Thirteen
Born in the UUA…Keeping Kosher
When I was nine years old, the ever-present war that we’d been fighting on the other side of the world at last came to an end, and body bags containing American soldiers stopped being a regular feature on the evening news. Everyone was relieved, especially since Vietnam had become, in writer Michael Arlen’s enduring phrase, the living-room war.
Saigon fell at the end of April 1975, and the television showed mobs of South Vietnamese trying to scale a fourteen-foot wall in an effort to reach evacuation helicopters as the last Americans departed the city.
On April 30, Communist North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), forcing the surrender of South Vietnam. The war had necessitated eleven years of United States military involvement, longer than I’d been alive, and resulted in the deaths of 58,000 American troops and around 2 million Vietnamese, about half of them civilians.
Gerald Ford was president, and the country lingered in its deepest recession since the Great Depression of the thirties. In the seventies, the value of common shares on the New York Stock Exchange fell by 42 percent. It was as large as the collapse under President Herbert Hoover, only spread out over a longer period of time. And thus it was no coincidence that an economic indicator called “the misery index” was created, a gauge combining unemployment and inflation rates.
Vietnam proved that a war of occupation can seldom be won, unless the intruder is willing to proceed in the way that Rome finally defeated the Carthaginians: kill all the fighters, enslave the remaining populace, raze the cities, and sow the fields with salt. Sadly enough, this fact would soon be forgotten—or conveniently overlooked. It seems our politicians and military strategists suffer from collective amnesia every two or three decades, since the futility of occupying foreign soil had already made itself evident when we lost the Korean War in 1953.
Thinking back, I wonder how parents, particularly mothers, felt when giving birth during those eleven long years. Did they hope the war would end by the time their newborn son turned eighteen? Did they pray for a girl? I imagine it was much like it is today, even though there isn’t a draft, with regard to those who ask why anyone would bring a child into this world; we just have to believe that they will grow up to help make the world a better and safer place.
I’ve often heard, “Your folks must have been hippies.” Only my parents were anything but hippies. They both came of age in northeastern working-class families during the forties and fifties. And they never used any recreational drugs.
The hippies were from the generation between my parents and my classmates. The only flower children we knew were offspring of slightly older neighbors and had moved to communes, geodesic domes, and wherever hippies went to practice Kundalini yoga and smoke cigarettes with no writing on them and appear on the evening news, which was where we got most of our information about them. We occasionally had wardrobe crossover—sandals; patchwork vests; violently hued, polyester, zigzag-print shirts; medallions that brought to mind Olympic
champions; and long hair. But that was about it.
The hippie confusion about my family probably resulted because we were out-of-the-closet Unitarian Universalists. In short, UUs believe that there is truth to be found in all religions, but no one religion holds all the truth. On any Sunday morning you’re most likely to encounter a coterie of dialectic agnostics and social activists waving petitions and signup sheets to tighten DUI sentencing laws, operate food drives, and fight global warming. (That last group is recognizable by their I Brake for Butterflies bumper stickers.) You won’t, however, find any Bibles in the chapel. But that doesn’t mean you can’t bring one. Or the Torah. Or a cookbook.
Another way of attempting to sum up UUism is to say that it’s Emersonian (Ralph Waldo Emerson was a Unitarian minister), with a strong inclination toward self-determination and personal responsibility. If we wear a T-shirt that says WWJD, it probably means “What Would Jefferson Do?” The emphasis is on deeds, not creeds. “Noisy Quakers” is another popular definition. The basic difference between UUs and the pacifist Quakers is we believe that on occasion arms must be taken up to discourage the more megalomaniacal and murderous of our species.
Some early Americans, based on their beliefs and activities, were tagged borderline UUs. These included Benjamin Franklin, Walt
Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. As a child I assumed this was like being borderline schizophrenic.
It’s natural to want to take pride in a religion that, while representing less than 1 percent of the population, claims several signers of the Declaration of Independence and five presidents. However, it’s also necessary to point out the flip side. The architect of the Titanic was a Unitarian. The captain of the Titanic was a Unitarian. And, “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” the hymn played while the Titanic went down, was written by a Unitarian. Our very own trinity of disaster.
People don’t really become UUs, convert to UUism, or accept UUism as their personal savior (unless perhaps they’re drowning during a failed Greenpeace mission) so much as one day just discover that they are UU, have been all along, and find there is a name and place for it, possibly like discovering that one is gay or has a natural aptitude for clog dancing.
Mom was raised Roman Catholic on her mother’s side and
Spiritualist on her father’s. Though my uncle Jim claims that his father was actually Church of England, and a meeting with a Spiritualist who declared himself able to communicate with the dead (undead?) raised the prospect that the man might be able to select winners at the racetrack for Grandpa Watson.
This schism made for some heavy fireworks around the house, especially the day Grandma took my mother to be confirmed. My mom doesn’t appreciate being told what to think, plain and simple. For her, the UU church was the last stop in organized religion. It’s a place where she can believe as she likes, and yet do so in the company of others. Mom doesn’t believe in heaven, hell, or reincarnation, but she insists that if anyone smokes at her funeral she will find a way to come back and put a stop to it.
If anyone was going to commune with spirits, it would be my father, given the clouds of cigarette smoke trailing behind him like phantoms and gray eyes beneath thick wavy hair that turned gray in his thirties. Decades of puffing unfiltered Luckys left his skin such a deathly pallor that I was often tempted to put a mirror under his nose when he napped, in order to make sure the nicotine was still coursing through his veins. Fortunately, Dad’s glasses have dark brown frames, or on a particularly overcast Buffalo day we might have lost him for good. I’m constantly amazed that Ingmar Bergman never tapped him to play the part of Death in one of his productions.
Dad was raised a no-nonsense Lutheran. They have a reputation for being a staid, industrious, and sensible people, and my father’s folks were no exception. Or, as the joke goes, did you hear the one about the Lutheran who loved his wife so much that he told her? Danish Lutherans
are known for being slightly on the dour side, though not to the same extent as the Swedes and Norwegians. Still, I tend to think there’s a
reason that Hamlet was set in Denmark.
When my dad was a teenager, there were plans for him to become a Lutheran minister. However, he began to notice that his pastor spent more time excoriating Catholics than extolling the virtues of a model Lutheran. So Dad decided that in his adult life he wanted a religion defined by what it favored rather than what it forbade.
Being drafted at twenty-one and sent to the front line in the Korean War further shaped his religious views. As a forward observer locating the people his government had decided needed killing, it occurred to Dad that many wars are fought over God. And that whether it was the Crusades, the Balkans, or Sinai, killing was more often than not in some way related to believing in the “wrong” god. If Dad returned home in one piece, he was determined to find a religion where another person’s god was not incorrect, just different, and it was okay to have a dozen gods, or no
gods at all, or to just sit on the god sidelines while considering which team to back.
Thus it happened that shortly before I was born, my parents cast off their old religions once and for all and joined the Unitarian
Universalist Church in Amherst, which billed itself as a place of religious
tolerance with an emphasis on social reform through protests, petitions, pickets, and other types of civic action. In the early seventies, buttons like Committee to Reject the President and Suppose They Had a War and Nobody Came? could be found in my church, but rarely in my school or neighborhood.
Many UUs attend church to ferret out individuals they concur with as much as to find some feisty arguments. During the Vietnam War, the Buffalo Unitarian Church provided sanctuary for conscientious objectors. The Amherst church debated the issue and voted against following suit. If local churches in the same denomination can’t reach an accord on the issues of the day, certainly no one expects the individual members to agree on everything. Even my parents regularly voted for different political candidates.
One joke has it that UUs go around burning question marks on people’s front lawns. Another is that if you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah’s Witness, you get a person who goes door to door for no apparent reason. A favorite yarn says that when a house of worship catches fire, the priest grabs the crucifix, the rabbi saves the Torah scrolls, and the UU minister rescues the coffee urn. Coffee is one of the three UU sacraments, and the church is like a political convention in that all the wheeling and dealing takes place during coffee hour, which usually runs twice as long as the sermon. The other two sacraments are the clipboard and the Birkenstock. We realize that an uncomfortable protestor is a less-effective protestor. Comfort is also synonymous with safety, although UUs still account for over 80 percent of all clipboard injuries.
When two UUs produce a child, there is, of course, great cause for celebration, since a future committee member has been born unto us.
However, instead of a traditional christening, the congregation has a naming ceremony. This consists of a few minutes worked into the regular Sunday service when everyone welcomes the newborn into the community and makes a note of when the child will be old enough to take petitions out to be signed, sell UNICEF greeting cards, and paint placards.
UUs are absolutely wild about committees and discussion groups, even more so than the federal government. We can have a congregation of three hundred members, but over four hundred committees. They say that when UUs die they are faced with three choices: heaven, hell, and a discussion on heaven and hell. It’s a well-known fact that a metal clipboard can better withstand any fiery furnace than a wooden cross.
Though many UUs profess to believe in a single god, there are not many who believe that a single god created the universe in one week. This doesn’t relate to dogma so much as to the fact that when we work entirely by committee, the idea of anything being accomplished in such a short time is unfathomable. Rather than a comment on the prowess of its members, having sent five of our faithful to the Oval Office more accurately reflects the view of committee-addicted UUs that the presidency means being in charge of the biggest committee of them all, the American People.
To be sure, some UUs pray. However, many address these prayers “to whom it may concern” or, alternatively, “the party of the first part.” UUs take summers off to go election-watching in Africa, backpack through Bhutan, and frolic in the sea while avoiding person-eating sharks. For the most part, these small churches on shoestring budgets can’t afford to operate during the summer, but members prefer to say that God trusts them. In the end they’re looking more for a feeling of closure than salvation.
With regard to finances, UUs don’t tend to be well-heeled investment bankers, but instead teachers, social workers, master potters, and minor poets. Therefore our edifices incline toward the modest. Usually the only stained glass to be found is in the sink. And during winter, it’s strictly BYOH—bring your own heat. Which also saves money because then we don’t need a lot of coatracks.
Though UUs may not be able to afford high-class entertaining, they still love a party. A lively social occasion with drinking and dancing isn’t considered to be in any way sinful; if anything, we believe a party is good for the economy and keeps profits flowing for wineries in northern California and cheddar manufacturers in Wisconsin. UUs believe that we have a friend in cheeses. Crackers too.
A good thing about being an only child is that I could join in adult gatherings. Not that UUs are very vigilant about keeping children segregated in the first place, but at my house I was always allowed to remain at a party until I was too tired to stay awake. For many years there were handprints on our living room ceiling from one particular soiree where people danced and apparently walked across the furniture to the asymmetric rhythms of Ravi Shankar’s Hindu ragas. Political arguments often took place in Hungarian or German, followed by the appearance of bongos, maracas, and a hurdy-gurdy. My mother actually belly danced at a party, wearing a silk turquoise scarf fashioned into a low-slung sarong and playing zills with her fingertips. And Dad, who’d lost his sense of smell, dropped an atomic bug bomb in the backyard right before one barbecue that succeeded in welding partygoers’ contact lenses to their corneas.
There were always visitors from foreign countries at these get-togethers. Invited guests called an hour beforehand and asked if they could bring the people staying with them—exchange students, a Bengali family, visiting professors from Kenya or Sofia, someone seeking political asylum from wherever for whatever. There was certain to be at least one other person who spoke Bengali or Bulgarian. Neighbors peered over the fence to see if the United Nations was in town.
As a small child, I was sent to an interracial day camp organized by our church and operated on its premises. My mother was on the board of directors. I was one of a half-dozen white children spending the summer making clay creations and jumping rope with a busload of inner-city youth. At the time, I didn’t notice anything different about my camp versus the ones attended by my friends—mostly vacation Bible school and Girl Scout camp. Colors were what we used to paint and draw with, not to describe people.
One might charge some particularly zealous UUs with using their offspring to further their social agendas. I recall one Sunday morning spent digging a mock fallout shelter along Main Street and surrounding it with charred dolls to protest nuclear proliferation. Meantime, the church newsletter was a veritable menu of rallies to attend and bills heading for Congress that required phone calls and letters from
local constituents.
On weekends, many a UU child could be found accompanying Mom on the ERA bus trip to Washington, or pressed into service painting signs with Dad to protest the treatment of fruit pickers at an afternoon march in front of a local supermarket. Adult UUs regularly volunteered as bodyguards at women’s clinics. And if that wasn’t enough to prove that we had a dangerous side, Nixon’s White House investigated the Unitarian Universalist Association after its publishing arm, Beacon Press, brought out the first full edition of the Pentagon Papers.
Even though I was only seven at the time, I recall that extra wine and cheese was needed at the UU church during the first month of 1973. The first cause for celebration was the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which overturned antiabortion laws in forty-six states on January 22; the second was the end of the draft five days later, on January 27.
In the eighties, my minister handed out Trojan condoms to his flock as part of a sermon on AIDS awareness and prevention. The national media dubbed him The Condom Cleric and wanted to know what in God’s name he was doing. I can’t say the resulting paparazzi carnival affected membership at our church, but it certainly increased attendance at the Baptist church across the street, as they apparently wanted to get a good look at who they were praying for.
There are a few drawbacks, in addition to sore feet, to being born into this low-density religion. The UU child is not exposed to the Bible to the exten
t that most Christians and Jews are, so we tend to fail the test on The Grapes of Wrath in high school. Religious symbolism usually went right over our heads. There’s the story of the little UU girl who describes Easter to her teacher: Jesus is resurrected, they roll back the stone of his cave, and if he sees his shadow there will be six more weeks of winter.
The church offers no specific guidelines for raising a UU child. Parents are left to use their own judgment. And so as horrifying as this may sound to the many of today’s self-actualized parents, I was spanked as a child. Though my father halted corporal punishment when I reached the age of reason, i.e., when I understood that I wasn’t supposed to dash out into the road because I could get run over by a car. My mother stopped spanking me when I was able to run faster than she could. I attribute this ability to evolutionary biology: we develop the traits we need in order to survive.
All religions have their taglines. The Irish say “God willing” after everything, e.g., I’m going to take out the trash, God willing. UUs like to say “as you are able,” e.g., stand as you are able, give as you are able. It’s too bad that most aren’t able to sing, though people claim this is really because they’re too busy looking ahead to see if they agree with the words.
Also, UUs are rampant revisionists. Some of them are working to change the word women (look what it ends with!) to Estrogen Americans.
The old standard “Onward, Christian Soldiers” has actually been rewritten in our hymnbook as “Forward through the Ages.” The holiday pageant can easily become Coincidence on Thirty-fourth Street, complete with wise persons bringing gifts and gingerbread persons served afterward. Around President’s Day they get busy considering a petition to change Founding Fathers to Founding Parents. And many will say that Moses came down Mount Sinai with the Ten Suggestions.
Buffalo Gal Page 14
