Wrestling with religion

does it matter if it's organized??

There’s a Full Moon in Gemini coming to you early early early Sunday morning. I am biased, but this is a wonderful place for the Moon. Communication and community. Chit chatting. Witnessed by Mercury who is in mutual reception with Jupiter. These are two humbled planets at the moment, Mercury uncomfy in Jupiter’s home of Sagittarius, Jupiter uncomfy in Mercury’s home of Gemini, both retrograde.

This Full Moon in Gemini has the energy of being at a wedding where you only know one person and you don’t matter to the ceremony at all. You can have any conversations with anyone you want and you can have fun at the open bar and photo booth and for years afterward people will be like “who was that really fun guy at Jan’s wedding? was he a cousin??” Enjoy it 💫

Becoming religious.

I’ve always been more concerned than I wish I was with how intelligent other people think I am. That’s why it is a little embarrassing to say that I’m considering becoming religious again. Maybe not “becoming religious” since, against my best efforts, I’ve stayed religious about plenty of things since I stopped going to church in 2013. I’m religious about (i.e. devoted to, committed to, reverent of): how people’s personalities work, what the people I care about need and want, trying to understand what a just society would look and feel like. But I have been thinking about bringing together my religion and my spirituality again. I’ve been thinking about putting myself back into religious community.

During a Sunday evening teen service at Notre Dame Catholic Church in Kerrville, Texas, I was trying to make conversation with some girls I knew from high school. When I joined in on complaining about having to be there, one of the girls told me she was surprised. She assumed I loved church. She assumed it because I was always going along with whatever dumb thing we were made to do at Sunday school. Note: This was not the Sunday school of my youth, where we learned through stories, engaged in theological philosophy, and were encouraged in our curiosity. By this point we were cosplaying Young Life. The youth group leader was a twenty-two year old graduate of A&M named Wyatt. We were learning what not to do to be good Christians, learning about evangelism, and learning about all the ways we were likely sinning without realizing it. We were singing cheesy songs with hand motions and call and response. It was, admittedly, mortifying, but I did participate. Participating seemed like the best way to blend in.

I’ve talked before about this idea of cringey behavior and church going hand in hand. The image of the cow is never far out of mind. She stares wistfully toward the horizon over churning waves, with the words i am cringe but i am free superimposed over her. It’s interesting to me how worship and cringe have become synonymous over time. From something that was once so ingrained into our social lives that it might have been mistaken as organic, to this plastic, mass produced, Disney-fied version of worship. From traditional rituals and mystery cults to something that includes pyrotechnics, ecstatic performances led by Christian pop musicians, and a cottage industry of ministers slash motivational speakers.

Talking with someone about this lately, we agreed that this specific kind of cringe is central to what turns us off from the idea of regularly attending a church. While there’s a world where this aversion reflects a resistance to earnestness (which I am famously in favor of), I think, at least in my case, it comes from a resistance to the plastic of it all. If I am going to spend time at church, I want it to feel real. I want nourishment, not junk food. Much of modern religion feels packed full of preservatives.

And yet, now, at 29, I am reaching back out to the religious. If you’ve read even a couple of these blogs in the past year, that’s not a surprise. It isn’t a surprise to me, but, still, I wouldn’t have guessed a few months ago that I’d find myself exactly here, on week five of attending some church service or other each Sunday.

First there was the Quaker meeting. I was excited and nervous, a little like I was going on a date with someone I thought was interesting, but not really viable as a partner. I thought it would be fun, good for me, and might scratch an itch. I didn’t expect to pursue Quakerism. I tried to be open, but I’d gone down that road intellectually several years ago and had already decided my admiration for the Quakers probably went right up that point and stopped. Admiration.

And I did enjoy it! I did admire the Quakers and their meeting. I’ll go back at some point. It was exciting to spend time in that old meeting house, sitting on pews that reminded me of my Catholic upbringing, but to focus on the mundane humanity in the room rather than on a gilded priest on a raised altar. That was valuable, as was the experience of listening to so many people who chose to stand and speak, people who I doubt I’d otherwise find myself listening to. There was the guy who talked about his Scottish heritage, the woman who talked about how hard it was to be a Black woman in the days after the election, the man who offered to talk about his nonprofit TV pilot with anyone interested. The room skewed older and white, but there was a kind of diversity that I don’t run into on the Internet so often. I could not predict what anyone there would share or believe and that was interesting.

Watching the Zoom Livestream of the Philadelphia UU congregation last Sunday, I geared myself up to attend in person soon. The service contained a lot of the silliness that I hated in my younger church experiences with the added cheesy artifacts of modernity that I so associate with liberal Protestants. Ice breakers and coffee fellowship and sharing pronouns and lots of citing The Body Keeps the Score. Still, I feel like I want to go.

I like Unitarian Universalism’s formlessness that is somehow still graspable. There are principles, guidelines, and stated values that usually boil down to “do no harm, help who you can, respect lived experience”. When you look back through American history, it seems like most of the people who were ahead of their time when it came to justice were UUs. And then there was the building where the worship took place. It actually reminded me of my home Catholic church, something I have found not to be the case for most Protestant congregations which often resemble gymnasiums or conference centers. I appreciate that there is a consistent worship structure, fleshed out with new and different perspectives. I also appreciate that the UU seems to have almost as many atheists and Humanists as it does Christians, Buddhists, or other dominant faiths.

I’ve also been reading a lot lately about people who practice Earth-centered and Pagan spirituality within the UU umbrella and I don’t find it patronizing or infantilizing in the way that I had expected. The overlap between these pagans and the rest of the UU community appears as earnest as everything else. It seems that when these groups build their home within the Unitarian Universalist walls, they work from where they overlap first, a commitment to lived experience and lived evidence.

Attending services like these, both in person and virtually, has inevitably brought me around to the obvious question: can I believe in a god? Related questions follow. Can I believe in many gods? Is any theist belief just a distraction from the human needs around me? Do I join a religious community before or after I answer these questions? It seems that with the UU church, you join before you have an answer and that looking for the answer is the uniting characteristic for the members of the community.

When I think about telling any of my friends that I’m going to church, I feel a pit in my stomach. Not because I’m afraid they’ll be surprised, they know I have a draw to religion. But, even more so than when I first spent money on astrological education, I have the instinct that many in my life will worry about my sanity if I align with any organized religion. It’s the organized part of it specifically that I think prompted one friend I discussed this with to joke that if it got too far she’d need to stage an intervention.

Another friend suggested, not explicitly to talk me out of attending services, that I could likely get much of what I crave in the “organized” part of organized religion by getting involved in local politics and movements. I agree with her and I am seeking that political engagement out. But one part of an organized religion that I think I might really want is the often embarrassing devotion that you get in a religious space. That earnestness, shared openly.

Between my experiences at the Quaker service and my exploration into the UU community, I keep returning to the value of a communal space built by people who are mostly different. The intellect, articulateness, political allegiances, and privilege may be all over the map, but everyone has their time. I’m sure that this is present in many non-religious spaces, but I wonder if (some) religious spaces are best suited for it. This topic deserves its own blog, but part of why religious groups can be such effective agents of change (bad change more recently, good change in the 1960s) is their resilience to “unimportant differences”. They can organize themselves around “greater truths” that help provide cohesion even when members might disagree about the details. Those details matter, but a movement needs to be built on a foundation of greater truths, not details.

This is where a lot of my interests lately converge. It’s the reason I’m playing out these kind of bumbling thoughts for you here in what is ostensibly a newsletter about astrology and the enneagram and big esoteric questions. I am becoming more and more convinced that these “big truth” things need a place to be played out in society and with the loss of traditional church structures (which, it can’t be overstated, have often caused impossible harm) there is an empty space. The empty space is a vacuum and a vacuum will be filled, has been filling. It’s inevitable.

I think at the moment, a lot of things are jockeying for that spot, though, as is usually the case in an algorithmic world, the different bubbles we live in put different things into that space. Proud Boys have Trump. Western society writ large has cash. Liberals have Diversity™. Elites globally have Power. Lefty chronically online girlies have astrology. Swifties have Taylor. The Beyhive has Beyonce. A certain sect of queer pseudo-anarchists have ketamine. I could go on for a while.

It’s not necessarily bad for people to love certain media, to love certain famous people they’ve never met, to love certain drugs. But it does seem problematic for coalition building when we don’t have some other overarching unifier. Patriotism is absolutely out as an option, at least for me and most people I know. And while capital-G God is also probably out for most people I know, I think we could possibly use a god-like idea, image, idol, concept, principle, or purpose, that allows us to focus, to put aside how differently we feel about very many things, and work on fixing the most dire issues. Not god, but something that rhymes slant with god.

I have some ideas. Humanists make a good case. Earth-centered, pagan spiritualities make a good case. Communism makes a good case. The major religions in the world carry a lot of baggage, but there are certainly groups, possibilities, ways of being in each of them that could probably work to help get us headed in the right direction. Whatever it is, it’s got to be spacious enough for messy humans living on a messy planet. That’s all we have ever had to work with, all we have ever needed, and all we can rely upon as we keep moving forward. So, what do we do?

I’m going to keep teasing this apart. I’m going to keep exploring religion and using the tools I know best, curiosity, astrology, the enneagram, and asking people questions about their experiences, to do that exploring. If any piece of this resonates with you (or really doesn’t), please what me know about it in the comments or in an email response! I always learn something when one of y’all do, which is the greatest gift.

Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.