It’s no secret I left my UU church last year. While my specific grievances are personal and partly confidential, I can speak to an overall trend that I’ve witnessed in other UU churches.
Yes, this really exists.(This is the third in the series “Erik can’t decide what the hell he believes in.” See earlier posts here and here.)
I wish I had read Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Naht Hanh years earlier. It had been on my reading list for ages, but I didn’t pick it up until a few months ago. Hanh describes, with a poetry that only a Zen master like himself can produce, how the teachings of Gautama Buddha and Jesus of Nazareth parallel each other.
I say this because I still flounder on this question: am I a Unitarian Christian who also follows the Buddha, or am I a Zen-leaning Buddhist who also loves Jesus of Nazareth? (The correct answer is actually that I’m a Unitarian Universalist; more on that below.)
I’ve explored my proto-Christian side for months now, and while it’s been fruitful, I still keep returning to the rituals and worldview of Buddhism. There are many complicated reasons why, but I’ll outline a few below.