A Sermon for New Member
Sunday
By The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist
Church of New Orleans
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Recently a First Churcher asked about my personal theology,
and I realized that it was not a topic that we as a congregation have done much
talking about. Bringing in a
Consulting Minister after a major disaster is not a situation that allows for a
lot of congregational choice, and when that minister is a former member of the
congregation, there may be a certain amount of “been there, done that”
attitude. But the minister's
theology is a subject of much discussion when a congregation searches for a
settled minister, and there’s usually a lot of questioning of the potential new
minister about what that minister believes. When I candidated for the ministries in Chattanooga,
Tennessee, and in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, there was a lot of lively
conversation about my compound theology, and in the course of those exchanges,
those congregations and I learned a lot about each other. And over my years of being a UU, I’ve
discovered that I am not alone in having a spirituality that is, as they say on
Facebook, “complicated.”
Today’s service of welcoming new members is the perfect time
for sharing about what I believe and what is my spiritual practice (or what ARE
my spiritual practiceS), because one thing I’ve learned in nearly 20 years of
UU ministry is that I am not alone in crafting together my own individual
theology. Most contemporary UUs
have put together more than one strand of our Living Tradition as their
personal brand of spirituality, and it’s good for our newest members to hear
about this practice and begin to incorporate this understanding into their way
of being Unitarian Universalist.
What’s really interesting to me is that if you go online to
look up the topic, you discover that other religious denominations also speak
of “hyphenated theology,” but they mean something different than what I’m
talking about here. When other
faiths say “hyphenated theology,” they are usually referring to cultural or
ethnic identity coupled with Christianity, such as, African-American-Christian
or Korean-Christian, or they mean putting together two different Christian
denominations, such as a Methodist-Lutheran or a Presbyterian-Baptist.
When I or another UU says "hyphenated theology" we
mean something completely different.
For example, take me. Ask
me about my theology, and I'll answer, "I'm a Buddhist-Christian-Pagan-
Humanist." I usually add, "not always in that order." One of the main reasons I'm a UU -- and
a UU minister -- is that there is no other faith that would allow me to be all
of who I am. I hope that at least
portions of my religious journey resonate with yours.
I was raised Roman Catholic, but not completely. By that I mean, I was baptized a
Catholic, was sent to parochial school, and took the sacraments, but it was not
our family faith. For various
reasons, our parents did not attend church with us, and since neither my mother
nor my father were knowledgable about Catholicism, they could not answer any
questions or help us to deepen our practice. I learned about Jesus and Catholic doctrine in school, and
while I liked and admired Jesus And his stories, I was always iffy about points
of Catholic teaching. I couldn't
make myself believe in hell, and I certainly couldn't believe that good people
of non-Christian religions were all going there. (I was a Universalist before I knew there was a word for
it.). It didn't help matters that I felt drawn to the priesthood -- a fact I
learned quite early to keep to myself.
As soon as I was given the choice, I stopped stopped attending
Mass. I experimented for a while
with the short-lived Catholic community movement, where I had my first
experiences with designing liturgy and preaching a homily -- but in the end I
felt the Catholic Church had rejected me.
After that I turned to what you might call the religion of my
father: a compassionate, engaged,
activist humanism. My father once
explained to me how he had first gotten involved in organized labor and civil
rights by saying, "I couldn't stand how they treated people," which
may be as good and succinct way to describe humanism as there is. Humanism is the honoring of what is
human, our reason, our intelligence, our instincts, our emotions. Humanism is caring for other people; it
is the very life expression of being humane. For my father as for many other humanists of his generation,
humanism was not merely a rejection of conventional religion and orthodox
doctrine, it was also a call to action wherever there might be injustice. My father's humanism drew him to work
for justice for workers and for people of color; I added to that the great
justice issues of my time, the Viet Nam war, feminism and equal rights for gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersexed people. I got involved in anti-war protests,
the Equal Rights Amendment, Dutch Morial's campaign to become the first black
mayor of New Orleans, against nuclear power, and healthcare accessibility
issues for people of color.
I did not think I needed religion -- justice was my theology,
and the people engaged with me in all this good work were my community, my
congregation. If I had any
lingering yearnings for the way I sometimes felt during prayer or in the Mass,
I kept that a secret even to myself.
There were times in my work for justice when I felt a wave of
transporting, transcendent emotion -- like on the night Dutch was elected --
but on the whole I thought I was doing just fine without religion.
During this period I married and had a child. It's funny now to look back and see how
I unknowingly turned pregnancy into a spiritual practice. I who never execised went regularly to
fitness classes for expectant moms; I who never cared what I ate went on a
special high-protein good-for-the-baby diet. From my healthcare activism, I knew too much about what
could go wrong with childbirth in a hospital, and so I found and worked with a
midwife to do a home birth, complete with birthing classes. Without knowing I was doing so, I
entered into a readiness for feminist spirituality, with its honoring of the
physical functions and capabilities of women's bodies, its treatment of birth
and nursing as sacraments, its cloistered precincts dominated by women. When my son Stephen was born, I felt
powerfully connected through time and space to all women who had ever given
birth, and to a nameless and faceless Goddess who also gave birth and nurtured.
It was having the baby that brought me to Unitarian
Universalism. By whatever
conventional reasoning, we thought the baby needed a church -- needed some kind
of religious education to help give our child answers to Life's big questions
(hopefully answers that the baby's father and I wouldn't gag at). After a very short search, we ended up
one summer Sunday in this congregation, in the building at 1800 Jefferson. And here I found the religion I thought
I had made up in my head. I was so
relieved, and so sorry I hadn't found this faith earlier, I wept.
So here I was, with my activist humanism, my New Orleans
Catholic background, and my nascent yearnings toward feminist theology. If you believe in coincidence, you
won't be surprised to hear that soon after I became a UU, in the early 1980s,
the UUA published the adult curricula "Cakes for the Queen of Heaven"
and through taking that course I finally learned of the pagan origins of
Catholic rituals I missed, and heard the stories of the great Mother Goddesses
who had been worshiped before the advent of Christianity. The ground was
prepared and the seeds took root, and I became an enthusiastic pagan, helping
to found this congregation's first pagan group, and joining the Covenant of UU
Pagans, the denominational gathering of UUs around the world, where over time I
have served in several leadership roles.
I soon incorporated into my new pagan practice the customs of folk
Voodoo, many of which had been familiar to me since childhood, such as
devotional visits to the tomb of Marie LaVeau (who in her day had been both
Voodoo high priestess and a devout Catholic) and making gris-gris. (I have never been trained or joined a
Voodoo group, but my research and practice on my own have been important to
me.)
But becoming a pagan did not make me any less a humanist -- being
non-literal about religion, caring for people, and being active in justice work
and politics were all still very important to me. I guess it helped that, like my father, I had never been an
"anti-god" humanist. I
remember one time my father giving money to my sister who going to St. Louis Cathedral, telling her to
light candles for his parents and siblings who had died. My sister said incredulously, "But
Daddy, you don't believe in all that stuff!" and him replying quietly,
"No, but they did." I learned from him to respect the beliefs of
others, even when I didn't share those beliefs.
So I guess you might say I was a UU Humanist-Pagan when I
attended my first UUA General Assembly in the mid-1980s, and got unexpectedly
blown away by a worship service led by two UU Christian ministers. I didn't even know there was such a
thing as a UU Christian, let alone a UU Christian minister! I was amazed at the different, liberal,
non-literal way they interpreted familiar stories from the Bible, and it felt
wonderful to be hearing again about good ol' Jesus, but without the oppression
of so much forced doctrine. I
learned that liberal Christians don't have to believe Jesus was God, and that
was SO incredibly freeing. At that
GA, I participated in communion for the first time since Dutch Morial's
funeral, and I felt connected to all the people throughout two millennia who
had shared that riual meal and remembered Jesus. Once again in a UU worship service, I cried. I joined the UU Christian Fellowship,
and served that organization in several leadership roles. I guess I had become
a UU Humanist-Pagan-Christian.
By the late 1980s, I had stopped trying to forget that I had
once aspired to the priesthood, and followed my call to ministry into seminary
-- which in my case was the Loyola University Institute for Ministry. In seminary, I met the Jesuit priest
who was only half jokingly called "Zen Ben Wren" and learned about
Buddhism and meditation practice and the conscious effort to "be here
now." For me, with my near-frantic planning and looking ahead and
anxieties about what might or might not happen in the near and far future,
Buddhism was a great gift. I
practiced mindfulness while riding the streetcar, while washing dishes, while
walking to pick up my son at school.
In a way that might sound strange to you but not to me, I found that
Buddhism deepened my pagan and Christian spiritualities.
And so over the course of time I became what I am today and
what only a Unitarian Universalist can be: my own personal spiritual and theological blend of
Christian-Pagan-Humanist-Buddhist, not always in that order. I pray, sometimes to God and sometimes
to Goddess; I meditate and practice mindfulness; I use the Voodoo tarot given
to me as an ordination gift for guidance and divination (and sometimes for fun); I take communion with
UUs whenever I can; I visit Marie LaVeau's tomb and ask for help (and while I'm
there, I throw in a request to guide the city to her next-door neighbor, Dutch
Morial).
Sure, there are times when I am more one theology than the
others, but there are never times when I feel ONLY one. And there has never
been a time when I felt I would better fit in some other church or
religion. After all, who would
take me?
On this New Member Sunday, I want to challenge all of
you: What's YOUR hyphenate? How has your life experience conjugated
your spirituality? Are you a Mystical
Humanist? A Buddhist-Christian or
a Zen Atheist? A
Jewish-Pagan? A Voodoo UU? Don't be fooled into thinking, as some
other religions teach, that in order to be UU you have to give up whatever you
loved from your religious journey.
As religious liberals, we have both the freedom and the responsibility
to "build our own theology" out of the lumber of our lives and
experiences and learnings. While
it may be a little more challenging than the faiths that tell what you have to
believe in order to belong, it sure is a lot more interesting, and sometimes,
fun. To our newest members, I say, We are glad that you've joined us on this quest. May we honor each other's journeys, and learn from them. So might this be! AMEN -- ASHé -- SHALOM -- SALAAM -- NAMASTE -- BLESSED BE!
