Doubts of God Inspire Universalist Outlook

It was a moment I will always remember. I was driving my 13-year-old daughter to her ballet lesson. There was silence in the car, and then she spoke up: "Dad, you're an intelligent person whose opinion I respect."

"Why thank you, Melissa."

"Dad, I don't think I believe in God, is that okay?"

What could I say? This wasn't your usual father-daughter conversation. Why couldn't she have picked an easier topic, like sex? But there was no escape.

I thought back to similar conversations with my own father 30 years earlier. He was the congregational minister in our small town in Connecticut. I had come to know a graduate student who served as advisor to our high school debating club. On an out-of-town trip, this budding political scientist confided to a few of us that he was an atheist.

Mind you, this was the early 1950s when atheists were about as popular as communists, who were often referred to as "godless communists".

Nevertheless, what my friend said made sense while my father's sermons seemed to me the ramblings of an unsophisticated fool.

"It's okay," I told Melissa. "You're about two years ahead of where I was at your age." I added that I greatly respected her grandfather, because he had never tried to bully me into accepting his point of view. He had experienced his own period of doubt, and he trusted that I would come to my senses eventually.

In fact, I never did go back to conventional Christianity and neither did my sister, who married my Jewish brother-in-law; nor my brother, who trained for the ministry but became a high school teacher instead. All three of us, to a greater or lesser degree, are now Unitarian Universalist.

Melissa eventually grew up and married into a Catholic family. Neither she nor her husband goes to church, but if pressed she describes her beliefs as Unitarian. She has produced three grandchildren, and her mother-in-law is strongly recommending they be baptized by a priest.

Meanwhile, taking advantage of her own mother's Sephardic Jewish heritage, Melissa has enrolled my grandson George in an excellent orthodox Jewish pre-school in the New Jersey suburb where they live. He's the star of his Hebrew class, and the staff thinks he would make a wonderful rabbi.

I'm betting that George, with his richly varied religious heritage, would make a great Unitarian Universalist minister.