“FINDING YOUR RELIGION - When the religion you grew up with no longer makes sense”

Scotty McLennan was a student at Yale in the 1960’s, and his roommate was a fellow named Garry Trudeau. Trudeau went on to use Scotty as the model for one of his Doonesbury characters, the Rev. Scot Sloan. The caricature was of Scotty, but he says that he filled out the character with some borrowings from the Rev. William Sloan Coffin, who was chaplain at Yale in those days. He was introduced into Doonesbury in one strip of four frames. “’Good morning. Brother! Welcome to THE EXIT, the coffeehouse where people can really relate! Reverend Scot Sloan’s the name. Perhaps you read about me in ‘Look.’ I’m the fighting young priest who can talk to the young.’ Addressing a helmeted college football player and fraternity man, B.D., Rev. Scot goes on in the third frame. ‘My specialty, of course, is setting up dialogues. Often I am successful in getting people to look at themselves honestly and meaningfully.” In the final frame, B.D. speaks for the first time, saying, ‘Good for you sweetheart. One black coffee to go.’”

While Trudeau was getting established as a very popular cartoonist, Scotty entered Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Law School, getting both degrees at the end of five years. He was ordained to the Unitarian Universalist ministry. He wanted to use his training in both disciplines to help poor people, and he set up a legal ministry, attached to an old Boston organization we used to call the Ben Frat: the Benevolent Fraternity of Unitarian Churches. For five years he worked for the poor people of one inner city neighborhood. He found himself at a low point in his life when he was thirty years old: his wife had left him; he was developing an ulcer; he was overworked and not finding the fulfillment he had hoped for in spending time in court and in the law library, keeping people from being evicted, getting them the health benefits they deserved, representing them in neighborhood disputes. He was also spiritually empty. He decided to work one more year, save, and then take a year to travel around the world, learning about many cultures and many religions, and, incidentally, learning who he was and what his religion was. When he returned to Boston, he worked at a slightly different legal ministry for two years and then accepted an invitation to become the Chaplain at Tufts University. He stayed there for sixteen years before becoming Dean of Religious Life at Stanford University.

I borrowed the title of his first book for my sermon this morning. As a university chaplain he dealt with persons from every background, race and class as both teacher and counselor. “When the religion you grew up with has lost its meaning” probably describes what many of us have gone through in our lives. McLennan crams his book with stories of many different people in that situation, and he uses the metaphor of climbing a mountain to describe the religious journey. He breaks it into stages, which he calls Magic, Reality, Dependence, Independence, Interdependence, and Unity. Most of us start out in life with some magic conceptions of a God pulling strings to make things happen and other mythic explanations of the world around us, perhaps angels and demons. Then we tend to shuck off those explanations and try to understand how the world really works. We probably go through a time of being very much taken with particular leaders or teachers who help us to shape our beliefs. The next stage is more skeptical, more personal and unique to us. There comes a time when we find it important to identify with a group and to see our religion more in institutional, perhaps churchly, terms. The final level for Scotty he calls unity, when all the experience is put together, perhaps leading to moments of ecstasy or times of profound awareness. He thinks that not many people make it that far.

But let us go back to the situation described in our title: “when the religion you grew up with has lost its meaning.” Some people stay with the religious practices of their childhood, even when they are no longer significant in their lives. Others just drift away, finding other uses for the time and energy that used to go into a church or temple. Recently I talked with someone who did not drift away, but ran away, saying, “I was subjected to religious abuse. I would rather have been physically abused; then I would know who to be mad at. But the impact of all that guilt and bigotry stays with you.”

My experience was not like that. The Methodist Church was good to me growing up, and it was a source of support and identity for my family. I might have gone on being a Methodist for a long time, but I am sure I would not have been tempted to enter the Methodist ministry.

Some of the people whose stories are told in McLennan’s book have difficulty leaving the religious tradition they grew up with because their families take it so hard. They have to live with ruptured relations or find ways to demonstrate that this is not a rejection of the members of their families but simply a growth and movement in another direction.

Because I am such a skeptical Unitarian Universalist, I have to insert the question: who says we need a religion? Why do we need it?

Don’t a lot of people get along very well without anything we could really call a religion? These are the sort of questions which do not have any single right answer. There are answers out there, but we have to test them against our own minds and hearts to find the ones that fit. I do like what Henry David Thoreau said in our reading:

“I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived.”

Have you known people whose lives seemed to be just going through the motions, not really living? Have you felt that way sometimes yourself? It seems to me that part of the task of religion is to help us to give our lives meaning, somehow to put it all together so that it adds up to being a real person. All of us face times when, like Scotty McLennan at thirty, it all seems to be falling apart in emptiness and despair. Some people think of suicide at times like that, and some people commit it. Can religion make a difference? I think so. A religion which encourages us to search ourselves regularly, to know ourselves, and to live bravely instead of fearfully, generously instead of meanly, and hopefully instead of pessimistically, can certainly make a difference in how we see and understand ourselves, and ultimately in how we live our lives.

McLennan is right in pointing out that religion is not something that some people have and some people don’t have, like freckles; rather it is a process of thinking, experiencing, relating and celebrating. Some of us pay more attention than others to the process, but we are all involved in it. And it is not all in our heads; it is walking and singing and sitting under a tree and looking at the sky. Sometimes it is being present where there is pain, hunger, suffering, and responding as best we can. Sometimes it is just doing what needs to be done, and sometimes it is finding others whose quest of the spirit is similar enough to ours that we want to join them. It is risky for anyone to try to chart the steps and stages of such an individual experience as finding one’s religion, and no one has to feel a need to place one’s own development somewhere on the chart, but I think that Scotty’s description of the process is helpful to us especially, as Unitarian Universalists, because we are such individualists that sometimes we think and act as though we invented every human experience for ourselves.

Finding one’s own religion Scotty McLennan likens to climbing a mountain. You have to start somewhere and find a path. There are lots of paths, and he suggests that the best way to get started is just to pick one of them, i.e., pick a religious group or tradition that seems possible for you and just tackle the mountain up that path. At one point in his journey he spent a whole summer living and studying with a Hindu teacher. When he went to the teacher and said that he had decided to become a Hindu, the master said, “No, no. You’ve missed the whole point of all that I have been teaching you. You’ve grown up as a Christian, and you know a lot about that path. It’s the religion of your family and your culture. You know almost nothing of Hinduism. Go back and be the best Christian you can be." That was not the response that Scotty expected, but he took it to heart and has been a Christian Unitarian Universalist ever since.

How do you feel about the faith you grew up with? In what ways is it part of you yet? And where are you in the process of finding your true religion? I hope that it includes some celebrating, some good life for you and for others. We all need to celebrate more, to make special times that are different from every day, times when we come together

affirming that however we express it, life is good, and we are very, very glad to be part of it. That’s real religion!