for their ethical wisdom, and studying the Torah more for the richness of the stories there, and Indian poetry for the earth-centered metaphors that drum there.

He’s not sure what to call himself these days, theologically, except to say simply that he is a Unitarian Universalist. All that he knows is that his church has made room for him to change his mind several times and grow in new directions, and never once asked him to consider going to some other church.

He has been a Unitarian Universalist for 40 years now, and he can’t imagine being anything else.

10. And the 10th portrait is a self-portrait, but I already gave you that. As for you, you know your own story.

The two poems read as readings this morning sum up for me the significance of this little gallery of portraits.

Through them both I see a thread running that says this: We Unitarian Universalists are people who journey, as the poet put it so well, without any clear expectation of arrival. Yet our journey is beautiful, in and of itself.

Or, as the great Ken Patton put it, we make of “the mysteries” of our suffering, of life and death “a song, and a story,” and we teach each other the “ways of acceptance and peace.”

At our best, at least, this is what we do. We don’t always succeed, I know. It’s to be expected. We’re human, after all. Imperfect creatures. And sometimes our actions don’t quite fit our ideals, sure, but what ideals they are. Lofty and lovely and loving.

Let’s make a pact. I’ll be telling you about myself over the years to come. Over those same years to come, take the time to tell me your story, and describe your journey to me. Who knows? You may be part of this very sermon one day!

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Last update: 05/02/2001