Day 9 - Go To Church
The Quest: Go visit a church service and see what it feels like.
I haven’t been to a Sunday church service since I was a little kid. I decided to check out the Unitarian Universalist church in Vancouver. Unitarian Universalist is what you get if you take one of those quizzes about which religion you should follow and you happen to not have any real ideas of what’s out there. One of their core tenets is that everybody has to have the right to figure out what they believe, therefore, the church has no theology to speak of (you can believe in one god, many gods…etc.)
The service was very community-oriented and generally humanist in outlook. The word ‘god’ wasn’t uttered once. The hymns they sing are all about being together, searching for truth…etc.
Here’s what I noticed:
- It was interesting to see the effort to have at least some formal rites (such as the lighting of a flame before the beginning and the extinguishing of the flame at the end) inside of something that has no formal theology or dogma.
- The audience was varied, but pretty much exclusively white.
- I felt like it was a positive, non-threatening environment.
- I felt creeped out. This isn’t their fault - I think I just don’t feel connected to a community of any kind.
