The June Big Question over at the UU Salon is up: Universalism, the "other U." What does it mean to you? Do you resonate with Universalism, or not? What about the Universalist perspective challenges or comforts you?
Really, I would have been just as happy if we never merged the two churches. As you know, I was raised Unitarian and our family had no connection to the idea of the Universalists. There was no heaven so it didn't matter if we all went there (which in my very simplified world of UUism is what Universalist means. Now that we are merged (and have been for over 30 years) I have accepted that it is part of our current history. We took to failing or shrinking religious institutions and merged them into one and in that act we forced both sides to get it together to agree on something. What that something is unclear to me.
I know that in churches that were mostly Unitarian there wasn't much influence of the Universalists, and I suspect that goes both ways. We Unitarians were suspect of those God fearing, heaven bound creatures - we were FINE that they believed that, but we were unsure about US believing that.
Now that most of that history is LONG gone it seems that there is just this mesh of the two. Some watered down version of spiritual belief -or actually a more wide version that has UU Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. rather than Unitarians and Universalists.
I don't think we really think about either any more. We are just UU. And maybe that is a good thing.
