From Your Minister

Quest Monthly Magazine

One thing I do to relax is to read mystery novels. Not the kind where you are continually terrified and can’t breathe deeply while you read them—that’s not relaxing to me. No, I read mysteries where a plucky heroine (and yes, it’s always a heroine) will come near death while tracking down a murderer, but I know very well she’ll be just fine in the end.

In each of these books, women do physically daring things: go to the murderer’s house for a confrontation at midnight; ignore death threats and keep investigating; survive duct tape and being tied to chairs repeatedly. And in each of these books, there is a resting place, a place where the heroine belongs, where she can relax.

As tension builds in the book, those places of belonging become more important. It might be a relationship with someone trusted who is equally daring and brave. It might be a cafe’ where the food is reliable and the company is familiar. It might be dog shows or catering jobs or Chinatown in New York City, depending on the particular identities of the heroine. What or where doesn’t matter. It might even be a relationship which is abrasive and annoying, but familiar. What matters is that there is a place where the heroine is known, and seen; where the heroine belongs.

Realizing how relieved I am when fictional characters, engaged in unrealistic activities, find places where they belong, I can only imagine how relieved I am—consciously or unconsciously—to have such places myself, and when people I care about have such places.

In some sense, CLF is one giant opportunity to belong. Our mission is to bring Unitarian Universalism and liberal religious values to “Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime.” There are many things we cannot do for one another, such as take casseroles to each other’s houses, drive each other to frightening doctor’s appointments, or form a choir.

Yet I am always moved by how much belonging here matters to people, and gives us strength for our lives. Even people who don’t ever write, call or visit us online, but simply receive this newsletter each month, tell me they feel connected in deep and meaningful ways.

I think of a story passed on to me by my mother, of an event that probably took place in the 1950s. My mom had a friend who, after deciding to marry in a Unitarian church and become Unitarian instead of staying in her family’s denomination, went with fear and dread to tell her parents about this decision. The mother responded exactly as expected—terrified that this young bride would go to hell.

The father, however, took her into his office, and opened his desk drawer. From underneath a pile of business papers, he pulled out…a copy of the CLF newsletter. He had been secretly subscribing for years, held by reassurance that there was a place where his ideas were not going to be judged, but welcomed; reassured that others believed as he did.

This sense of belonging, of being connected to others like us, can keep us going, even if it is held as tenuously as this man felt he could hold it, secretly reading about Unitarianism as if it were something shameful and sinful. One friend of mine who knew at an early age that she did not want to marry a man said she would parse every word that adult women around her spoke. When my friend was in first grade an unmarried teacher gave her hope that she was not alone in the world. Another friend, African American, said that when she was growing up she would watch The Lone Ranger because Tonto, the Native American sidekick, was the only person of color she could see on TV who actually had a name and a personality.

Some people have to work much harder than others to belong. Those with conventional ideas and/or personal identities favored by media and culture are told from birth that belonging is a birthright. Mirrors everywhere reflect back normalizing messages. Those who live with marginalized identities or are quirkier—particularly if they are born into conventional families—have a harder time of it.

Our large community of people with diverse lives and experiences means that, at CLF and in this publication, we try to include a variety of viewpoints which will connect with different people. We avoid printing authors (besides Lynn Ungar and me) more than once a year. We try to feature seasoned voices along with fresh and new ones. As much as possible, we try to feature diversity in race, age, experience, geography, and tone.

When I write my columns I am thinking of providing a constant touchstone amidst all of the diverse—and much more substantive—voices that make up the rest of each newsletter. I hope that my voice, no matter what I am reflecting on, is most centrally saying to you, “You belong here. You. Just as you are. This is your resting place.”

Many of us make more decisions in a day now than our ancestors did in their lifetimes. In all of this change and flux and choice, may you know that you belong on this planet by belonging to places and people that know and see you. And may CLF be one of those places.