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| We the Six Billion: Church with Takuma | | 4/1/2010 12:28:00 PM | Email this article • Print this article |
by Joe Steinberger
I am a Protestant Catholic Jewish atheist - in other words, a Unitarian Universalist. That sect, at any rate, is the only one around here that could accept the likes of me. I have been an on-again off-again member of the First Universalist Church since I came to Rockland almost 30 years ago. Mostly off, I should say, but I have been back these last two Sundays with my son Takuma, who is now two and a half. Tak inherits not only my mixed religious identity, but also his mother's Shinto tradition, itself a mixture of religions - ancestor worship, animism, Buddhism. So liberal religion, as the UU's are content to characterize their tradition, suits us both very well.
Unitarian Universalism, if it can be called an "ism," is itself a hodgepodge, a mixture of two different Christian denominations, the Unitarians and the Universalists, who merged in 1961. The Unitarians were a venerable but small group of religious intellectuals who rejected the Christian trinity in favor of a more abstract monotheism. Thomas Jefferson was one of them. The Universalists were a populist sect that rejected the Calvinist belief that only the chosen will be saved in favor of a belief in universal salvation. Rockland's First Universalist Church was once the largest church (a huge brick edifice on Union Street) and the largest congregation in the city.
Its successor, still called the First Universalist Church, now a part of the Unitarian Universalist Association, occupies modest modern quarters on Broadway, just up Gay Street from my house. Tak and I can walk to church in five minutes, so as polytheists who are also pedestrianists, we are in luck.
Tak has taken to the church experience very well - too well, I think, for the taste of some in the congregation. It is the custom to allow young children to spend the first 15 minutes of the service with their parents in the pews. By our second visit, Tak had become so comfortable with this new playground that he spent most of these 15 minutes dancing around on the stage while the minister and various lay functionaries performed their duties and the congregation from time to time stood up to sing. Tak clearly found the whole business absolutely thrilling.
I kept thinking that maybe I should go up and drag him off - and couldn't help noticing that other parents had their children under control - but I didn't want to turn a happy scene into an unhappy one. I contented myself with the idea that Tak was just having his own religious experience, which is what UUs are supposed to do.
No one else dragged him off either, though some in the front row did beckon to him, silently (and to no effect) gesturing "come, come down" with inward curved hands. Perhaps he owed his non-arrest to the fact that he was, of course, in the sanctuary, and thus heir to a long tradition of protection.
Part of the ceremony this Sunday was the blessing of the year's new crop of children. Parents with infants under a year old were invited to come with them onto the sanctuary, and to bring their toddlers along too. Tak was too old to be blessed, and I didn't have an infant with me, so I didn't go up - but Tak saw no reason to come down. The parents sat on the floor with their children on their laps, and Tak found a lap to sit in - the lap of a woman who (I later learned) had no idea who he was, but who, like most of us, could not deny the trust of a two-year-old. Tak's prayer, and mine, should be to thank God for that.
After the blessing of the infants we sang the older children out to their "Religious Explorations" groups, and Tak marched out with them, completely at ease and paying no attention to me at all. I went to check on him a couple of times, peering in through the glass door, and he seemed to be having a grand time playing with the other children who were using various implements to manipulate a pile of rice grains in a big plastic tray.
Even more fun for Tak was his attempt to eat all the cookies at the coffee hour after the service. There were quite a few cookies, so his technique was to take just one bite out of each. This behavior was beyond even my tolerance, so I had to restrain him - and eat quite a few bitten-off cookies myself just to hide the embarrassing evidence.
At the coffee I had a chance to chat with our young minister, Mark Glovin. I asked him if he was bothered by Tak's behavior at the beginning of the service, and Mark was kind enough to say that he "tended to be permissive," an expression, I thought, of some chagrin moderated by a large dose of the tolerance that is the hallmark of the Unitarian Universalist tradition.
That is what draws me to it, but I'm not proselytizing. Unless you are against truth and love, I can't "convert" you since whatever you believe now is entirely OK. I am just glad to have a place where my beliefs are OK too. As for Tak, when asked he now says, "I like chooch!"
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Reader Comments
Posted: Thursday, April 01, 2010
Article comment by:
Richard McKusic, Sr.
Wonderful message for all of us people of faith. Thank you, Joe, and you Takuma. :)
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