Spiritual autobiography, part 1

For anyone who’s coming here from Chaos Theory, let me just warn you up front that this blog involves no poker. I repeat, this is not a poker blog. I don’t even know how to play poker. Yet.

Onward.

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As I write this, the sun is about to go down to end Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. I did not attend services. I have not attended services, except for family events, in almost 25 years. I’ve gotten some pushback on this, especially from various older family members, but I’ve never had a strong emotional attachment to the faith of my ancestors. It never gave me any sense of spiritual nourishment. At the same time, my ethics are strongly colored by my heritage — especially my strong belief that I am obligated to be a positive force in the communities I belong to, to work for justice, to try to build a better world. Ironically, I never heard the phrase tikkun olam (which means “repairing the world”) when I was growing up. I didn’t hear it until I was a college student, by which point I had already decided I was joining the long, rich tradition of cultural but non-religious Jews.

In my early 20s, neopaganism caught my attention. I liked a concept of the divine that included the female, and I enjoyed creating my own rituals that I could change whenever I felt like it. But after a few years, that, too, lost its appeal. I knew intellectually that it was all symbolic, and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief long enough to enter the mystery.

At that point, I stumbled into Arlington Street Church, the “mother ship” of Unitarian Universalism. One Sunday, intrigued by the fact that the minister was planning to talk about Thich Nhat Hanh, I walked in, sat down, and listened as the sun shone gloriously through the largest collection of Tiffany stained glass windows in any church. And I ended up there most Sundays for the next couple of years. At ASC, I found all the community and intellectual stimulation of organized religion, without any insistence on dogma. (I confess I also noticed the place was chock-full of attractive like-minded men — although, sadly, they too were looking for like-minded men.)

I probably would have hung out at ASC on Sundays indefinitely had I not decided to move to San Francisco. I tried the UUs here, but they were a little too tied to their Christian roots for my heathen comfort. And so for the last ten years, I’ve had no spiritual home. In that time, I’ve gradually arrived at Douglas Adams’ point of finding the garden beautiful without needing to believe in fairies at the bottom of it. There’s not really any organized way of observing that, I suppose.

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