What's your religious inheritance? The view of a UU.

“There was a moment in the 1960s or 1970s when Unitarian Universalism might have become an unofficial Church of Humanism. Humanism was clearly the dominant philosophy and all forms of traditional religion were in retreat. Many UUs felt that their centuries-long evolutionary journey was done now: They had shaken off the barnacles of orthodox Christianity and had arrived at Humanism.

Many still feel that way, but the community as a whole has gone in a different direction. Particularly among the ministry, there is a trend to view traditional religion not as an encrustation to be shaken off, but as a resource to be mined. The solid shore of Humanism is largely taken for granted, but from that shore many 21st-century UUs dive back into religion, to see what can be salvaged: community-building rituals, teaching stories, techniques of personal transformation, invocations of awe and wonder, and so on.

And so, religious words that once seemed to be on their way out—worship, prayer, God, holy, sacred, salvation, divine, and many others—are on the upswing again. If you tap on those words, if you ask what UUs are trying to get at by using them, chances are you'll hear an explanation largely compatible with an underlying Humanism. But if you view the words themselves as the carriers of a dangerous infection, you'll find today's UU churches to be unhygienic environments.”  — Doug Muder

My religious inheritance? Primarily Roman Catholic. My mother’s family was French Roman Catholic, handed down through generations of Acadians. My father’s maternal family was Congregational-Protestant. Dad’s paternal side was Irish Catholic, straight back to County Waterford – so Catholic that my paternal great-grandmother spirited the baby away to be baptized by a priest, right under my grandmother’s nose. My brother and I were raised Catholic.

My own current belief system sits firmly in the agnostic and religious humanist camp, but I am not one to take on labels easily. I prefer to grow and change with what’s right for me, and I’m glad that the framework of Unitarian Universalism allows me – and asks me – to do that.

But I still have the trappings of Catholicism around me. I appreciate the “Cult of Mary” that retains within it an ancient form of goddess/earth-mother worship going back through to Isis and other far older archetypal female figures. I have a figurine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, because to me she’s one of the protection goddesses of the American continents.  But she stands next to tiny figures of the Buddha and Kwan Yin. My Catholic confirmation name is Bridgette (for St. Brigid of Kildare) and I keep Brigid’s cross hung in my living room: not only a Christian symbol, but purportedly a prehistoric sun wheel symbol. I have something in me about wanting to keep symbols of protection around me and it works for me to use images and statues for that purpose.

I realize perhaps this behavior is sourced out of my religious inheritance: being taught to pray to the trinity (God/Jesus/Holy Spirit) and the saints for protection. I’m okay with that, but it doesn’t mean I’m praying to the iconography. Instead, it is similar to keeping a small library of books around me: books reassure me of the knowledge that is also our collective societal inheritance. I feel as if our religious inheritance and our written (not to mention oral) inheritance must stand together to carry us forward. I acknowledge that it may be theologically immature to select the bits of the Catholic religion with which I resonate – but I have long felt I could not follow the core tenets of the Catholic faith unless I was outside of that religion’s dogmatic and institutional structures.

So I would ask: how do you view the religion of your inheritance? Is it something you accept wholly and completely? Is it something to be shaken off and left behind? It is a “source” that might offer truth and meaning? What if you had no religious inheritance? What kind of religious inheritance will your children have? How will their behaviors differ from yours if you had a different inheritance?