My Faith Story

I was recently asked to share my faith story with the United University Church, where I have worked in the worship band for the past 11 years. Below is my speech.

Faith has always been a bit of a mystery to me.

I remember being in elementary school and learning that some of my friends were celebrating Hanukkah because they were Jewish. And learning that we didn’t celebrate one classmate’s birthday because he was a Jehovah’s Witness. And I had heard of buddhism, though I wasn’t very clear on any details.

So one day I went to my Mom and asked “What are we?”

And I’m sure she said something more accurate and thoughtful than this, but in my kid brain the message that I remembered was “We’re nothing.” That is to say, we didn’t have a religion.

My mother has been raised Catholic and my father’s family was vaguely Protestant but not observant.

Their experiences with the harsh ways that Churches can sometimes act led them to a certain resentment for organized religion, and they brought up me and my two brothers with no religious education at all.

Certainly my parents raised us with a moral code. To do our best to be as kind as possible, to be fair to others even if it meant having to make sacrifices. But we didn’t learn any specifics about any religion.

So what I learned as a child about Christianity I learned through cultural osmosis:

That there was a man long ago named Jesus who taught about treating everyone with dignity regardless of their station in life. Sounds pretty reasonable…

I learned that for this unspeakable offense, he was killed.

That while the ideas and principles Jesus taught might be very good, a lot of institutions over the preceding several thousand years had used Jesus’ name as an excuse to do horrific things.

But for me, this was mostly abstract. An anthropological curiosity rather than something that pertained to me personally. Because after all, I wasn’t religious.

I organized my life around other things. I went off to music school and spent my time thinking about art and how to make a living in what everyone was quick to tell me was a very hard business.

I moved back to Los Angeles and one of my very first gigs was playing a community theatre production of Annie starring one Oliviana Marie who had convinced her father, our very own Tom Griep to play piano for the show.

Shortly after, Tom started inviting me to play for services at United University Church. This was a little over 10 years ago. “How exciting, a gig!” I thought.

For the first time I was experiencing regularly what actually happened in a church. And I wasn’t necessarily paying a lot of attention to start.

It’s a bit of a cruel twist of fate that the two most likely times for a musician to be working are late Saturday night and early Sunday morning. Consequently, I was (and still am) often a little bleary-eyed during the service.

And besides, this was my first steady gig in town - I was focused on a doing a good job musically so that Tom and everyone would be pleased with my work, so some of the specific traditions continued to just fly right past me.

The first time I ever took communion was at UUC. Someone came up to me with a plate of bread and a chalice. I panicked, not knowing the rules of any of this, (Don’t the Catholics require I be fasting and confess my sins first?) I couldn’t think of a polite way to decline so I just copied what everyone else had done, dipping the bread in the chalice and eating it. I was relieved when I didn’t immediately burst into flames.

But despite this stumbling start, I slowly started noticing things. How it was explicit in the Words of Welcome that if I believed in God some of the time, or none of the time, or all of the time, I was welcome here.

I wondered how true that middle part could be… Looking into the pews it seemed like the rest of the words of welcome were true, so I eventually learned to trust all of them.

I heard the sermon each week, focusing on kindness and love. Justice for the downtrodden and oppressed. Which, honestly, I would expect from just about any church, even if for many of them it was just lip service. But here the people seemed to actually act on those principles.

I would hear during community life about UUC finding innovative ways to provide food for both the USC student population with the Jubilee kitchen and the greater community through the food bank program.

I heard how these gifts were freely given, that there were no requirements to display particular piety or religiosity to be fed.

When the COVID19 Pandemic came, almost all of the work I had been doing was canceled indefinitely. It was exactly the right move in the face of all the danger and death that surrounded us, but it was personally devastating. And it was then that Pastor Sunny decided that we musicians should be given a raise.

It turned out we would be recording our individual parts on our own time frame to be edited together for each service. I would have completely understood if the church couldn’t continue to employ musicians at all, or if our wages had to be cut - services would be so different. But the people of this church extended me and my colleagues a lifeline. it was an extraordinary act of kindness.

Not so long after, when my pet lizard died, I got a sympathy card from the church.

When the fires raged through The Palisades and Pasadena earlier this year, Christof made me aware of programs through the church that could help with the lean times from more gig cancelations.

I realized I was being cared for in a thousand ways, large and small. And I certainly wasn’t alone.

I continued to hear updates on the Food Pantry, and how many thousands of people were being served. I heard about open mic nights, providing new ways to connect and celebrate. This church, which can look small on any given Sunday morning was moving mountains to improve lives in this community, my own included.

So what I know about Faith, I have learned here.

I’m not much of a joiner. I regularly have early afternoon shows and have to run out of the service pretty quickly. And with my upbringing I have often been hesitant to be more directly involved with UUC. But this church has never been afraid to - gently, with no pressure or expectation - be more involved with me.

And while in many ways I am still uninformed in the rites and rituals and traditions of any specific religion, my experiences here have left me with a deep and abiding Faith in the people here today, and all of those involved with this church.

Thank you.