INTERGENERATIONAL INGATHERING AND WATER COMMUNION SERVICE

A Service Offered by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
September 9, 2007 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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Note: We begin each church year with a special service of Ingathering, which includes our beloved Unitarian Universalist tradition of mingling the waters (Water Communion). 

Everyone is invited to collect a few drops of water during the summer, either from places they might visit in their travels, or from favorite ponds or lakes, the ocean, their backyard pool, a garden hose, or even their own kitchen sink. 

During the service, each person brings their water forward and pours it into a large glass bowl, which represents our church community.  Water from previous years is also added, connected our present moment to the lives of the past.  This ritual blends our separate lives into one common community. 

The water is then blessed by the love within all our hearts, and this water is used during the church years in rituals such as Child Dedications, healing services, and, if requested, weddings.

There is no sermon offered at this service, although there are readings and special music and times of reflection.

Opening Words, adapted

We bid you welcome.

We bid you welcome
who come with weary spirit seeking rest.
Who come with troubles that are too much with you,
Who come hurt and afraid.

We bid you welcome,
who come with hope in your heart.
Who come with anticipation in your step,
Who come proud and joyous.

We bid you welcome,
who are seekers of a new faith.
Who come to probe and explore. 
Who come to learn.

We bid you welcome,
who enter this hall as a homecoming,
you who are old-timers and long-timers,
and in-between-timers.
You who know a church is not its walls, its ceilings,
its stone or mortar
But who know that a church is her people,

People of all ages and differing abilities….

A church is its spirit,
A church is its caring,
A church is the way we hold space for one another.

We bid you welcome,
Who have found here room for your spirit. 

Whoever you are,
whatever you are,
wherever you are on your journey,
we bid you welcome.

Chalice Lighting Words

These words are by the wonderful and imagination-filled poet Shel Silverstein:

Invitation

If you are a dreamer, come in.
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!

First Reading

Reflection by Rod MacIver, adapted

Note: We have two short readings today.  Both of these readings explore two very different ways people find a sense of comfort and peace.  But both readings remind us that no matter how independent we might want to be, we also need the moments in the company of others to help us find and claim meaning.  We help each other to see what is important, and why.

Three days into a trip a few years ago, during late fall, at the end of a long portage in Algonquin Provincial Park, I saw an older man sitting at the edge of the water. As I took the canoe off my shoulders and laid it down, he half turned and smiled a brief, almost embarrassed smile. I walked down, washed my face in the cold water and sat about ten feet from him.

He was eighty-two years old. Sitting by the lake, and later sharing a campsite, he told me a little of his story.  This was his last time on this lake. He had been coming here since his teens. Now even getting in and out of a canoe was difficult.  He tried to come up every year, always alone, and usually now in late fall when the park was empty and the leaves a kaleidoscope of color. And almost no bugs.

Northern lakes and rivers were a primary source of peace in his life. He was saying good-bye after decades of foggy sunrises on remote lakes, moose, wolves howling and clear nights when you could see millions of stars. I asked him if this final trip was sad for him. No, not really. Maybe in a week or two. For now, he was just absorbing the beauty one last time, creating memories to carry him through the last years of his life, and thinking back on the memories he had accumulated.

We shared a few minutes of silence. Then he said goodnight, got up, and went into his tent.  When I got up in the morning he was gone.

Second Reading

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, adapted.

Sam is the only kid he knows who goes to church—who is made to go to church two or three times a month.  He rarely wants to.  This is not exactly true: the truth is he never wants to go.  What young boy would rather be in church on the weekends than hanging out with a friend?  It does not help him to be reminded that once he’s there he enjoys himself, that he gets to spend the time drawing in the little room outside the sanctuary, that he only actually has to sit still and listen during the short children’s sermon.

It does not help that I always pack some snacks, some Legos, his art supplies, and bring along any friend of his whom we can lure into our churchy web.  It does not help that he genuinely cares for the people there.  All that matters to him is that he alone among his colleagues is forced to spend Sunday morning in church.

You might think, noting the bitterness, the resignation, that he was being made to sit through a six-hour Latin mass.  Or you might wonder why I make this strapping exuberant boy come with me most weeks, and if you were to ask, this is what I would say:  I make him because I can.  I outweigh him by nearly seventy-five pounds.

But that is only part of it.  The main reason is that I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by.  Most of the people I know who have what I want—which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy—are people with a deep sense of spirituality.  They are people in community, who pray, or practice their faith; they are Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Unitarian Universalists—banding together to work on themselves and for human rights.  They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something beautiful.

I saw something once from the Jewish Theological Seminary that said, “A human life is like a single letter of the alphabet.  It can be meaningless.  Or it can be part of a great meaning.” 

Our funky little church is filled with people who are working for peace and freedom, who are out there on the streets and inside praying, and they are home writing letters, and they are at the shelters with giant platters of food.  When I was at the end of my rope, the people at my church tied a knot in it for me and helped me hold on.  The church became my home in the old meaning of home—that it’s where, when you show up, they have to let you in.  They let me in.  They even said, “You come back now.”

WATER COMMUNION

Let us come together, now, people of different ages,
Different backgrounds,
Different beliefs, and different ways of loving.

Let us come together, now,
People of differing abilities,
Different challenges,
Different hopes and different dreams.

Let us come forward,
Now, and merge the waters of our world.

In doing so, let us become one people in faith.

Water Blessing Chant

Response:

Bless this water,
We are many,
Bless this water,
We are one.

Spirit of Life’s every growing
Flowing through community.
Spirit shape us, guide your people.
Truth within bring unity.

Bless this water,
We are many,
Bless this water,
We are one.

Bless our hearts with love’s capacity
Bless our minds with gentle song.
May compassion flow like water,
Love within resounding strong.

Bless this water,
We are many,
Bless this water,
We are one.

© Copyright 2007 Tim Kutzmark