Faith Part 5

Hey, remember last year when I said I was considering hitching my wagon to the Unitarians? No? Well, I did consider it. Then I decided not to join, figuring that I just wasn’t going to fit in there. Like a lot of organizations, there’s a bit of social bubble that can be hard to break into and it seemed the case with this church. At one point, I was calling the place, “Our Lady of Passive Aggressive Post-It Notes”.

And besides, as Marx (Groucho, not Karl) once said, “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.” So for now, I remain contentedly irreligious. Religion remains a subject that fascinates me even if I’m not personally religious.

Although I did read about these “post-theist” United Churches…

 

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LOST: The End. Explained. (Spoilers, obvs)

Ok, so this post contains an image from the last 10 minutes of the last episode of LOST. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a good idea to look away now.

Ok?

You’ve been warned.

So I’ve been mulling it and over and after all the smoke and the polar bears and the Apollo bars and that Nikki and Paolo business and Dharma bums and pockets of energy and Egyptians and Richard’s eyeliner and Dr. Marvin Candle and teleporting rabbits and invisible peanut butter and We All Everybody and corks, I think it all came down to one thing: that church. I mean, seriously, check out that stained glass window.

I’ll let Christian Shepherd explain it:

Faith: Part Three

Rod: Keep firing; convert the heathens!

Bart: Got him!

Rod: No, you just winged him and made him a Unitarian

The Simpsons

It wasn’t until the wee lad came along that I began to think about faith again. It was a non-starter that he would be baptised. We weren’t going to stand in front of a crowd and make a bunch of faith statements that we didn’t believe.

A friend suggested that we try out her family church, the Unitarian Church of Montreal. There, we could have a dedication ceremony. I didn’t know all that much about Unitarians, or as they are more properly known, Unitarian-Universalists, other than that some of my cousins in Massachusetts were members. So before he was born, I did a little research and we started going.

There was a lot I liked about it: the drawing on sources of enlightenment from across the religious and philosophical world, the meditation, the music, and the sermons. I like the principles. I feel better after having gone and not, as I do in the United Church, simply hungry because it’s lunchtime.

But in the sense, to quote Groucho Marx, that I would never belong to any club that would have me as a member, I feel a bit distant from the place. It’s in one of Montreal’s wealthiest neighbourhoods and the congregation reflects that. I may be one of the few people there who isn’t employed at a university. A U*U minister in the US once wrote about this, casting it a class problem. And while I’m being pedantic, the hymns they sing hit a lot of high notes because they weren’t written by men in the 19th century and that’s a bit tough for me to sing. And for the number of accusatory Post-It’s I’ve seen, I’ve privately nicknamed the church ‘Our Lady of the Passive-Aggressive Notes’.

Still, their hearts are in the right place and they’ve become the closest thing to a spiritual home that I’ve found in a long while. But I haven’t made the big leap and become a member yet and I’m not sure that I will, perhaps I’ll be content to simply attend. The fact is, that for various reasons, we can’t make it there every week so it’s hard to make that commitment. There’s a church in Saint John. Maybe when we move there, we’ll become members.