While I was growing up, I started as a child in the Society of Friends (aka Quakers) and then, when living in towns with no Quaker Meetings available, attended Episcopalian or Congregational Churches. It was the thing to do; my mother was a teacher in the town and the mores of the day said that 'thou shalt not be divorced' and 'thou shalt attend church'. Also and most especially, 'thou shall abjure any contact or knowledge of Catholics or Catholicism'.

I was, of course, blithely unconcerned with all these shalls and shalt nots and sometimes I went to church and sometimes I didn't. I adamantly refused to go to Sunday School after being forced to sing, "Jesus loves me this I know/ For the Bible tells me so...." as I came from a home where we had Bach for breakfast and the Hallelujah Chorus for lunch. Any church that had a decent choir to sing in was fine with me. Very religious, huh?

My uncles all married Catholic women (to the horror of the rest of the family) and my cousins were, of course, raised Catholic. Once I discovered the joys of singing the Mass, the magnificent music in Latin, I abandoned my Protestant past and went faithfully to Mass, every Sunday and Wednesday Vespers. Such glorious music! At last I understood how one could have a religious experience in church.

Needless to say, the family were not amused. But I have kept my love of music, liturgical music most especially, all my life.

What makes my Unitarian Church different, I was going to say, when I got sidetracked into waxing lyrical about music, was that our services often lapse into the informal and, yea, even disorganized. Episcopal, Congregational, Catholic--all were highly ritualized and very formal. But our church, often to the great discomfort of our minister, is, shall we say, quite flexible.

Take this morning for example: The guest preacher was not able to preach (taken ill at the last minute), so we Lay Associates filled in, having been given about 10 minutes' notice. Disorganized but with a service structure so familiar and amongst friends so dear to us--we laughed, we meditated, we shared our words and it was a fine, meaningful, musical service after all. Just throw away the Order of Service that you received from the ushers and worship as the spirit moves you.

Which is what we did in our Quaker meetings so many years ago.