Starting on the path to UU

In my Faith Journey post I referred to a letter I wrote in my LiveJournal that really kicked off my path to Unitarian Universalism. I wanted to share this letter since it reflects how much my beliefs were in aligned with UU, before knowing what UU was. To set the setting for this post, it was in December of 2005. I was in the ugliest phase of my custody battle and had been out of work for about 5 months. It was Christmas Eve and I had found out earlier that day that my ex-wife wasn't going to allow me to see Audrey until I had paid back due child support. Here was my post back then:

I have thought a bit about how I got to this state of mind, but I am here and I am going with the flow. Bare with me as I explore a thought I had tonight that I feel I have been getting to for a while now.

I am inspired by the religions of the world in one way, the core belief of love. I feel like that love toward your fellow man is awe inspiring and should be sought after above all things. We exist in the world together and we might as well make the best of it. I enjoy the teachings of Jesus, Mohammad, and other great people because they inspire men to love one another. Unfortunately the idea is twisted when turned into dogma and build into an institution. I understand why people want to spread the good word, because if you realize the purity of life in loving one another, then it is a good world to live in.

Most of you know me as an atheist, and you are right. I could never understand worship, because I didn't understand how important love is. Now that I do, I want to join others that believe the same. But I think that man is capable of finding this joyous love from within. I think it is much easier to draw your strength from some sort of higher power, but I believe that individually, we all have the capability for love. We do not need to create a god to do great things. The problem with a deity, is that once you have accepted that a god has brought you such a good life, then you feel the need to repay such a gift. That leads to worship. Then you are spending more time honoring the god that gave you your love than practicing the things that inspired the religion in the first place.

I am not sure if I am making sense, but I am trying my best to explain a belief system that I have been seeking. I believe in love from within, that all actions should be based on the premise of love for your fellow man, and to inspire your neighbor to do the same. I do not want to follow a god, or a person, but I am willing to listen to those who have figured out how to make this work, and learn from them. I look around my life and want the best for all my friends in family, and want to help them get it. Could you imagine what the world would be like if we all could live by the golden rule?!? That is the thought that excites and inspires me.

Does such a belief system exist? Yes, in many forms. I, however, am contemplating something of my own. I am filled with such a desire to make the world a better place, and must figure out how to do so. I am thinking of creating some sort of place of dialog, and since I am a geek, I probably do so on the web. (I checked on kingdomoflove.com, but it's a porn site.) I am not going to run off and do anything tonight, but I will sleep on it. I have had quite an emotional day, and I might be in a state of lunacy. But this feels right. And I need to work out how to live in a dog-eat-dog world and not get swallowed by life's misgivings. I want a way to talk to others on an ongoing basis, and, as a community, figure out how to live together with love in all things.

I truly believe that this is what my sister would have done if she was still alive. She just wanted everyone to be happy. I would love some feedback, please be honest with me.

Later, I had friends over and one of them mentions humanism. While I had heard the term, I really didn't know what it meant. I would be about 9 months before I found UUCA.

My Faith Journey

If you are a UU convert, you might have gone through the exercise of mapping out your faith journey in the obligatory "New UU" class. For everyone else, let me explain. The exercise typically involves a piece of paper with some crayons and markers. The goal is to draw representations of our individual faith journey. So I will try to do the same here, just by utilizing the power of Google images.

The Catholic Years: I was raised a Catholic in the protestant bible-belt. I was forced into all sorts of Sunday school events and sacrament rituals. I never did believe everything that was said and as I grew older, I doubted more and more. It was very natural doubts for a child, like if God is so good, then why do so many bad things happen to good people? And then as I got into high school, I started learning truths about the bible that exposed "real stories" for just myths. Which would have been fine had anyone in the church said, "yes, these are just stories in which we can teach valuable lessons." No, the bible was the word of god (according to them).

Eventually, I went through the sacrament of confirmation. My father let me know that I was considered an adult by the church and could make up my own mind about my religion. That was pretty much the last time I went to mass.

Gifted English Class. I took a gifted English class in high school that was very influential in my appreciation of books and development on personal philosophy. The teacher had us reading very odd books like Jurassic Park (this was before the movie came out), The Zodiac Killer by Jerry Weissman (and other true crime books), and The Stranger by Albert Camus. We had a extended session talking about existentialism and reading from other sources like Jean-Paul Sartre. It was very different than any other point of view that experienced. At the time and shortly after, I dismissed it a interesting factoid, an oddity that had little bearing on my personal views on life. Only very later in my life would I realize what impact this class had on my perception of reality.

The Pagan Years: I remember very vividly the day I met my first pagan. The following discourse exposes my naivety and being raised in the south:

"So what denomination are you?"
"Not part of one."
"But you said you weren't Catholic. Are you Jewish?"
"Nope."
"Okay, ummmm... Muslim?"
"Nope."
"Okay, I am confused, what else is there?"
"I'm Wiccan."

This was early nineties, before google and wikipedia, so I had to do some asking around to find out what the heck she was talking about. I started down a path of amazing discovery. I was learning concepts and perspectives I had never heard of of. The first thing that clicked for me was energy magic. Through exercises I was able to get myself very in-tune with other people's energy. Unfortunately, this new gift was not framed with any moral obligation, and being a young teenage boy, I used it very selfishly. I took a hobby of reading minds, controlling emotion and doing thing commonly referred to as physic vampirism. This continued until I came across The Celestine Prophecy. My selfishness was made aware to me and opened the door for me to seek more wisdom.

My Shamanic Training. The next eye opening moment for me was discovering and learning more about Native American spirituality and Shamanism. I often thought as a child that the trees were speaking to me and animals had wisdom to share. It was a great relief to know I wasn't crazy, but lost in a monotheistic world. I read a mountain of books and started to learn how to meditate and commune with nature. One series of books that was very inspirational to me was from from Mary Summer Rain. I wrote her a letter hoping that she would know someone near me that could be a mentor. She responded and connected me with a Cherokee in the north Georgia mountains. I have been racking my brain trying to remember this fellow's name, but I was 17 at the time and am horrible at remember names. He was half Indian and half hippie, but it was very useful to have a skilled dream walker teach me how to heal someone's soul. I think he healed a bit of mine in the process.

The Death of my Sister. My sister, Margaret Elizabeth Ashe , was born two and a half years after I was. When she was 16 years old, she was diagnosed with a type-3 Arterio-Venous Malformation, or AVM. With her from birth, the AVM was a spaghetti of vein and artery cross-connects at the base of her spine that rerouted her blood flow and grew over time. We only noticed it at age 16 because it was putting pressure on spinal column and Elizabeth started to lose feeling in her legs. The AVM was too big to do surgery, so doctors did embolizations to seal the malformation from within. Elizabeth was a paraplegic in varying degrees for the last 3 years of her life. She eventually threw a blood clot and the blood thinning medicine and stress to her body eventually took her life.

I still have the web page obituary I wrote in 2000 on the internet. You can see what type of person she is from the Teen Help website she maintained until her final days. She was an "old soul" and full of so much energy, it still drives me to this day. While her death changed me somewhat, her life changed me completely. No matter what, she did not stop believing in the power of happiness and the goodness in all of us. She refused to let anything upset her. She also stayed a devout Catholic, which made me rethink my complete dismissal of the faith.

The Rat Race. After her death I was ready to grow up. I was still going to Georgia Tech, but I got back with an old girlfriend that had kids from a previous marriage. Elizabeth died in March of 2000, but I was married with children by December of that year. Nothing like trying to raise a family, go to school, and work to make someone forget about their spirituality. I went from being a very spiritual person to a very busy person. It was soothing to focus on raising a family versus the contradicting world of spirituality. We eventually moved to East Cobb (a snobby Atlanta suburb) had a child of our own, and bought the perfect house. Everything was "perfect". Well so it seemed. The marriage last 4 years to the day. The last night I slept the same bed with my ex-wife was on our 4 year anniversary. She left me for another man.

The next 2 and a half years I would ride the great emotional roller coaster of divorce and child custody battles. But my sister always told me, "We are measured by our dark times, not the easy times". I took the opportunity to reconnect with my shamanic teachings. With all the negativity that surrounded the divorce, I sought a new spirituality that was grounded in treating everyone with the utmost respect and love. I found myself back to the teachings of Christ and couldn't understand why the basic message got lost. I knew that I didn't believe in an afterlife, so I took the gospel a bit differently.

I lamented one evening on my private LiveJournal about the fact that I wish I could find a place that taught love to your fellow man, but for the sake of love and not for an afterlife. I wanted to find a community where your beliefs are your perspective on this world, and yours alone. Where you can discuss other people's perspective and learn new ways of taking about life, spirituality, and those things we can't fully explain. I will follow-up this post with that letter, but the short story is that I was pointed toward humanism and eventually unitarian universalism.

I eventually won temporary and then full custody of my daughter Audrey. This brought a new dimension to my faith journey, now I felt a need to raise my daughter in a healthy community. One that had similar values and allowed for her to grow and eventually lay the foundations for her own faith journey. And that is when I found UUCA.

If you made it this far, thank you for taking the time and allowing me to share. As time goes on, I may delve into the past a bit more. If there is something you would like to hear more about, let me know.