Note: our 2020 Annual Meeting (April 24-26 at The Good Shepherd UCC in Sahuarita, AZ) theme is Stories That Transform. Humans are meaning-making, storytelling creatures. In the weeks leading up to AM2020, the SWC blog will feature posts that highlight this aspect of our human journey.
Two things happened in my senior year of high school that have helped form my character. Like most of us, I’m barely recognizable as the same person that I was all those years ago, but two experiences over that year have set me on a course to be who I am now.
The first was in Washington DC. My biology class was visiting the Capitol area and the national aquarium in Baltimore. I had visited the monuments before with family, but on this trip, we walked through the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. At that time, I could not have found Vietnam on a map or told you anything of significance regarding American involvement in that conflict. I knew vaguely that I had born around that time and that friends of my parents had been drafted.
As I walked along that stark wall, I cried. My friends wanted to be helpful… they inquired about my tears. Had I lost someone close to me? Was I homesick or heartbroken? I had no good answers. “I just hate war,” I kept saying. It was the emotional reaction of an adolescent – wanting to be special, discovering who she might become – but the idea of nonviolence, of a life committed to peacemaking has stayed with me.
The second event was less dramatic… just a phone conversation. My parents’ house had a single rotary dial telephone in the kitchen. To have a private conversation, I would walk a couple of steps down the stairway to the basement and snake the phone cord under the door. I was pretty conventionally churchy in those days and I had a friend whose soul I was very sincerely trying to save. This seems nearly laughable now, but again, adolescent emotions were involved. ‘Just how does this work….?’ my friend wondered. And I had my opening! Out of my mouth poured all of the atonement theology I had absorbed in 17 years…
“There’s a price to pay for sin.”
“God is righteous.”
“Humans don’t deserve eternal life.”
And as those words poured out, they seemed to crash down on the steep wooden steps where I was sitting. And I sat there, listening to my own words, and no longer believing in what had moments before been so important.
In that year (1988 in case you were wondering), I became a nonviolent universalist. The content of my intellectual faith assents (like miracles and healings and virgin births and even bodily resurrection) has ebbed and flowed through the years, but these identities have remained.
To share a story from your life, please email Wende Gonzales at wgonzales@uccswc.org
For inspiration, click over to this Medium article with advice from Pixar.
I think this is a wonderful article and the theme a great idea for the annual conference meeting. It would be great if you said just a biographical sentence or two about the writer of the article.