Taryn Strauss

Director of Religious Education

October 2009

As a child and young adult growing up in the UU church, sometimes I wished I was Christian. My friends who attended Christian churches knew so many fantastic stories. They knew stories about great floods that swept through the Earth and an ark that carried every animal two by two. They knew stories about parting waves, inspired tales of courage, wisdom, suffering, and love. They heard these stories again and again until they knew them by heart. As an adult, I’m still a little envious. I have a personal theology, but this is not grounded in heroic legend, or even ritual or a lot of tradition. We have begun to incorporate more ritual into our worship time and RE classes. In the past few years, we have developed traditions and ceremonies that help us mark special times in the year. But still, we have not formulated an agreed-upon set of stories and myths that give us a context for our beliefs or strong examples of our principles in action.

Enter Spirit Play. Now, as our children begin their Religious Education in Kindergarten and 1st grade, we have the opportunity to offer them these myths, dramatically creating the foundation for our UU principles. We will tell these stories, ask existential questions to help children explore the deeper meaning, and then we invite them to play with the stories and relate to them in their individual way.

Congregation, I ask you: What stories will we choose as the foundation of our RE program at UUCA? Consider all of our six sources we can employ to find these tales. We have at our disposal the sense of awe and wonder of life, Bible stories we can relate to, wisdom from the world’s religions and their texts, UU heroes and heroines whose pioneering ideas or social justice work created our foundation, and the lessons of the natural world around us. We are now accepting your suggestions for the great stories that will help ground our religious education at UUCA. These stories can be ancient, standing up to the test of time, or they can be newer works, creatively weaving our seven principles into the fabric of the message. Please contact me with your story suggestions at DirReligiousEd@UUAsheville.org.