Cycle of Water, Church, Life
Water Ceremony and Ingathering Sunday. Ingathering Sunday and Water Ceremony. These two not inherently related events have, through repetition, become fused in the liturgical cycle of many Unitarian Universalist congregations, and in the hearts of many individual Unitarian Universalists. Including here at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah. This fusion makes some small degree of sense–if the water ceremony is mostly about all the places people with the means and leisure to travel traveled to over the summer and collected water from. And if we don’t have summer church services or only a few services or only a few people attend summer services. Under such conditions it makes sense to schedule the water ceremony on the Sunday most folks return to the church for the first in two or three months.
But when we have services, and religious education, and covenant groups year round, and when we strive to be ever more mindful of the wide range of personal and family circumstances our congregation encompasses, especially pertaining to vacation and travel, then the whole concept of ingathering or homecoming gets a bit squishy and wobbly. Add in the already potentially problematic water ceremony and we could end up with… I don’t know what. Muddled focus? Muddy worship? An isolated Sunday that’s like a puddle that will evaporate before it runs into the streamlet of accumulated Sundays that leads to the ocean of our communal congregational life?
Still, the water ceremony is tradition, here and elsewhere, and beloved too. And some of us do take extended breaks from church in July and August and maybe even June. The choir returned today and some of you did, too, for the first time in many weeks. Our nursery and teen room are open for the first time in several years. And when I thought about it for more than a grumpy, antagonistic minute, the pairing of the water ceremony with this not-quite arbitrary ingathering Sunday does have a certain logic and thematic resonance to it.
Today is both the first Sunday of the new church program year–gathering us in once more from summer pursuits that had at least some of us scattered for awhile–and simply one more in an unbroken line of Sunday worship services stretching back to the chartering of the modern Unitarian (now Unitarian Universalist) Church of Savannah sixty-five years ago this month. The latest of an even longer, though disrupted line of worship services stretching more than a hundred years farther back to the founding of the Unitarian Society of Savannah in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and farther still to the Unitarian churches back in New England those original Savannah Unitarians came from. Our theology and our refusal, in the words of one 20th century Unitarian minister, to fence the spirit, reach back several hundred years farther even than those New England churches.
As the poet reminded us, the same splashes of water we will shortly pour into our bowl were once hoarfrost on a seal’s whisker, and a cloud over Paris, and poured into and out of countless other containers and coursed through countless bodies of water, over centuries and millennia–according to our story this morning, four and a half billion years! Again and again, water cycles, through condensation and evaporation and ice melt, from liquid to solid to gas. Rainfall and snowfall. Streams to rivers to oceans, aquifers to springs to lakes. Never disappearing. Never introduced from a novel, outside source. Continual motion and transformation but always the same water since earth’s beginnings. We experience that vast, eternal Water in rainy seasons and snowy seasons, in monsoons and hurricanes, in atmospheric rivers and typhoons. We feel its absence in dry seasons and in droughts. It never really goes, but it does come and go over human time and geography. It’s all one Water but we can scoop it up and contain it for a time, discrete portion of it from specific identifiable sources.
So, too, though slightly less eternal, the fact that every Unitarian Universalist Church has grown out of the influence of earlier Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalist Churches and individuals through the centuries, doesn’t mean that there aren’t cycles to church years, cycles of church life similar to cycles of human life and family life, and often tied to the calendar. Arbitrary or not, now that schools start at different times across the country and from district to district, and now that seasons of agriculture no longer shape almost every aspect of life–arbitrary or not, early summer has come to be understood as the end of the church year here and elsewhere, with high summer sort of a season out of time, and early September the beginning of a new church year. Making ritual use of water on this day to celebrate the dual and cyclical nature of church–ongoing and starting all over again–opens this annual ceremony to meaning and significance beyond that of a soggy travelog.
Wherever your portion of water came from, whether your collected it somewhere far from here or from your kitchen or will pour some from the pitcher provided, please pause for just a moment to reflect on its significance in your life: is it most representative of a vacation or time spent in familiar comfortable environs close to home? Did you gather it at a time of great joy? Does it symbolize tears?
Instead of inviting you all up in one long line to make your aqueous offerings, I’m going to call you up in groups. They are listed in your order of service. You get to decide which group to join, and as always, you’ll have the opportunity to tell us about your water. Please speak into the microphone. Yes, even if you have a big voice. Without the mic our participants on Zoom will not hear you. To further honor the cycles of water and life and church, we’ll boil this water after today and stow it in the minister’s study. It will be available throughout the next year for use in baby dedications and other lifecycle blessings.
May the blessing begin now with our offerings and our stories–stories of the cycles of our lives. Amen.