Water Communion

[beetiger]

Due to some weird bits of history that probably come from a combination of their secret identities as branches of Academics Anonymous and the fact that the members tend to travel a lot in the warm months, most Unitarian Universalist fellowships and churches close for the summer. Most of them don't quite fully close; they often offer occassional social events or lay-led summer services, but the fact is that most Unitarian ministers are off-duty on the services side between about late June and Labor Day. In my fellowship in Ithaca, the minister used to always tell us to spend the summer in the tradition with which we grew up, just to check we still wanted to hang out with the UUs.

This means that this Sunday more or less qualifies as opening day of the fellowship season, and I got to see lots of people I've been out of touch with for the last three months. We traditionally do an "ingathering" service, in which people bring a bit of water from the places they've been over the summer, and let people know where the water comes from while tossing it into a common bowl. UUs are often somewhat well-off folk, so there is a little of a risk of this turning into a bit of showing off of who went to Alaska and who went to France, but generally it's a powerful ritual of community reconnection from our diverse lives. It's one of the few rituals that the sparsely intellectual UUs tend to have, and I always love it. Although I actually did go a bunch of places this summer, I chose to bring water from home, representing my interior journeys over the last few months.

These last three months have made a significant difference in my appearance, and so I got a lot of attention, which is always kind of fun. This is likely to be a good support group of people for me as I move into motherhood. Although most of these folks are more acquaintances than friends, there are a lot of parents there, and it's a very compassionate community, which seems to be sincerely happy in other people's joy and concerned for their difficulties. I don't often go places where I feel overall well-liked in a big group of people, and this is one of those rare places. It's a place I'm going to be happy to raise my son to believe that people are important, that caring matters, and that asking the hard questions is often as important as getting the right answers.

Comments

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

God, I have to love a church that takes the summer off! This whole UU thing is beginning to make more and more and more sense, the more I hear about it.