Old Time Religion
In every little thing we do, we are just irreducibly homo sapien, aren’t we? Looking for groups and identity and the way to fit in.

This morning, I went to church. I’ve been going to this great big Unitarian Universalist church on and off since I’ve lived here in Atlanta. I first went there as part of an overall desperate search to feel at home in this town. As one of the few, the proud, (the confused, some would say – har) who were actually born and raised U.U., I thought this place might be a good place to start to find some sorta real community.

However, the degree to which the Atlanta Church, this Iglesia Gigante, resembles the church of my nostalgic youth – and how much I want it to – is up for debate.

My church growing up was much smaller than this place; it was actually a converted Victorian-era house. I remember standing in a circle with the entire congregation late one Christmas Eve singing “Silent Night.” (I was five or six, and I actually disrupted the whole beautiful, solemn moment when some wax from the white candle I was gripping dripped onto my hand and I screamed bloody murder. But that’s another story.)

At that age, the place was more a forest of familiar knees than anything else. Everybody knew me. It was my family’s support network growing up, absolutely. My dad’s poker buddies; my mother’s group of friends who came over to our house once a month to drink wine, talk and cry. I took for granted running around and around that old, creaky mansion, exploring its secret passageways with childhood friends, because no matter how creepy it felt when we dared each other to go into the old boiler-room without a flashlight, that room, like everything else, was mine. And no matter how long we played, or in what strange corner, some familiar adult hand would always find its way to my shoulder, some voice would always tell me my parents were looking for me; it was time to go home.

We never had a great minister at our church back home. We had good ministers, familiar ministers, but no great speakers, no amazing inspirators that I recall. But that was never the point for me between age of zero and fifteen.

Wunderbar
Once I was all grown up, though, it was the minister that kept me coming back to my chosen church here in ‘Lanta. A man in his mid-60s or so, a New-Englander who looked and sounded it: from his rather stern, rather pensive bearing, to the way he presented everything he had to say: as if it came from somewhere deep inside of him after many days’ thought (perhaps spent striding through some Maine or New Hampshire forest. With a walking stick, maybe. Like Gandolph.) He spoke with an authority which made it a good thing that what he said was actually of substance. Because while admittedly, I know nothing about his actual pastoral skills, his involvement with individual church members’ lives, I do know that when I came the first time to sit down and attend one of the services led by him, I left feeling transformed; some dark, doubting part of myself knocked down. And that’s what happened nearly every time I went to listen to him speak. Each week, his sermons renewed my faith in a humanity that has the tendency to leave any of us deeply disillusioned. Moreover, he made me feel just and good about my place in that humanity - about my purpose and principles, to coin a phrase. I didn’t bother with music on the way home from many of those services. I drove home in silence, thinking. Then at home, I’d find someone to talk with about whatever the sermon topic had been.

I won’t pay a lot for this muffler.
The senior pastor retired this summer. Clearly, his were not easy shoes to fill, and I went to today’s first service with a new minister with that in mind.

Now all in all, I’m sure New Minister’s a really well-meaning, err, person. But seeing a service led by him and the other Regular-Unleaded minister today, inspired a sad revelation: The old minister was the only reason I came to church.

The large congregation of mostly 40 and 50-something white yuppies and their kids? The folk songs the choir sings about doves and love and humankind? The quasi-“World Spirituality” practices mixed into each service? All of that I had just put up with, waiting, well, for the Word, or I guess, since we’re UUs, the word.

Maybe I was just feeling hypercritical today, but I found myself picking apart nearly every aspect of the service, the rumblings of displeasure in my stomach growing louder and louder till I had that horrible standing-on-edge-of-scenic-outlook feeling: What if I jump? Yes: What if I just stood up, right there in the middle of that octagon-shaped room and screamed, “Bollacks, bollacks, bollacks!!!,”

Bollacks to you, new minister-guy, when you gushed about how this congregation is sooo wonderful: Why, just days before when a Little Boy in a Wheelchair had died, everyone just rallied around the family like regular lay-ministers.
(Uhh, yeah. That’s what people do. When they care. When a friend’s child is more to them than just Little Timmy Wheelchair.)

And most especial bollacks to you, sir, for your FIVE-HUNDRED, yep, count 'em, DOLLAR hurricane relief check whose amount you made absolutely sure to tell us all, because people, it just Feels So Good to Give.

There’s more, but. I’m tired. Anyway, you get the point.

I’ve made some new friends at the church whom I’d like to keep up with. But today’s service made me think, Okay: Just because this is the largest congregation in town of the religion I like to call my own, doesn’t mean I have to call what they do Right, in my book. It doesn’t mean that just because I call myself UU, that I have to try to fit in with these people. It does feel slightly sad, but it’s also a relief.