The Unitarians (according to Wikipedia) historically didn’t believe in the Holy Trinity, they didn’t think Jesus was God, but rather was somewhere higher than human but still lesser than God. Um but the most important part about the history of Unitarianism is that they didn’t believe in dogmas or creeds or other Christian doctrines like Original Sin, Predestination, or any of that other stuff. They believed that the only way to get to heaven was through ~righteous acts~, not only through faith. They became a formal denomination in the early 1800s (the UU Church of Wakefield, where I grew up, started in 1813). They also had a lot of awesome members, like Thoreau and Emerson and Susan B Anthony and Florence Nightingale, the Adams, and so on.

The Universalists were a Protestant movement who believed that everyone would be saved by God because he was so forgiving and gracious. Even if someone didn’t believe or even if they were bad people, he’d still save them (eventually, periods of redemption in Hell weren’t out of the question) cause he loved them anyways and he was just that cool. As an American denomination they got their start earlier than Unitarians, spreading throughout the mid-1700s with the first general convention in 1778. They were also a lot smaller than the Unitarians, the only ~notable Unitarian~ I recognized immediately from the Wiki list is P.T. Barnum. I guess that’s cool.

Both movements grew to be pretty similar and had a lot of shared beliefs, and both had starting accepting members who had widely differing beliefs, but the two denominations didn’t combine until the 1960s, which is why we’re under the creative name of Unitarian Universalism. Since then the Unitarian Universalist Association has been the main force in the growth of the religion. Modern mainstream UUism is not very Christian at all, and a large portion isn’t really into God either. This is a bit rectified by a sub-organization called the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship, which is made up of UUA member churches who still believe in God and Jesus and those sorts of things. Most Unitarian/UU churches overseas are Unitarian Christian, though they’re still affiliated with the ICUU (International Council of Unitarians and Universalists).

There are three beliefs that I can see in this abbreviated summary that we inherited directly from our ~forefather denominations~, imo. First is the Universalist belief that God loves and will save everyone regardless of beliefs or actions. To me, that is a very UU thing to believe (even if you don’t believe in God, the equality and worth of each human being is something fundamentally UU). The second thing is the Unitarian disregard for dogma, creed, etc. Spirituality is a very personal thing and dogma in any form is abhorred. Worships, sermons, religious education, all of these things are aimed at getting you thinking about spirituality, but what you actually decide and what you actually believe ought to be your own decision. Finally, the Unitarian belief in righteous acts. Even when we don’t believe in heaven/salvation at all, we still place a lot of emphasis on doing good deeds and treating other people well and striving to be a good person. It’s sort of an “actions speak louder than words” thing.

I went to my first YRUU Con in my sophomore year of high school. It was a Social Action Con at my home church, but I still didn’t know many people and I was really awkward and I barely talked to anyone. But even though it wasn’t a perfect first Con experience, something about it still touched me and inspired me beyond anything I had known before. The workshops, the worships, the other kids- it was intense and unreal and important and fulfilling.

When I came home that Sunday night, suffice it to say my mind had been blown. I was sitting in my room just thinking about everything that had happened, when this song came on the radio. Very little production, not even drums, just a gorgeous deep voice and a simple guitar line-

I wanna be better than oxygen,
So you can breathe when you’re drowning and weak at the knees.

“Aw, that’s cute.”

I wanna speak louder than Ritalin,
For all the children who think that they’ve got a disease.
I wanna be cooler than t.v.,
For all the kids that are wondering what they are going to be.

“Huh.”

We can be stronger than bombs,
If you’re singing along and you know that you really believe.
We can be richer than industry,
As long as we know that there’s things that we don’t really need.
We can speak louder than ignorance,
Cause we speak in silence every time our eyes meet.

And with those lyrics Willy Mason summed up everything I felt at that moment.

The song continues to the chorus-

On and on, and on, and on it goes
The world it just keeps spinning
Until I’m dizzy, time to breathe
So close my eyes and start again anew.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now, I love that the chorus isn’t a rally cry or a call-to-arms so much as a moment of reflection and grounding in reality. It just makes the song more beautiful.

I wanna see through all the lies of society
To the reality, happiness is at stake.
I wanna hold up my head with dignity
Proud of a life where to give means more than to take.
I want to live beyond the modern mentality
Where paper is all that you’re really taught to create.
Do you remember the forgotten America-
Justice, equality, freedom to every race?
Just need to get past all the lies and hypocrisy
Make up and hair to the truth behind every face.
Then look around to all the people you see,
How many of them are happy and free?

At this point I was completely in love. On paper the lyrics might look like the idealistic-activist sort of silly naivety, but when he’s singing them they’re nothing but the truth.

I know it sounds like a dream
But it’s the only thing that can get me to sleep at night
I know it’s hard to believe
But it’s easy to see that something here isn’t right
I know the future looks dark
But it’s there that the kids of today must carry the light.

Once again, summing up everything that I felt about the Social Action Con and what it meant to me. Since then, the words have broadened to represent how I feel about everyone trying to do something good in the world.

If I’m afraid to catch a dream
I weave your baskets and I’ll float them down the river stream
Each one i weave with words i speak to carry love to your relief.

After this little bridge, the song ends with the first verse and the chorus.

When the song ended and the DJ came on the radio, I wrote down the name of the singer on a scrap piece of paper, and immediately went online to try and find more of his music. Most of Willy Mason’s other music deals with wildly different topics, but all of it is brilliant. Oxygen isn’t even my favorite song of his anymore, but it still speaks to me on a level that I can’t really explain. I guess the optimism in it- “I know the future looks dark/ But it’s there that the kids of today must carry the light”- is something that I really, truly believe in. I believe in it because I’ve seen it, at YRUU Cons and in my old youth group, in the Harry Potter Alliance, in the Project for Awesome, in the continuing ability of people to give and love and never stop giving.

A couple of weeks ago I went to church with my friend Danielle. It was an interesting experience, because Danielle is Christian. Very Christian. Her church is an Evangelical Christian church in Amherst called MERCYhouse.

I followed Danielle to church for a couple of reasons. The one that pertains to this blog, though, is the bit of this page of uua.org that says a source of UUism is “Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.”

Since we’ve been studying Christianity in Religion class, I’ve been thinking about how it relates to UUism a lot. I know a lot of people, in the UU community and outside of it, who are uncomfortable with Christianity. I was raised both UU and Catholic, and I went to CCD until I was 14, so I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of the Christian side of things as well as the UU side of things.

I think UUs tend to forget our Christian heritage and inspiration. We try not to talk about God, and especially not about Jesus. The kids might do a section in Sunday School on Bible stories, but sometimes, the adults can turn “embracing all traditions” into “embracing all traditions but distancing ourselves from evil Western religions.” I think that’s unfair. Sure, there’s a lot to dislike about Christianity. But there’s a lot of value in it too, and it’s important to understand it even if you don’t agree with it or the way it’s used in society.

So getting back to my story, I went to church with Danielle. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, because for all my Catholic upbringing was worth, Catholicism is a very different beast from Evangelicalism. I’ve lived all of my life in Massachusetts, so of all the Christian traditions, Evangelicalism is probably the one I’m least familiar with. It’s also the one that gets a lot of bad press in most of my social circles- the documentary Jesus Camp comes to mind. The only reason I wasn’t more worried is because Danielle is quite possibly the nicest, sweetest, most open-hearted, honestly good person I know. She was ecstatic that I wanted to visit her church, and really enthusiastic to share her experience of religion with me.

Still, I wasn’t really comfortable when I walked through those doors. I didn’t know how the other members of MERCYhouse would take a visitor, someone who had consciously chosen to forgo Confirmation because I didn’t feel comfortable with the Catholic Church’s view on things. I didn’t know what I expected to gain from this experience, except an hour’s worth of time devoted to a Christ and a God I don’t really care about.

What I found, however, was an example of what I feel Christianity should be like. The bit I quoted up above states that we draw inspiration from Jewish and Christian teachings that “call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves”, and that is what I experienced at MERCYhouse. So maybe I didn’t really sing along to the band when they sang stuff like “You are magnificent, eternally/Wonderful, glorious/Jesus/No one ever will compare to You/Jesus” Maybe I wasn’t really sure about the passage from the Book of Joshua where they stoned Achan and all of his family to death because he took some gold and robes from the town they’d rampaged.

Overall, however, I never once felt judged because I was a visitor. No one talked about how abortion is evil, or about how homosexuality is a sin, or how Obama was a sekrit Muslim, or anything else that the stereotypical conservatives of America like to talk about. And a lot of people at MERCYhouse probably do believe that abortion is evil and many probably did support McCain in the last election- and I kind of doubt it, but maybe they all think Obama’s a Communist Muslim and only Sarah Palin can save America- but my point is, at that service it didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were all children of God and we were all there to worship Him. Maybe I just got lucky with the service I chose to attend- but that day, no one fell into that dialogue of hatred which so pervades American culture these days. The message I got from MERCYhouse wasn’t one of hatred, or division, but one of acceptance and love.

Danielle and the people at MERCYhouse exemplify a Christian lifestyle I can really get behind. Loving each other and helping each other, whether in the name of God or some other ideal, can never be a bad idea. And I think this is what UUs tend to forget about Christianity- at its best, it’s all about love and acceptance. In the Bible, Jesus hangs out with prostitutes, beggars, lepers, and tax collectors, and he brings a message of universal love to the world.

Nowadays, many may have forgotten about this, or ignored this in favor of their own agendas. These are the people we always hear about, the people who compare Obama to Hitler, who started the Birthers movement, who cling to Glenn Beck’s every word. But the people who call themselves Christian, who constantly fill the world with vitriol and hatred and fear and lies- they’re not the ones we, as UUs, should remember. We ought to remember, teach, and take inspiration from what Christianity ought to be- what I found at MERCYhouse. We ought to remember and take inspiration from this guy, whose story nearly made me cry.

I was writing this because I couldn’t sleep due to illness, but now that I’ve stopped sneezing my brains out I’m actually getting tired, so I’m going to stop it here. One of the strongest qualities of UUism, for me, is our ability to draw inspiration from many sources around the world. For all that our history is very rooted in Christianity, however, we tend to ignore it due to the overwhelmingly negative associations it gets today. Visiting MERCYhouse and talking to Danielle has helped open my eyes to all the positive aspects of Christianity, and recently that’s where I’ve been drawing my inspiration from as a UU. I still don’t think I’ll ever be sure about God or Jesus, but I think that’s okay.

“The inherent worth and dignity of every person.”

It’s also the only principle that I can quote verbatim, which might tell you something about how important it is to me. It’s also first on the list, and short and catchy and easy to memorize. But being the very first principle on the list, it’s probably just as important to other UUs as it is to me.

But seriously, worth and dignity is something I think about a lot, especially since so much of my free time is spent on the internet. It’s incredibly easy to devalue other people on the internet. Instead of a face, you’re interacting with a username. You forget that there’s a person on the other end of that username, and so it’s easy to say things to that person that you would never, ever say in real life. In fact, some people on the internet make a habit out of bothering and insulting other people. These are what we call “trolls”. But even for the non-trolls among us, it’s still riduiculously easy to get into a fight on the internet. It’s incredibly hard to avoid, and we have terms like ‘snark’ and ‘wank’ and ‘butthurt’ and ‘flame wars’ to describe these interactions.

I recently joined a community on livejournal called ontd_political. Members post current political news stories and discuss them in comments. Being a livejournal community based on such a sensitive topic as politics, there’s a tremendous amount of conflict. People are very passionate about their views. The majority of people take insults and snark and differing views in good humor, trying instead to be involved in the debate intellectually or diffuse the conflict with a funny macro (it is an ontd offshoot, after all). But there’s still moments when a thread will devolve into an internet shouting match equal to the worst Youtube comment battles, only with less typos and better grammar.

Being respectful of other people in such a setting is not something that comes naturally, and this is where the first principle comes in. Your automatic response is to devalue someone when all you know about them is a silly username and an insulting viewpoint. I’m as guilty of this as the next person- when afa_mom tells us Obama is a secret muslim or when bludstone tells us the government is evil and Ron Paul will save America, I don’t want to think of them as actual people. I don’t want to be reminded of their inherent worth and dignity as human beings, I want to ridicule them, insult them, and take them down a notch.

But responding to them as faceless internet trolls, and not as real people, is what starts the thread wars. I have found overwhelmingly in my interactions on the internet, that if you take care with your words and make it clear that you take the other person’s response seriously, they will be more likely to take you seriously, and listen to what you’re saying. Even on youtube, it’s possible to hold a polite debate and even persuade a person to change their viewpoint if you treat them with respect and talk to them as people.

For me, being a good Unitarian Universalist in life means being a good Unitarian Universalist on the internet, too. It’s ten times harder to remember the inherent worth and dignity of the person behind every username, but just as important. If so much of people’s interaction takes place on the internet, then we have to adhere to the same standards as we hold ourselves in everyday life. As ridiculous as it sounds, there’s inherent worth and dignity behind every username, and I always try to remember that.

Basically, I’m in my sophomore year at Smith College. Here at Smith I’ve been exposed to many more religions and cultures than I ever experienced in my hometown of Wakefield, Massachusetts. I have friends who identify with a variety of traditions, including Christian, Catholic, Buddhist, and more.

Among all these traditions and friends, I’ve had to explain Unitarian Universalism more than once. There’s a lot of UUs at Smith, but it remains one of the toughest religions for people to grasp.

So instead of tripping over my words every time someone asks me a question about UUism, I thought it would be cool if there was somewhere I could send my friends to explain something, somewhere that would explain it in terms they could understand (The UUA site tries, but it’s not really aimed at curious college students).

I thought about doing a series of explanations (maybe one for each principle?) in my Livejournal, but… that’s Livejournal. That’s for fandom and squee-ing and grumbling about life and sharing weird videos. It’s not so much for serious things like reflections about spirituality.

The idea festered in my brain for a while over the summer. When I got back to Smith I was really looking forward to joining Smith UUs (I wasn’t very active last year for a variety of reasons) and attending church in Northampton and being a good Unitarian Universalist.

Well, yeah. SCUUs meet at the same time as my Tae Kwon Do class, and Tae Kwon Do won out. I’m not a big partier or anything, but I always manage to stay up late on the weekends despite that, and combined with my weekday sleep deprivation, I haven’t managed to wake up for a service yet this year. It’s a little bit pathetic, really.

So I’m starting a blog, partly for myself, partly for my friends, partly for anyone who stumbles across it. I’m going to try and explain what UUism means to me. I’m going to write about things in my life that relate to UUism. I’m going to chronicle my journey to try and be a better UU- go to church once in a while, even. Hopefully what this blog will become is a snapshot of a college student’s life as it relates to her Unitarian Universalism.

ENGAGE.