Tadpoles, Whizmabongs, and Jerry...with Peace, A Beginning

Some people find Jesus. Others become bar mitzvahs and it sticks. My religious awakening began in the late seventies, in springtime, at a small pond in the woods behind the First Parish Church.

For those of you who didn't grow up in New England, where a First Parish Church seems to dot every town center, First Parish churches are Unitarian churches, and I was a Unitarian. At first, I didn't know what this meant. When we started going to this church, with our mother, I was pretty young: maybe 5 or 6.I knew why we were going as early as this, though. If you are into miracles (and thus probably not a practicing Unitarian), it is something of one that my parents actually met and married each other, as my mother, daughter of two Swedes, was a Lutheran Sunday school teacher when my father met her, and my father had been raised as an Orthodox Jew.

There was actually never any religious tension in our household, or very little. This was for many reasons, but one was certainly the Unitarian church: one of my parents' best shared decisions, in hindsight. When they had decided to marry, knowing they both wanted children, they had had "the talk." My father was by this point a lapsed Orthodox Jew, lapsed to such a massive extent that he was eager to marry a Lutheran, although he couldn't help himself, once we were no longer hypothetical but actual Unitarians, to whispering pointedly to us once in a while that "Martin Luther was actually a significant anti-Semite." This was okay. My mother had been perfectly willing to drift away from her Lutheranism, but she--unlike my father--wanted something, some spiritual education, organization, community for us. My father was not exactly down with this; I suspect he was a bit confused. But whatever he was told about Unitarianism must have seemed preferable to the rigid rules and doctrines of his own religious education, which had, in part, turned him away from a faith he never had much of a chance to embrace.

So this was the agreement--Unitarianism--and although my father never attended church with us, I think he grew to understand that it posed no threat to his latent primarily cultural attachment to his own religion, for he remains more Jewish than he realizes; as I am realizing now, one's initiation to religion is actually more significant and formative than one may initially think.

The First Parish Church of Sudbury turned out to be the perfect place for our family: my mother, whose idea of rapture was Cat Stevens--or the Unitarian choir--singing "Morning Is Broken," my father, whose idea of rapture was guilt-free Sunday morning basketball, and us, unsullied by the labels and posturing and hatred and bigotry and conversion and bias and judgment and superiority complexes and insecurities that are the underbelly of most organized religions, at least to some extent, at some point in history.

Like most I have encountered since, and certainly those in our neck of the woods in Massachusetts, the First Parish Church was a repository for a number of groups that appeal to me still. Ours housed many mixed-marriage families, mixed in terms of race, religious background, gender, age. It boasted more than a few members who went by a single name (this may have been a seventies thang, and yes I meant to spell that with an "a"), tons of hippies and those slightly too old to be hippies but still totally grooving with the movement, an inordinate number of guitar players, atheists, agnostics, people who'd been alienated from churches, temples or mosques and were exploring, and, I think it's safe to say, not a single member whose politics were to the right of George McGovern. Not the most diverse group, in a certain light, but in my opinion, not diverse in all of the best possible ways.

Children at our First Parish church attended Sunday school, although all four of my grandparents would have been shocked by what this entailed, had they known. Each year, Sunday school was different. One year, for example, you studied world religions and went to a Baptist church to observe a Baptism, a Catholic church to witness communion, a temple to meet with a rabbi. This was of minor interest to me; I had both Catholic cousins and Jewish cousins, all of whom got a better deal with the parties as far as I could tell. But except for a few moments over one cousin's First Communion dress and another's bat mitzvah pinball machines, I didn't envy any of them. They didn't have Mr. Fisher.

Mr. Fisher, whose two children were around my age, was the best Sunday school teacher in the history of the world, if I may say so objectively. I can't actually remember what the exact subject of the class he taught was meant to be on paper, which is true of so much of what I learned at First Parish. The names of things have disappeared; it is their spirit which remains. And for me, it is the memory of walking through these woods, with children who seemed like relatives to me in a funny way, based, I can only assume, on this shared and rare community, as Mr. Fisher described what we were seeing.

As is true of most important memories, I remember these mornings as sensory experiences, the literal opposite of a lecture or the way most people use the word "sermon." In fact, although as we got older we did go into the main church to hear the sermons, for me a sermon will always be Mr. Fisher explaining how tadpoles transformed into frogs, not just explaining it, though, but showing us: as we crouched around him in the cool dark woods around the edge of this little pond and saw what actually is a miracle, Unitarian-style.

How many of us can say that we were taught about evolution, and the miracles of the natural world, and the importance of viewing the natural world as one of the ultimate miracles, when we were 7 or 8 or 9, by a man who crouched down with us, in the mud, and explained it in a way that both made sense and was spiritual? I cannot deny it, in spite of my hedging around this word, when I remember this moment, the realization that at one point there had been a tiny little tadpole in a little pool of water and that it had sprouted legs and changed the future of the universe, life its very self, it was nothing but spiritual. What's more, it shaped the way I view the world.

More to come, and some of it will even be funny....