“Odyssey of Bruce”
the Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
Sunday April 22, 2007
Frequently, when I tell someone I changed careers to become a minister, they ask me what made me do it. The members of the Search Committee who brought me here as the candidate to become your settled minister knew a lot about me and my history. They interviewed me for an entire weekend, and read my packet of information—there’s a copy of it in the church office, but most of you haven’t gotten to read it. You need to know who I am religiously before you vote on whether to call me. So today, I will tell you my personal faith story that led me to become a Unitarian Universalist minister.

My road to the ministry includes some transformative experiences. I did not go into a trance, nor did I have a visit from a celestial messenger who told me to begin preaching the gospel. Fortunately that’s no longer required in order to become a UU minister. Instead, my decision to devote my life to this church happened gradually, one small step at a time. My call to the ministry was the culmination of a long search for a religion which has life-sustaining spirituality and which supports building compassionate and inclusive community in our churches and in the world. In Unitarian Universalism I found such a religion.

In UU jargon I am affectionately known as a “Come Outer.” That’s a person who came out of another church background. We Come Outers commonly name our former churches as a way of introducing ourselves religiously, so I’ll start there. I don’t remember the Methodist Church where I was Christened because my mother took her five children to Southern Baptist churches throughout our elementary and high school years. I was churchless in my college and Navy years. At age 27 I joined my first wife’s church- the Christian Church- Disciples of Christ. The Disciples were a more ecumenical and liberal denomination than the Southern Baptists. For the first time I had permission to come to my own conclusions about religion, to discuss them openly in church and to stay in fellowship even if I didn’t accept all the church’s doctrines. Later, I attended a United Church of Christ for awhile, and then was a Presbyterian. I found the Unitarian Universalist church 15 years ago.

There were different reasons why I joined or left all of those other churches. I left the Baptist church when I left home for school. The Baptist church didn’t condone my college lifestyle which included such things as drinking and dancing. I married into and divorced out of the Disciples. I joined the Presbyterian church because I could walk to it, and I wanted to connect with my neighbors. I left it after my daughter attended their confirmation class but decided not to go thru with it.
My church membership history is only a broad framework for my spiritual journey. What I was looking for when I went to those churches, and what I still look for in church, is a process through which IO can build my faith and then act on it. By faith, I mean more than mere beliefs, which are intellectual constructs. By faith, I mean ‘that core of ultimate meanings, values and convictions out of which we live our lives.” It is rooted in a universal human need for meaning in life. People both discover and create meaning for their lives. Each of my churches has contributed to my spiritual growth, and I have evolved each time one of life’s experiences drove me to search for meaning to make sense of it.

I was born in St. Louis, Missouri on February 12, 1950, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. My parents also named me Abe (Rev. Abe?- I don’t think so.) Lincoln was one of my childhood heroes. I learned from him that we should treat all people equally. The mood of the country in the 50s was one of optimism, at least amongst a lot of white people, who believed that a “Can Do” attitude had won World War II, and would create an American way of life full of prosperity, health and happiness. Many still believed moderism’s promise that a better world would inevitable emerge through the use of rational thought, scientific methods and new technology, this despite much evidence to the contrary during the first half of the 20th century.

During my teen years in the 60s I lived in a very small town—Russellville, Kentucky, where I played clarinet in the high school band, sang in the church choir, and became an Eagle Scout as my father had before me. Scouting taught me to love and protect the earth. My minister, Brother Joe Carrico, built Post Oak Baptist Church by caring for the needy. He listened to the police scanner and often went to the scenes of domestic disturbances. After the police left, Brother Joe provided the family clothes and other necessities and brought them into our church. The more affluent in the congregation were asked to provide them jobs. His respect for all people watered the seed of universalism in me.

I wanted to follow the values of my family, school, church and scouts, but my world didn’t match their ideals. I became painfully aware that some of school friends wouldn’t associate with my poorer friends. I was forced to choose among my friends. I experienced racism there when desegregation came to my school in the early 60s and later to the swimming pool where I was a lifeguard. My boss made us count and report to him every African American who came to the pool, and he instituted policies to keep them out. Also there was a huge gap between my father’s scouting values and his behavior. My experience of post World War II America was not a utopian, idealized human community but one which harbored poverty, racism and abusive family systems.

I was determined to be more successful than my father by going to college and then climbing thru the corporate patriarchy. I won a Navy ROTC scholarship so I could attend Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee beginning in 1968. But the path to affluence turned out to have a few rocky patches in it, the largest of which was the Vietnam War. Many of us baby boomers, just then coming into our young adulthood became skeptical of the nationalistic claims used to justify going to war, and indeed about America’s entire economic and cultural system. We questioned the values of earlier generations. This made for a rather schizophrenic existence. I hoped to preserve the potential benefits that might come to a white, college-educated, male military veteran by working to earn my degree and a commission as a Naval officer. At the same time, I grew a beard and smoked pot. I called myself a closet hippy. After college, I deployed on the aircraft carrier Saratoga off the coast of Vietnam and was anti-war the whole time I was there.

This was a period of testing my faith. I pitted traditional Christianity, modernism and American nationalism against the post modern, anti-war counter culture. I was a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut’s books. I loved his dark sarcastic commentary on our society. The Navy took me around the globe which helped me see America from a much broader perspective. I loved seeing all the foreign countries, bit I was not a good match for the military. I left the Navy as soon as I could. Then, during the late 70s the idealism of the so-called Cultural Revolution faded. It has failed to provide the country with a new set of commonly accepted beliefs to replace the old ones into which it had punched holes. At the same time, my own belief system was just as fragmented as was the country’s and marijuana and alcohol became major players in my life.
After leaving the Navy, I returned to my roots. I lived once again In Russellville, Kentucky when I began work with the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, as a mechanical engineer at Paradise Steam Plant. I married and became stepfather to 2 children, Holly, age 6 and Russell, age 10. I had an instant family with two kids, two cars, two incomes, and three dogs. Three years later, in 1979, our daughter Katy was born.

My first marriage was difficult, and I turned to my pastor for help, He recommended James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio shows, I tried to follow Dobson’s recipes for family life, but my family never seemed to have the necessary ingredients to make life work the way Dobson said it should. In 1983, I transferred to TVA’s central office and moved my family to Chattanooga. Shortly afterward, my nine year marriage came to an end. The tragedy of divorce shattered my self concept and brought on depression and a return to drinking. At age 36, I was asking “What’s wrong with me that I can’t be happy?” I believed myself to be deeply flawed and was unsure if I could be fixed. I was confused about the values I had tried to build my life upon, and I had lost my family.

I was able to stop drinking with help from Alcoholics Anonymous, and psychotherapy. In this period of my life, one which AA calls “Recovery” from alcoholism, I gained a deeper understanding of family systems. Specifically, I explored my own history and realized I had not learned enough good relationship skills growing up in a shame based family. To move forward I had to let go of ideas and behaviors which had both worked for me. I examined my belief system and began to build a new and more adequate one based on better ideas.

AA showed me that I could learn from all kinds of people, and it opened me to exploring various forms of spirituality. AA recommends that you go to church, pray and meditate. 20 years ago meditation was a new spiritual practice for me, and to learn more about it I began investigating Buddhism. Also around that time, I joined the Sierra Club. At one program meeting, I heard a person who had hiked the entire Appalachian Trail say that it had transformed his life. He seemed like a pretty mellow guy, and I wanted to be more like that. It seemed spending time in nature might do something for me so I proceeded over a period of years to hike about 400 miles of trail and found spiritual rejuvenation in those wilderness experiences. Both my Sierra Club and Adult Children of Alcoholics groups met in the basement of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Chattanooga. At that time, the little I had heard about UUism sort of scared me, but I thought, “If these two groups, that mean so much to me, meet here, maybe the church would be compatible with my interests, too.” So, one day I cautiously slinked into a worship service; the message I heard was “It is OK to believe what you believe,” and I felt immediately that I had found a church home.

A significant influence in my early UU years was Joseph Campbell. His book, Myths to Live By, told me that virtually all religions can help people access divinity. When I got to the part of the book that said there were myths similar to the Jesus stories, I shut the book and put it down. It scared me to think that what I had believed all my life might be just one of many possibilities. A month or two later I picked up the book again and read one. Finally it sunk in that my soul was not in danger and Jesus wasn’t the only way to salvation. What a liberation that was!

The price I paid for that liberation was that my religion no longer had a center. After reading Joseph Campbell,. I felt compelled to continue my search for truth and meaning. In my first years as a UU I continued an intensive exploration of spiritual sources. I found inspiration in Humanism, Buddhism, Judaism and in Women and Earth honoring religions, also known as Paganism, as well as Christianity. Although I gained much from these religious sources, none of them alone became the new center for my faith. Unitarian Universalism provided that center. After a few years I was pretty content with where I had landed religiously and slowed the pace of my spiritual search. To express my gratitude for the UU church, I worked to build the institution of UUism by serving on church committees as a Trustee, teaching in the Religious Education program, and in social justice work.

When a teenage member of my family attempted suicide and then came out as a lesbian, I knew she would face oppression, and I got very interested in making the world safer for her. I led the Chattanooga church to become a Welcoming Congregation, and I joined PFLAG- that’s short for Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. These involvements helped me address my own homophobia and game me ways to confront heterosexism in our society. With support from my UU church I was able to revise some long held beliefs and then to take effective action on an issue that was critically important to me, my family and my community. That’s what I call a church that matters, and that’s another reason I decided to devote myself to our movement.

A few years later CeCe, my wife, recruited me for a team of people she put together from her Episcopal church and my UU church to provide care for a man dying from AIDS. I was honored to be invited to go more deeply into his world. Caring for him gave me many unexpected gifts. I enjoyed being a care provider, and I knew I wanted more opportunities to serve people in need.

Seeing if I could nurse someone with AIDS was the last test I imposed on myself before I decided to go to seminary. You see, my call to ministry started somewhere back in high school. It wasn’t clear back then, and through the years I always had other important things to do or fears about going all the way into church work. At fifty years of age, I lay in bed early one Saturday morning wrestling with my thoughts, unable to sleep. I finally admitted to myself that I could be a minister if I wanted to. I answered a call that had taken decades to break through.

I retired from TVA, CeCe left Chattanooga Tent Company and we moved to Hyde Park in Chicago so I could attend Meadville Lombard Theological School. We were unpacking the moving boxes in our condo on September 11, 2001. That event of course changed all our lives, and it gave shape to my seminary class as we immersed ourselves in religious study and did our own personal spiritual work. In addition to school, I spent a summer as a hospital chaplain, I learned to minister to people of different faiths going to where they were religiously in order to offer comfort to them while remaining true to my own theology. I spent a year as an Intern Minister at North Shore Unitarian Church under the supervision of Gary James, a great philosophical preacher and a mystic. We often discussed theology. He pushed me to find a real connection with the divine, and there I became more comfortable ministering to UUs with Catholic and Jewish backgrounds. I also learned a lot about their very successful RE program and went on a trip to Boston with 42 eighth graders in their Affirmation class. During school I regularly met with a therapist/spiritual advisor, a Benedictine nun, who helped keep me on a level keel throughout all the emotional trials attendant to becoming a UU minister.

The last 2 years CeCe and I have spent in Utah while I have been the interim minister at the UU Church of Ogden, which is almost the same size as Northern Hills. I could tell many tales of Mountains and Mormons and how we did it in Ogden, but this sermon is about my personal path of spiritual development, so I won’t digress just now. Those stories will come out in other sermons. I guess the biggest thing I have gained out of my experience in Ogden is self-confidence as a minister. Partly this comes from having been thru the cycle of the church year a few times and having practice with all the special services and tasks that make up this job. But, more than that, it comes from having connected with a congregation, from having been in relationship with individual people and with committees and with the entire church community. I have been their minister, and I love them and I love the job—most of the time. The spiritual transformation of become a minister has happened.

Unitarian Universalism has been transformative for me—because it helped me to heal the divisions I felt earlier when my values did not guide me to a happy life. In my church work I align my actions to my beliefs. In this way I am able to maintain continuity between my inner self image of who I am and what I can do, and what life means to me. Through UUism I have come to feel a sense of personal unity. As Emerson said, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” I have learned to delight in my authentic self, in that set of values that are uniquely mine. This is what I offer you.

There is a uniquely wonderful aggregation of gifts, talents, insights, and wisdom in each one of you, too. May your spiritual path help you to use them, and may they bless your lives.
Namaste, Amen and Blessed Be.