Having been raised a Jew, I figured out really early on this wasn't a religion for me.  Maybe it was that I couldn't understand the Hebrew prayers.   Or why the men and women couldn't sit together.  Or why we didn't get to have a tree at Christmas.  Or being raised in a very small Jewish community within a small English-speaking mostly Protestant minority within a medium-sized French-speaking city.

Whatever it was, no-one was surprised when I decided that I didn't really believe what we were saying, even if we were saying it in Hebrew.  Of course, the fact that I pronounced that I had no interest in any religion that wouldn't let me pray unless there were ten penises in the room was surprisingly precocious, even for me at 13. But the inevitability of the decision was clear from years before.

My surprise came years later, when I found out that there was a religious community, of sorts, for athiests.  My first mother-in-law was an active member of the Unitarian fellowship in London, Ontario.  She was also a New Democrat, a high school art teacher, and a woman of impeccable taste.  All of these things were new to me, but I'd never even heard of Unitarians before.  I asked her about it: "How can you not believe in anything and still belong to a religious or spiritual group?" 

She explained that she believed lots of things, just not in a supreme being.  And she believed that those who didn't believe in any god has a particular responsbility to think about their morality, and that being a Unitarian gave her a congregation in which to do that.  I was bemused, I suppose.  I never went to any gatherings or services with her.  And I thought little of it, until she was dying, and I realized she was going to stick to her atheist guns, and have a Unitarian memorial service. The service itself is a fog to me, not only from grief, but for a series of unrelated but traumatic events going on in the lead-up hours.  But Unitarian it was.  And I recalled how I had always referred to her as a Unitarian, "you know, the practising atheists".

A series of events led me and my life partner to the Unitarian congregation here in Ottawa.  He, of the gentle Protestant persuasian, had told me that his personal religion was "Bad things happen when good people do nothing".   He had been a  Church-goer, though, and a choir member, and so on.   Judging from what I could see when we attended the church of his childhood in Ohio, I thought this was something missing in his life.  He never said so, but he didn't disagree when I made the observation.  By the time we came to be in the Unitarian church twice in six months at the behest of friends, we realized that we had found a spiritual congregation in which we could both be comfortable. 

Tonight, as we began a discussion group about Unitarianism (based on a book called Freethinking Mystics with Hands), I felt that I had finally become a practising atheist, following the example of a woman I admired in my life, and who I am sure would approve.

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