Growing Up UU: The High School Youth Group

One of the few places my brother belonged as a teen (besides away from public view) was in the youth group at our church.  It was a colorful cast of characters.  In fact, at least one member appeared on Maury Povich.  Now, UU youth groups are almost always full of oddlings: the last one I attended formulated a plan to "gutter punk it" for a week. 

Anyway, "as a joke" (again, UU kids invented lulz) one evening, the youth group my brother attended decided to leave condoms and pot all over the youth group room.  A letter went out in the church bulletin the next week about how the youth group was suspended and how disappointed the congregation was in them. 

Years later, it was determined by my siblings and I that this disappointment stemmed from all that pot going to waste.

Growing Up UU: Picking Fights with Imams at Age 12

I'm a feminist.  I come from a family where the women are as educated or more educated than the men, and the only thing I was ever told I couldn't do based on my gender was drive a stick shift, which I can so... yeah, fuck you.

In my last GU^3, I discussed the 6th grade RE curriculum, where we visited various religious centers.  I've already told my Born-Again story, and the only thing memorable about the Buddhist temple was that it smelled, oddly, like Corn Flakes.  I did not go to the synagogue because I had something for Girl Scouts that night and to me, synagogue was a place to catch up on my Boxcar Children during my cousin's bat mitzvah ceremony.  That is, approximately, how much respect my mother has for Judaism/my dad's family.

Anyway, we also went to a mosque, which was really interesting for a couple of reasons:

1. It was a Sunday.  There was no one there besides the imam.
2. Mosques are BEAUTIFUL.  Plush carpet, marble, indoor fountains... our church was built in 1867-ish.  The furniture probably dated back to that time.
3. The moms leading the field trip actually deferred to another religion and wore headscarves.  I think some of us were asked if we needed them too, but I sure as hell didn't and I don't think any of the other girls would have admitted to having their period yet.

So, we were in a library and the imam was talking about women in Islam and I started asking questions.  I feel kind of bad in retrospect, but I think I learned a lot and I appreciated the imam's patience with me.  That imam's patience and calm when dealing with my fiery pro-woman rhetoric cemented my impression of American Muslims as people who put up with a lot of shit.  I have nothing but respect for them, and I think years later, the experience and my behavior made it easier for me to deal with religious leaders that can maintain a reasonable dialogue for questions.  Wow, that wasn't actually funny.  FAIL.

Growing Up UU: Testify!

As I may have mentioned in this blog before, my father is Jewish and my mother was raised in various Protestant denominations and is somewhat of an anti-Semite (she also hates Catholics, to be fair).  As a compromise (or something), they sent my older brother, my younger sister and I to a Unitarian church.  When I was really little, I had no idea what that meant.  I regularly confused my church with the Mormons who advertised on TV.  Now I understand that being a Unitarian in Cleveland in the 1980s and '90s meant that you were the product of an interfaith marriage.  I was one of the only kids in my Sunday School class whose parents had the same unhyphenated last name.  As a result, I have some humorous anecdotes.  Here is one:

As part of the sixth grade RE (religious education) curriculum, we went to a bunch of different religious centers, including a Buddhist temple, a mosque, a synagogue, and what the teachers told us was a "Born-Again" church.  To highlight how much we were told about this church, I didn't realize until about age 14 or so that it was "Born-Again" and not "Bornagin", like some kind of Irish surname a la "Finnegan".  Anyway, I remember gathering in the parking lot and one of our teachers saying the following (artist's depiction of UU Sunday School teacher follows):

There will be a part of the service where they ask you to come up and get saved.  If any of you go up there, we will all be going home and explaining to your parents what you did.

Now, for the uninitiated, this may, at first glance, seem like our heathen instructor was trying to prevent us from accepting the love of Jesus.  However, in reality, our teachers knew that we would all go up and get saved just for the lulz.  This was years before there was a name for lulz, but I am pretty sure UU Sunday School kids invented lulz.  More stories of lulz to come later.