Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 12th of September 1999
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here
gathered together to begin the new church year
and to remind ourselves of what we already know:
that together we are stronger than when are alone;
that together we share one breath, one spirit of life, one earth;
that together we flow through time like a river
intent upon the beautiful waters of peace to come.
Blest is this day; the fountain of the year flows afresh!
The First Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from Guy Murchie's wonderful 1972 book The Seven Mysteries of Life
At John Hopkins University, in April of 1939, Donald Hatch Andrews, professor of Chemistry put on a ballet for the national meeting of the American Chemical Society. Every atom has a frequency, and Dr. Andrews found audible pitches to represent these "sounds" which the ordinary human ear cannot hear. Dancers dressed in red to represent the element hydrogen, and blue to represent the element oxygen, leapt and spun upon the stage.
There was a water dance in which several blue dancers each flanked by two red ones, danced an elaborate routine to some "watermusic" (barcarolle) as sung by the gondoliers in Venice. They wheeled around each other exactly like real water molecules, so that the audience could actually see the true rolling motion of water. When we perceive the world as melody, (as dance) I feel that we mortals are about as close as we can get to understanding the chorus of evolution that may never end.
The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from my dear Szymborska, whose fine poems you have heard a dozen times since I have been serving this congregation. This is from one of her earlier collections, dating back to 1972. It's called, aptly enough, Water.
A drop of water falls on my hand.
Its drawn from the Ganges and the Nile,
from frost on a seal's whiskers,
from broken pitchers in the cities of Ys and Tyre.
On my finger the Caspian Sea is not landlocked.
And the Pacific Ocean itself is tributary
to the stream that flows in my backyard,
the same stream that was once a little cloud
floating above Paris in the year 764 on May 7th
at 6 o'clock in the morning.
There are not enough mouths to speak
all your fleeting names, o water!
I would have to name you in every language,
pronouncing all the vowels at the same time
while also remaining completely silent for the
sake of the lake that still does not have a name,
and which reflects a star that is not really "in" the sky,
any more than the lake is "in" the earth.
Someone was drowning in you yesterday.
Someone dying of thirst called out your name long ago.
You have saved housed from fire,
you have carried off houses and trees, forests and towns.
You have been in christening bowls and bathtubs,
in kisses and tombs.
You eat at stone, you feed rainbows.
You are in the sweat of those who build pyramids
and in the petals of lilacs.
How light you are.
You are the world gently touching me.
Whenever, wherever, whatever has happened,
is written not on the Tower of Babel,
but in its waters.
Homily: WaterMusic [Next] [back to top]
When I was about 9 years old, I realized I had a pretty good relationship with water...specifically, lake water. It wasn't that I was the best swimmer in the world. I wasn't, although I certainly was not the worst. However, to this day, I have never met anyone else who could float as good as I could back then. I was like a cake of Ivory soap.
I floated on the surface of Lake Michigan, where we would go for summer vacation. I would just lay back in the warm water, and it was like the best bed I had ever slept in.My ears would be floating below the surface of the water, and I would hear a strange hum, which I later was told was the sound of my own blood rushing through my ears.
Once I even fell asleep on the surface of the calm lake. I napped for over a half an hour, held in the arms of the water like a baby. As I drifted off to sleep, I thought of the big lake that was my bed, and how so many rivers and creeks flowed into it.
I thought of my geography class, which taught me of the waters of the great St. Lawrence River, which connected me, floating in my warm water-bed in Michigan, with the distant Atlantic, dark and cold and moving in its deeps with silver fish. And that ocean was connected to the Mediterranean Sea past the Rock of Gibraltar. The water danced around Malta and Sicily and found itself warmed by the sandy water of the Nile. And from there the water I was floating in would probably one day flow through the great canal of Suez to warmer seas into which emptied the Ganges River and wrapped around China and the Philippines.
I felt as if I was part of the whole world floating in that lake. My fingertips could reach out, and in grabbing a handful of Lake Michigan water, I had also cupped the cool water of Lake Victoria in Africa, and Lake Baikal in Siberia.
The poet Szymborska says as much. Her fingertips too touched the Ganges and the Nile, and even ancient water. But she also knows that water isn't just cool lakes and playful creeks...it also has power that can be dangerous as well. There are floods and tidal wave as well as placid lakes reflecting the stars.
I know that from my own experience. A few years ago, in California, when we had a particularly wet winter, over a thousand of my drawings and paintings were destroyed by a severe water leak that ate through the walls of my loft. Weeks and weeks of my history as an artist dissolved as the water slowly clotted my work into pulp, work never to be recovered.
Any celebration of the Water Ceremony takes into account this dual power of water, to connect and to disconnect. It can bring us together but it also can wash us away. This makes our beautiful ritual an honest one. When we finish the ritual, I will take the bowl of water out and pour it slowly into the Memorial Garden, to symbolize this honesty...water symbolizes beginnings and endings. It signs joyous connection and it signs our completion. Like any river, we have a beginning and an end. Thus, our symbol is not a romantic symbol, but an honest and beautiful one.
When we celebrate the Water Ceremony at the beginning of the church year, like so many other Unitarian Universalist congregations, we celebrate symbolically the flow of all of our lives into the bowl of our common life. This is as it should be. In fact, the word "symbol" in English comes from a Greek verb "symbolein" which means to put things into a common bowl or pot. You may find it interesting to realize that its "opposite" word is "diabolein" which means to scatter thing in different directions with no connections between them...the English word "diabolical" comes from that word. Whatever tears us apart and cuts our very real connection with each other, our covenant of courtesy and faithfulness whether spoken or unspoken, might be fairly described as diabolical.
But we are a community, and thus we celebrate all that brings us together...our desire to get at the truth of things, our faith that prejudice can be conquered, our love of the common natural world of which we are a part, our sense of connection with men and women throughout history that claimed their costly freedom, and dared to make community where only conformity had existed before.
But in the Water Ceremony, we celebrate more than that. We celebrate with that wonderful liquid which once supported me in Lake Michigan, and which connected me to all the earth...not just the nations, but also to the fish, the pelicans, the mule deer drinking at their mountain streams. We celebrate the water music...for water, like music, has a beginning and an end; a river flows from its source to the sea which receives it.
And going even deeper than that, we celebrate the music, not just of the river waters that connect the world, but the very music, the very dance of all creation....we human beings who are made up of water and the elements of the earth mixed together are part of the "music of the spheres" the music which Pythagoras reminded us binds all the universe into a whole. The vibrations of the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen, their dance around each other in the water molecule.. this is part and parcel of who we are, we, the animals and plants, and all the universe. The harmonies of the choir, the sound vibrations of our voices when we sing or speak, the vibrations of our bodies when we move together in a dance, the rhythm of the interpreter signing rhythmically with her hands... these are representations of the way the whole cosmos is made...a great, powerful, and mostly unheard music flowing with the strength and beauty of a river of water...forever and ever amen.
When we pour the water of our lives into the common symbolic bowl we are celebrating our connections to be sure. But we are also celebrating the great mystery that we are at all, that everything is, that the music of the Jordan River as it rolls over its stones, and the music of the choir as it sings a spiritual about the Jordan is one music, one reality, one mystery that resists our little human naming.
So praise for new beginnings. Praise for all that supports and connects us into community. Praise for all that sings with the cosmos that is our home. And praise for Love, the power that flows most like the waters of the world, making us one.
Water Ceremony [Next] [back to top]
Mark: "Many will come from north, south, east and west" and so we are here, the new church year beginning as we all flow like streams into the great river of the coming year. We come from every direction of the compass to this deep place, a center of life and love.
(Michael Barfuss, Lauren Fields, Ben Sostrom and Fritz Gale are bringing up the water to the table.)
Wendy: Our beginnings are in water. Our remote ancestors came from the water, struggling onto the dry land. Our beginnings are in water. With our mother's bodes we floated in water. Our beginnings are in water. Our lives flow like water. We are not rocks in the stream of life, but the stream itself.
Chant: We are the stream of life
North Waterpourer: says loudly: "We are the stream of life" then pours water slowly into the bowl as Mark reads about northern waters.
Mark: Behold water from the North, from North Teas Lake in high Ontario, Canada, reflecting a family in red canoes, from Lake Superior, cold and vast, along Chapel Beach or from the pine cone studded shore; water from Owen Sound on Georgian Bay, and the waves lapping Sauble Beach on Lake Huron; water from Lake Monora in Wisconsin, holding in its mirror reflection the great Civic Center that arches over it, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright so many years ago. Water from Lake Michigan lapping the storm-darkened beaches of a resort for the heart and terrifying memories. Water from Mullet Lake in Northern Michigan, where a family cottage of almost thirty years hugs the dark shore with the summer stars dancing overhead. Water from the St. Lawrence River grey and steely by the shores of golden Montreal. Water from Chautauqua Lake in New York, still bound to honeymoon memories. Water from the Avon River in Stratford Ontario, still echoing the Bard's better plays downstream; Water from Lake Eire, near the rocky cliffs by Kelley's Island, or the shore near Lakeside, Ohio, or a nameless beach where tender lovers facing many odds receive lessons in surviving every storm.
Chant: We are the stream of life
East Waterpourer: says loudly after the chant: "We Are The Stream of Life" and then begins to pour water into the bowl as Wendy speaks of eastern waters.
Wendy: Water from Beirut, in Lebanon, still echoing the sounds of joy from a family wedding. Water from the legendary Rhein River, from the Main River and the Lech, in Germany shadowed by ruins of castles and bordered by the autobahn. Water from Lake Geneva where a family finds its roots and where our own church claims its roots as well as the shadow of our martyr Michael Sevetus is still dark upon the water there. Water from Land's End in Cornwall, England, which once sheltered pirate ships. Water from the rocky beaches of beautiful Maine, where 87 year old women still play tennis with a vengeance, and the ocean, deep and dark still rolls rhythmically like a verse by Byron. Water from the shore of Mount Desert in Maine, where joy and peace refreshed a family and bestowed them a home away from home. Water from Narragansett, Rhode Island, where joy and sorrow ran together during August. Water from Lonesome Lake in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where our Universalist ancestor Thomas Starr King once hiked, blazing a trail for some of our own. Water from New York City, from the East River a door or two down from the great stone monolith of the United Nations. Water from the Atlantic Ocean, from Hatteras Island where Ohio children first see the miracle of the ocean, and from Atlantic Beach in North Carolina, littered with the debris of Hurricane Dennis.
Chant: We are the stream of life
South Waterpourer: says loudly after the chant: "We are the stream of life" and then begin to slowly pour water into the bowl Mark speaks of water from the south.
Mark: Water from the Indian Ocean off Perth, where the expected tropical breezes gave way to a cold family picnic on the beach. Water from Puerto Montt, Chile, where fish stew in the curanto pot, and sweaters hang for sale in every shop. Water from the streams of Tennessee in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains by Gatlinburg. Water from the muddy Mississippi, churned by a paddlewheel into a froth, bearing a family reweaving itself anew along the shores of mighty river. Water from the shores of the Ohio River near Cincinnati, where an artist paints the green and dusty hills.
Chant: We are the stream of life
West Waterpourer: says after the chant: "We are the stream of life" and then begins to slowly pour the water into the bowl as Wendy speaks of western water.
Wendy: Water from so far to the west that it becomes the East...from the Yangtze and Li rivers in Guang Zho, which we in the States usually call China. Water from O-saka in Japan, from the Yo-do River which is both a water route and the waters of which eventually becomes sake. Water from the Pacific Ocean that glows warm around Hawaii, and churns the Oregon Coast near Cannon Beach. Water from the straits of Juan de Fuca past Seattle, and from the Olympic National Forest which literally shines with water on every leaf and frond of fern. Water from the hotsprings in the rough landscape of southeastern Oregon mixed with its icy streams. Water from stone fountain in Salt Lake City, and from the mountains above it, where members of the same family, both Mormon and no longer Mormon work to get along despite real differences. Water from the lengthy Colorado River near Moab, Utah, strong foaming water cruising past dry as a bone desert, opposites united. Water from the Virgin River in Zion National Park, where mule deer lap up the sweetness. Water from a river in Kansas not much bigger than Rush Creek nearby. Water from Roughlock Falls in South Dakota, where motorcyclists gather by their thousands, and a family gathers around an aged and sick father. Water from Lake Geneva surrounded by resorts and camps and filled with swimmers, where sisters reconcile and let their hearts embrace again. Water from the Little Miami River where it cuts through Clifton Gorge and two men discover their love for the natural world of which we are part, and their part in each other's lives. Water from the Scioto River which threads through our town.
Mark: We are the Stream of Life, and for our connections and our flowing together in this season of beginnings, I lift my heart in blessing and thanks. Praise for this water, sign of our beginning and ending, sign of our power to bless or curse. May our lives pour out this year for the common good, and may we make music together as beautiful as the singing of the morning stars. May harmony prevail. May harmony prevail. May there be peace for us, and for all the people, no all the creatures who share the common water on our common earth. Amen.
Blessing of the Honey and Apple [back to top]
May the new year be sweet to us, and to all. Amen.
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