The Church, the Country Club and the Barn

By Mel Harkrader-Pine

November 20, 2005

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Loudoun

As this church year began in September, the Buildings and Grounds Committee did some rearranging in the sanctuary. I liked most of what they did, but one addition annoyed me – that chair.

The idea of one chair – just one in the whole place – with arms and padding for the preacher to sit in, while we regular folks use wooden pews, rubbed me the wrong way. And as I gave it some thought, I realized why that chair was especially offensive to me. The reason goes back to my religion of origin. It will take me a few minutes to explain.

I grew up Jewish, in a Conservative congregation, in the 1950s. We were not as strict as the Orthodox, whose women have to sit in the balcony of the synagogue, but we were closer to them than we were to the Reform Jews, who prayed in English and didn’t wear yarmulkes and prayer shawls.

As I learned to read English in my public school, I also had to learn to read Hebrew well enough to satisfy the requirements of my bar mitzvah. I attended Hebrew school in the synagogue twice a week from 4 to 6 p.m., from the age of 6 until past my bar mitzvah at 13.

In order to be bar mitzvahed, we’d have to read and chant a series of prayers – that was the easy part – and a haphtorah, the harder part. The haphtorah is a section from the Prophets, and it’s different every week. So around a year before my bar mitzvah, I was assigned a date and the haphtorah that I’d have to chant on that day. I had a year to learn to read the words fluently in Hebrew and to chant them a certain way. The words had symbols called cantillations over and under them – each one representing a few notes.

When I did chant my haphtorah on the day of my bar mitzvah, here’s how it began. … That’s all I remember, but it went on for several very long minutes.

Now that was not a good time in my life. My father had died 15 months earlier, leaving us destitute. So we couldn’t afford the kind of bar mitzvah party all my friends got – dinner at a catering hall with a band and an MC. My bar mitzvah party was a deli lunch at my house. We didn’t have money for stylish clothes. I was wearing the cheapest suit my mother could buy at the Dick Kranz bargain men’s clothing store down on South Street in Philadelphia. And I was very aware of not having a father.

So, after seven years of study, I still felt pretty small up on that grand stage with its grand ark, holding the torahs and haphtorahs, and the alter where the torah and haphtorah are read…and four grand chairs that looked like thrones. The chairs were generally occupied by the rabbi, the cantor, the shamus (like a deacon) and the president of the congregation, whose name was Mr. Ulster.

I chanted the necessary prayers and then the haphtorah, feeling small and poor and barely adequate, and when I had completed the haphtorah I got to sit for a moment in one of the chairs as the rabbi said a few words before calling me up again for a blessing. As soon as my rump made contact with the felt on that magnificent, throne-like chair, Mr. Ulster, in the chair immediately to my right, leaned over with a big book of haphtorahs in his arms.

“Is this vat you vas reading?” he asked.

Without even focusing on the words on the page, I quietly said yes.

And he replied: “Dat vas terrible.”

So it’s easy to understand why I hate special chairs on the stage in a place of worship.

My congregation, Brith Israel, also made a big thing of ostentatious giving. There’s a whole other sermon I could do about that, but for now I’ll just say that giving was a spectator sport and impoverished families like mine – people who couldn’t afford to be members of the congregation – were made to feel unwelcome. For that reason – because of the pressure I felt as a youth – I don’t like to put money into a collection plate. Carol and I honor our church pledge by direct deduction from our checking account, and we’ll put something into the plate for special appeals, but not as a matter of course.

That may surprise some of you, because I have no trouble passing the plate. I recognize that the offering is an important ritual for many, but I feel safe here to forgo publicly giving without fear of ostracism.

I don’t mean to slam Judaism. I’m told that what happened to me would never happen in today’s synagogues and wasn’t common even in the ‘50s. I just grew up in the wrong congregation. But the scars remain.

I left Judaism in my teens and found Unitarian Universalism in my 30s at Community Church of New York. It happened that Community Church rented its sanctuary to a synagogue, and on the high holidays the cantor sang some of the Hebrew religious music as part of our Sunday morning service. It was a transforming and healing process for me to hear that music again in a space where I felt safe, and it enabled me to reclaim some of the good of my heritage.

These quirks of mine – about special chairs on the stage and about the collection plate – came to mind as I thought about this sermon, which arose from a conversation at a meeting of the Worship Committee. I manage a couple of email lists on worship for the Unitarian Universalist Association, which Chris King and Leslie Wright also subscribe to. We were talking about a discussion that had arisen on one of them.

Someone had asked for help finding other ways to say “sermon,” which launched a discussion on all sorts of variations – homily, talk, speech, report, and so on. I stayed out of it for a week, but finally I wrote: “Would someone explain what’s wrong with the word ‘sermon.’” No one, in any of the emails, had explained why they were looking for an alternative, or why they preferred their suggested word over the word “sermon.” It amazed me that people could go on at such length without ever explaining what they were searching for that the word “sermon” doesn’t provide, or what in the word “sermon” they wanted to avoid.

Of course the assumption was that “sermon” is too “religious.” It reminds us of being chastised or being bored in our religions of origin. But we need to make our churches safe places for those who use the word “sermon” as well as those who don’t, for those who put money in the collection plate as well as those who don’t, for those who like chairs on the stage as well as for those who don’t. We drive people away when we’re dogmatic about any one approach.

It may come from my background as an editor, but I hate to ban any word without good reason. To me, banning words is akin to banning books.

An extreme case of word banishment was my second UU…er…place of worship. It was the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Northern Fairfield County, Connecticut, which met in a converted barn. We weren’t allowed to call it by the “C” word. If you ever referred to it as a church another member of the congregation would correct you and explain that we call it “the barn.”

Going back to my first UU church, the Rev. Bruce Southworth there was what I’d call a humanist or a rationalist. As part of every service, he’d say, “Prayer doesn’t change things. Prayer changes people, and people change things.” But on Christmas Eve he’d offer a vespers service with traditional carols, and he’d wear his robes for it. At the first one I attended, I was moved, and I happened to be with him as he disrobed. So I said something like: “Good service, Bruce.” To which he replied: “If you can stand saying those things.”

Maybe he had a need at that point to disclaim the words that he had been speaking and singing. But by doing so he derailed my “peace on earth goodwill toward men” train.

And so it goes. In a denomination like this that applauds our individual search for truth and meaning, it’s easy for us to say the wrong thing sometimes – wrong from the other’s point of view at that moment. We’re not as bad as Mr. Ulster was, but still the things we say or those that we leave out may sting another.

Some come to a church like ours as part of a journey. Maybe they find that they need a more structured place of worship, and they move on. We have not failed them. We’ve aided them on their journey. But I think most of us would agree that it’s more satisfying to maintain a tent big enough for a wide variety of religious styles. Maybe we Unitarian Universalists are a bit too quick to make the assumption that the tent’s bigger if we avoid words like God and prayer and sin.

Those who disparage Unitarian Universalism would call our churches country clubs and see ours as a country club religion. Even within our denomination we use that tag sometimes for a church with no mission except to its own members. I agree that a church is not really a religious sanctuary unless it carries its mission beyond its walls, but I also find something I like in the description of ours as a country club religion.

This is where I choose to make my social connections, and I know that’s true for many of you. This is where I find my community. So for me it fills a need that a country club fills for others. That doesn’t mean that I’m content with only the social aspects of church life, but it does mean that I’m proud to choose my community by shared values rather than by golf handicap.

But others often have trouble understanding what we stand for. They know what we’re against and what we don’t believe in. They want to hear what we do believe in. And it’s not enough for them to hear that we affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

Some of them eventually get it. They get that we don’t make it easy. There’s no UU key to the universe. What we do is to support one another in our own individual quests. And that’s hard, and sometimes painful, as we cope with the ways that the religions we grew up with left those scars. And one of the best things we can do for each other is not only to open up new theologies but also to provide a safe space for us to come to terms with those spiritual leaders who hurt us.

Many of us come scarred and of course need time to heal. No one need be forced to use the language that contributed to scarring him or her. But to truly heal we need eventually to be able to incorporate into our lives the language of our own ancestry. Maybe there are two stages to religious healing – the one where we reject the symbols of the past and one where we can reintegrate some of them into our lives. May this be a safe place for both of those stages.

A year and a half ago I led a Buddhist meditation here called the five touching. The second touching had to do with our spiritual ancestors. So for those who are willing, I’d like to offer that meditation again.

….

Closing Words  -  Stephan Papa

If we would but allow the majesty of creation to be, it would bless us.

If we would incorporate the myriad aspects of creation instead of trying to incarcerate them, the war would end.

If we could accept ourselves, maybe then we would accept others.

If all these questions add up to confusion, all these answers add up to one affirmation --

Love life and it will bless you.