Unitarians Represent Many Religions.
I have been an official Unitarian Universalist for 6 months now. I go to our services every Sunday (except the one the day after I broke my foot or the occasional time I get to be on vacation.) So really, I go MOST Sundays. I find that every time I go to our services, I learn something or feel something. The key is the whole “something.” I spent many a Sunday (or Saturday) going to some sort of church or another and that something, well, it just didn’t happen. For that little bit of something I get every time I go to a service, I am grateful.
So let’s talk about being grateful. I am grateful for my Sunday mornings. I am happy to sing, “Enter, rejoice and come in. Enter, rejoice and come in. Today will be a joyful day. Enter, rejoice and come in.” Singing, “go now in peace, go now in peace, may the light of love surround you, everywhere, everywhere you may go” at the end of each service — well, my goodness!! My happy, holy universe – how cool is that? We don’t need a blessing, we bless each other. We don’t need solemnity, we request being filled with light and joy. We light a candle, held in a beautiful chalice, at the beginning of each service. We light more candles to offer joys and concerns to all of our congregation. We extinguish the chalice “that is may glow gently in our hearts.”
We may have just talked about how to pack a really light suitcase. We may walk a labyrinth. We maybe just talked about civil rights, or the journey of a young gay man growing up as a Mormon. We maybe talked about license plates or bumper stickers or war, or Casey Jones, or Jesus or Buddha, or Syria, or being gay, or abortion, or choice, or prayer, or scientific studies, or the world or environmentalism, or a plethora of topics. BUT, we start out and we end it almost always the same way. Enter, rejoice == go now in peace.
Really? How come no one told me about this before I turned 50, like maybe in my 20s or teens or something so I could have been spending all of my Sundays being a part of something this fabulous? At least now I know, and so do you. I’m grateful to be a UU.