This Sunday we invite you to bring some water from home to the service, a little bit of water to pour into a common bowl.
I write this in the midst of the 109-degree Tuesday heat (having, with some pride, sent my Michigan family photos of the weather app stats on my phone), and so the value of water is near the top of my thoughts.
Some of you will know this annual UU ritual, called a Water Ceremony or Water Communion. The original was created in 1980 for the Women and Religion Continental Convocation of Unitarian Universalists by Carolyn McDade and Lucile Schuck Longview. They “wanted to create a new ritual ‘that spoke to our connectedness to one another, to the totality of life, and to our place on this planet.’ They included a new, inclusive symbol of women’s spirituality: water.”
Eight women were asked to bring water from their far-flung homes across the continent, to pour them into a shared bowl, and to speak to the significance of that particular water, now joined with the rest. Women at the convocation brought the powerful ceremony home to their congregations, and so a new UU ritual was born.
For many years, the localized versions of this ritual involved people bringing water from special places to which they had traveled over the summer, and naming the water’s significance. It has long been a fall ingathering ceremony in UU congregations. As you might anticipate, this has often led to some very clear distinctions between those who have the means to travel the country or world in the summer, and those who do not.
Here, this year, as we enter our theme of belonging, we invite you simply to bring water from your home or someplace special nearby. (If you bring water from a special far away elsewhere, that’s okay, too.) Once again, we will pool our waters in a shared bowl, with all the layers of meaning such a gathering of waters might call forth in these sweltering, arid, and bifurcated times. In fact, I’ll ask you about the meaning you find in this! NOTE: If you will be joining online Sunday, we invite you to have some water to pour into a bowl as well. We’ll invite you to be seen on-screen as you pour, if you are willing.
Meanwhile, may you find the hours of respite you need from the many kinds of high temperatures that hover over our lives.
With care,
Rev. Kevin