Once my family belonged to a Unitarian Universalist church that was located between a Roman Catholic convent and a golf course. The minister used to joke that we were somewhere in between the devoutly religious and those who golf religiously.

Maybe that's the truth about our faith. Most of us aren't exactly what many people would call devout or religious. We have no creed, have no confessed dogma and expect, even enjoy, debate. Some of us believe in a god of some definition; others do not. We don't have rules about dancing or drinking or birth control. If a member misses a Sunday for a hike in the mountains, the most we do is light a candle and wish them well in their communion with nature.

On the other hand, we have a long religious history that's founded on such deep faith convictions that many of those we honor in our heritage were burned at the stake or otherwise persecuted for refusing to lie about their religion. Unitarians who believed in one god, not a three-headed trinity, faced trials as heretics and took the penalties.

Universalists read the scriptures to say that everyone who's created by god is loved by god, and therefore couldn't possibly be condemned to hell. In speaking this belief, they faced the scorn of their Calvinist neighbors, who feared a human nature set free of the threat of eternal punishment.

Of course, those early Unitarians and Universalists lived in another era, one in which god was clearly a part of their beliefs. So I suppose no one here would argue that they were religious. But can we be religious and not believe in god?

As we moved toward the middle of this century, Unitarians began to look more seriously to the teachings of science. A new perspective on faith called humanism took root among the intellectuals of our religion, casting out the need for a being named god. Humanists find inspiration in the here and now. They believe in themselves, in humanity, in us.

Some people call that perspective atheism, a belief that there is no god. Others think of themselves as agnostic, doubting the existence of god. Either way, under the humanist umbrella, religious language became undesirable. We rejected suspicion and conjecture. We tended to think of ourselves as above mythology, as thinkers who taught our children to question authority and challenge assumptions. Not bad ideals, really. But the catch here is that, while we turned from superstition and blind faith, we created a new kind of religious shortsightedness. In allowing ourselves not to believe, we became a bit paranoid about trusting our feelings. In the name of freedom of religion, in freeing ourselves from a prescribed belief system, Unitarians seemed to reject religion itself.

Universalists, on the other hand, were moving toward finding the same basic ethical principles in all religions — Christian, Buddhist, even pagan. The definition of Universalism broadened from universal salvation to universal truth. Emphasis turned from a specific religion to spiritual meaning.

So, when the Unitarians and the Universalists merged in 1961 into the Unitarian Universalist Association, perhaps a kind of balance was achieved. Universal truth-seeking in the here and now took on religious significance.

We could speak a common language, regardless of what we believed. We shared not a mythology, but a faith in human ethics. We embraced many of the teachings of Christianity and other religions, but we tried to live true to ourselves rather than to someone else's rules.

Before long, in the 1980s, our general assembly of delegates from every member congregation approved our principles and purposes, giving voice to our ethical understanding and honoring the myriad of sources of our spiritual inspiration.

You might say we were religiously devout in our pursuit of freedom.

But still, we taught something called religious education to our children, shared Sunday morning gatherings and, in many cases, named our congregations "church."

Even ten years ago the average Unitarian Universalist society would have shied away from embracing a "religious" definition.

When I first joined this association, I believed that, while I was not a religious person, I did consider myself spiritual.

I no longer worshipped a father-god, but I acknowledged a kind of impersonal universal "force." Prayer had become "meditation." Holy communion translated to something that felt like cannibalism to me, but I enjoyed our flower exchange at Easter.

Sure, I'd been hurt by Christianity, and disenchanted with the mythology that embraced death sacrifice and martyrdom. Like others of my generation, I found a fresh perspective the impersonal philosophy of Eastern religions. And I'd been particularly enlightened by ideas like a transcendental image of god in nature or a mother-goddess with whom we participate in ongoing creation.

But those things that were positive for me, that were different from the protestant Christianity I'd experienced as a child, those things I called "spiritual."

But these words — religion and spirituality — are words that, when you think about it, imply a value judgement, one that has roots farther back in our culture than we might expect.

While the Bible has numerous references to things of the spirit, the times when the word "religious" is used are limited. In the Hebrew scriptures, religious is the word used to describe pagans worshippers whose rituals involve idols and sacrifice. As you might expect, these are not flattering references.

In the Christian New Testament, religious is used again to describe those who follow the rules and rituals of religion, this time the Jewish faith. For example, First Timothy 5:4 reads in part, "they should first learn their religious duty to their own family and make some repayment to their parents."

On the other hand, the same Bible uses the word "spiritual" to refer to something that has less to do with "duty" or prescribed acts of worship and more to do with a quality, a feeling of connectedness to god. The hierarchy of spirituality over religions clearly pointed out in I Corinthians 2:14-15. "Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of god's spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. Those who are spiritual discern all things, and they themselves are subject to no one else's scrutiny."

Quite a privilege, this ability to be spiritual. No wonder those of us who so firmly rejected our Judeo-Christian religion could find true spirituality elsewhere, in a place we would not consider a "religion."

Jesus himself, if we are to believe the stories passed down to us, wasn't teaching a new "religion." He was exemplifying a new way of living spiritually. It was his disciple Paul who taught the Christian "religion."

In seminary, I took a class called "The Spirituality of the Five Major Religions." It was taught by a woman named Ana Matt, who had lived in countries where each of these religions were the major or dominant one. She studied them on their own ground, always seeking for the universal spiritual truths. And her spiritual discernment was that "all spiritual traditions agree that the central lessons to be learned from this journey is to know who you really are."

In Christianity, she said, this lesson is found in the belief that the kingdom of god is within, that the real person was created by god in god's own image, spiritual and whole.

In Buddhism, it's found in the belief that each person has a Buddha-nature, that "behind the mask of your apparently separated and isolated ego" is the I, the lonely center of being.

So, as she found in the five major religions of the patriarchal era, spirituality is defined as something essential about our being, something real and deep about our deeper source. In these belief systems, religion is the ritual, the rules, the mythological framework from which the underlying spirituality emerges.

Perhaps the aim of Unitarian Universalists has been to remove the artificial trappings of religion, all religions, and to seek that more pure spirituality.

Those of us who entered this movement as humanists may be less willing to embrace this concept of "spirituality," even if it simply means a feeling, an inner sensitivity to ethical balance. But today's newcomers to our faith are more willing to embrace the search for something we know as spiritual. There's a calling from our ranks for this experiential spirituality, even though we are mostly still unwilling to limit it to a religious definition.

So religion remains a bad word. It is, at least, if we buy into the definition we hear from the Religious Right and from our Biblical ancestors. It is if we see religion as simply the duties, rules and trappings of those who belief a particular mythological history or as the meaningless acting out of a framework, a shell of human convention.

But, you know, I remember a time when I was devoutly religious, when taking communion was more about the act of becoming one with god than it was about the Christian interpretation of that ritual as eating the body and blood of Christ.

In those days, when I accepted wholly the mythology of the Christian ritual, I was doing more than acting out a meaningless religious duty. In those days my ability to embrace the ritual of communion made that ritual real. It truly was spiritual. In fact, it was the religious that made the spiritual real.

If that were all to the story, I might feel really sad because, when I began as a feminist to de-mystify the Christian myth and to discover my own sense of religion within deeper truths, when I stepped out of the trappings of Christianity into a more universal sense of religion, I also lost access to the meaning of the ritual. The act of communion no longer brought me closer to god, to spirituality. When I closed my mind to a de-mystified Christianity, I gave up t