13th Feb 2008
Surviving High School: YRUU and me
Jacqueline and I were chatting via email about our blogs being nominated in the non-UU blog category in the Unitarian Universalist blog awards and how that’s funny as we’re both lifelong UUs who probably don’t mention that enough. Did I mention I was raised a Unitarian Universalist? And even though I have theological tantrums and threaten to go to the Zen Center of LA or get myself baptized and go UCC, I’m really still quite UU. So here is a bit more of my UU background with YRUU.
What is YRUU? For non-Unitarian Universalists readers, it’s Young Religious Unitarian Universalists. For me it was a high school youth group of other Unitarian Universalists that met at our church, the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara. We often ate pizza. We often saw movies. We always talked, and we covered just about everything. This particular group sustained me throughout high school where I was the only Unitarian Universalist in a Christian fundamentalist landscape. At least that was how I saw it at the time in between people telling me that they would pray for me because I hadn’t taken Jesus as my personal savior and the lunchtime Christian group. YRUU presented an opportunity to connect with other sort of like-minded youth throughout Santa Barbara County and at a district level.
YRUU was not without its challenges. It’s youth-organized, and sometimes it was youth-disorganized. We royally screwed up a conference my senior year in high school. The screw-up was so bad that when I found an unrelated UU Camp discussion board people were still talking about that conference twenty years after the fact. (One of the misadventures involved teenagers from another UU church exploring the organ pipes in great detail.) But, at the time, YRUU was just about the only organization that seemed to trust and respect me as a teenager. My high school certainly didn’t.
YRRU meant a great deal to me, and I hope the cessation of funding of YRUU at the continental level isn’t indicative of a. lack of interest in teenagers organizing, or b. lack of interest in teenagers because, of course, where you allocate funding tells quite a bit about what you value, eh?
Two of my three kids have been involved in the district-wide YRUU cons, one held elected office. Our small, local church doesn’t do youth-led programming well - but my kids found a wonderful network of friends, companions and allies in YRUU. I also hope this doesn’t show a lack of interest in our young people - we have a hard enough time keeping them involved, eh? (And, yeah - what’s up with the non-UU themed nominations? I’m there, too. Did I mention I’m a candidate for UU ministry? Probably not enough… Good luck!)
I’m glad to hear your kids found a great network in YRUU too.
You know I went to HDS in the MDiv program to be a UU minister (until I transferred into the MTS program). Clearly I need to say “Unitarian” and “Universalist” daily, because I’ve been under the impression I write mostly about Unitarian Universalist theology applied to the workplace.
We have qualifications!
Me too! Unitarian! Universalist! Over here! I wasn’t into YRUU… I was too late or too early for it… or something. UU! Go UU!
I’ve always taken your blog for a UU theological slant on workplace issues, and a good one at that. That’s why I voted for you in the UU blog awards. Maybe the liberal religious angle isn’t as obvious for readers who didn’t grow up in this denomination, but it always seems clear (if unstated) to me.
Well, thanks, Jeff.
It is probably very unstated.