Roy’s Sunday Letter for March 1, 2026
The Unfolding of Life and Faith
My parents attended a neighborhood church which meant early Sunday morning, Sunday school and back again for evening Training Union. I accepted a youthful Faith as taught to me by caring adults I knew and trusted. As I grew physically, my early faith carried me through my teen years and into college.
Both faith and world events ceased to be my family’s faith experience and suddenly I became my own faith leader with the murders of JFK, RFK, and MLK. The injustices of voting, housing and education exploded before me, my faith and my generation. My Sunday School faith did not match the actions and corrective purpose of my young adulthood and first job in society.
In what ways did your faith keep pace and connection with your young adult self, your first job, eyes and ears of a fast changing and challenging world? Spiritual retreats? Mentors who helped you balance who you were with who you were becoming? Did experiences of faith, in a community of others, deepen and broadened your beliefs and your faith?
In my experience, the catch-up of faith takes time and decades of living. Perhaps a family death, a divorce, or job change created a spiritual crisis, an opportunity for a renewing of faith. It is not uncommon that renewed faith is stronger and strengthened by life’s challenges. Hopefully, a covenant community and a path of faith will be with you in the stages of life to come.
Beth and I participate in a weekly Meditation “Sangah” based upon the historic teachings of Buddha, and more recently Thich Nhat Hanh. To follow the path of Buddhism is a Practice, not a traditional faith experience. Exposure to wisdom and truthful ways is a path to be valued whether traditional faith or Practice of the ways of the Buddha.
Questions and doubts regarding the journey of faith can arise at any life stage or life crisis. This is especially disturbing and upsetting as we age, suffering the loss of a spouse with our circle of family and friends becomes smaller. We often face these circumstances with declining health and a need for relocations. I understand the tendency to withdraw and to isolate. My call out, to all of us, is to be brave, show courage, join and be with others as we all find our way to a faith of hope, of light and joy.
Roy, seeking the same faith and Practice as do we all
I had the same youthful faith experience that you had, Roy. I attended Sunday School, church, evening church, Wednesday night service and choir practice on Thursday. The majority of my youth was spent attending some sort of church service. I wasn’t allowed to miss. I can still hear my mother saying, “ if you can party on Saturday night you can get up for Church on Sunday morning.” I attended 2 Christian colleges but they had vastly different philosophies . It wasn’t until I divorced that I discovered the God. I worshiped was not happy with divorce so I had to look elsewhere for my faith journey. I discovered a kind, loving Being that didn’t judge us as harshly as I had been taught and my whole attitude changed. Instead of a vengeful God that would hand out punishment I found a loving God that wanted us to love others and treat our neighbors like we wanted to be treated. It was a refreshing awakening and one that has sustained me in my adult life.
Yes and Yes again to all your wisdom, painfully gained.
You found grace at UCC and the community resource center.
We Americans are now facing once more the vengeful, small hearted god.
But, together we hold faithful hands and continue serving others.
So, good for you and your goodness of spirit you share with so many, including we two also.
RB
I must admit that I had to look up the many definitions of faith. The following is what I want my existence to be a part of. I believe it is important to be intertwined with life, experiencing it as we live and grow, heal, discover, learn, help others, forgive, build, grieve, giving a helping hand, celebrate and find PEACE, LOVE, Self and one another. I have developed my faith over a lifetime putting aside and pasteing in changes as needed to be responsive to the needs of self and others. Buddhism, Christianity, Humanity, PEACE, LOVE, and Healing, have all been among my many paths in finding SELF and my path.
Yes in all the ways you have defined as well as lived in a full way.
For me, both faith and practice I stumbled into more than result of a search.
I think that is the faith part…..believeing there more out there, for all of us.
& now we continue…..
My father died in WWII when I was 2, and my mother took refuge and solace in the church. She was the organist, choir director, youth director, and on every guild in our local Episcopal church as well as active in the diocese. If the doors were open, we were there. In this milieu, I felt from early teens that I would be a priest, and on the recommendation of a priest, went to St. John’s College (the “Great Books” school): “If he gets through St. John’s and still wants to be a priest, it is a real calling.” he assured my mother.
I didn’t. Indeed, by Thanksgiving of my freshman year I was in a turmoil of faith, and kept searching for “the truth” throughout studying the classical theologians and philosophers at St. John’s. I wrote my senior thesis on Dostoevsky, and the head examiner in my thesis defense began by saying: “Well, Mr. Kunkle, it looks like for you, it’s either the mouth of the pistol or the foot of the cross.” I was not suicidal, but I was a very melancholy and confused young person. I remember a poem I wrote at that time called “Ellie and I”: A graveyard, I passed by, where, at last, the poor folks lie. On the ground to mark the spot where Ellie lay there was a block, a common cement building block, building nothing. Likewise I am building nothing; likewise soon will lie.
Not quite ready to totally dismiss religion in general and Christianity in particular, I went to Divinity School for a year just to see what contemporary theologians had to say. I couldn’t buy it and it was off to graduate school to study philosophy and hopefully to decipher the mystery of life. I didn’t, but I did get involved in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, and involved with my students and their drugs, and opened my mind to things much more real than I had found in my books. During a time of communal living and exploring other religions, I realized that the mystery of life should remain a mystery, but not in conflict with faith, a faith in that one source of everything that is and everything that is True, and Beautiful, and Good, and that the core of that faith is Love.
For forty years now, I have been ordained in the Episcopal church, not exposing a doctrinaire, exclusive belief, but an open ended universalistic faith ala Thomas Merton and Richard Rohr. “God is Love and where True Love is, God itself is there.”