Tonight my Interweave group at UUMAN (more affectionately called UUMANWeave) had a discussion about how "coming out" had affected our beliefs. The short answer for the majority of the group was not much. The majority seemed to have similar experiences growing up dissatisfied with the Christian faiths they had limited experience with, while others have always remained agnostic or atheist.
I had hoped to get more perspective on this topic. My experience has been that people adopt the fight, flight or compromise attitude in regards to their faith.
FIGHT: There are those who who chose to try and change their religious sect/denomination to accept homosexuality. The Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptist springs to mind.
FLIGHT: People leave the church never to return or consider spirituality again.
COMPROMISE: This takes 2 forms. Either the person stays where they are and trys to hide who they are, or the person finds that sect/denomination which is identical to theirs but accepts homosexuality. Metropolitan Community Church for example.
In my journey, I tried at least 2 of these options. I began by trying to compromise and hide who I was since I was single. Eventually, I fled my Southern Baptist life and for several years did not really think about my Spiritual Life. I tried for a while to compromise on a denomination that share my previous beliefs and accepted homosexuality. I as briefly a member of both a MMC church and later a AWAB church.
In the end, I realized that what it all boiled down to was definitions. For years, I had been indoctrinated into a faith and I was still a part of it because of how I defined the terms they used: God, Prayer etc.
I finally got tired of having to define every term I sang and/or read in terms that I believed and began to try to articulate what I really believed about the Divine, the Universe and Life. That is how I ended up in a Unitarian Universalist congregation. They support this search and encourage it.
No comments:
Post a Comment