Dena Ellery

 Intern Minister

September 16, 2001

I learned to sing songs in Sunday school like, "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and Yellow Black and White all are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world."

And because Jesus loved me, I was going to go to heaven. But, what about my friend down the street? She wasn’t a Christian, but she was a good person, I knew that for sure.. Why wouldn’t Jesus love her too? Why couldn’t she go to heaven too?

You see, I was a Universalist and didn’t know it. I was a Universalist ever since I started thinking theologically – which is what we do naturally when we’re small. Right from the start, I believed that a loving God loved all of us equally.

I was a universalist thinker at a young age. I would sit in church and listen to the sermon at my little wooden United Church in Cedar – that’s just outside Nanaimo, BC – well, I’d try to listen to the sermon. I mean, it’s hard to stay focused on a sermon when you’re an adult, never mind when you’re 8. So here I was, supposed to be paying attention to the sermon, and I’d start thinking about things like, I wonder how big this God is? Does God know I’m here at church today? What about all the other people who are at church today. Does God know about them? There’s so many people for God to take care of on this whole planet, God must be pretty big. What if there’s a church somewhere on another planet? Does God look after them too? God must be as big as the universe, or has a lot of helpers.

I knew that Christianity wasn’t the ONLY answer. I was a spiritual seeker for many years. And when I found the Universalist Unitarian Church of Halifax, I knew I had found my spiritual home. Here, here was a place where I didn’t have to hang my thinking hat up at the door when I went to worship. Here was a place where I had the freedom and the safety to give up God altogether. For the first time, I had the courage to ask the question, what if there is no God? I still haven’t come to a conclusion as to whether God exists or not, though if God does exists, I’m certain that God is actually quite small - as small as the quarks and leptons and bosons of quantum physics that are in constant and dynamic and radically interconnected relationship with one another.

I am a Unitarian Universalist, because I struggle to understand how can I live faithfully, given that I am radically interconnected to all of life – even at this very molecular, this very fundamental level. I include Universalism as part of the living tradition of which I am a part – even here in Canada. It offers me and others a gift of wholeness as we struggle to engage the diversity that is all of life. Universalism calls us to engage our religious imagination and imagine a universe large enough to include all of us. Universalism speaks loudly to people who want justice and fairness for ALL living creatures in the universe. I am glad to be part of this living religious tradition, where I find my sacred texts from many sources. Here, I can keep sacred company with the words of Howard Thurman, whose question I live with every day as I contemplate how to live faithfully: "How do we live as friendly people under a friendly sky?"

Web Weaver: Webmaster@firstunitariantoronto.org