Rev. Mike Morran grew up a city kid from Chicago, attending the Unitarian Universalist Church of Evanston. With an atheist father, a mystic mother, Catholics in the extended family, and friends who were Jewish and Greek Orthodox, comfort with religious diversity has always been a part of life.
Unitarian Universalist churches were caught up in social activism in the 1960s, and Mike remembers thinking that religion is what happens when you pitch in with your friends and family to help someone out. Recycling drives, serving soup to the poor, visiting nursing homes, and cleaning up city lots with rakes and garbage bags were early and formative church experiences. Teen trouble and a strong independent streak led him to drop out of high school for a few years of itinerant manual labor.
To this day Mike appreciates the saying by Mark Twain, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Facility with math and mechanical things eventually took him to engineering school and a decade of productive industry, much personal searching, and some dark and groping places of the soul. In 1990, he went back to church and some light found its way in. Church was a lifesaver, and religion again happened when friends pitched in to help him out.
