Guest Blog by Camille Speck

This week’s blog features the thoughts of QUUF member Camille Speck.  It was originally posted to her Facebook page in 2018.  I only recently noticed it, however, and asked her permission to feature it as a guest blog post for QUUF.  Lucky for all of us, she said, “yes.”  Thank you, Camille!

~ Kate Lore

“You’re a scientist. How can you go to church? I’m shocked you’re into that hogwash.”

Sitting in the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship sanctuary last Sunday, I pondered this reaction, and how I felt some sort of shame or need to explain my new affiliation to people who have known me forever, or who hesitate when I mention something about “church on Sunday”.

At the very root of it is the fact that I have never wrestled with the question of the existence of divinity. This puzzle does not cause any tension in my personal paradigm. In my first year of college, I spent countless hours reading the early philosophers: Anselm, Algazali, Descartes, Locke, Luther, Galileo, Hobbes, Bacon, all those Greeks, and the Renaissance thinkers. My takeaway: So many lives spent questioning the existence of God and seeking answers to questions that would inevitably be resolved by their own deaths.

Although I could also see how our New Religion (Science and Empirical Reasoning) sprung from these lives, their existential agony seemed…wasteful. I’m a Capricorn, I was born with a lens of efficiency. Why waste your life worrying about whether God exists or not? I don’t need that answer. So by that reasoning, I didn’t need church.

Instead, I went to work and I found divinity in the sound of the spotted owl I was tracking in a remnant stand of ancient trees, or in the salmon redd that was so perfectly created in the slow eddy formed by an old growth tree that had fallen across a spring system in the process of death giving way to life. I found grace in being the first footsteps in new snow on the Upper Hoh trail as I hiked in chest waders to an off-channel coho stream, or successfully identifying a rare beaked whale with just a quick glance of the breaching animal through 16x binoculars mounted to the flying bridge of M/V MacArthur.

This was my church for over 20 years. And then, at 41, I had a child. When she was 4 she started attending Sunday school with the neighbors and for 6 months I saw this as the gift of 2 hours of “me time” on Sundays. I was flaky about her attendance. If she was asleep, I wouldn’t wake her. But consistently and with increasing alarm, she began to protest when I let her sleep past church time.

I decided I needed to check the place out and I probably needed to give them some money to help pay for all the craft supplies she used each week. My first sermon happened to be Celebration of Ancestors. There were not enough hankies in my pew.

“Well, this is interesting,” I thought, “They didn’t talk about God or Jesus once.” We sang a Cat Stevens song among more traditional hymns.

So I went back the next Sunday. And the next. Nobody told me what I needed to believe in order to be part of their community. In fact, I was encouraged to develop my own creed on a deeper level. I signed up for new member orientation so I could tail sniff a little more, despite the 3-hour time commitment.

In that orientation, scales fell away from my eyes as each member of what looked like the typical group of new Port Townsend retirees told their story of religious background and what lead them to be interested in QUUF. The depth of thought, the tapestry of human experience – I was in love. So I signed up and with shaking hands put my name in their book in front of the whole congregation.

And now on Sundays I go to church. I learn something amazing every. single. time. I still don’t wrestle with any questions related to the existence of God, and I don’t have to in order to feel the deep sense of community or the fire of commitment that comes with belonging to this church. My personal creed is safe and intact. I don’t have to explain it or justify it. The person sitting next to me might believe in God and that’s OK too. We have common ground that is more important than believing the same things.

These are the reasons why I now give up one of my two rare weekly chances to sleep in and linger over my coffee. My partner still can’t quite understand it and he seeks to bin people who belong to any church, but every time he tries to create and name the bin where he stuffs QUUF he misses the mark. And I’m OK with that too.

That’s the beauty of this Fellowship. I don’t ever have to convince ANYONE what they should believe beyond a practice of kindness and compassion. Never been? Might be worth checking it out. Eleanor will be playing Mary in this year’s Christmas Eve pageant event and I’ll be seated somewhere in the congregation emitting my own unique glow.