Faith
Of...
 The
Faith of a Theist
There Must Be a God Somewhere
Rosemary Bray McNatt
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Early in my ministerial internship, I was responsible one Sunday
for leading the congregation in a period of prayer and meditation.
After the service ended, one of the long-time members pulled me
aside. "When you were praying this morning, you were addressing
your prayers to someone, weren't you?" she asked. "Yes, I was,"
I said. The woman looked slightly incredulous. "You don't think
there's really someone there, do you?"
"Yes," I answered, "I really do."
Becoming a Unitarian Universalist more than a decade ago was the
path that led me back to God. Brought up in an African American
Roman Catholic home, I measured my childhood days by the feast of
the saints and the holy days of obligation. By the time I was ten,
I found my youthful devotion challenged by the rigidity of the church
and deeply damaged by its rejection of women's gifts, even when
those gifts were as small as my desire to serve Mass as my younger
brother did several times each week. My spirit crushed, I tossed
aside both the church and all thoughts of God before I reached my
teens.
Not that God wasn't due for some serious criticism from me by that
time. It was the 1960s after all, and questioning authority was
more than a slogan to millions of us. The unfairness of life, the
poverty and racism I knew from personal experience, the violence
that was present all around me—including in my own home—had
me asking tough questions about the God my mother clung to with
such fervor. I informed her by the time I reached my teens that
whatever God she thought she knew had done her precious little good
and that I was fed up with all this religious mythology.
My mother, bless her, was more than used to her oldest girl; she
had great experience with my periodic pronouncements of cynicism
and rage. With her usual aplomb, she simply looked at me and said,
"Just keep on living, baby. You'll find out."
I did keep on living, stepping out into the world of college and
work, a thousand miles from my mother's watchful gaze. I resolutely
stayed away from churches—and yet I found myself always in
search of something. In my late twenties, I married my college sweetheart,
an African American Unitarian Universalist by birthright. He and
his parents had introduced me to this religious movement a decade
earlier, while he and I were both in college.
Before meeting them, I had no clue what a UU was. As I walked
down the aisle of the First Unitarian Church of Chicago on my wedding
day, I didn't know a whole lot more—only that this faith mattered
to the man I loved and to his parents. How could I know that my
gesture of goodwill toward my new in-laws would lead me to a new
faith—indeed, a new life?
I started attending the Community Church of New York to live out
the fantasy of being a dutiful young wife. It was a fantasy fueled
by my own love of tradition and heritage. I loved going to the church
my husband grew up in and meeting the members who remembered him
as a little boy in Sunday School. I basked in the affirmation of
my husband's parents and the church's long-time members.
After a time, I began to pay attention, not just to coffee hour,
but to the hour before that, when the community gathered amid the
banners representing the great religions of the world. I sat beneath
those banners and heard from the pulpit and the pews the deepest
longings of my heart. I learned about the similarities among the
great religions of the world, about their common hopes and aspirations
for humanity. I heard about the beloved community—the gathered
people hungry to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with
God. I heard about people who had risked all they had—even
their own lives—in order to speak out loud the longings of
their hearts, longings so much like mine.
And I heard about all these things in the context of freedom, the
freedom to think for myself about God and about the world, the freedom
to decide how I might live so that one day "righteousness and peace
would kiss one another," even if I would not live to see that day.
No one required me to make promises I could not keep. There was
no list of beliefs that determined whether I was in or out of favor.
And most importantly, there were no gatekeepers who decided on my
worthiness or unworthiness. Everyone in the sanctuary, including
me, was part of a glorious creation. Just by being alive, I was
good, I was worthwhile, I was sacred. It was a revelation. For a
long time, it was enough—this freedom to think for myself,
to embrace the spirit of skepticism and the rejection of doctrine.
I reveled in the community of like-minded people, all of us fleeing
the excess and rigidity of our childhood beliefs, the blind and
unquestioning faith of our fathers and mothers.
But as my mother told me earlier, I kept on living. I kept on
living in a world filled with tears and tragic events that had no
easy explanations. I kept on facing great joy and deep disappointment.
I kept on being confronted by hopeless situations that unexpectedly
came to amazing conclusions. And thanks to the freedom I found as
a Unitarian Universalist, I continued to ask what it was that I
was experiencing.
The answer came slowly. Bit by bit, I learned to acknowledge grace,
came to believe the irrational idea that, amid everything, there
was a knowing, loving presence that abides in all things, even in
me. I knew that I could not explain what was gradually becoming
clear to me. I only knew the truth of the mystic Julian of Norwich's
proclamation that "all will be well, and all will be well, and all
manner of things will be well."
At the same time I was comforted by this notion, I remained suspicious
of it. How could all be well when I myself had spent a childhood
in which all was definitely not well? How could it all be well as
long as people cried out for justice and bread? How could it be
well when millions lived out their lives without one moment of ease
or pleasure while others knew nothing else? I had no answers to
the questions—only the continuing sense that there is so much
more to our lives here than the horrors we inflict on one another
and the blessings we bestow too rarely.
And then, one day, God spoke. On retreat at a women's conference
in Wisconsin, I joined with other participants in a sacred spiral
dance led by a noted member of the women's spirituality movement.
Asked as part of the dance to speak to the divine and listen for
an answer, I joined in, impatient, skeptical, and freezing cold.
As I made a perfunctory list of my concerns, I could suddenly feel
a Presence in me. It was a Presence that made itself felt in every
cell of my body, and it was followed by a Voice, neither male nor
female, and utterly unlike anything I had ever felt. The Voice made
itself heard in my body, and it told me clearly, lovingly, "Don't
worry, my child, don't worry." When I spoke to the Voice about the
hopes and dreams of my life, the secret desires I carried with me
everywhere, it promised me "all these things and more." And then
the Voice and Presence left me, and left me changed forever.
Most of the great Western theologians agree at least on this: God
is beyond naming or full understanding, yet we human beings, created
in God's image, nonetheless are called to make the attempt. It is
the free faith of Unitarian Universalism that makes my attempts
worthwhile. Because of this faith, I can be confident that my search
for the Divine is structured, not by static institutions or individuals,
but by the God who continues to call me and whom I continue to question.
Because of this powerful freedom to believe—and to doubt—I
live in trust, believing all manner of things will be well.
| Rosemary Bray McNatt, an
editor and author, is a candidate for the Unitarian Universalist
ministry and intern minister at the Unitarian Church of Montclair,
New Jersey. She serves as the vice chair of the Board of Trustees
of Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California.
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