© Hannah Wells
October 12, 2003
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
SERMON
I am what they call a “lifer.” No, I don’t mean a convicted felon, or even a career military person. I mean a life-long Unitarian Universalist. My parents found the church when I was a year old in Deerfield, IL, north of Chicago in suburbia. As a typical UU kid, I went to Sunday school sporadically until we had the pre-cursor to the OWL – Our Whole Lives – sexuality program. It was called AYS back then, About Your Sexuality. I still think of those filmstrips sometimes and cringe. Barbaric or not, I know it kept a good group of us Junior Highers returning faithfully each Sunday for a year. Soon after, we all went through the Coming of Age program under the instruction of the same teachers we had for AYS, Tim and Claudette Dirsmith, a young married couple.
All in all, I have to say that my childhood UU curricula wasn’t all that great, but I think the commitment of the youth advisors made a bigger impression on me than anything else. There wasn’t much to the Coming of Age program when I went through it, but I definitely remember the Affirmation ceremony we had one Spring Sunday morning when I was 14 years old. We got to share a little speech with the congregation and I was excited about that.
I hold here before you the actual hand written affirmation speech. To be affirmed is the UU version of being confirmed; it’s a recognition ceremony of continuing status as a UU into adulthood. I had no idea at the time that I was going to be where I’m at today, on the path to ministry. But apparently, shoddy or not, the Coming of Age program planted a seed that I believe kept me coming back. I’m going to share now what I shared with my home congregation 16 years ago. . . .
After I finished reading this credo statement, I pressed play on a boom box and sure enough, Joan Baez sang the cover of Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young.” The sanctuary was very still, and I noticed people were starting to cry. Staci Banta, my Sunday school friend who I’d known since I was two, and I sat there dry-eyed while the song played, bemused. I know we both sensed a power we hadn’t felt before. It wasn’t just a day recognizing our faith, it was a day the adults recognized US.
Do you remember that moment in your early teens? When the adults who you grew up around really saw that glimmer in you of what was to come? Or when you first did something that impressed the adults, and it gave you the first taste of what it feels like to be acknowledged as a person, regardless of your age? This is a moment of ‘coming of age,’ when you become aware of the extent of your own worth and dignity as a human being, by way of the world simply noticing you.
Maybe some of you did a Coming of Age ceremony when you were 14, but it was in a different faith. Maybe you didn’t get a chance to address the congregation. What if you were given the chance to go back in time and address a liberal church faith. What religious beliefs would you have said were most important to you when you were 14? What beliefs are most important to you now? Have you considered which beliefs you held as a youth informed the adult that you have become? And what about the times in your adulthood that you’ve welcomed such a significant amount of change in your life that it, too, was like a coming of age? Often we don’t acknowledge that the difficult yet positive changes we make in our lives can be thought of as rites of passage.
I didn’t mind leaving my home church behind when I went to college because I was ready to get away from anything “home related.” I was ready to embark upon the adventure of life after leaving home. Since I was little, I have had itchy feet. I loved going away to camp for 2 weeks every summer. I finagled overseas travel before I was 16. I decided on Kalamazoo College in Michigan for my under grad solely because they offered a 3-week adventure trip in Ontario for Freshman Orientation. At some point my family started to joke that I have wheels on my posterior.
This adventuring spirit followed me after college, when I decided to move to Oregon to fight forest fires for the summer. How perfect, the glamour and mystique of a dangerous vocation rewarded with thousands of dollars by the end of the season that I would proceed to fund my trip around the world with. But my parade was literally rained on when there were no big fires to fight that summer and no big bucks to be made. That is called a “bad fire season” from the firefighter’s point of view. So I rode my bike to the San Juan Islands and went hitchhiking to Santa Cruz instead. I went broke, and, broke up with my parents’ fantasy of a future husband, Ed, who was slaving away for Arthur Andersen in Atlanta. I was destined to begin a five year stint in the hippie capitol of the United States: Eugene, OR. You might think Berkeley is the hippie capitol but it’s Eugene because there’s not even a third of the money there is in Berkeley in Eugene.
My attitude toward life at that time reminds me of the Alanis Morrissette song, “Hand in Pocket.” . . . . “I’m free but I’m focused, I’m sane but I’m overwhelmed, I’m tired but I’m working, yeah . . .” Mostly I was right about the part that I hadn’t got it all figured out just yet. I learned a lot of hard lessons about the real world between 1995 and 2000. While many people were benefiting from the country’s economic boom I was trying to get my rent paid on time with the variety of odd jobs I had, and I do mean odd. But it all seemed worth it at the time; it was the trade off for living in a beautiful town with liberal-minded, friendly people. Or, what many people – certainly my family – called the hippie lifestyle. I tend to wrinkle my nose at this label, for if I was a hippie, I was at least one of the cleanest. But to make a point to the young people sitting in the congregation today, let’s say it was the modern day hippie lifestyle, with all its stereotypical trappings. I am here to say that, I admit, it is overrated.
One day you wake up and you realize you are hanging out with people who really aren’t going anywhere. You may share some values in common, but you notice there are a few very important ones missing, such as integrity and a sense of accomplishment. You think, maybe participating in society isn’t such a bad idea after all. Fresh out of college, I had mistaken this transient community I was a part of with something I wanted very badly: a community that shared the same values I had grown up with and wanted to live out.
In retrospect, I can see now that I romanticized the so-called hippie lifestyle for a few reasons. I was reluctant to leave the anything-goes community of Eugene, OR because I was reluctant to come to terms with who I really am. I am a well-educated Euro-American young woman who grew up Unitarian Universalist on the North Shore of Chicago. I represent a fairly small slice of the American social strata. The world is my oyster, but because of this, I feared that I would become an elitist, and the socialist in me who has great compassion for the poor did not want this to happen. In order to not fulfill the destiny that was surely mine for the taking, I felt I needed to stay “down with the people.”
But to stay down, I realized, meant, to stay down, and that was not who I am. I know now that I am extremely fortunate to possess the gifts and blessings life has given me, and it would be an injustice to my own life, I feel, if I did not use these gifts in service to others. My gifts have called me to the UU ministry. And though I would not generally label UUs and other religious liberals as “elitist,” in many structural contexts of this society, we are. Elitist or not, I believe in our sincerity to condemn injustice. We are hard working, civic-minded citizens who represent the badly needed liberal end of religious belief. Learning how to be a minister to you will be a great honor; I am serving my roots. And so I have discovered that it is only through acknowledging the truth of who I am that makes it possible, in the end, to serve others. In this way, I have come home to myself.
I look forward to that community I have searched for since college – the one that shares my values and lives them. It is ironic to me now, that in all my adventuresome spirit of my young adult years, I have been running away from what I want the most: this sacred, reliable community I can call home. I often used to wonder how my older brother could stay so close to home after college and his three best friends from High school, who all live near each other in Chicago. Now I see that a lack of community with roots was the trade off for experiencing more of the world. It reminds me of the question Forrest Church poses in the reading I read to you earlier. “How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?” I am still learning about this, and I am certain it has something to do with being at home within myself, wherever it is I may find myself.
So – some beliefs of mine have changed since I wrote that affirmation speech, but not a lot. They’ve really only gotten more specific. When I was 14 I wrote, “And I think that’s what Unitarians are about. Knowing how you feel, who you are, having a clear picture of what you believe in, seriously considering the values that are important to you and how to use them properly. It gives me the chills to think that I am so lucky to know these things are important.” – It still gives me the chills to think that I am so lucky to know these things are important. Because it seems like, no matter how much change or transition is in my life, no matter how scared I get, no matter how tough the decisions are before me, no matter who or what I lose, if I can remember that this is who I am and where I came from, I’m gonna be okay.
Speaking of transition, I just turned 30 years old, and I don’t care if 30 still sounds young to some of you, losing my 20’s is a loss! But it’s also a coming of age. And I look at moving from the laity to clergy as involving some loss too, but I know it’s also a rite of passage. What changes and losses in your life can be considered rites of passage? I invite you to recognize them as such. Because when you do, you acknowledge your dignity and worth as a human being at a particular point on the path of life. This is especially important when the changes are hard, because it’s a good way to love yourself in the midst of pain. No matter how old you are, life is a continual process of coming of age.
And if you look at the life of this church, First UU Church of Austin, it too is coming of age in many ways. There are growing pains. It’s large enough now and there’s enough youth that it’s high time for its own Coming of Age program. The very first of its kind will be launched this January. How exciting! What’s exciting about it is that the church is ready to recognize its youth as valuable members of this community. That we are making a point of saying to them, we want you to be a part of Unitarian Universalism’s future. You are our future. We want your spiritual journey home to lead you HERE. But what’s even more exciting is that we “adults” are going to get a chance to learn from them. Our youth possess the power of seeing the world with fresh eyes, and therefore can offer some of the most authentic expressions of our liberal church faith.
Coming of age. It’s part of coming to our full humanity, of claiming our promise. It’s something we’ll all be doing here this year, and I’m excited to be a part of it with you. Together, we’re going to have a great year.
