By: Claire Gapsis

Growing up I have attended a Unitarian church. The basic idea of Unitarians is to create your own belief and ideas, accept people and their beliefs, and to respect everything. As I progressed through the religious education classes I learned about world religions and the stories of the bible. Once a month the church would come together as a whole and have a Celebration of Life service; sometimes taking form of a Day of the Dead service. For Christmas we would light all the candles on the Menorah, sing holiday songs, carry out a Yule Log and have a moment of silence in a darkened sanctuary that was lit by everyone’s candle. Sounds accepting, loving, and just fabulous, right? It was! I felt I was living the life; I was not being told how to believe or what to believe in.

Things changed, though; in seventh and eighth grade the kids enter a program called Coming of Age that helps us identify our beliefs. I had a hard time because growing up in such an open environment I had no input or direction for what I should believe in. That was the point, though, to figure out what I believed in. It was just too hard for me to pinpoint what exactly pushed me forward and woke me up everyday; what I looked to in my troubling times. In the end I just slapped different religions together – mostly Buddhism and what now seems to be Native American beliefs.

What changed me, though, was not the struggle or the self-reflection but the acceptance my church gave me, embracing my ideas and loving me even more for them. This is when a new belief fell into place. Variety and individualism are beautiful and necessary. It also is not limited to religion but includes the people I meet and my every day happenings. I search for the differences in people and learn to love them for the beauty their difference gives them. People often say uniqueness is good but they hardly ever look at it and say, ‘This is beautiful.’

Everyday I find something different and say to myself, ‘I accept this unconventional beauty.’  This, I believe.