OWNING YOUR RELIGIOUS PAST: THE HAUNTING CHURCH

Have you ever experienced anything you thought was haunted? I did. When I was in early elementary school, we had to pass a certain house on the way to our school and church which people say was haunted. The memory of it is still vivid in my mind. It was one block from my house. It was a large house, some three stories high, the largest house in the area, and certainly unlike the much smaller houses we lived in. It stood on the corner. It was unoccupied, abandoned as long as I knew it. The paint was peeling from the windows and doors. Some of the windows were broken. I remember particularly the large hedges around the house, unkept, uneven, and very scary. Some said they heard shrieks and cries coming from the house. Especially at night we ran as fast as we could past the house, lest someone jump over the hedge and grab us. It still unnerves me to think about it these many years later.

If you didn't have such a house in your neighborhood, I'm sure you went to an amusement park which had a "haunted house." I'm know it frightened you when you were young when you passed through those narrow, twisting, dark corridors, where some frightening sound was heard or some hideous face appeared out of the dark.

Today we talk about the "Haunting Church." This is the church or synagogue of our youth. It is also the name of a UU curriculum which some nine of us studied for five consecutive Wednesday mornings. The Haunting Church. Upon reflection we began to realize that the word, "haunted" can be viewed in a positive way as well as in a negative way. Indeed there is the "haunted house" but there is also the haunting melody, that comes into our mind at unexpected times, brings us back to happy days, and delights us. "Mona Lisa" is one my haunting melodies.

Yes, we are haunted. I'm convinced that every significant thing that we experienced in the past, especially when we were young, comes back to haunt us in a positive or negative way. This is especially true of religion that touches on such core values and deep-felt feelings. That every-Sunday attendance at church and Sunday school is certainly such an experience. We can never totally banish it from our minds.

What is it that haunts us from our old religion? Is it a jumble of negative thoughts such as recurring anger, unresolved feelings, or is it a traumatic estrangement from family and a culture we have known from birth? Or are there positive thoughts, warm memories, a beauty of worship, hymns that could be sung with gusto, a summer Bible camp?

Almost all of us came from another religion. Many have said that they have cut that piece out from the fabric of their life. They have burnt that bridge. They have disowned it. The curriculum we studied said that this is not possible. The early, formative experience is part of us. We can try to forget it, ignore it, dismiss it, but it will not go away. You might say of the old religion, "That's not me" or "That was too long ago" or "I left that part of my life behind." Yet we do remember--and it still haunts us. Until we really own it, say it is ours, we cannot feel whole or be able to go forward to use our full energies in our religion of the present and be able to make the solid, healthy commitment to our religious community of today.

It is a failure in our UU congregations that we frequently neglect to understand and acknowledge the transition that one must make to move from that authoritative but reassuring church of the past to this new world of UUism with its open vistas and unorthodox view of the divine and dogma.

Do we help one another to handle the anger and bitterness with which we left a former faith or do we encourage each other to bring the best in our previous religious experiences to a Fellowship such as ours? The religious feelings, dormant though they may be, are powerful and valuable, but we rarely touch them. We seem to say to a new visitor or member that "you are in something entirely new and wonderful that has little connection with your past." No. Our path, our journey, is a continuum rather than a series of unrelated episodes. When we reclaim and own our past we continue our journey with greater strength and vigor. We need connecting bridges between past and present. Our present moments are more complete and enjoyable when we can resonate with something from the past.

The curriculum we studied, "Owning Your Religious Past," helped us to go back over the bridge and experience once again our past religions. We were not so concerned with the intellectual elements of the religion or the dogma as we were with the affective elements, what we felt rather than what we thought.

Each of us came away with something different and we will hear from several participants as they express their thoughts. At the very least we had wonderful discussion about the things of religion that meant most to us, or what were our deepest thoughts on things we felt most precious in life. In this congregation we have such a wealth of experience, such varied thoughts and insights, that we so rarely share with each other in any sustained period of time extending over several weeks. We all agreed that we need to do more of this. We learned so many new things about others whom we thought we knew well. The beauty of a UU congregation is that we enrich each other by sharing what is within.

We talked about what we liked about our old religion and what we didn't like. We talked about what we liked about our new-found UU faith and what we still find missing and sometimes, we felt, it was something we left behind.

I will now ask those who participated in our study group to express their feelings and what they found of value. Afterwards, I will express what I learned in that group and then I would like to hear from other members of our congregation as they react to this theme and our thoughts.

<Others speak.>

The exercise I found most moving and most insightful was the "guided imagery" which Kathy Clay led us through earlier in the Service. I affectively and emotionally walked around my old church of St. Francis De Sales in West Philadelphia. Something stirred in me just to look at this massive church of fieldstone from the outside. Inside the quietness of the church, its darkness brought back old and happy memories. There was a sacredness about this place. It was so still. I remembered the moving pageantry of its rituals, especially on Christmas eve, with the choir of one hundred, the many altar boys, the priests in liturgical vestments, the incense and the resounding organ. My young soul was fed here. My most basic values were formed here. Just to sit quietly in that church reminded me how rich my experiences were. It reminded me that all good spiritual things did not begin the day I first entered a UU church. I felt strengthened to return to that scene. It is so much a part of who I am, even though I have said I have burnt my bridges behind me. Like most UUs, for too long I have concentrated on what I had left behind in my old religion and not what I have brought with me. No. I need that bridge. I feel connected. I do feel more whole, more complete. My steps on this journey ahead seem lighter. I want to "own my religious past." I want to savor those haunting memories.