Welcome to this online worship service. We may be apart and distant, yet we are home to each other as we gather in this new way.
Prelude – The Water Is Wide-arr. R. Vandall by Lynn Orlando & Anna Kojovic-Frodl
Call To Worship – adapted from words by Lawrence E. McGinty
To this space we come bringing our boldest dreams –
seeking here the inspiration and strength to make them be!
To this space we come hoping to bury broken dreams,
to be sustained through their pain and to discover new ones amidst their tears.
We come here lonely, isolated from meaningful human contact, searching for warmth and closeness and care.
Needing to grow beyond plateaus of the commonplace,
we seek here challenges and commitments productive of greater wholeness and deeper meanings.
We come intense and constructed,
hoping for encouragement to shed our pretenses and to be ourselves.
Filled with despair and self-doubt,
we seek affirmations prodding us to say “yes” to ourselves and to life.
Somehow, always putting happiness ahead of ourselves,
we enter this space trusting that what happens here will enable us to make and to accept a little bit of it now — today!
Strange place, this space – Here we cry, sing, laugh, hurt, dance, touch, survive, celebrate, grow, search, doubt, hope, rejoice, pray, trust, care, learn, think, wonder, be, Become!
Yes, this morning, to this space, we have come.
Let us join in worship together!
Chalice Lighting – adapted from “Callings” by Nancy Shaffer
When you heard that voice and knew finally it called for you
and what it was saying
– where were you?
Were you in the shower, wet and soapy, or chopping cabbage late for dinner?
Were you planting radish seeds or seeking one lost sock?
Maybe wiping handprints off a window or coaxing words into a sentence.
Or coming upon a hyacinth or one last No.
Where were you when you heard that ancient voice,
and did Yes get born right then
and did you weep?
Had it called you since before you even were,
and when you knew that, did your joy escape all holding?
Where were you when you heard that calling voice,
and how, in that moment, did you mark it?
How, ever after, are you changed?
Tell us, please, all you can about that voice.
Teach us how to listen, how to hear.
Teach us all you can of saying Yes.
We light our chalice this morning for that calling for that “Yes”.
Hymn #1064 “Blue Boat Home” by Peter Mayer
Love be with you and all living things
Gesture of Friendship:
Message For All Ages – “The Star Fish Thrower” by Loren Eiseley
Children’s Blessing
We are…
We are blessed…
We are blessed by being…
We are blessed by being here…
We are blessed by being here together.
Musical Reflection – “For Good” by Colleen Wilkinson and Anna Kojovic-Frodl
Reflection – “Being The Wave” Rev. Marlene Walker
Musical Response “Traumerei”- R. Schumann by Anna Kojovic-Frodl
Chalice Extinguishing and Benediction – by T. S. Eliot
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
Go in peace gentle people, go always in peace.
Postlude – “The Parting Glass” OBUUC Choir