Sunday April 30, 2017

“​A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”- Marcus Garvey

“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” – Harriet Tubman 

 Sunday our youth and children will tall about three UU ladies who changed history, Ysaye Barnwell, Laurel Clark, and Maurine Neuberger.  

We would love to have you come worship with us.

Our services are Sundays at 11 a.m.  at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse. There are classes for children and adults 10 to 10:45 am, and a coffee gathering before the service. More about us.

Children are welcome.  There is childcare and an activity for young children during the service.

The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom.

Map

The schedule for the current adult religious education class is here.

Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information

or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302

Sunday April 23, 2017

I enjoy the cleaning up—something about the getting of things in order for winter—making the garden secure—a battening down of hatches perhaps… It just feels right. —David Hobson

This Sunday Cricket will explore cleaning as a Spiritual Practice. 

We would love to have you come worship with us.

Our services are Sundays at 11 a.m. at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse.

Our Religious Education/ Life Long Learning Class will meet at from 10am to 10:45 am with a coffee gathering before the service. More about us.

Adult religious education, at 10, will be a discussion on applying our beliefs to current events.

Children are welcome. There is childcare and an activity for young children during the service.

The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom.

You can park on either side of the PWA building. The lots are marked as private, but are available on Sunday mornings.

Map

Flower Ceremony and Egg Hunt: Sunday April 16, 2017

See last year for the full service.

Today we are celebrating our Flower Ceremony, which was created by Dr. Norbert Čapek for the Liberal Religious Fellowship he founded in Prague, then Czechoslovakia, in 1925, and which became the largest Unitarian Church in the world. He sought a ceremony that would celebrate love and community and the interdependent web of life and love among a new and diverse congregation drawn from many backgrounds, and which would be a celebration not tied to any older religious ceremonies, which many of his congregation had rejected. Nearly a hundred years later, it is celebrated by Unitarian Universalist congregations everywhere.

We will have a potluck dinner and egg hunt following the service at Robert Helfer and Lisa deGruyter’s house in Clarksburg. Ham and potato salad will be provided. Please bring a dish to share and baskets for collecting eggs. There will be cascarones. Your friends and family are welcome, too.

We would love to have you come worship with us.

Our services are Sundays at 11 a.m. at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse.

Our Religious Education/ Life Long Learning Class will meet at from 10am to 10:45 am with a coffee gathering before the service. More about us.

Adult religious education, at 10, will be a discussion on applying our beliefs to current events.

Children are welcome. There is childcare and an activity for young children during the service.

The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom.

You can park on either side of the PWA building. The lots are marked as private, but are available on Sunday mornings.

Map

Sunday April 9, 2017

We have a special guest this Sunday. Andrew McKnight, former environmental engineer turned award-winning singer/songwriter and guitarist from the foot of northern Virginia’s Blue Ridge. His musical journey is nearing a million miles of America’s blue highways and scenic backwaters. His music and messages are infused with great reverence and warmth for the human journey and our place on this magnificent blue ball. In addition to his nationally-acclaimed performing and recording career, our fellow UU has devoted much of his energy and passion to causes and issues dear to our faith.

He will be sharing a special service with us called Beyond Borders, rich with themes of personal growth and challenging our individual “comfort zones”. Several of these songs together lay out a compelling and provocative look at our footsteps and those awaiting the arrival of our feet, often leading us places we never imagined for ourselves.

We would love to have you come worship with us.

Our services are Sundays at 11 a.m. at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse.

Our Religious Education/ Life Long Learning Class will meet at from 10am to 10:45 am with a coffee gathering before the service. More about us.

Adult religious education, at 10, will be a discussion on applying our beliefs to current events.

Children are welcome. There is childcare and an activity for young children during the service.

The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom.

You can park on either side of the PWA building. The lots are marked as private, but are available on Sunday mornings.

Map

Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information

or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302

~

Namaste
Cricket

Sunday April 2, 2017

 

“Your worth consists in what you are and not in what you have.” – Thomas A. Edison

This Sunday, John Hall will be discussing the first principle with his lesson “Measuring up: What is Worthy?”

We would love to have you come worship with us.

Our services are Sundays at 11 a.m. at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse.

Our Religious Education/ Life Long Learning Class will meet at from 10am to 10:45 am with a coffee gathering before the service. More about us.

Adult religious education, at 10, will be a discussion on applying our beliefs to current events.

Children are welcome. There is childcare and an activity for young children during the service.

The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom.

You can park on either side of the PWA building. The lots are marked as private, but are available on Sunday mornings.

Map

Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information

or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302

~

Namaste

Cricket

Sunday March 19, 2017: The Doctrine of Love

Prelude: Mango Thoughts in a Meatloaf Town
Rev. Meg Barnhouse, First UU, Austin, Texas

Welcome

Hosea Ballou saidMan, being not only a religious, but also a social being, requires for the promotion of his rational happiness religious institutions, which, while they give a proper direction to devotion, at the same time make a wise, and profitable improvement of his social feelings.” And so we gather here, not only to practice our religion, but to support each other.

Chalice Lighting Drawn Together – Jennifer Leota Gray

We come together every week bound not by a creed,
Or a mutual desire to please one God or many Gods
Yet we are drawn together by a belief, that how we are in the world,
Who we are together matters.
We light this chalice, together in the knowledge
That love, not fear, can change this world Continue reading

Sunday March 12 2017: Saving Daylight

Sundial

Prelude: Here Comes the Sun – George Harrison

Welcome: Here in this sanctuary – Jack Mendelsohn

Welcome to this community.

Here in this sanctuary of ancient dreams and wisdom and beauty we come to grow, to be healed, to stretch mind and heart, to be challenged, renewed; to be helped in our own continuing struggles for meaning and for love; to help build a world with more justice and mercy in it; to be counted among the hopers and doers.

In the face of cynicism, darkness, brutality around us and within, we seek to align ourselves with a living community that would affirm rather than despair, that would think and act rather than simply adjust and succumb.

Here we invite the spirit of our own humanity and the healing powers under, around, through and beyond it, to give us the nerve and grace, the toughness and sensitivity, to search out the truth that frees, and the life that maketh all things new.

Chalice lighting: Take from life its coals – Laurel S Sheridan

Take from life its coals, not its ashes.

Fan the flames of love and justice;
join hands and hearts in common endeavor;
and there will be no limit to what we can achieve together.

Song: Gathered Here (5 times)
Please rise in body or in spirit and join in singing Gathered Here, five times. Continue reading

Sunday February 26 2017: Church! What Is It Good For?

Church! What Is It Good For?

Prelude: Closer to Fine – Indigo Girls

And I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line…

Welcome

Let our church be a gift from each of us to the other.
But even more let it be a gift from each of us to our community.
Let us be a gathering place for the spirit, a refuge for hope, a beacon of inspiration, and a dynamo of life and justice for all.
Let faithful community be the ground of commitment and action to enrich the world.

Dennis McCarthy

Chalice Lighting

For me the essence of Unitarian Universalism is the responsible search for my personal spiritual truth in a loving and supportive community that values that search. The analogy I use is the campfire or hearth. When the cold, existential winds of the uncaring universe blew hard and bitter, it was all that was between our ancestors and the outer darkness. But it was enough, and they thrived. It was the center of life. Children heard the stories of the people from the elders. How to find food was discussed. Strangers were welcomed around the flame. We learned to take care of the weak and infirm, the young and helpless, but also that if everyone did not tend the fire and fetch the wood, that there was no survival. For me our Chalice symbolizes that flame that was the center of community. Today, it is the center of where I find, explore and celebrate my own spiritual truth and continue to grow as a person of faith.

From Bob Hurst, First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City Continue reading

Sunday February 19, 2017

“Indeed our survival and liberation depend upon our recognition of the truth when it is spoken and lived by the people. If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth. To know the truth is to appropriate it, for it is not mainly reflection and theory. Truth is divine action entering our lives and creating the human action of liberation.”
James H. Cone

This Sunday we will explore the connection between liberation theology and the Unitarian Universalist Association.

We would love to have you come worship with us.

Our services are Sundays at 11 a.m. at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse.

Our Religious Education/ Life Long Learning Class will meet at from 10am to 10:45 am with a coffee gathering before the service. More about us.

Children are welcome. There is childcare and an activity for young children during the service.

The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom.

Map

The schedule for the current adult religious education class is here.

Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information

or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302

~
Namaste
Cricket

Image Credit – http://www.slideshare.net/chaoxine/liberation-theology-34109525

Sunday February 12, 2017

Prelude: P!NK “Don’t Let me Get Me”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asaCQOZpqUQ

Welcome: “All That Lies Within You” by Angela Herrera

Consider this an invitation
To you.
Yes-you
With all your happiness
And all of your burdens,
Your hopes and regrets.
An invitation if you feel good today,
And an invitation if you do not,
If you are aching-
And there are so many ways to ache.

Whoever you are, however you are,
Wherever you are in your journey,
This is an invitation into peace.
Peace in your heart,
And peace in your heart,
And-with every breath
Peace in your heart.

Maybe your heart is heavy
Or hardened.
Maybe it’s troubled
And peace can take up residence
Only in a small corner,
Only on the edge,
With all that is going on in the world,
And in your life.
Ni modo. It doesn’t matter.

All that you need
For a deep and comforting peace to grow
Lies within you.
Once it is in your heart
Let it spread into your life,
Let it pour from your life into the world
And once it is in the world,
Let it shine upon all beings.
 

Song: Gathered Here

Chalice Lighting:  A Spark of Hope By Melanie Davis

If ever there were a time for a candle in the darkness,
this would be it.
Using a spark of hope,
kindle the flame of love,
ignite the light of peace,
and feed the flame of justice.

Continue reading