We spent the day back up in Santa Barbara; it was the first time my brother, sisters, and I had all been together since before our father died nearly two years ago.
This morning, my ten-month old nephew Matthew Hubert was honored in a “naming” ceremony at the Santa Barbara Unitarian Society. I’m fairly accustomed to being around earnest, sweet, doctrinally vague, and unfailingly left-leaning Unitarians. But my wife and I couldn’t hold it together, when, after a service filled with virtually every cliche in the Book of Progressive Religion, the minister asked us to — yes, you know it — join hands and sing “Kumbaya.” My beloved and I did quarter-turns away from each other as we clutched hands, knowing that if our eyes met we would both lose it completely.
How often does the phrase “we’re not going to hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’” make its way into our discourse? And yet, in all my church-going experience, I’d never actually been asked to do it. Oh, I’ve held hands with my fellow worshippers; I’ve sung Kumbaya a time or two. But I’ve never had these two activities combined into the great archetypal experience of well-meaning liberalism.
The Santa Barbara Unitarian Society, bless ‘em all, is an irony-free zone.
Amusingly, the only times I’ve ever sung Kumbaya in church have been in Missouri Synod congregations as a child. I don’t remember whether we held hands. :-)
I actually did hold hands and sing Kumbuya back in Catholic High School in the late sixties.
I don;t miss it!
I’ve only ever done that in summer camp when I was a kid. But never as an adult in church (of course, I rarely go to church as an adult–only for weddings, funerals, and baptisms, but that’s a separate thing).
Hmm. I sang “Kum ba yah” at Presbyterian summer camp.
Anyway, Hugo, you nail it. The UUs provide a thoughtful, nonthreatening spiritual home for people who’ve been badly burned by (or who have an innate horror of) more creedal faiths. But, Lord, Lord, their stuff is full of clichés. And so very, very banal. I discovered this not long ago at a Solstice service that did more to put me to sleep than to remind me of happy bygone days in my neopagan young adulthood. Still, they mean absolutely no harm to anyone, and they are always very kind.
I find myself on that funny cusp between joyfully apprehending the sacred and absolutely loathing creedal religion, but UUism doesn’t cut it for me. Over the last few years, I’ve found that flaming liberal manifestations of Episcopalianism work pretty well. I used to go to St. Augustine-by-the-Sea in Santa Monica when I lived in L.A., and I miss it (and Hartshorn Murphy) a very great deal.
Crap, forgot to close the <i> tag.
Hey, when it comes to religion I’d rather have sweet, well-meaning but banal kumbya than “well-meaning”, bigoted, and hurtful fundamentalist.
I think “earnest, sweet, doctrinally vague” as well as “banal” describe the mainline protestant churches I’ve been to just as well as the UU ones.