by Reverend Carol Strecker

My family is from the Midwest. My father's family is from Marietta, Ohio and my mother's family is from a rural area north of Flint, Michigan. I grew up in University City, Missouri, a community adjacent to the city of St. Louis. My father worked in the library system at Washington University until he retired. My mother worked at home, raising my younger brother and me until my parents were divorced.

My parents were divorced when I was six. My mother went to work full-time as a pre-school teacher. Our household was quite chaotic but my mother kept us engaged in a routine that revolved around church activities. The members of our church became our primary support system. We all sang in the choir. My life revolved around the ritual and music of the church year. My mother is a person of great faith who believes in living by her beliefs. In those years, she exemplified her faith by teaching art in inner-city churches. I tagged along and learned some early lessons about racism and oppression.

I spent my youth searching for my identity. I spent my summers at a Christian youth leadership training camp in Michigan. Camp provided me with a philosophy of balanced living grounded in the spirit, which keeps me balanced to this day. I met women of all ages, vocations and persuasions from all over the country at camp. It was with the benefit of some wonderful role models and friends during those summers at camp that I started to settle into me. They gave me permission to be me - a wonderful gift. Grounded in their unconditional affirmation and love I found the courage to come out as a lesbian in my early twenties. When I came out it was like a light bulb going off. I was finally able to stop worrying about why I felt so different, embracing that difference so I could move on to figuring out what I wanted to do with my life.

Unfortunately, coming-out put me at odds with my church family. I had worked out my theological difficulties with church doctrine, taking what I could use and leaving the rest. Although, when the Methodist church made an explicit statement denying the full humanity of gays and lesbians I felt I had no choice but to leave the church. I was working for the church at the time as an outreach minister in the community. I was on a path leading towards a vocation in ministry, but I felt compelled to leave the church so I moved to Boston and made social work my ministry. I worked as a social worker for many years until I realized that I needed to ground my vocation in the spirit.

I was "unchurched" for 10 years but I found ways of creating spiritual community during that time. Ritual has always been very important way of creating community for me. Celebrating the cycles and seasons of our lives together is something my mother instilled in me from a very early age. I have been creating rituals since I was a kid. After I moved to Boston, I began to talk with friends about their experiences with religion and church. Many of them felt alienated from the churches where they had grown up. I decided that planning and leading rituals for my friends could be ways of helping all of us reclaim spirituality in our lives. I began to learn more about paganism and ancient goddesses. Solstice rituals became a regular part of every year's celebrations. My partner and I created a ceremony of affirmation that has had a profound effect on all of us. We have used ritual to create a community that is grounded in the spirit of our love and lives together.

Discovering Kim Crawford Harvie at the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House in Provincetown during the summer of 1990 opened my heart to a vision of me returning to a vocation of service in the church. Seeing someone like me in the pulpit was something I had never experienced. When Kim came to Boston, I began attending church more regularly. My work as a substance abuse counselor with teenage girls reinforced a growing need to look more closely at how spirituality affects our lives. Eventually I got to a place where I believed that spirituality needed to be the foundation of my work. As I learned more about Unitarian Universalism, I began to feel hopeful that Unitarian Universalism was a place where I could ground my work in my beliefs as I helped other people to ground their lives in their beliefs.

Therefore, I am back on the path with the help of my loving partner Mary. We have been together for many years. Mary was a Public Health Administrator, organizing a community-based public health initiative in South Boston. We lived in a house she owned for twenty years in Cambridge before we moved to Kennebunk. We have two cats and dog. We spend a lot of time at our cabin in southern Maine during the warmer months. We are both very much tied to the seasons of the land. We enjoy gardening and walks almost anywhere outdoors. We both love to ride bicycles. We play squash and swim together. We try to see our friends as often as possible. We are both quite handy and enjoy working on projects around the house.

I love sports, although I do not participate in organized team sports anymore. I am trying to learn enough yoga to keep myself limber enough to do all the other active things I enjoy. I also love music. I love to sing and I have been playing the guitar for a long time. I am learning to engage in activities during my spare time, of which there is very little these days, that feed my soul. I try to sing, do yoga, swim, ride my bike, walk, and even write mindfully, as forms of spiritual practice.