HomeOpening Words
To all who come with joy in their hearts for returning together, for all who come with joy for new beginnings, for all who come with smiles and stories and love to share, welcome.
For all who come with sadness or pain, whose lives are filled with fear or despair, whose minds race with turmoil or feel dead with numbness, to all whose lives feel small and shrunken, welcome.
For all who feel a mixture of these or other emotions, welcome.
We come together for mutual support, for sharing, for community. We come together to give to and to receive from each other. We come together to share the wellsprings of human caring and faith. We come together to build each others spirits and to build a better tomorrow.
Welcome to this house of hope and promise.
Welcome to this place of strength and nurture.
Welcome home.
Chalice Lighting
I light this chalice for community, for our common endeavors, for our mutual search for truth and meaning.
Water Ceremony
[closing words] As these waters flow together, so our lives do as well. We strengthen one another in community by sharing visions, hopes, strength and caring.
Words of Ingathering
Good morning!
And again, welcome.
For just over one hundred and fifty years this congregation has held aloft the beacon of liberal religion, the faith that individuals can find their own religious and spiritual truths along their own particular paths. We hold that each person must be free to pursue that truth as they see fit, bound only by the dictates of their own heart and by a respect for the rights of others and the calls to love and justice.
We share our religious stories and beliefs because in doing so we ourselves learn more about our own beliefs. We share our religious faiths with one another not to tell others what to believe, but to learn from others ways that we ourselves might travel.
Our water ceremony is a symbol of our creation of a community that supports and nourishes that search. It is not a symbol of loss of individuality; it is a symbol of the unity of individuals, of our mutual commitments to each other and to the broader world. Like molecules of water that merge into droplets which then merge together into streams and rivers, we become part of something that enriches our personal lives while never losing our selves.
Five years ago tomorrow other waters flowed together. A torrent of tears poured forth from disbelieving eyes. Grief filled us all; grief for loved ones lost, for innocence lost, for security lost.
The horror of that day, sadly, is only one moment in what sometimes seems a never ending litany of human violence and cruelty, of human suffering and tragedy.
There were scattered moments of hope amidst destruction of that day. We saw acts of true heroism. The pain of shocked and broken hearts pulled us together as people.
And millions of us rethought our lives and our commitments. We asked questions of ourselves: What have I done with my life? Am I pursuing the things that really matter, or am I chasing after false goals? What can I do to change the world, to make it a better place? How can I change what I do to bring to myself greater peace and serenity? How can I bring peace to the hearts of others? What is the real meaning of life? What is its purpose?
Those are living questions every day, but it is in moments of grief and loss that they stand out most sharply in our minds.
Some of those questions can only be answered within our own hearts. But we also turn to community for some of the answers or for clues as to where to search, and how.
We all have places of hurt, and we all have places of healing strength. We come together to share these with one another.
May we each find here, in this place, healing for our own hurts, and a place to give to others that they, too, may heal. Believe that it can happen and it will.
May the tears of a million years of human pain and sorrow someday quench the fires of war and hatred and human suffering. Believe that it can happen, and it will.
Welcome home.
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