Rituals
Rev. Beth Dana held this ritual during SWUUW Conference 2023 in Dallas, Texas. We share here with her permission.
OPENING RITUAL
As we begin our time together, I invite you to join me in a short ritual, to remind us of where we come from and to ground us in our Unitarian Universalist faith.
Let us first pay tribute and express gratitude to our ancestors and foremothers. We are grateful for their gifts, their lessons, and their challenge… calling us to fulfill their hopes and aspirations.
We [were] asked to make available the original worship service Coming Home, Like Rivers to the Sea: A Woman's Ritual for distribution at the 1997 General Assembly of Unitarian Universalists in Phoenix, Arizona.
We originally created the worship service for the November 1980 Women and Religion Continental Convocation of Unitarian Universalists in East Lansing, Michigan.
As we worked to give the service shape, our awareness increased of water's presence and deep meaning in our lives. Water is more than simply a metaphor. It is elemental and primary, calling forth feelings of awe and reverence.
Coming back to this service again after seventeen years, we see in it a deeper meaning than we had been aware of earlier. Acknowledging that the ocean is considered by many to be the place from which all life on our planet came—it is the womb of life—and that amniotic waters surround each of us prenatally, we now realize that “Coming Home, Like Rivers to the Sea” was for us a new story of creation.
Lucile Longview
Rosemary Matson
May 21, 1997
UU Women's Connection has begun a collection of rituals to share.
