Why Not to Begin with the Water Service

Once again,  I find myself among people whose custom is to begin the church year with the water service, an event I struggle to find meaningful. Once again, I asked them to move the water service away from Opening Day, to make room for something a little different, just as an experiment.  And once again, they are willing to try. I am grateful. I hope they like doing it a little differently.

Mainly, I don't really like starting the year with a ceremony that is (a) backward-looking and (b)individualized, though there's more, of course.

To gather and spend the opportunity of a service looking back over what has happened during summer seems an odd way to energize the congregation for the year's challenge. Yes, those who were away for the summer have stories to tell, and many of them have important spiritual content.  But.here in Montana, the geese are getting ready to fly south, the late harvest of hay is being gathered in, the race between the ripening of tomatoes and the coming of frost is on...  and many things are beginning.  Like school.  And what we call Sunday School. Like all the programs the congregation has planned for the season.  Isn't that exciting? Shouldn't we be talking about that?

And this is a time of gathering, of knowing the congregation as a gathered body.  Why would this be a time to share individual stories for an hour?  If we must look back, how about a moment of congregational history, a golden story of why this institution is important?  It is challenging for me, and I suspect for others, to listen through the water ceremony's litany of summer vacation stories for threads that connect them to the spiritual life of the fellowship.  True, the symbolic pouring of waters into a common bowl can be made a strong symbol of the gathered community, but the words and the gesture of the common bowl do not work well together. "This is water from the South Pacific, where I had a unique and wonderful adventure.  I am glad to have gone, and glad to be back..." The uniqueness of the experience competes with the joining of the waters.

Once upon a time there was a First Water Ceremony.  It happened, according to legend, in Michigan, when a gathering of women convened to change the world.  They brought waters from their home places, from the places that watered their roots.  They mingled the waters together for their time of meeting, blessing the mingling with the energies of their work together.  At the end, they took the mingled waters back with them. This First Water Ceremony joined water from the far flung places where people actually lived, rather than the far flung places where they went on vacation. And it was a temporary thing.  It was appropriate to gather up the water again and send it back blended to the places where it had started, unblended.

I came into ministry from a congregation that started the year with the Water Ceremony.  I thought that was what we did.

Fortunately, I learned in my internship with David A. Johnson (Rhode Island) that there is another way.  He invited the congregation to gather outside the building on Opening Sunday.  There was a procession into the church, bringing objects of symbolic value to be placed appropriately inside.  There were words about the congregation's past, present, and future.  There were familiar hymns.  There was a feeling of "it is good to be together."  Now I try to do this, carrying the message to whatever corner of the Unitarian Universalist village I visit.  And now I have told you, so you can consider it.