A surfeit of spirituality

We went to the Germantown Friends Meeting today. It's the meeting that longstrider's mother and grandparents went to when they lived in Philadelphia, so we thought we would go at least once to say hello to anyone who might remember them.

It was a good morning. K, after the obligatory protest, had a great time in the nursery and running around with a couple other kids during the coffee hour. And we sat through a fairly lively meeting and afterwards talked to a lot of very nice, very friendly people that we thought we could very happily spend a lot more time with. It was a good time and I want to go back.

We're suffering from too much religious choice here at the moment. Philadelphia is Quaker Central, so it would make sense to take advantage of that and start attending meeting. But on the other hand, after having travelled an hour to go to a UCC church that's Open and Affirming (UCC-speak for gay-friendly*), the fact that there are five Open and Affirming UCC churches in Philadelphia is something we want to take advantage of as well.

The crux of the problem is that we have a mixed marriage where we belong to denominations which have largely the same beliefs, but radically different worship styles, and neither of us feels at home in the other's church. longstrider always feels like UCC services are too crowded and rushed, and I will need a lot of work before I can get much out of an hour of silence. I was thinking about it this week and realized the problem with that style of worship for me is that I'm already a very inwardly directed person. I go to church to be taken out of myself, to hear different viewpoints and be reminded about other people's needs. And given the amount of time I spend without any other adults around these days, the last thing I need is another hour of listening to myself think.

Just to add a few more factors into the mix:
-if I should decide to pursue my Master's in Theology again and go to the UCC seminary in Lancaster to do it, I would want to have an established membership in a UCC church.
-By having K baptized, I made a promise to raise her in a church and make sure she has the opportunity to confirm her baptism. I could argue that as long as we attend a meeting with decent religious education, I could consider that promised fulfilled, but I still want her to have that opportunity to stand up and make her own religious declaration
-There are several Friends schools in Philadelphia and we would like to send K to one of them. However, none of them are cheap, and there might be scholarships available if we belong to a meeting

So we're at a standstill at the moment. The current idea is to go to each church on alternating weeks until K is old enough to begin Sunday School, and then we will probably want to settle down to one place. Given the situation we came from (a meeting consisting of about six people in Lafayette or traveling an hour for a liberal UCC church), this is a wonderful problem to have. But that doesn't make the solution any easier.

*But I thought the UCC was the super-liberal denomination that's friendly and welcoming to homosexuals, I hear you saying. Well, it is. We were in fact the first denomination to ordain openly gay clergy and to endorse performing same-sex marriage ceremonies. But that's the denomination, which has little to do with the churches within it.

See, it's like this: the UCC is the merger of the Congregational Christian churches and the Evangelical and Reformed (ENR) churches. The Congregational church is descended from Puritans who hated the Church of England and felt that a congregation should have all authority over a church with no outside authority over it (besides God, of course). While they softened over time and formed a loose association with each other, you can imagine how this makes for an attitude of bloody-minded independence. So while when the UCC was formed, all ENR churches meekly joined and changed their names to UCC, only most of the Congregational churches joined, and merely appended UCC to their names. For instance, my parents attend Park Congregational Church, UCC. And of course, no Congregationalist would agree to join a denomination if that denomination had any real authority over them. So while the governing council of the UCC sits and talks about marriage equality and apologizing to Native Americans for our overzealous conversion efforts 150 years ago, they are only speaking for the governing council, not the churches of the UCC. And so while many UCC churches are liberal, many are not, and it can be a real crapshoot unless you find one that has undergone the discernment process necessary to declare themselves Open and Affirming.

On the whole, I like belonging to a denomination where we can choose our own minister and even committee membership has to be approved by the congregation. But there have been plenty of times of turmoil when it would have been nice to have a bishop step in to sort things out.

***

We spent the evening with coeli's sister tonight and had a great time. It felt like one of those situation where although you barely know someone, you somehow fall into talking like you've known each other for years. Of course, in this case that's probably partly due to E's resemblance both in features and voice to coeli; it was a little eerie to hear her voice over the phone since it sounded so much like coeli. But we liked her in her own right as well. She gave us the names of several of her colleagues who have small children, so hopefully we will be able to connect with some fellow parents soon.