The following is the text of a “sermon” I plan to give this coming Sunday at our Unitarian gathering. Since it will only drift off into the ether afterwards, I’m putting it up here too so that my reader can be as bored as the fifty or sixty poor souls on Sunday. I was asked to give a five minute talk on how I became a Unitarian.
Comets and Curiosity .
Bill Maher, the comedian and also the guy that made the movie Religulous (which we’ll probably never get to see here in Bozeman), had a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. He talked of his first confession. He went in and kneeled in the confessional and said:
“Bless me father for I have sinned. This is my first confession… and this is my attorney, Mr. Cohen.”
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I want to talk a little bit about astronomy – I know that’s on everyone’s mind this morning. I want to talk about something called the Doomsday Twin.
In the history of our planet there have been at least six “apocalyptic” events, including the extinction of the dinosaurs. These events seem to occur at regular intervals – once every 26 to 30 million years. Many suspect that comets colliding with the earth cause these events. The comets are clustered out there – and once every 26 million years, we and the other planets get a comet shower. That’s the theory.
What causes the shower? One theory is that there is an unknown body out there – that our sun has a dark twin. It would be either a brown dwarf or a massive planet. This would make our solar system, which most of us believe has only one sun, more like a binary system with two suns orbiting around one another. The other sun, too dark to shine, would be too far away to imagine, but would come close to us maybe once every 26 to 30 million years. When it got that close, it would disrupt everything, and would kick up a ruckus among those clustered comets, sending many of them hurtling towards our regular sun, perilously close to earth. One or two of them would hit us, and we’d have one of those periodic mass extinctions.
I don’t usually pray, but I do offer up a small prayer right now: I pray that there are no astronomers in the room trying to follow this.
The pathway to Unitarianism for me is intellectual, if I can say that without presuming too much. I moved to Bozeman in 2001, when I married Hassie, and had time on my hands, so took a few college courses. One of them, American Thought and Policy, spent quite a bit of time on our religious heritage. I’ll never forget the teacher, Bob Rydell, looking out the window one day and talking about all of the churches around Bozeman. He said the Methodists, Episcopalians, the Baptists and Lutherans may all seem to get along, but they have very fundamental differences. And, he said, the Unitarians even have atheists and agnostics for members.
I did not know that. I thought Unitarians were just another Christian religion. We were curious, Hassie and I, and so checked the yellow pages for a local group. We found them at Beth Shalom (the Jewish synagogue), and dropped by one Sunday. We were very surprised to see people we knew – regular people. It was like we learned a dark secret – like discovering a Freemason cell. We wanted to learn the secret handshake.
At that time there was no minister, and the weekly service was provided by the members, and we found it all interesting, and we started going on an irregular basis. Then later I became the treasurer, and found we could no longer be irregular attendees.
That’s how I got here.
So I’m a Unitarian, but I’m not a spiritual person. I don’t pray, except for that one time today, and I don’t meditate, and I don’t have any piercing deep thoughts about the meaning of life. I just take it all in. The Doomsday Twin is a mystery. I’ll never know what’s true about that. I don’t know if there is some incomprehensible intelligence presiding over all of this, but I think if God existed like the other religions say he does, he’d come out of the shadows.
It’s curiosity that stirs me, and I hope that I’ve stirred some curiosity with my tale about the Doomsday Twin. We’re not different. And the most important difference between Unitarians and all of the regular religions it is that Unitarians don’t pretend to have the answer. I like that. Having the answers would make life very boring. The mainstream religions, big and small, take the beautiful complexity and mystery of life and reduce it to a story of one unusual man. Too much simplicity – yet they say don’t wonder, don’t question, just settle for our answer – this man was executed by the Romans two thousand years ago, and didn’t die. They make him into something he was not, and use that to explain everything. Their story is supposedly the answer to the mystery of all time – who are we, why are we here.
I don’t know why we’re here. I don’t care – that’s above my pay grade. I’m only the Treasurer. Let’s just have some fun. There’s so much we don’t know, so much to wonder about, so much to research and investigate. We’ll never run out of questions. And we are not bound by anyone’s belief system. We are free to investigate and wonder and let it take us where it takes us. Even to our inevitable doom, wiped out by a comet.
Piece of Mindful 
A Unitarian Universalist dies, and on the way to the afterlife encounters a fork in the road with two options: “To Heaven” and “To a Discussion of Heaven.” Without pausing, the Unitarian heads right to the discussion of heaven….
(Where are we in the 26-30 million year cycle, by the way? My calendar doesn’t go there.)
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How come Unitarian congregations are so bad at singing? (Because the members are all reading ahead, to see if they agree with the words.)
I think we’re about half way between episodes.
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Inevitable doom, huh, well,….. I guess it’s not God bless America, but God damn America.
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Tequila shooters all night?
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