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My parents grew up with different religious backgrounds. My father’s family was Catholic, my mother’s Protestant. When they married and moved to Pittsfield, they did not ascribe to either of their parents’ choices.
The only time religion came into my early life was when we ate at my mother’s parents’ house. It was only after one of them said Grace, usually a short two or three sentences followed by all of us saying “Amen” that we could start eating. I never really thought much about this or what it meant. It was just something we did at my grandparents’ house.
There was no mention of religion or church in our household until I was in fourth grade, 1954. My brother was a teenager, my younger sister just born. We were living on Dewey Avenue, a step down from the community-oriented neighborhood where we had lived on Stanley Avenue. I’ve always thought their decision to seek out a church was related to this move to a poorer part of the city. Perhaps, my mother wanted to find a community to replace the one she now missed. No one ever told me this. It is supposition on my part as I reflect on my growing up.
In any case, my father took on the task of actually attending different church services each Sunday to determine if there was a church that felt right. One place he visited in response to an ad in the Eagle was the Unitarian Church. That Sunday when he returned, he talked excitedly to my mother about his experience. It turned out the main reason he was so positive was the minister, David Kibby.
I have since found out this was a pivotal moment for the Unitarians in Pittsfield. Mr. Kibby had just been hired to give life to the Pittsfield Unitarian Association which had a long history but was inactive at the time. He was charged with finding fifty charter families in one year in order to maintain the church in Pittsfield as active. According to church history, he did this in seven months. My family was among them.
At the time the building we went to, Unitarians called it a meeting hall not a church, was on 11 Wendell Avenue just a few steps away from East Street. That space is now the home of the Pittsfield Public Library. The building on the other side of the Unitarian Meeting House is still there, The First Church of Christ, Scientist. When we went into church those spring Sundays, I recall looking over at the First Church building and puzzling over the name. Most of the churches I recognized were Catholic, all named after saints. Saint Joseph, Saint Charles, Saint Marks. None were named scientist. It was confusing to a nine-year-old.
I have no idea what my parents or older brother did on those Sundays. We parted as we entered the building. I went downstairs to one of the Sunday School classrooms. I recall a damp basement smell, partitions set up to divide the space into separate rooms for different grade levels, but little else. What we did or learned in the Sunday school those months is long gone. We attended services at the building on 11 Wendell maybe a month or two before a new meeting hall opened in the fall. It was further south on Wendall at 175. I remember how excited every adult was about this new chapter for the church.
They were right to be excited. This building was amazing even to me. It once was the home of Ben England, one of the Brothers of the England Brothers’ Department Store on North Street. As I became familiar with the new church building, I kept trying to imagine what it was like to have lived there when it was a family home. The main floor was symmetrical, two large rooms on either side with a wide main foyer in the middle. Off this foyer was a set of stairs up to the second floor.
To serve as a church, the large room on the left of the foyer had rows of pews with a raised platform on the far side away from the street from which the minister conducted the service. The large room on the right was a social hall used for church suppers and other meetings. Both the social hall and meeting room for services included one-story enclosed porches fronting Wendall Avenue. The one on the left was the minister’s study, the one on the right was a meeting room, often used for the youth group meetings.
In back of the social hall was a kitchen. The upstairs contained a series of smallish rooms used for different grade levels of Sunday school along with a fairly large space used as a nursery for entertaining the youngest members of the church while the adults were at services. It was so conveniently organized as a church meeting hall, that I found it hard to imagine people living here. Where were the bedrooms? Was the social hall a dining room? Wouldn’t one of those enclosed porches be great for my bedroom? Sometimes I would wander around just trying to picture living in this building.
Throughout my teen years I was an active member of the church youth group. I really enjoyed being with these other kids. In school we were sorted and grouped in different ways. Elementary school was based on geography as each neighborhood had its own school. In junior high, geography also mattered. You were either in North where the GE factory workers lived or in South where the GE engineers lived. In addition, our classes were grouped depending on if we were in the college, secretarial, commercial, or trades programs.
Age mattered. Ninth graders took ninth grade English, tenth graders took tenth grade English. Students just a year or two older or younger were not in classes with me. My graduating class in Pittsfield High had about five hundred, but I only encountered about fifty of them in my classes over those three years.
Another type of school grouping rule, no less rigidly imposed than the more formal ones, were that boys hung out with boys and girls hung out with girls, unless you were dating. Even the high school cafeteria was segregated according to gender. The guys sat on benches on one side of the cafeteria, the girls on the other.
The Unitarian youth group broke every one of those rules. We were both male and female. We ranged in age from thirteen to seventeen. We were from Lee, Lenox, Dalton, Lanesboro, as well as Pittsfield. Some of us liked playing sports, some did not. Some expected to go to college, others didn’t seem to care much. We met on Sundays for years, rarely saw each other away from the church, but enjoyed each other‘s company at church social events and the regular meetings of the youth group on Sundays.
In a few cases, my friendship groups overlapped with the church youth group. I met Carole in seventh grade at school and stayed friends with her through my early college years. She became part of the youth group, after her family joined the church when we were in ninth grade. I first met Nancy in the church youth group, then in ninth grade she showed up in my junior high math class. We were together in every math class from then on. We even ended up living in the same dorm together in college. Our friendship lasted into my early married years when we had babies a month apart. Nancy and Carole were the exceptions though; I socialized with the rest of the group only at church functions. I found I was more myself at youth group than in other social gatherings. I enjoyed the variety, the mix of the group. There didn’t seem to be a need to prove you belonged there.
Every once in a while, Mr. Kibby came to one of the youth group meetings to talk about the history of Unitarianism. At that time, I was in high school there was a movement in the country for the Unitarian and Universalist churches to join together to become the Unitarian-Universalist Association. During this decision-making process, he wanted us to understand what it was about.
As he talked about why the two churches should join together, how their beliefs were compatible, he began to realize how little we knew about the history of the Unitarian Church. In our Sunday School classes, we had studied many other religions using a book called, The Church Across the Street. Mr. Kibby noticed that while we could talk about Shintoism or Judaism, the tenets of our own religion had taken a back seat. So, for the next few months, the topic of youth group Sundays was the history, beliefs, and development of Unitarianism. The lessons culminated in a contest. One evening after a church supper and with an audience of our families and other church members, Mr. Kibby conducted a contest. The boys against the girls as Mr. Kibby asked questions about the history of the church. I honestly cannot remember a single question asked that night. However, I do know the girls won.
One year when I was in high school, I volunteered, or maybe I was selected, to attend a regional conference for Unitarian Youth Groups encompassing western Massachusetts. There was an opening welcome session on Friday night with meetings all day Saturday. Two of us represented the Pittsfield congregation, me and a guy named Bob. One of our parents drove the pair of us to the opening night in Springfield. We each stayed with a local family that evening.
I have two vivid memories from that weekend conference. One took place at breakfast Saturday morning at the home of the family that was hosting me. I was sitting with their daughter, about my age, who was also attending the conference. It seemed odd to me to have an entire family sit down for breakfast together. Even on weekends, that never happened at my house. My usual Saturday breakfast routine was to grab bowl of cereal while watching the Saturday morning TV shows with my sister and brother.
I was prepared for the usual surprised reaction when I declined the orange juice. I was allergic to citric acid. However, I was not prepared for what was right in front of me. It looked like a hard-boiled egg except it was placed in a short glass cup that held it upright. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with it. No one else had touched theirs, so I ate some toast and cereal while drinking the milk that was offered in place of the OJ, slowly waiting for someone else at the table to start on their egg. Then the father softly tapped the top of the egg, removed part of the shell and dipped in his spoon. It wasn’t a hard-boiled egg after all, it was soft-boiled, something I didn’t have at home. Finally, I knew what to do. I was glad I had withheld my first impulse to pick up the egg, crack open the shell, and eat it as we did with hard boiled eggs at Easter time. In fact, I found the soft-boiled egg rather tasty. Odd what you can do with eggs. Better yet, I had managed breakfast without any faux pas.
Recounting this story now, I have two different reactions. You might say I had developed a good strategy for not making social errors. I could wait and learn from others who already knew what to do. But another part of me questions why couldn’t I just have said, “This is new to me. What kind of egg is this? How do you eat it?” It seems simple enough. The reason is I hated admitting to anyone that I didn’t know something. I always wanted to present myself as capable and competent even in situations that were new or that had elements that were unfamiliar. That personality trait was actually a detriment to me for a long time. It got in the way of seeking advice from others because I felt asking advice was admitting I was a failure. It wasn’t until my first year of teaching when I found a genuine mentor that I learned how valuable it is to be honest about what isn’t working; that’s a sign of strength, not weakness, to ask questions. However, on the egg day I was pleased with myself for finding a way out of my ignorance.
The conference which was held at a Unitarian meeting hall in Springfield. It included a series of small group meetings and a large business meeting of the youth group association at the end. We were separated into small groups of about twenty each with a leader who proposed a topic for discussion. At the one session the topic was “ Are Unitarians Christians?” Remember this was in the late 50s. The word Christian was not yet associated in the general public as evangelical Christians; it was a term like Protestant or Methodist. I didn’t feel there would be much of a debate. Of course, we were not Christians. Since Unitarians did not believe Jesus was the son of God, it was obvious to me.
It surprised me to hear so many others reasoning that since Unitarians believed that Jesus was a wise man, a prophet whose teachings were worth following, we could be called Christian. But I reasoned we had also been taught that Mohammed was a wise man who offered worthwhile advice for living. We had also studied the teachings of many religions: Hindi, Buddha, Shintoism, and Judaism looking for what life’s lessons they espoused. Yet no one was asking are Unitarians Buddhists? Or Moslems? I kept all of these thoughts to myself.
In fact, as the conversation went on, I started to feel like an outsider. I felt conflicted, wanting to speak up but uncomfortable doing so amidst the sense of the majority. Instead of offering my now minority viewpoint, I began to ponder why it felt so important for the others to say yes to this question. I began to think our wider culture used the term “Christian” not necessarily as a religious term, but as a moral one. Someone with ethics was called a Christian, as in “She is a good Christian woman.” My thoughts began to wander even further. Was this discussion really an example of wanting to distance oneself from Jewish people who were the main group identified as non-Christian. Was this a form of anti-Semitism? All of these thoughts stayed in my head. I did not feel comfortable sharing these thoughts with the group.
As I write this today so many years later, I am still embarrassed that I did not speak up. The emotions are still present. Why didn’t I just speak up? I regret this, wishing I had felt brave enough to offer my ideas. This hanging back and not expressing my own opinions stayed with me for the next few years in other social situations as well. I wasn’t happy with this part of my personality, but it wasn’t until I went to college that I began working at changing my ways of interacting with others to be more forthright, more courageous about offering my opinions when they were different from those of other people. However, at this youth group conference, whatever I learned, figured out, or questioned remained as my own learning, figuring, and questioning. It was not shared.
When I was in elementary and junior high school talk about church would only come up in casual conversation. ”I had to finish my homework before going to church yesterday.” “On the way home from church we stopped to do an errand.” These were things I also did, so I had a sense we had shared experiences.
By the time I reached tenth grade, I would hear some of my Catholic friends comment they couldn’t see a particular movie because it was banned. They would mention warnings the priest gave on Sunday about some particular behavior or clothing choice. During Lent, they would give up going to movies completely or stop eating candy bars. Their talk of church was about the rules that were imposed. This was not at all what happened when I went to church. For me church was a time to socialize with my friends at the youth group while we read or talked about how different religions came about. Sunday school seemed more like a history lesson. I didn’t associate church with telling me how to behave.
Another difference was that we did not have church during the summer months. Just like school, Unitarians took a summer vacation. My Catholic friends were surprised and slightly envious about this. “I wish I could sleep late on Sundays.” For my mostly Catholic friends, church was on Sunday and then it was over. Some attended weekly catechism classes but those were built into the public-school day. The Catholic students would be excused to walk over to a catechism class, while the rest of us stayed in home room for study hall. It was one way the Catholic students were identified. Some of the students were irritated by the idea of others getting to leave school early while they had to sit quietly in home room. “I wonder how many of them just go upstreet and never show up in catechism?” However, I liked the time to do some homework in school. There would be less books to carry home.
Our family’s time at the Unitarian church followed a different path. It wasn’t just a Sunday morning activity. There was a social hour following the church service, church suppers on Saturdays, youth group meetings, men’s night meeting, women’s night meetings, and weekend work parties. At least once a week we went back to the church for some event or other. If, in fact, one reason my parents joined the church was to find a new community that goal was fully met. Any time they went to a party or gathering in those years it was either at the church or the home of a church member.
Church suppers were usually potlucks with different families bringing in dishes to share. There would be several long tables set up in the meeting hall. As a fussy eater, I liked this format. You were able to take whatever you wanted. It was easy for me to choose food with which I was familiar. There was also a wide range of home-made desserts to choose from. I was pretty open to trying any of those!
One time I had arrived early to help set up for the event. Glancing up I see my mother bringing in a large pot of her chili con carne. I was shocked at what happened next. She lurched forward, tipping the pot. The chili went all over the floor. Later she told us she had slipped on a rug, but it looked for all the world like she just threw it on purpose.
Another story my mother used to tell on herself happened at a similar social. Lots of people hovered around making conversation in small groups. The room with its tall ceiling was echoing, almost magnifying the sounds. As my mother was chatting, she was having trouble hearing. She said, “It sounds like a nuthouse in here, doesn’t it?” At home she told my father, “I was so embarrassed when I remembered the man I was talking to had just returned from a stay at Northampton.” Northampton was the site of what we all called a mental hospital in our area. It featured in our childhood taunts as in, “You belong in Northampton.” My father didn’t miss a beat while listening to her. “Well, he ought to know,” he said.
Each Sunday after the service there was a coffee hour. I didn’t drink coffee, but it was a time to talk with my church friends while our parents did. The original idea was for people to gather to talk about the ideas in the sermon, but mostly people just chatted, catching up on each other’s lives. My father called upon his previous experience as a book-store owner to set up a book table with titles he thought people might like to buy. It wasn’t a for profit situation, they paid whatever the books cost. It was a service for the church community. While people were milling about, enjoying their coffee, they would talk to my father about the books he had displayed, choose the ones they wanted to buy and make suggestions for what they might like to see in the future.
My father also took on the task of writing the advertisements in the local papers to encourage new people to visit the church, and perhaps become members. He had a scrap book in which he pasted them with the dates they were published. Maybe so he wouldn’t repeat himself or possibly so he could reuse some ideas he thought were particularly good.
He even wrote new lyrics to a popular hymn. Many members of the church were originally in other denominations. Even Mr. Kibby was trained as a Methodist minister. So the music to many hymns were well known even if the words did not fit the tenets of the Unitarians. In response my father rewrote lyrics to such a hymn. . The notes I have do not tell me the original name of the hymn. When I first found a single sheet of typed lyric titled #90 OPTIMUM VERUM dated 3-3-58, I was a bit surprised. I never thought of my father as musical. After some reflection I realized that while my father was not musical he could be poetic. Often on my mother’s birthday or their wedding anniversary or to celebrate some event like Thanksgiving, he would call us all into the living room to read a poem he had created for the occasion. The verse was usually seven or eight stanzas. Rhyming was important but so was the rhythm of each line.
The verse he wrote for the hymn was similar. Six stanzas, every other line rhyming, but also the cadence of each phrase a perfect rhythm:
The second stanza reads:
“But man’s adventurous spirit/ Will not be caged by creeds
There are no final answers—/ The search is what man needs.”
It concludes:
“All virtues can develop/ When there is truth and light
All prejudices crumble- / When man lives as he might.”
The meaning of the hymn is clear. Man’s spirit should not be bound by creeds or limited by deeds from the past. Man must live in freedom, capable of seeking truth and goodness for himself. (I am following the tradition of the time using the word man to mean all of mankind, including women.)
The title Optimum Verum translates as But the Best. It sounds fancier and more profound in Latin. The lyrics were submitted to the Unitarian-Universalist Association and at one point appeared in the church hymnal with credit given to my father.
Another component of the church community was Mr. Kibby’s commitment to providing employment for individuals who were physically limited in some way. He turned an outbuilding in the back of the church property into a workshop for handicapped individuals called Opportunities Workshop. One evening at youth group meeting, Mr. Kibby asked for volunteers to help him build a kiln for the workshop so he could expand the crafts to include ceramics. The following Saturday I showed up as planned. I was the only one who did. At first this made me nervous as I knew nothing about making a kiln and had figured I would just follow along with whatever the others were doing. However, neither my being alone nor my lack of knowledge bothered Mr. Kibby. He assured me he knew what he was doing and would tell me what to do.
It took the better part of two Saturdays to build the kiln. I recall stacking bricks and working with sheets of fiberglass. Oh, that stuff. Even though I was wearing work gloves, I still remember that feeling in the tips of my fingers caused by touching this material. I suppose it was small particles of the fiberglass that became embedded in the skin. The gloves offered some protection but not enough. I did wear goggles and hopefully a mask as well.
I told him all about my plan to be a high school math teacher. At one point, he paused from our work on the bricks, looked directly at me and said, “You’ll be good at that.” This was so reassuring to me. Maybe he was just being generally supportive, but he sounded so sure. Maybe he had noticed something about the way I was with people, I do know his comment made me even more confident that this was the right career for me.
In addition to running the Opportunities Workshop, the church was often involved in fundraising for various charitable groups. UNICEF was among them.
A nickel and a dime
A nickel and a dime.
Oh, won’t we have a time
With a nickel and a dime!
This little poem was the refrain in a play the youth group put on at one Sunday night church social. The message of the play was that while we could buy a bottle of soda, a bag of chips, and a candy bar for that fifteen cents, if we gave it to UNICEF they could feed a family in some far-away place like Africa or India. It was to encourage us to be good citizens of the world and to share our wealth.
The play was the kickoff to the Halloween Trick or Treat for UNICEF event. This was a city-wide event with several different churches involved. I happily volunteered. I knew I was too old for trick or treating but still loved the idea of dressing up and going out on trick or treat night. In my attic I searched through my mother’s old clothes to put together what I considered a fortune teller’s outfit. This consisted of a wide swishy skirt, black with gold strands, a white blouse with puffy sleeves, and a black sequined shawl wrapped around me. It never occurred to me to ask my mother when she wore these clothes or why she had them at all. I loved this outfit.
In Pittsfield October 31 was reserved for the annual Halloween parade while trick or treat night was usually the 30th. Each of us who had volunteered for the UNICEF trick or treat had been given a small cardboard box for donations, a list of streets in our neighborhoods to canvass, and brochures about how well UNICEF would use the funds collected. This was great fun for me. Most people dropped some change into my UNICEF box, but offered me candy as well. “You’re such a good person to do this. Take a candy bar too.”
I felt a bit like a fraud when people thanked me for being selfless. Here I was a teenager walking around at night, in costume getting free candy. To top it off, when I arrived at the Episcopal church which is where we all turned in what they had collected, they had organized a Halloween party for the volunteers. Doughnuts, cider, balloons, bobbing for apples. And more candy to take home!
Most of the kids my age who lived on Montgomery Avenue were Catholic. Families went to St Charles Church and their kids went to St Charles Elementary School. There was a complex of Catholic Church buildings on the corner of Pontoosuc and Briggs Avenues. The church, the teaching nun’s housing, and the school, all just a few blocks walk from Montgomery. I went to public school so didn’t see much of these kids until the summer. Then we would play in each other’s yards or on the street itself. Badminton was a big draw in my yard as my father had set up a net and purchased rackets and birds.
One August day a girl who was about my age, thirteen, started talking about religion as we played. She was trying to understand why I didn’t go to church in the summer. “Isn’t that a sin? Missing church?” I tried to explain that the Unitarian Church didn’t talk about sin. She was clearly confused about this. I had an idea. “It’s going to start up in a week or so, maybe you can come with me one Sunday and see what it is like?” She thought a moment and said she’d have to ask her mother. A few days later, she told me her mom said she couldn’t go to a different church as she was Catholic. But Judy, that was her name, did have an idea, the reverse of mine. “Why don’t you come with me one Sunday and see what my church is like?” So that is what I did.
She explained I needed to wear a hat. “Women always cover their heads in church. You don’t need anything fancy, just a scarf tied over your head will do.” I could see she was anxious that I fit in. When we arrived at Sunday mass, she suggested we sit in the back row where we wouldn’t bother anybody. “Just watch and follow along, “ she advised. “Sometimes we sit, sometimes we kneel, sometimes we stand.” Much of the service was in Latin so I didn’t understand what was actually being said, but there was a pleasing rhythm to the way the priest spoke the service, almost like singing or reading a poem. I sat, I knelt, and I stood all at the right times. In a way it was soothing being a part of others moving in the same ways.
Then the priest began to speak in English. I felt this was equivalent to the kind of sermon Mr. Kibby offered. However the tone was quite different. The priest had chosen this day to explain in great detail the horrors that awaited all non-Catholics. He used the phrase “eternal damnation.” He made it clear that no matter how “nice” people might seem, if they were not baptized and confirmed, there was no path to salvation and ultimately heaven. He warned his congregants not to be fooled by their seemingly pleasant neighbors. If they were not Catholic, they would be sent to Hell.
My poor friend was mortified as we listened to this. As we left the church, she told me she was scared for me and my family. I didn’t know how to help her feel okay without disparaging her faith. I was not upset because I didn’t feel threatened by the tone of the priest. To tell her that, though was also to admit I didn’t place any credence in the teachings of her church. I mumbled something like, “It’s okay.” to her apologies. We never talked about religion again.
At the Unitarian Church, I had a choice the weeks when the youth group did not meet. I could either attend the service or help out in the Sunday School as an assistant to the adults who led the sessions for the younger children. I went to the service a few times but found it boring. The service had a pattern to it. An opening prayer or welcome, a hymn, the sermon, a few announcements and a final hymn. I found the sermon long and difficult to follow. I did like the singing. A couple of times a month, the service was broadcast over a local radio station. Those Sundays were different in two ways. One, the service started right at ten o’clock sharp. On other Sundays, people would linger in the hall or talk at the doorway to the meeting room, taking their time to be seated. Once, I recall Mr. Kibby looking a bit impatiently from the pulpit at the doorway, where his wife and mother were chatting. He made a joke about his relatives being the last ones to come in and sit down. Clearly that day was not a radio Sunday!
The other difference was that on Radio Sunday the most familiar and popular hymns were chosen. Mr. Kibby picked hymns that everyone knew the music to, encouraging people to sing loudly so the church would sound full. Radio Sunday or not, my preference would be the nursery school to help out there. It was more fun to play with the little ones than sit and just listen for an hour. As a fringe benefit, this volunteer work also became a source of my babysitting jobs.
There were some exceptions to my avoiding the Sunday service. One was the Sunday before Christmas. The entire church was decorated, pine boughs and red ribbons abounded. All ages attended. Hymns were replaced by Christmas carols. The sermon was shorter, more celebratory than instructive. The service was never on Christmas itself, that day everyone stayed home with their families.
One of the church members was part of a bell ringer’s choir. The week before the holiday service, he came to the youth group with a set of handbells to teach us some of the basics about bell ringing. After giving each of us a particular bell, he showed us the proper way to ring it and as importantly to silence it. After a little practice he conducted us in a simple song. I had expected this would be an easy way to make music, but like many things in life, it turned out to require a lot of practice if you were to make pleasing tones and play in coordination with others. We were not very good. As a result, I appreciated it all the more when I heard the group play traditional Christmas carols the next week at the holiday service.
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Another time I was pleased to attend the service was in spring of 1957. My brother was 18, I was 12, my sister Vicki was 3, and we had a new addition to my family, my sister Lisa. As part of the service, she was to be welcomed into the church. The church had no official baptism or christening rite since a basic tenet was that each person has the right to make that decision for themselves which a baby was not capable of doing so. Instead, the church offered a ceremony of Welcoming at which the church community would be introduced to the new baby. I recall my parents in front of the church with the minister who said a few words before offering my mother a red rose for Lisa.
One paper I found among my parent’s belongings is the text of a sermon titled Tranquility. It’s a five-page single-spaced typed document. The language is rich, almost academic. Mr. Kibby talks about humans seeking peace with the idea that some believe it’s only God who can offer peace in an afterlife. Mr. Kibby disagreed, arguing that social and religious conditioning have led men to believe they are not capable of achieving peace. “Not inconsequential in implication is the religious procrastination of postponement of personal and social regeneration that tends to make the goal unattainable in this world; that makes the individual inadequate.” Do you see why a thirteen- year-old might not find this easy to listen to!
He goes on to list various methods humans have tried as they sought peace of mind; among them, religion, chemical, group association, and mystical. The sermon continues as he points out the negatives of using chemicals (including alcohol) and group association as a tool for finding internal harmony. He concludes we must come to know ourselves “as this is the first step toward loving our neighbors or at least respecting their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The truly religious way is not easy and there are no shortcuts. Be assured the rewards are consistent with the effort.”
Reading this sermon in its entirety now is so interesting. I rarely attended the Unitarian services, don’t recall much conversation with my parents about religion, but have lived my life with the belief that it’s up to each one of us to do the best we can in this world, not to avoid hell or reach for heaven but simply because it’s the right way to live. Perhaps I took in more about what gives meaning to life from the church than I may have thought. Perhaps my beliefs grew from simply watching the way my parents acted in the world, the way they treated and respected people. We honored my grandparents’ religious beliefs by saying grace when they were present and we were friends with our Catholic neighbors without debating religious points with them. We never felt the need to explain our positions or to try to get anyone else to understand our point of view. We just did what we thought was right. That was religion to me.
In 1960, Mr. Kibby left the Pittsfield church to take over a larger parish in Pennsylvania. For a couple of years after he left, my family remained church members. After a series of guest ministers, eventually a new permanent minister was hired. Whatever kept my parents engaged seemed more about Mr. Kibby’s personality, interests and intellectual curiosity than the experience of church itself. Without Mr. Kibby’s sermons and influence, they didn’t seem interested. Sometime during my college years, they stopped going altogether.
During my freshman year in college in Amherst at UMass I was amused to discover the Amherst Unitarian Church was literally the church across the street from St Brigid’s Catholic Church. Like many college students away from home for the first time, I was finding it was up to me to decide if I should go to church on Sundays. I went for a few Sundays but never became engaged with this community.
I did attend a series of evening talks at the church that first semester but it was a way to satisfy an assignment in one of my courses. In those days, all incoming students were required to take a rhetoric course. Some were able to test out of this requirement by showing your public speaking prowess at a session conducted during summer orientation. I was able to test out of the freshman math classes but not speech.
As part of our work for this class, we were to analyze four speeches according to a provided rubric. I chose to go to talks given at the Unitarian church to satisfy this assignment. It would be nice if I could recall what the talks were about or if I spoke to anyone else at the meeting but I did pass this speech class, so that was worth something.
A final story about religion.
Many years later when my second child was about eight, she came to me and asked,
“How come we don’t go to church?” I was startled by this as no conversation about church had been part of our family for years. I inquired, “Why are you asking?” She responded, “Rebecca’s family goes to church every Sunday. She asked me why I don’t go.”
Remembering my inclusive Unitarian upbringing, I told her, “When you’re a little older, we can go to different churches and when you find one that believes the same things you believe in, we can look into joining that one.” “Oh, good,” she said. “I want one that believes in unicorns.” Satisfied she returned to her room full of stuffed animals.
At first, I felt badly, that I had left something out, misled her about the nature of church. Upon reflection, stories about unicorns reveal them to be friendly, kind to others, pure of heart, offering hope and seeking peace. Maybe a church that believes in unicorns isn’t such a bad idea.
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