Cultures around the world celebrate the shortest day of the year—or the longest night of the year, depending on how you look at it. A Celebration of the Darkness and the hope for new Light. Rev. Maddie helps us mark this part of our end of the year holidays with words, chants and song.
“Tradition!” is the theme for this multi-holiday service. It’s the first night of Hanukah, and Saturnalia starts on Dec 17. We will light the menorah and also talk about how Saturnalia eventually evolved into the biggest celebration of the year, and together we will decorate our little Christmas tree and sing some favorite carols. There will also be an opportunity for you to share your holiday tradition in story or song. Feel free to bring an ornament from home if you’d like to hang it on our tree.
Come with your favorite poems to share – either written by yourself or anyone else. Our annual Gifts and Goodies fundraiser will follow the service with handmade and homemade treats you can buy for holiday giving and yourself.
As we approach Thanksgiving, Eli will lead us in recognizing how much we have to be grateful for even during these difficult times. We will practice gratitude with a sincere commitment to sharing a call to right relationships with each other and our community.
We draw on singing to feel closeness, to educate, to express joys and sorrows, to protest, to feel the joy of laughter and fun and feel liberation. We will sing together and explore some of how singing brings us together.
Bee invites you to wonder at and embrace both the Seen and the Unseen in the in-between. Can there be a better integration between art and science beyond today’s perceived separateness and through the lens of art, between science and spirituality? Can art shine a deeper, wiser understanding about the true nature of reality, the power of consciousness over mere matter?
In these times of often chaotic noise of the world, how can we remember and tune into the loving song within our heart? How can we expand into greater peace and trust as we bring harmony to our inner sound? How does the welcoming stillness of nature assist in this organic process? Kathleen will reflect on how we can use sound meditation to listen within, and come into aligned coherence with the guidance of our soul and the Divine. She will share the pure sounds of her alchemy crystal singing bowls, and take us into the place of peace and knowing within each heart and soul.
Someone once told our guest speaker that “So?!” may be “the greatest affirmation of all.” Come and find out why, and why it’s needed today more than ever.
Twenty years after the groundbreaking Unitarian Universalist book “Worship That Works” first shaped understanding of Unitarian Universalist liturgy, Seminarian, LaVonne Limpus, revisits its core principles with insights of evolving community needs. She will reflect on how the book’s call for authenticity, intentionality, and spiritual depth still resonates, but now, how we can challenge our congregations to move beyond inherited forms and into co-created ritual that honors pluralism, ecological urgency, and embodied presence. Drawing from her chaplaincy work and professional speaking, she invites worship leaders to see liturgy not as performance, but as communal transformation, where silence, story, and symbol are tools for resilience in a time when UU Values are needed more than ever.
Prayer brings us together. Different people call prayer by different names, yet it is the same unified feeling behind our activity of prayer. In the Native American tradition we immerse ourselves in prayer and gratitude every day. Today we honor Indigenous People’s Day, joining each other in circle in a prayerful way. Jesse invites and encourages all to come share in this practice of connectivity through prayer in circle.
