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Commentary for
favorite radio station, WAMC, by Dave Belden. Aired
early 2001
Values for Your Kid--on Joining the Unitarians
It's a funny thing, but having a child approaching the teenage years has made me think hard about what values I want him to at least know about, and hopefully practice, and possibly even see me practicing. And what I have found is that actually practicing my own values as a way of inspiring my kid, has inspired me instead.
It started two and a half years ago when our son was almost ten, when my wife and I thought, what he could do with during his teen years would be a bunch of likeminded kids who share our family's values. But how do we find these kids? In fourth and fifth grade he seemed increasingly isolated at our rural school, where being into sports is important and he had decided his identity was bound up in resisting any organized sporting activity whatsoever. We started looking for a church which might have a youth group and an ethic of service, and an appreciation for the arts and nature and the beauties of evolution, and people who thought tackling world poverty was at least as important as tackling the full back. There must be lots of churches like that in rural New York, but I'm an agnostic and I'm not quite sure what my wife is, and we both find the Christian language we were brought up with interrupts our search for the spiritual more than it helps it. It turns out we are basically church-phobic. An impossible task then, to find a church we would be comfortable in. But we found one, and we started going for his sake.
It's a Unitarian church, which may be the only truly post-modern church around. You remember post-modern - the awareness that different people have their own different truths and there is no way to definitively say This is the Truth with a capital T. The Unitarians, at least the ones we found in Kingston, New York, are very eclectic. The congregation includes various kinds of believers and agnostics or atheists. One marvelous guy I met there calls himself a Buddhist Christian Hindu Jew. The congregation has lots of musicians, artists, writers, environmentalists. And it has a strong commitment to kids, and to teaching them about God (in all genders), and not-God, and service to the community. So we joined for our kid's sake, and we found a community for ourselves.
Before this we had believed in community, but we didn't have one. Now I rely much more than my son does on that weekly service, the time out of time when we meditate and sing, and the bedrock reality when we share our joys and sorrows with each other, and the thoughtful sermons of the minister, Linda Anderson. I think my boy does get a lot out of it too, but he's a pre-teen - if you ask before the service he'll say he doesn't want to go - he'd rather be on his playstation, or skateboarding, or with his big buddy he's starting a rock band with - but ask after, and he'll say, 'it was cool.' But we're the ones who are really singing the praises of the place.
In the same spirit, we thought this Thanksgiving that what we really wanted to do was to go help out at a soup kitchen, because our son really needs to find out that a lot of people don't have much at all - in fact are lonely or homeless or hungry in this richest of countries. It was my wife who found where we could go help. So Thanksgiving morning we spent a couple of hours at a Methodist church in Kingston helping prepare the Thanksgiving meal. I carved about five turkeys. My son ladled out zillions of little paper pots of cranberry sauce with his mother and then helped me with the turkeys. I rediscovered and he discovered that thing of working with a big crew of people to do something worthwhile - boy that's fun. I used to do a lot of that when I was younger. Duh! Why aren't I doing it now? Too much nose to the grindstone. Too much focus on my own goals, good as they are, like feeding and housing my family, and writing the books I've been trying to write, and getting enough exercise and rest.
Thank God, or perhaps not-God, for having a kid.
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