Personal Narrative: Coming Of Age

When I was fourteen, a neatly demarcated threshold between childhood and adulthood manifested before me, identifying itself as “Coming of Age.” And to be fully honest, I wasn’t thrilled about it. To my limited knowledge, Coming of Age was just a program at my church where each week we would talk at length about, well… something. After that process had repeated itself enough, I would have to make a personal speech about the somethings I had learned. All that time for a vaguely defined speaking commitment hardly seemed worth the trouble. But whatever the program truly entailed, I felt I should take part, as a decided majority of my class of the middle school youth group would be taking part.
There are few outside of Unitarian Universalism— the denomination I’ve belonged to my entire life— to whom Coming of Age would seem like much of a religious maturation. Coming of Age is the product of a church where the average member isn’t quite settled on what they believe, but they’re definitely certain they don’t want to seem too narrow-minded about it. The capstone of the program was not giving an affirmation of a creed, but rather to determine our own personal spiritual beliefs, drafting a credo which would then be read to the congregation. …show more content…
For fourteen years, apart from brief moments of interest, I had been successful in dodging serious consideration of affairs divine or metaphysical. Agnosticism functioned as a perfect avoidance strategy, and I saw no reason to trouble myself about greater powers. I began giving actual thought to these matters not because I suddenly regretted my apathy, or was struck by a realization of how spiritually desolate my life had been until then, but because when we read our credos in front of the congregation I didn’t want to embarrass