It was good seeing you and meeting your friends last night -- I apologize if I was a little graceless at times.
The issue you're struggling with is very foreign to me, but you very much have my sympathy; you're actually the second friend of mine who has basically had a running battle with their faith and their attempts to find a community of faith. Finding balance between individual conscience, the articles of faith of a church and its community, and, realistically, the baggage of history is a tough tattle. Even figuring out which is which is a tough tattle.
I've been to Unitarian services and left wondering if I'd been to church or not (or, being second-gen agnostic, whether I cared). That seemed to be a community but whether it was a community of faith was less clear to me -- not that I'm sure I'd know one if I saw it. It seemed closer to a bunch of people asking questions, which is not a bad thing, but perhaps not the same thing. On the other hand, I was also at a UCC service recently and it did seem like a community of faith, if a very liberal one. They had made that very political decision to hang the rainbow flags. Their literature said that everyone was welcome, regardless of belief, but they also seemed to feel that if you were really a part of what they were, then you definitely believed certain things. God and Jesus were very present in the language being used; there was a baptism and the litany contained the phrase "...declaring with one voice our faith in God and God's son Jesus." (I'm quoting verbatim from the handout, which I left in a pile of junk on my desk and just now rediscovered.) So... maybe "non-creedal" means different things to different churches?
As a tangent, I wonder if part of what "a community of faith" might mean to you is "a sacred space that you can feel you belong in'. The sacred is not an easy thing to find under any conditions these days,I suppose. It would be easy to say that people have to just create what is sacred for them out of whatever is around, but I don't feel that's entirely adequate. It was interesting to me that the UCC handout I got had the legend "creating sacred space together" on the front. A few decades back, a church describing itself as sacred space would be like a swimming pool advertising itself as wet.
Anyway, I have no real business sticking my nose in here, I guess this basically amounts to a long winded invitation to tell me more about this when I see you, if you're so moved. See you Saturday. :)
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The issue you're struggling with is very foreign to me, but you very much have my sympathy; you're actually the second friend of mine who has basically had a running battle with their faith and their attempts to find a community of faith. Finding balance between individual conscience, the articles of faith of a church and its community, and, realistically, the baggage of history is a tough tattle. Even figuring out which is which is a tough tattle.
I've been to Unitarian services and left wondering if I'd been to church or not (or, being second-gen agnostic, whether I cared). That seemed to be a community but whether it was a community of faith was less clear to me -- not that I'm sure I'd know one if I saw it. It seemed closer to a bunch of people asking questions, which is not a bad thing, but perhaps not the same thing. On the other hand, I was also at a UCC service recently and it did seem like a community of faith, if a very liberal one. They had made that very political decision to hang the rainbow flags. Their literature said that everyone was welcome, regardless of belief, but they also seemed to feel that if you were really a part of what they were, then you definitely believed certain things. God and Jesus were very present in the language being used; there was a baptism and the litany contained the phrase "...declaring with one voice our faith in God and God's son Jesus." (I'm quoting verbatim from the handout, which I left in a pile of junk on my desk and just now rediscovered.) So... maybe "non-creedal" means different things to different churches?
As a tangent, I wonder if part of what "a community of faith" might mean to you is "a sacred space that you can feel you belong in'. The sacred is not an easy thing to find under any conditions these days,I suppose. It would be easy to say that people have to just create what is sacred for them out of whatever is around, but I don't feel that's entirely adequate. It was interesting to me that the UCC handout I got had the legend "creating sacred space together" on the front. A few decades back, a church describing itself as sacred space would be like a swimming pool advertising itself as wet.
Anyway, I have no real business sticking my nose in here, I guess this basically amounts to a long winded invitation to tell me more about this when I see you, if you're so moved. See you Saturday. :)