SUNDAY SERVICE with a smile

Years ago, when I was living in Sarasota, I would regularly attend Sunday morning services at Unity Church. Though I was raised a Catholic, I became disenchanted with that church during my adolescence when no matter how many nights I prayed for "Sally" to come over and give me a big wet smooch and ask me to be her boyfriend, it never happened. The whole meat on Friday thing and the threat of going to Hell for thumbing though National Geographic to see the topless african girls, the highest form of "porn" available in those days, lead me away from Catholicism and toward...not much.

I later found the spirituality movement, and retrospectively, found that every religion has its more metaphysical or mystical side. Jews have the Kabbalah, Catholics have Thomas Merton, and generic Christians have Wayne Dyer and other spiritual authors. Within those same religions are folks who go the "other way" towards what my old friend Peter Gomes calls Bibliolatry...or too much literalism. I have a rule regarding religion... If you have to wear a funny hat to practice your faith, you are too extreme for me. There is a broad spectrum of what that includes... a Yarmulke, covering your head like the Virgin, a dunce cap and face shield, a turban or a "rag" of any kind. All the wars on earth are fought because "my hat is better than your hat." So, I seldom wear a hat, even one that says Harley Davidson, because that puts too much faith in one type of vehicle and brands me as a member of a cult. Ditto for any Sports Team which would align me with a screaming shirtless, body painted crowd of inebriates worshiping in a stadium. Or, the home-bound faithful watching "the game" on TV waiting for a miracle, like victory over the Devil (the other team) in "the Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup, World Series, or "where have all the real men gone" the soccer World Cup. But I digress and "run on." You will notice that as I get more passionate about a subject, I tend to write paragraphs that are one sentence long.

It is Sunday morning and I will be going to a "service." Not the one at St. Mary's, the Catholic church, nor the one with the tall wooden steeple that reminds me of the Salem Witch Trials, but the one with the short steeple that I heard about yesterday from a new friend in Nantucket. They have a Unitarian Universalist church here too. By the way, Unitarian was the only church to recognize a Harvard Divinity School degree as the equivalent of their seminary... therefore you can become a minister right away upon graduation. Their secular humanism is a perfect complement to liberal academia. I enjoyed many lectures at the Unitarian church in Cambridge. I must say, however, that I never got the impression that the God I was taught to believe in was there, but then again, maybe that's the point. Good works and social engineering here on this planet may well be what our savior intended.

Any how, I am not starving because of having to fast since midnight to take communion like in the days of Sister Mary Knucklewacker. I do not have a tie with me here in Nantucket so wearing one of those is out of the question. I don't have to learn some obscure language to participate in the service. I will be riding my bike there but I will lock my helmet to the bike outside so folks in the church don't think I am a follower of a religion that requires that I wear a funny hat.