Religious Education for Such a Time as This

"You know," Harold said. "You could say something about religious education."

Excuse me?

Well now, here was a challenge. What could I possibly have to say about religious education? I had managed to fool people into believing that I knew something about the field so far, but how could I stand here and wax prophetic for fifteen minutes on a subject that I knew relatively nothing about?

"Yes, sure," I said. And somehow, I got through it.

This morning, I'm standing here in front of you again and you know what? I feel like I know even less about religious education than I did two years ago.

It's a paradox. At a Mass Bay District meeting of religious educators a couple of months ago, I told my colleagues that the longer I'm involved in this work, the more difficult it becomes. It has taken some time for me to understand the complex nature of the work… to learn that almost nothing in religious education is black or white. Kids want one thing, parents want another-but here's the catch: what one parent wants is the complete opposite of what another one wants. (Need I mention that those two at opposite ends of the spectrum are the parents of the same child?) You want more Bible study? He doesn't want any. You think we need more structure in our classrooms? She thinks we're too much like regular school as it is. And so on.

Religious education. The term itself is a bit of a paradox. According to Webster's, the word religious means a faithful devotion to an… ultimate reality or deity. Education is the knowledge and development resulting from an educational process. So are we concerned mainly with faith? Or are we concerned mainly with knowledge? Which are we talking about here?

In my conversations with parents and teachers, I have come to learn that there are-surprise!-differing opinions about the main purpose of our Young Church program. There are those who believe that our most important task is to provide a place of love and acceptance for our children. We must hold them in a loving embrace so that they will have positive feelings toward church, themselves, and others. There are those, on the other hand, who believe we need a meatier curriculum-one that really teaches stories of the Jewish and Christian scriptures and other sacred texts, that teaches Unitarian Universalist history, and so on.

Admittedly, I have mostly been in the first camp, drawing from my own church experience as a youth. I couldn't tell you a single fact, story, or lesson that I learned there, but I can tell you this: I remember that not a single kid in my confirmation class laughed at me when I used to pronounce the "t" in "apostle." I remember the warmth with which I was always welcomed by the adults who served with me on the religious education committee. It was, without a doubt, a community that embraced me and helped to shape me.

But these are different times. Though I still believe fiercely in the power and necessity of a strong community, I realize that our lives today are not necessarily conducive to creating the type of church community that I grew up in. Kids have busier lives now than they did in my day. Church is, I have sadly come to admit, just one more activity in lives that are already full. My vision of a church where everyone knows your name is starting to feel quaint and old-fashioned, like the black and white portrait prints of my kids that I recently ordered from Sears.

So, what do we have to offer? By asking this question, I don't mean to imply that we should give up on our community-building efforts. But maybe in this day and age, we need to set our sights on other goals, too. What might those goals be? What is the best that we, as a Unitarian Universalist congregation, can give to our kids?

On our Young Church survey last year, we asked what parents want from the program. One parent responded: I want my kids to have something to lean on in tough times. My mind has returned to this simple but powerful statement many times over the past year. For who can deny that these are indeed tough times? The world collectively holds its breath, waiting for the next devastating act of violence, be it in the form of war or terrorism. And I wonder if Unitarian Universalism is giving our kids something to lean on… something to give them hope in such a time as this.

I have often thought that, in some ways, it must be hard to be a UU kid. With all our emphasis on the personal search for truth and meaning, it's hard for kids to explain this religion of ours to their peers. It often gets explained as "a religion where you can believe anything you want." (In truth, I've heard adults explain it this way!) But on a deeper level, I think it must be hard to be a kid and not have some of the reassurances that some other religions provide. Our kids do not sing "Jesus Loves Me" or "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands," for instance. Instead, we sing "We've Got the Whole World in Our Hands". "We" presumably means all of us. But how reassuring is that at a time when truthfully, the fate of our planet seems entirely out of the hands of all but a few?

I watch as our kids come here week after week, learning about what other religions teach, learning about Unitarian Universalist history, learning about the good deeds of courageous men and women. This is sort of a standard way of doing Unitarian Universalist religious education. It is a pretty common assumption that these are the building blocks that will help each child build his or her own faith. And that is all well and good. But in order to build, one must have a foundation. I believe that it is the duty of the religious education program to help provide that foundation.

As Unitarian Universalists, of course, we start to squirm at the suggestion that we should tell our children what to believe. So I won't suggest that we tell our children what to believe. But I will suggest that we find a common vision for what we want our children, as Unitarian Universalists, to believe. And then I will suggest that everything we do-every program we plan, every curriculum we develop-be done through the lens of this vision.

I will go one step further and provide you with a vision!

I have a vision for what I want our kids to understand more than anything about our religion. The vision came to me when I listened to our denomination's President, Bill Sinkford, preach at our combined Association Sunday in Haverhill a few weeks ago. During the service, he challenged each of us to create an "elevator speech" about Unitarian Universalism. In other words, if someone gets on the 11th floor and asks you what Unitarian Universalism is, you have so many seconds to give an answer. If this scenario seems farfetched to you, just go to General Assembly, our annual meeting-it will happen far more frequently than you would have thought.

You might have assumed that, having been a UU for close to 15 years, and working as a religious professional, I would have perfected my elevator speech by now. Not really. I have always relied on the seven principles and a vague mumbling about a personal search to describe our religion. The principles are, I think, a useful tool for us, but are not the end-all and be-all of our historic faith. We are tied as UUs by something deeper than these principles that were drafted and voted on 20 years ago. It has only been in recent weeks, perhaps because I have myself needed my faith to lean on, that I have come to articulate it.

Like the Rev. Sinkford's, my definition is historically-based. Unitarian Universalism did not, after all, come spiraling out of a black hole just last week. As I've tried to come to understand what makes it a religion as opposed to, say, an interfaith community, I have looked to the roots of both Unitarianism and Universalism. I'll spare you the long history lesson because I'm sure half of you know the history better than I do anyway. Instead, I'll remind you of a little quip that simplifies our early theological positions: The Universalists believed that God was too good to damn them; the Unitarians believed that they were too good to be damned.

In this age of bumper sticker philosophy, it might be said like this: God is good. We are good.

The message is clear to me: God is good, we are good, we are part of God. The wording needs a little tweaking, I know, to appeal to everyone. You might wish to rephrase it as such: Life embraces us. We are all inherently good, and thus, inherently connected.

Do you agree with me that these are simple but profound truths? Are these beliefs that we can try to instill in our children?

Life embraces us. We are inherently good, and thus, inherently connected. Imagine if our children and youth believed deeply in these truths. Imagine if we believed deeply in these truths. On my best days, I do. On my best days, I feel a deep connection to people for reasons that I can't explain. I grieve inexplicably for the families of people lost in a fire I hear about on the radio. The woman struggling with the two little kids and full shopping cart becomes my kindred spirit. I know that the man who asks me for money when I get off the train in Boston is simply living his life the best that he can. We are all living our lives the only way we know how. At times, I know this. Those times are, unfortunately, fleeting. But I have been able to lean on this faith in our interconnectedness, this faith that we are all a part of a masterful web, in times of crisis.

This leads to a logical question. I said earlier that it is the duty of the religious education program to help provide kids with a foundation on which to build their own faith. If the foundation is this belief in our goodness and connectedness, how do we go about creating it? How do we help our children to not only understand that this is what Unitarian Universalism is about, but also to feel it deeply in their hearts and bones?

It's a tall order, to be sure. It's not something that can be done in one hour a week. It must be taught and modeled and nurtured in the home and the outside world. But this does not get me off the hook! Everything we do in our program must reflect these beliefs and must have the goal of nurturing these beliefs in our children.

I recently read The Courage to Teach, by Parker Palmer. In this book, Palmer writes of the importance of creating paradoxical tension in the classroom. Though he's writing about secular education, much of what he says can be applied to religious education. In his discussion about paradox, he lists six paradoxical tensions that the tries to build into his classroom. These include honoring the "little" stories of the students and honoring the "big" stories of the disciplines and traditions; another is welcoming silence in the classroom and welcoming speech. The paradox he suggests that can be most useful to us, I think, is this: the learning space should be hospitable and charged. He writes:

A learning space must be hospitable-inviting as well as open, safe and trustworthy as well as free… [it] must have features that help students deal with the dangers of an educational expedition: places to rest, places to find nourishment, even places to seek shelter when one feels overexposed.

But if the expedition is to take us somewhere, the space must also be charged. If students are to learn at the deepest levels, they must not feel so safe that they fall asleep: they need to feel the risks inherent in pursuing the deep things of the world or of the soul.

I was reminded of this recently when a transgender person came to talk with our seventh and eighth graders in their Our Whole Lives class. As I read the anonymous evaluation forms that they had filled out on the speaker's visit, I realized what a meaningful exchange it had been. I was touched by the depth, maturity, and insightfulness with which they reflected on their conversation. Many of them were transformed by the encounter. It was not their most comfortable moment. But within the safety of a loving community, they were able to "pursue the deep things of the soul." They were able to be in relationship with a person who by all outward appearances was very different from each of them and they were able to honor that person and ask themselves tough questions.

Opening their hearts to others, making connections with those who are different, helping to comfort those who suffer from injustices, will not solve the world's problems. But in doing this sacred work, our kids will, I believe, come to understand what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. They will come to understand that being a Unitarian Universalist does not necessarily mean that you can believe anything you want. They will come to have faith in the goodness of the human spirit. They will have a faith that will, in the words of Olympia Brown, comfort them in sorrow, strengthen them for noble duty, and make the world beautiful.

Unitarian Universalism has much to offer our children and youth. It can give them something to lean on in these tough times. In spite of all that I don't know about religious education, I do feel that we can provide a more focused message about what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. This does not mean that we feed them answers to their theological questions. This does not mean that we deny them their personal search. What it means is that we do what we can to help them understand that as Unitarian Universalists, we are called to recognize the sacredness of every single life on earth.

Life embraces us. We are inherently good and thus, inherently connected.

Amen.

Julie Parker Amery