After 50 years there have been some changes made in the road we travel. Looking through some of the fellowship's ancient documents, all the woman who served are listed by their husbands names. It was easy to spot a single woman back in those olden days, and I defy you to make that identification now in a newsletter or document.

The result of this de-gender revolution is that I have whole notebooks and many a box crammed with once moving readings, gracious thoughts, inspirational meditations now too flawed for use.

Recently I have tried to salvage the best of the lot by developing an immunity to what I call the gender tic. So all right, the writer uses brotherhood, mankind, he, his while half of the population thereby goes literally unmentioned. He meant no harm.

Some of the eloquence, the wisdom, hard to part with, for instance, was written by the first minister to visit our fellowship, Rev. Arthur Foote, of Unity Church in St. Paul. He believed so strongly that the denomination needed the fellowship movement that he visited many of us often, and I believe, over the years, every fellowship in the district.

In 1972 his church published a collection of his short essays in a book entitled Taking Down The Defenses. My copy is heavily underlined, evidence the historic decision I made to ditch the admonitions of my childhood about the care of books was circa 1972. I now underline, turn down corners, even spill coffee and occasionally suntan lotion on books that belong to me. Along with deciding that I didn't have to finish every book I started, it set me free from one of life's inconvenient restrictions.

Arthur Foote was a gentle, eloquent, compassionate man who believed with a passion that we had an obligation in this life to help the less fortunate. He puts it this way, that we must "never let our many blessings cause us to forget the many who are unblessed, the many who do without what we take so for granted."

And he has this to say about modern life: "So comes the end of man's moral childhood. From now on, freed of old taboos, men will have to find new and better reasons for committing themselves to responsible ethical behavior."

He did not simply talk the talk, not Arthur Foote. He was very involved improving mental health care in Minnesota, and was an important resource for the fellowship members who worked for that cause here in North Dakota., among them Charles Conrad and Olov Gardebring, both of whom will be here not only for our celebration but for the 50th anniversary of the North Dakota Mental Health Association.

Of necessity, when someone in the fellowship is avidly pursuing a worthy cause, many of us get drawn into the struggle. And I had a personal reason to be interested, a story I had not told publicly. After my father died, my mother spent two years in hospitals under treatment for acute depression. Now she would have been given anti-depression pills, but that was those famous good old days when high blood pressure, for example, was treated with phenobarbitol.

Mental illness was something you didn't babble about if it was in your family, and I was not about to break that social taboo, with a young lawyer and politician for a husband, and a new community to meet.. Mother was by that time beginning to find herself a life, teaching school, participating in her children's lives.

But I did tell Olov , who you will meet during our anniversary celebration. He is a clinical psychologist and one of the wiser men I ever met. Then he said, "You need to tell your mother's story.. There is no one who does not know of someone or have a family member who is mentally ill. If people will only talk about it, we can gather public support for improvement. If you are willing to discuss it, it gives them permission, too."

It is a sad story, although it had a happy ending. Mother spent most of a frightening two years, first in a private hospital where she was given electric shock treatment, and then in the Jamestown Hospital which was still referred to as the "Insane Asylum." My mother, who would not set foot out of the house without a bath and clean underwear, was forced to use the single comb on the ward, which hung by a string in the bathroom. She refused at first, thereby earning her big black marks in the treatment record used to decide whether or not she would be moved to the back wards and forgotten.. No one in the family was allowed to see her for the first 30 days, and she believed she had been abandoned in this terrible place. As it was, during her stay in Jamestown, she never saw a psychiatrist or psychologist.

Olov was right. People responded with stories of their own, not with fingers of shame pointed at me. Perhaps it was easier to relate to a dirty comb on a string than fancier explanations like schizophrenia, or manic depression or dementia.

Telling the story did something for me, too-it freed me of the guilt and the fear I felt over what had happened to my mother. When I was 21 years old I had to sign a statement that we would not hold the hospital or doctors responsible if mother died during electric shock treatments. Nothing in my young and sheltered life had prepared me for such a decision. Half a century later as we watched "A Beautiful Mind" at the lake this summer, I could not watch the electric shock scene, in fact ended up in tears.

Embarking on the road less traveled took each of us down many undreamed of trails. Did we suspect how widely our roads would diverge when we started the fellowship? I doubt it. We were simply looking for a meaningful religious experience for ourselves and for our children. We wanted to quit translating the sermons we heard, the hymns we sang, the prayers we joined, to sing the songs, and repeat the words which made sense to us.

Of that hardy band which launched the venture which led where we are this morning, most of us had once belonged to another denomination, and some had been unchurched for a long time. Sometimes I wonder where I would be had there been a Congregational church (now the United Church of Christ) in Bismarck when we returned in 1949 from California. Would I have become involved, tolerated the translations, made friends, commitments, and been reluctant to leave? A road not traveled.

We were a pack of strong minded individuals, we early fellowshippers, with a whole lot of "thou shall nots" considering the restrictions we were rebelling against. One woman with a Jewish background did not want her children in church school if we were going to talk about Jesus, another disdained budgets and bylaws, and another would have no part of a collection plate, while still others were nervous about how we went at prayer or used the Bible.

We even had three ballots to decide whether the words on the outside of this building said church or fellowship. I was secretary at the time, and a good friend of mine accused me of falsifying the count-- lest you think rational Unitarians are always rational!

But we had a lot of help from the denomination, at that time the American Unitarian Association, since it was before the merger with the Universalists. They recognized we were plowing new ground for us, and sent us professionals to hold our hands, to lead us into the Sunday school waters, and to recognize how to place our organization on firmer ground with by laws and budgets rather than our ad hoc arrangements.

We were so enthusiastic about finding a religious home that suited us-no more translations, no more singing songs we didn't believe, no more nodding to statements that were not credible. There was an enormous sense of relief for many of us to find that we were not alone in our dissent, and there was excitement. When someone discovered a new book on Unitarian history, or a sermon or a reading, it went rippling around the group faster than a new Susan Wittig Albert murder mystery whistles through my family.

In the beginning we all shared that excitement, and it was contagious. Perhaps we should figure out a way to capture some of that kind of excitement for new members who join us.

Robert Feragen, who belonged to this fellowship in the sixties, is now retired and living in Texas, has written a murder mystery entitled "The Albino Stag Witness." In the main character, Jack, a Unitarian reader will discover that he is one of us.

Jack is becoming involved with a woman who attends the Presbyterian church in the small South Dakota town in which the novel is set, so he goes with her, but finds himself silently arguing with the minister, a Rev. Masters. Been there, done that, I said to myself as I read.

"During the sermon Jack thought contrary thoughts, countering Master's polemic by thinking how much this minister to a small flock was diminishing the glory of creation. It seemed to him that Masters was pulling the drawstrings of imagination tightly around a proscribed brief which came out of a misty past and held it up as the one by which all must live. Jack rejected the narrowness of this vision. How could this good man fail to understand that the geocentric world had been destroyed centuries ago and that mankind had to face not being at the center of creation's interest. Man was something other than a mere pawn in a late Roman deity's tight little game. Jack silently countered Master's words with his own idea that man was a peculiar and favored witness who was gifted with the intelligence to contemplate the vast galactic array of time and space. Homo sapiens had been invited, Jack thought, to send the mind and soul into a vaster miracle. It was a far more profound existence which the creator had offered the human spirit to contemplate on its way to understanding the mysterious gift of human life."

You know something about Robert Feragen after that passage, even if you never knew him personally. Perhaps leaving in the male gender identification was a literary device, even though the novel takes place in 1995.

You can never step in the same river twice, the old saying goes, and not only that, but none of us ever step in precisely the same river. So the experiences of the charter members was much affected by the religious climate of the community at that time. We were denounced from the Episcopal pulpit, and declared to be communists by someone attending a city commission meeting. my neighbor proclaimed we were all going to hell. If it left us feeling beleaguered occasionally, it also made for a sturdy esprit de corps.

Perhaps the best evidence of our enthusiasm and our determination is this building. We became officially a fellowship in 1952 and by 1958, we had dedicated this building! For the record, this being an historical year, the first event in the new building was the Xmas celebration of 1958, and Joyce Conrad gave the first sermon in January of 1959 entitled "The Changing Roles of Men and Women." No surprise there, for those of you who knew Joyce then or now.

The building has been an important aspect of our fellowship life, much as I'd like to stick my head in the theological clouds and say it's the thought that counts, not the carpet in the sanctuary. Obviously there can be excesses in the portion of a religious community's income which goes to furnishings as opposed to social action or better hymnals, and I think of a church in a small village in Mexico near Mazatland. Once it was a thriving gold mining community, now it is home to people who work in Mazatland or scratch a living from the soil, or sell postcards to tourists who come to see the church..

The Catholic church there is on the central square, an unpaved, dusty street, and the church itself is old, its pews worn. But the altar runs from floor to ceiling, taking up the entire wall of the nave, and is completely covered in 18 K gold leaf, gift of the mine owner in the glory days.. It glows, it glitters, it gleams. I think a clinic would have served the community better or maybe funding qualified teachers for a school in perpetuity. On the other hand, maybe that shining religious shrine is a daily, weekly uplifting moment in otherwise difficult lives.

This building has served us well-a religious home, a meeting place for diverse community groups-but if it ever begins to glow, glitter and gleam, I think we should re-consider our mission.

If nothing else would have glued me to the fellowship, it was the laughter that laced our meetings and our Sunday mornings. I had never been in a church that allowed so much laughter-an occasional muffled titter, perhaps, but genuine laughter? At times I have thought we have raised it to the level of liturgy.

So over the years I have collected examples of our peculiar brand of humor, some of it clipped, some of it live and spontaneous from our own. I found this one while searching through those tainted gender files of mine. It came from a Fresno, California newsletter and is entitled "Unitarian Thoughts."

--Only God knows what UUs believe, and then only on one of His/Her good days.

--It is not true that UUs reject Jesus Christ: they would welcome him into the church and immediately put him on the Supper committee.

--UUs accept the Ten Commandments with the provision that they can be amended at the next annual meeting.

--UUs believe that God means well.

--UUs do not worship Mary as the mother of God but are glad that things worked out well for her.

--A UU Sunday school is a place where a child learns all about Jesus - or the home life of the newt-depending on who is on the RE committee.

-UUs will not be invited to the Judgment Day because God doesn't want to listen to all the arguments."

A minister once told me that basically a minister has only one sermon and he merely gives variations on the theme each Sunday morning. Perhaps that's true for a lay person such as myself. If so, my theme is probably "Why I am a Unitarian Universalist."

But what does this mean to a visitor, someone who is a Christian? Probably they have to translate what we say here back into words that are meaningful to them, perhaps a case of turn about is fair play?

But we do have a lot in common - we are in church to join a community of believers, to find religious expression for our fears and our joys, to educate our children in the ethical behavior that will make them better adults, to find wisdom for our daily lives.

David Rankin who was for many years minister of First Unitarian in San Francisco, the venerable old church founded by Thomas Starr King, and who is represented by one of California's two statues in the Hall of Fame in the U. S. Capitol-- not, of course , for founding First Unitarian.

David Rankin has written several meditation manuals for the Unitarian Universalist Association, and in one he says this:

"I have learned something in forty years.

I have learned to trust those who are witnesses rather than gurus; those who express their confusion as well as their knowledge; those who share their suffering as well as their joy.

I have learned that salvation is a life-long affair; that miracles are not often granted; that dreams are frequently smashed; that our hope are never wholly attained.

And I am learning how to deal with the long campaigns, the defeats, the dry season; how to suffer with my freedom; how to wrestle with my dreams; how to love another; how to be gentle with myself.

But the end is only the beginning. My truths are not your truths and we all have a long way to go."

Olov Gardebring once gave a pulpit essay here entitled, "Living With The Questions." That may be one of the distinguishing features of a Unitarian Universalist, that they have accepted the reality that, for however their genes were sorted out, whatever came with the family they were born into, or the mentors who changed their way of thinking, their religious lives will be spent searching for answers rather than basking in the contentment of having lit on the perfect truth., that we will always have a long way to go.

Presumably we all have made peace with the question my Lutheran mother once asked me: "What if you're wrong?" Or if my neighbor was really right and we're all going to hell?

I thought about those premises as we watched Bill dying, wondering if he, who could no longer speak to us, was re-considering his position. Or merely looking forward to finding the final answer. Or, as the Unitarian minister, poet, pacificist John Haynes Holmes put it,

There may be nothing past the door but silence As if the world has ended, and lies dead,

While I alone stare into mist, and listen,

Wait ­and listen-then the Word is never said.

As we celebrate or 50 year history, we need to remember that while 1952 is an important date in our history, so were all the years in between. As we stop to appreciate what has been done for this church to make it what it is, to have served whom it has served, to be cherished, or abandoned, by so many who have passed through our doors, it all counts-from the first letter written to Boston to find out about this new program they had called Fellowships, to the industrious ones who scrubbed and painted and shined this building to be ready for another year of our lives together-that the first president of this fellowship was important but so are the leaders who have been there ever since.

If Helen Hammond and I, the remaining charter members, feel a little like antiques, we can allay those emotions by remembering that we are also the historical memory. Dean Conrad and Sherry Moore are also charter members, but not yet qualified as antiques, since they were children when this all began.

The first fellowship in the denomination was formed in Boulder, Colorado in 1948. We came four years later. In 1968 the program committee for the UUA General Assembly asked me to give a talk at a special luncheon celebrating 20 years of fellowships, or as they put it, 20 years of a great idea.

I was terrorized, but here was my oft defined notion not heaven -spending a weekend entirely surrounded by Unitarian Universalists, but they'd gone me one better-I got to stay for a week and the paid my fare! This was about the time the oil industry folks had departed, and we, the remaining hardy ones, were struggling to pay the mortgage.

To close I'd like to read the definition of a fellowship I gave them at the General Assembly luncheon that year:

"A fellowship is an island of liberalism in a sea of orthodoxy; it is a group of people sitting on borrowed hairs in preference to padded pews. It is a state of religious satisfaction amidst financial despair. A fellowship consists of people with horrified relatives and precocious children, and develops tremendous esprit de corps by arguing violently among themselves. A fellowship has sourdough pancakes for Easter breakfast, jazz for the processional, and Mark Twain for the benediction. It cries loudly to Boston for help, and then tells it emissaries how to run the denomination. It borrows furniture form its members, hymns from the orthodox and idaes from everyone. It is composed of 3 parts exhilaration and two parts exasperation, and glues everything together with coffee. It is at once a risky enterprise and a great adventure, and without it I would be a lost soul."

Welcome back to another year of the great adventure.

Betty Mills