Faith for an Atheist

In Julie Schumacher’s essay, “A Support Group is My Higher Power” (published in the New York Times earlier this summer), she describes her participation in a Jewish women’s support group during her daughter’s struggles with depression. An atheist and a non-Jew, Schumacher nonetheless finds comfort in the group, and comfort in her daughter’s belief in God. These two aspects of the essay struck me as related in some way to Unitarian Universalism.

Unitarian Universalism, unlike most other religious traditions, welcomes people from a wide range of religious and theological traditions. Our communities welcome atheists, Christians, theists, Buddhists, agnostics and people from many other traditions. Rather than seeing diversity as a weakness, contemporary Unitarian Universalism is a religion that emphasizes the possibility of unity among people with a common purpose, although not always a common belief system.

Sometimes the argument is made that without unity of belief, it is hard for people to “go deep” together in discussion and in making meaning of their life stories. I disagree. Schumacher provides a wonderful example of how in a completely secular context, she was able to find comfort and meaning among people with different beliefs but a shared experience of parenting struggling teens:

Although I still don’t believe in God, I have come to believe in support groups. When I joined the Jewish women’s group, I worried that our monthly lunches might involve tears, handholding and episodes of recrimination and regret. They do in fact involve all of those. And I have found that the company of people who share the particular content and form of my unhappiness is a balm I cannot do without.

Fortunately, our meetings aren’t only about commiseration. They are also — Christian metaphor here — about rebirth…

In banding together to tell the truth about our own and our children’s suffering, we have found resilience; and we have kept the terrible vacant loneliness at bay.

The act of joining together to listen to one another, to comfort one another, and to help one another experience “rebirth” is what gives the group its healing power.

Schumacher also describes the paradox that while she herself does not believe in God, she is able to value and encourage her daughter’s belief in God. Schumacher sees that this belief helps her daughter hold on to life. Again, I sensed a parallel between Schumacher’s approach and what is needed within Unitarian Universalism. Because one of the seven principles of UU congregations is “acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations,” we Unitarian Universalists are (or should be) in the strange position of encouraging another person’s spiritual growth, even if that growth leads them to theological beliefs that differ from our own. What matters, in my view, is that a fellow Unitarian Universalist’s beliefs help him or her to find greater love and wisdom.

Schumacher writes of her early resistant to her daughter’s decision to convert to Judaism, and of her later embrace of that decision:

Having raised my children to be compassionate disbelievers, I did not support her plan. I feared she was entering into a foreign belief system, a foreign language, and (to me) a set of inexplicable rituals — which, of course, she was.

Maybe I would have felt differently had I known that her faith would later help her survive more than 20 months in the abyss of severe depression. Ironically, agnostic that I was and still am, I sometimes found myself arguing during those terrifying months that she should cling to her belief in the divine, to any slender hint or reassurance that, during her darkest, most dispiriting moments, she was not alone.