by David Stewart
Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation
on June 21, 2015
My spiritual journey has been something of a winding road. I spent a portion of my childhood unchurched. When my father got religion, I was about ten years old. We began to attend a Southern Baptist Church, where the preacher emphasized sin, hell fire, and Jesus Christ in approximately equal portions.
In subsequent years, I swore off all religion as hypocritical and god-bothering. I seemed to be representative of my generation, which often dropped out of church. It didn’t seem relevant. Just as many young adults do, I became absorbed in my own pursuits. There were other, more important things to do than church on Sunday.
At the time, my future wife’s entire family at the time belonged to the Catholic Church, and it was there that I was married, nearby in Marietta. Given that I was a questioning type and not willing to continue in an inerrant church, I kept us out of church in the first few years of our marriage. Then, my wife decided that we needed to find a church that could work for us. I was very reluctant, having been burned by the hellfire and brimstone of the Southern Baptist tradition. I would put up with a lot to get married to this wonderful woman, but… truly attend a church? Give up my principles about hypocrisy and god-bothering? How could this possibly work? So, I told her, because I do my best to follow the Happy Wife, Happy Life principle, “I will try anything once. We can go to any church one time, but if I don’t like it, I am not going back.” I was reasonably confident that I would waste a few Sundays, we would hear all about our sinful natures, and then we would be free again to pursue activities at our discretion on Sundays.
However, she found a Unitarian Universalist church, All Souls in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Oddly, I found myself enjoying the experience. I was starting to realize that I didn’t have to have such a black and white opinion about religion. Well… it is probably more accurate to say that I thought this church was certainly an exception to my previous critical thinking about religion.
After attending a few Sundays, we met with other young adults in the congregation who were trying to get together a young adult group. These young adults were interesting, sassy, fun, and open minded. They wound up being our friends, and quite a few of them remain our friends even after we have been gone for a decade.
Once I had become comfortable with our denomination and my fellow spiritual travelers, I took a class called “Building your own theology”. It was a one month series of spiritual seeking and written work to start formally deconstructing and reconstructing my beliefs, to create the principles that I would live by. It was the 4th UU principle in action: A free and responsible search for truth and meaning.
Like many UUs, I don’t accept only one source of inspiration for my meaning, I look for truth everywhere. Not just from the pulpit, not just from my community leaders, not just from one holy book. This active, individual responsibility for meaning making sets our denomination apart from others. We unite in our diverse search for personal meaning and join as a group to support each other in our spiritual search. We have different destinations, different challenges, different abilities, and yet, we all need support.
Community is where our denomination shines. We highly value the interconnectedness of our beloved community in right relationship. We feel the sacredness of our joining for shared times, such as this time, this beautiful summer solstice. Earth Mother, Buddha, humanism, Jesus, and the Tao and many other things may inspire all of us in different ways, but OUR community of inspired truth-seekers will be there for each other in our times of need and to celebrate our times of success.
This sharing, this deep bond of communion, of brother- and sisterhood and heart-felt friendship, allows us to share our wounds and our hearts, our vision and our spiritual journeys. Our love for each other demands that we be our best selves for each other.
At All Souls in Tulsa, I found that my young adult friends, my community, helped me start on my spiritual path. We spent a lot of time doing what young adults do: eating together, socializing, a bit of drinking here and there, sharing what we thought about philosophy and work. Some of them found their soul mates.
One of my best friends continued on his spiritual and professional path into a pulpit and another married a minister. We each found deep connections in extending our thoughts and efforts for our friends. We followed our own ministries, whether that was teaching, mentoring, statistics, art, reporting, finance, music, preaching, or science. All of these connections and paths reinforced and assisted my spiritual journey, giving me diverse viewpoints and a greater ability to appreciate the variation in our Young Adult group. We had heritage from B’hai, Catholicism, fundamentalist home-schooled Christianity, agnostics and atheism. They gave me examples to follow, as I provided an example for them. We guided each other, followed each other and picked each other up. Occasionally, there was some bad behavior, and we learned and gained wisdom as an outcome. Our community continued and persevered even after most of the founding members of our group left for their next stage in life.
Maintaining right relationships is a very important part of our spiritual practice. Friends are not like parents or spouses. They don’t have to tolerate your quirks. We choose our friends, but the feeling must remain mutual. It enforces a sort of spiritual work and questioning when we cannot maintain beloved community. Outside of the intimate boundary of marriage, we choose communion of the deepest kinds when we are friends and companions to our fellow spiritual travelers. We fulfill our inner need to nurture and grow by helping. We all build ourselves and others with our friendships.
I was lucky to have a friend in Justin, a ministerial student who came to All Souls to run our Soulful Sundown service and to guide the newly created Young Adult program. When he first came to town, we housed him in our home, and had the opportunity to deeply bond with him. He came to our home many times for a morning jog, followed by a breakfast. We talked about many things, and often shared our struggles and doubts, spiritual and otherwise. He sometimes led and sometimes shared spiritual paths with me that I would never have considered without his presence.
For instance, still being somewhat anti-biblical at the time, he encouraged me to take a history of the bible class that opened my eyes to textual critique and thoughtful interpretation of the bible. Previously, I had simply rejected the book because I believed it to be too often employed by those who are misguided as a book for financial gain or to beat down questions instead of upholding the truth. In that class about the Bible, I was able to learn and appreciate the global truths and wisdom of Jesus and his very Unitarian Universalist core message of love for all the world. I learned to understand it in my own way by better understanding the authors’ motives and cultural lenses instead of casting it aside as a flawed, imperfect creation.
Justin saw some ministerial qualities in me even then, arranging for me preach at a couple of the Soulful Sundown Wednesday night services that integrated local musicians with a liberal religious message. That evolution of my spiritual path, I would have never taken without the strong support of my friendship with Justin.
He saw an internal contradiction of truth-telling and the rejection of authority in me that I thought I could not reconcile. He helped me transform this pent-up energy into a desire to speak out about truth and share it with those seeking the truth.
Minister and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote on many topics including friendship. I found this quote to be true, “The only way to have a friend is to be one” and “One of the blessings of old friends is that you can afford to be stupid with them.” We often get stuck in cautious, proscribed relationships that are not transformative. Taking risks is challenging and requires that we sometimes need to be a bit stupid to explore what is internally contradicted within us. These explorations can drag up old psychological injuries and misunderstandings, and requires spiritual work and growth to manage effectively. How can we find a way to fully express ourselves without exploring the misunderstood, rejected parts of ourselves? I believe that one important way is to find loving friends to guide, share, and simply be with us.
My call to you this Sunday is to think about the friendships you have had and how they have enriched your life, how they have helped you on your spiritual journey. Reflect on those in your life that have helped make the good times and the challenging times more blessed. I encourage you to reach out to those who have made an impact in our lives and let them know. If you still can, thank them with a kind note or an extra hug. Relish these old friends that you can afford to be stupid with. Consciously make room in our ever-crowded, busy, hectic and sometimes too comfortable lives for new friends. We need to remind ourselves to be open and available to make new connections and confidants along the way. This unique combination of old and new friends will help us laugh and cry, help us create new insights and tear down old barriers, help us build and rebuild, help us navigate the winding, sometimes circuitous path to our fountainhead of spiritual meaning and truth. On this beautiful Sunday, let us all take root in finding our free and responsible search for truth and meaning. And let us do it among friends. Go in Peace.
On a separate note, for all of the Fathers here today, I bid you a Happy Father’s Day.
(image credit: “It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them” by Seranya Photography)