Little Kid Religion

I remember word-for-word the conversation where I first heard of Unitarian Universalism.

"I don't go to church," my lab partner in my high school Oceanography class (a goth chick who has several freshmen believing that she was an actual vampire) said. "But my parents are Unitarians." She spoke the last word like it was the most tremendously uncool thing to ever be.

"What do Unitarians believe?" I asked.

"They believe that you can believe whatever you want."

"That's a stupid religion." I said.

"No kidding"

And our conversation moved on to other matters, none of them relating to Oceanography.

As many times as I've corrected UUs of various ages (mercifully skewing towards kids) on the specifics of refining belief through reason, I can totally see why "you can believe whatever you want" is a little kid version of UUism.

Similarly, the little kid version of Christianity I grew up with was along the lines of "Be good and do good stuff and you will go to heaven. Pray and God will give you stuff. Take care of the poor because Jesus said to."*

I took some theology classes and developed a more sophisticated understanding of Christianity before I rejected it as a spiritual path, but I found those little kid tenets to be quite tenacious as far as my own thinking about these matters went and part of me still sees Christianity as a religion very focused on who gets what from God.

This line of thought has me really glad that I'm a YRUU advisor. We didn't have sunday school classes for teenagers when I was a Presbyterian teenager because we didn't have any teenagers who wanted to attend except me. (And this was at a decently-sized church in the middle of DC). As I've mentioned, the multi-church youth group I was in was all about keeping us from having sex with each other and not so much about anything else. I remember two lock-ins, a charades game, a retreat, a trip to the movies ("Groundhog Day") and a stream cleanup. There had to have been more in four years of high school but that's literally all I remember doing.

Also, there was one discussion where we were supposed to talk about our hero and lots of kids said "my mom" and lots of kids said "God" and Teenage CC said "Katharine Hepburn."

So yeah, there wasn't much moving on to becoming a mature Christian adult in there. It's not a big shock that I didn't stay.

Conversely, Jana-who-Creates grew up in Atlanta and tells lots of stories of driving across a state or two to go to a youth con and how YRUU cons were really where she fit in. She grew up getting Unitarian Universalism on a deep level because there were people who wanted to teach it to her. And she met Richard Simmons.

Here's hoping that the youth I know and the youth you know have a better grasp of the faith they are growing up in than I did and that like YRUU did for JwC it truly becomes a place where youth can fit and where they truly get what their religion tries to teach.

CC

*It bears mentioning that not all kids get the little kid version. LittleCSO had so many pointed questions about doctrine that his Sunday School teacher eventually had him meet with the minister, who told him straight out that if he didn't believe X, Y and Z then he wasn't a Lutheran. So theCSO stopped going to church as he was not a Lutheran. The actual truth of this story might be slightly less awesomely precocious, but that's how he tells it.

A YRUU class we did recently that went really well

This year our church's spiffy youth ministry coordinator, TogetherBeth, has us working out of the "Building your Own Theology" curriculum and it has been going really well. We had an amazing class a week and a half ago that I meant to write about before theCSO's accident started taking up all my time and attention.

We gave the youth paper and markers and had them draw "How I saw God when I was a kid" and "How I see God now." It was pretty fascinating to see what people came up with.

In the interest of maintaining their privacy, I only photographed my own drawing, but several youth drew a God figure that was highly influence by the "buddy Jesus" from Dogma. There were lots of old men in the sky, of course. Conversely, a few people drew God as being scary.

As you can see, mine was a little different. When I was a kid, I knew from picture books that God had a beard. Now the only person I knew with a beard was Rev. Thompson, the associate pastor at my parents' church. And HE talked about what God wanted us to do all the time, as he stood at the pulpit in long flowing robes.

So at about four years of age, I was convinced that the Reverend Thompson was actually God. My parents denied this, so I remember thinking that Rev. Thompson was SECRETLY God, the way Bruce Wayne was SECRETLY Batman.

Obviously, I got over this at some point.

My "how I see God now" picture was of an apple falling, a reference to how I see Gravity as the most useful metaphor for God. Most of the youth saw God in either nature or the connections between people, though the majority of the group considered themselves theist in one sense or another. We talked about the differing ways people see God and and found a certain amount of common ground. It was interesting how we really didn't have much in the way of actual atheists in the group, though I did mention atheism and how an atheist can still appreciate some of the things theists see God in.

It was really neat stuff, y'all.

CC

CC the rural churchgoer.

Robin says I'm out of touch because I live in an area with thousands of UUs in a couple of dozen churches (Thank you, A. Powell Davies), so I can't understand what more rural UUs go through.

And as much as I feel like the "I go to a 50-member UU church in the middle of nowhere and I find the people I go to church with intolerant of my views" people are overrepresented on the internet, for the record, I did used to be one to some degree.

I've lived in a place where there were only one or two UU churches within a reasonable distance (by which I mean "within 60 miles") and where I didn't particularly agree with a lot of the opinions that were voiced, from the pulpit and at coffee hour.

What did I do about it?

1. I picked the church that was older, smaller and needed me more. I did this mostly because they hugged less and made less of a fuss about greeting me. Pretty much one guy greeted at the smaller church. I loved that. Extroversion scares me off on Sunday morning. When I want to talk to you, I will. But let me test the water first. Anyway, they did, but when I joined, they were pleased to have me, even if I did believe weird things.
2. I participated with great enthusiasm in a discussion group where lots of people disagreed with me on lots of things, but where I learned about their beliefs as well as broadcasting my own.
3. I joined the worship committee where I worked with other people to design services better suited to people who believed what I did.*
4. When something was going on that I didn't believe in, I sat at the toasting table and watched the crowning of the queen of the may as the kids skipped around the maypole, and I tried to learn something from the experience.
5. I redoubled my efforts to explore my own spiritual beliefs through reading authors who saw the world similarly and through writing about what I believed.
6. I met some people online that I agreed with.
7. And yes, I found some people who agreed with me and went out to lunch with them and bitched about the service on occasion. Or tried to. But frankly, we liked some folks who disagreed with us so much that we always ended up inviting them along and our bitch session ended up more like a conversation. Also, my favorite pagan had an amazing voice and the blues trio at the restaurant we liked always wanted her to sing and when I was listening to her theological differences didn't seem terribly important.
8. I reached out to the people I went to church with. I got involved in charitable projects, I worked on lots of stuff for the church and I made lots of friends.
9. I tried to see if things I disagreed with could be interpreted as useful metaphor. This had been my parents' suggestion when I was a kid non-believer** and they were informing me that I was a Presbyterian until I turned 18***.

I learned more about who I was spiritually and what I believed at that church than I have at any of the churches where I've been more comfortable. And I developed a more sophisticated spiritual relationship with faiths different from my own and learned about things other faiths had to teach me, as well as more thoughtful reasons about why some things don't work for me spiritually.

CC
who again, stuck it out as a Presby for 18 years, let's remember. Once your Great Aunt has calmly told you over a game of chess that this particular game of chess was in God's plan and the outcome of the game would be whatever God's hand and God's purpose predestined to occur, ain't nothing a UU can say that's going to bother you all that much.


*Again, I worked WITH people. I didn't make dire threats about what would happen to membership if I didn't get my way, and I didn't try to impose my way 100 percent and take over. I was in the minority and I respected that and picked my battles and got a lot of what I wanted.

**As I've mentioned before, it was Abraham and Isaac that did it for me. The idea that God was a colossal jerk who didn't actually give a shit about us made a lot of things in my life make sense, especially once I got to Junior High. The God I believe in now is indeed different from the one I didn't believe in then, as we theistic UUs like to put it.

***Before I turned 18 and a half, the Presbyterian church had fired their minister because she was a lesbian and I had quit. The minister and I are still friends. My parents, brothers and theChaliceRelative still go to the church. Much of life is battle-picking, kids.

My non-opinion on Single Sex Public Education

PG, this blog's official asker of hard questions, asked me what I thought of this article on single-sex public education.

And honestly, I'm torn.

Actually, I'm torn on a lot of things relating to education. For example, I have for a long time been a great supporter of public schools and public education. I went to public schools myself and got a good education there and I have always stuck up for the public schools.

Then I started running a youth group with a girl who goes to Sidwell Friends, a bright, stimulated, thoughtful girl who raves about the education she's getting. Her friends and her kid sister (who also go to Sidwell) are equally confident, articulate and overall impressive. Chelsea Clinton turned out OK, too.

And I've started thinking "Gee, if I had a kid, I would really want to send her to Sidwell."

I'm similarly torn on single-sex elementary education. In this case, it's an issue of fairness to the minority. I believe the studies that the majority of students do well in single sex classes. A majority of boys want to watch snakes eat rats, a majority of girls would rather have more feminine sorts of science classes.

I just know I wouldn't have been happy with that sort of education, at least not socially. I hung out with boys all through elementary school. In gym class, we had a project where we had to make a "workout video." While small groups of girls worked out to Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul, my guy friends and I did a truly hilarious video where we worked out on roller skates to a Weird Al song. By the fifth grade, my best friend was a girl, but her name was Elizabeth and she went by "Lizard."

Would I have talked more in class? Dunno. I always talked a lot in class. Class is really boring if you don't. (This is an impulse I work hard to curb in law school.)

And TheCSO, to put it mildly, did not blend in at his elementary school in Charlotte, North Carolina, which had a large portion of lower-income students who were not culturally equipped to appreciate his sensitive and geeky self. (Ironically, I'm pretty sure he would have been just fine in Northern Virginia. I remember hanging out with a kid named James who was obsessed with disasters. On the swings we pretended we were escaping from the burning hotel in "Towering Inferno" and he knew more about the Titanic than any kid ever. I can totally see a little CSO and James being best pals. Also, in retrospect, James was way cooler than I gave him credit for at the time. I should totally google him.)

But the test scores are better for single sex education overall, and I totally don't want to discount that fact.

So what do y'all think? Is it worth a little extra cultural conditioning if the kids get a better education out of it?

CC
who did google James. He lives in LA now and seems to do something in the film industry. I friended him on Facebook.

An Evening with theChaliceDad

Picture it: Fairfax County, 1996. A young CC, rather depressed that the SAT she had been planning to retake has just been snowed out, decides to take a walk out in the snow to see if the local creek has frozen over. As she gets close to the creek, she slips, hitting her head hard on the ice. Head bleeding, she stumbles back home and sits on the kitchen floor, still sort of shocked.
“You need to go to the hospital,” her father says.
“Ummm… No. I’m fine,” she responds.
“No, really, you should go to the hospital. Let me take you” her mother says.
“I’m FINE.”

It goes on like this for awhile until CC, who just wants to be left alone, stomps off to her room, locking the door behind her.

The ChaliceDad breaks down the door.

She goes to the hospital.

Picture it: Fairfax County, 2008. It’s 11:00 at night, after a night of driving to school and back in an ice storm. I’ve just snuggled into bed next to the CSO. We’re talking, as we endlessly do, about plans for renovating the very kitchen I bled all over those years ago. The phone rings.
“Jason,” TheCSO says in the same annoyed tone of voice he always uses when talking about my brother.
I go pick up the phone anyway, “It’s Dad,” my brother Oliver is screaming, “He fell on the ice and he’s bleeding really bad and he won’t go to the hospital. Mom says it doesn’t look that bad.”
Oliver sees everything as a tragedy, my mother is the sort of person who assumes that using expired meat can’t be all THAT dangerous.
Fuck. There’s only one way to tell what’s going on.
TheCSO and I get dressed. He brings his laptop. He knows he’s in for a long night.

Yep, Dad is bleeding from the head still, an hour after his fall. It's an ugly wound, the kind of wound one can't really get from a fall without shaking one's insides.

“Dad, we should take you to the hospital”
“No,”
“It’s the smart thing to do,”
“No,”
“We’re all going to worry about you if we don’t,”
“NO!”

Jason and Oliver yell, my mother whines, I argue, theCSO does handyman chores. We break off and conference in little groups. There's lots of yelling and arguing, especially on my brothers' parts.

“You’re father is afraid of doctors,” my mother says.
“I’m afraid of head trauma,” I respond. But that's a weak argument and we all know it. My nervousness over a theoretical head injury is nothing to what my fether is feeling. My father's fears are strong and run very deep. When he's faced with one of them, he becomes hysterical, like a drowning man who pulls a potential rescuer under the water.

“We could call the paramedics, then claim he’s not being rational if he doesn’t consent,” theCSO says. "They would take him." Nobody argues that this wouldn’t work. After all, it's probably the truth. Rational people go to the hospital after they hit their heads. Besides, everybody else is dressed with middle class respectability. My father has that Unabomber beard that the mentally ill tend to get because of the difficulties of giving them a razor or keeping them still long enough to shave them. We're the crazy guy and his dysfunctional yet well meaning and respectable middle class family straight out of central casting.

“He’s so afraid,” my mother says. “What if the stress is worse for him than the head trauma would be?”

We look up the symptoms of a serious concussion on the internet. He pretty much has all of them. And has had them to an ever-increasing degree for the last ten years as he’s had stroke after stroke.

He’s still bleeding a bit. Head trauma aside, he could use some stitches.

It’s 1 a.m. at this point. The streets are a sheet of ice. I go back into the living room and crouch, putting myself at eye level with my father. Nobody ever looks in his eyes. At least, I don’t.

“Listen,” I say. “We can’t tell if you’ve hurt yourself or how badly. Ideally, we would stay here and keep bothering you until you consented to go. But theCSO and Mom and I have work in the morning, and we can’t play this game all night. Will you go to the hospital?”

“No!” he says. He’s not in good condition, but he’s still an ex-opera singer. His denial seems to shake the room a bit.

“OK, then. We’re going to go with that decision, theCSO and I are going home.” His whole body relaxes. “But, the really dangerous thing with concussions is getting two of them. At this point, we're playing the odds. Odds are good you’re fine now. But if you fall again, the odds become very bad. If I were you, I would stay off the ice and not leave the house if there’s an ice storm for some time, because if you fall again, we are taking you to the hospital. We don’t care what you have to say about it. Jason, Oliver and I are each bigger, stronger and meaner than you are and there are three of us. Do you understand?”

He grunted a “yes.”

And we went home, ever conscious of how family roles change over time, even when the personalities don’t.

CC

The worst pies in London

"So what are you doing with a weekend all to yourself, Miss Sue?" TheChalicerelative asked, a reference to theCSO being out of town until Tuesday.
"Dunno. I'll help you pack some, and I'll spend some time at work, I expect," I said into the phone, keeping my eyes carefully on the road.
"What about this evening? If I'd thought about it, we could have gone out to supper."
"It's OK," I said. "I have class anyway, and afterwards I thought I might see Sweeney Todd."
"Again?"
Damn. I'd already told her I'd seen it. "I like it," I said lamely. The Chalicerelative is the sort of person who might well draw negative conclusions about the mental health of someone who willingly saw Sweeney Todd multiple times.
Instead, she sighed. "Your father loved that show."

While it's not accurate in the strictest biological sense to talk about my father in the past tense, for all intents and purposes, one might as well. Still, the Chalicerelative's words set off a chain of memories.

I don't know how young I was. Young enough to be comfortably held. And my father was saying, his voice that of someone delighting in telling a dreadful secret,
"Do you know what happens next? His friend Mrs. Lovett makes MEAT PIES!" I can remember my own childish squeal, then my father would roll out the words with Hestonesque vigor, "Meat pies made of PEOPLE."

When theCSO says that all my snuggly childhood memories sound like child abuse to him, this is probably what he's talking about.

Something in that movie really reaches out to me. Tim Burton often does. I saw the Corpse Bride three times and I love how his adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory really evoked the spirit of the book*.

My father doesn't leave his house when he can avoid it. But I'm still tempted to call up my parents and see if they'd like to catch a matinee.

So that's what I'm thinking about tonight.

CC


*Yes, I know you love the 1971 version. Roald Dahl and I disagree.

Winter blahs

We have a week-long winter term here at GULC, and I'm in the middle of a superspeedy class on international law that is focused on deportation/rendition/extradition and related issues. For the last few days, we've been doing a simulation exercise and I played a judge in the European Court of Human Rights. It was fun, but exhausting. My questioning was hard enough on my peers that my TAs didn't think I was a wuss, but nobody hates me either as far as I know. I also emailed my Con law professor from last semester and asked him if he wanted to submit an amicus brief. (He didn't.)

It's weird to hear the professor referring to people from other countries as "aliens." As a Chick who was raised on ET and Star Trek, I've never had the negative connotations some people have for the word. But I'm not used to hearing it at this point as UUs tend to regard it as non-PC.

It's raining a lot here, which is a good thing as it follows the drought from this fall. I hate to drive in the snow, and I'm not very good at it, so I'm pleased that at least we haven't had snow.

I'm looking forward to seeing the YRUUs put on the play I've been writing. Admission is $20 a head and the profits go for University Education in El Salvador. I'm humbled by the idea that I'm writing something that will help even a few folks in El Salvador go to school and live better lives. Kim wrote in the comments that I should let other churches perform it. I had been kicking around something like that for awhile. I'm going to look into the proper language to license it so that YRUU groups may perform it as long as at least 50 percent of the profits go to a non-political charity.

But yeah, if you have a charitably-oriented youth group, shoot me an email and we can talk about it.

I'm also working on an RE curriculum on Christianity in the Culture, though I haven't field tested that one as much as I wanted to this year. I don't suppose anybody reading this knows the proper person in the UUA to send those when I finish them?

Anyway, life is actually pretty good. Probably the reason I'm so bummed is that the ChaliceRelative is moving to the Presbyterian Home in a month. (No, smartass, not Scotland, it's an old folks home in DC that is run by the Presbyterian church.)

When I was a child, the Chalicerelative lived in our basement. She was the RE person at a large Presby church in DC. Once, her car was broken into while it was parked in front of our house, but all that was stolen was a volume of The Interpreter's Bible.

Upon hearing of the crime, my five-year-old self, a Nancy Drew devotee, ran to her room, grabbed her notepad and started looking for clues. After a bit, I came into the house and proudly announced

"Well, we know one thing. The thief loves God, but he hates Justice!"

This is probably the most told-and-retold family story about CC, especially since I got into law school.

Some years ago, the Chalicerelative asked me what I wanted in her will. The first (and really only) thing I asked for was the remaining volumes of that Interpreter's bible.

Now the Chalicerelative's Interpreter's bible is boxed and in the backseat of my car. When I was helping her pack on Sunday, the Chalicerelative reported that the Presbyterian home has an excellent library and she gave it to me. She won't need it and she knows I want it.

Well, I thought I did.

CC

A response to Peacebang's depression thread

PB reacted to this article and asked about depression/medication stories. She got lots of people who didn't like loosing the emotional extremes depression can bring.

I've mentioned before that my Dad is schizophrenic. He has never believed in medication. I should baldly state here that different people with different mental illnesses take their mental illnesses out on the people around them different amounts. (But yeah, I do hope that everybody in the "Brilliant sadness" chorus has examined the effect of the depression on the people they live with.)

Anyway, my Dad was beyond volatile when I was a kid. The things that set him off always seemed to have just enough of a pattern that figuring out a plan to never freak him out always seemed just out of mental reach.

Growing up with a Dad who was essentially human nitroglycerine made my thinking really, really Dad-centric. "How would my actions affect my dad?" was constantly on my mind. I to this day retain a large list of Dad reactions to various things, assembled when I was desperate to figure out why thing A upset him and closely-related thing B did not. I can remember sitting in front of the TV as a very small child, doing mental drills. Which commercial would set him off? Which one would be fine?

Depression was like having Dad in my head all the time even as an adult. It was a head full of nitro. It was having to spend ridiculous amounts of energy on not getting depressed. "Can't think about thing B, because it's closely related to thing A and I might set it off" is the basic pattern, but in my near three decades of life I'd spun off many variations.

The affect of medication for me was to take away the inherent volatility and give me a little bit of power over the situation. I am still sad over big things, but for smaller things or things that don't affect me, I can say "Boy, that's really depressing" without letting the depressing thing be the center of my life and attention for some undetermined period of time.

I am having to learn how to pay attention to things now, having spent a lot of time as a kid learning to keep things in my mental peripheral vision so I could look away quickly if they started upset me. It sucks, but it's progress.

A Yakov Smirnov voice in my head is saying "In Russia, depression has you."

No interest in going back to Russia, kids. None.

CC

How to get little CC to sleep.

Jess tells a story about getting her son to sleep when he was a baby.

When CC was a kid, she slept with a smurf doll named Mr. Smurf. When she cried at night, her Dad would make Mr. Smurf talk. Mr. Smurt had a gruff voice and would bark that he had been dreaming about eating a double chocolate sundae with whip cream, and he was just about to eat it when CC's crying woke him up!


The CSO says that all my snuggly childhood stories sound like child abuse to him...

CC

The Mysterious Ways of Adults

Tonight, PB wrote about a fairly offensive ad comparing Dr. Phil to Jesus Christ. (And BTW, the evangelical feel of Dr. Phil's approach is discussed here if you're interested.)

I really do think the ad is too much and that PB's criticisms are justified, but I couldn't help being reminded a time when little CC was sitting at the breakfast table, eating her raisin bran as Aunt Jackie was reading the paper.

"Look at this!" She said, thrusting the paper across the table at me. She was showing me a full-page ad in the Washington Post with a large, pre-Raphealite Adam and Eve.

"This was a big mistake," the ad copy read, "but not as big a mistake as missing Daffy's spring sale!"

Little CC thought it was pretty funny, but didn't let on. After all, when CC had expressed skepticism about the talking snake, Mommy had explained that the Story of Adam and Eve was like that story about the dog who was carrying a bone, but lost it when he saw his reflection in the stream and jumped in after the bigger bone he thought the dog in the stream had. You didn't have to believe the story, you just had to learn from the story. Bible stories were allegories, Mommy had said.

Aunt Jackie raved about how tacky the Daffy's ad was for at least five minutes, and then showed it to Mommy and Daddy, who were equally upset. There was much loud complaining from the adults in Little CC's life that morning, and it had nothing to do with anything she herself had done. They were upset over somebody insulting the allegory. CC just ate her breakfast and listened.

And somehow, she remembers that as the best morning of her entire childhood.

CC

Ps. Picture is by William Strang and hangs in the Tate Gallery. It's not the one from the ad, but fairly representative.