When asking yourself, “but what can I do, I am just one person?” The answer is always to find others and band together.
Here is an opportunity to do just that.
Namste,
Cricket
Clarksburg WV
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.
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.
penned in black
In celebration of national poetry month, Showing Up for Racial Justice (“SURJ”) Morgantown, invites you to “Penned in Black: An Open Mic Poetry Night.” Community members may share their original or covered poetry from authors of color, as well as other poems exploring race, privilege, and our shared humanity. SURJ looks forward to welcoming you on Friday, April 21, at the Blue Moose Cafe from 7pm-9pm for a night of unforgettable spoken word poetry.
Coming Soon: Andrew McKnight
Keep your eyes peeled for more details, but on Sunday April 9th we will be hosting Andrew McKnight for our Sunday morning service.
Here is a short biography of Andrew and more can be found on his website.
Since permanently leaving his corporate environmental engineering career in 1996, award-winning folk/Americana artist Andrew McKnight’s musical journey has traced nearly a million miles of blue highways, and earned him a wealth of critical acclaim and enthusiastic fans for his captivating performances and seven recordings. Andrew’s powerful and entertaining show is like one man theatre, delivered with warmth and down-home comfort. His finely crafted songs are woven together with humorous stories and poetic drama, while the musical soundscape traverses influences from Appalachia, tasteful slide and jazzy blues, feisty anthems, rustic folk, and even a little fancy flatpicking on a Carter Family tune. While his skillful guitar work provides a tasteful foundation, the touches of native American cedar flute, resonator guitar, djembe (African hand drum) and even mandolin add delightful and mesmerizing embellishments to the show.
Andrew has performed at many prestigious venues like the Kennedy Center, the International Storytelling Center and the Atlanta Olympics, has been part of the Rocky Mountain, South Florida, Boston and Delmarva Folk Festival lineups, and a guest on NPR’s “Art of the Song” and “River City Folk” shows.
Andrew will be sharing his service “Beyond Borders” with us.
We hope you can attend.
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.
Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information
or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302
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 said “Man, 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
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…
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 5, 2017: Democratic Process
Prelude: Heyr himna smiður – Árstíðir
[Heyr, himna smiður (Hear, Smith of the Heavens) was written by the Icelandic chieftain and poet Kolbeinn Tumason, according to tradition, on his deathbed in 1208 AD. Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson set the poem to music in 1973. This recording features the Icelandic “Indie Rock” group Árstíðir. For more information, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolbeinn_Tumason.]
Welcome: The beauty of the whole, By Meg Barnhouse
We gather to worship, our hearts alive with hope that here we will be truly seen, that here we will be welcomed into the garden of this community, where the simple and the elegant, the fluted and frilled, the shy and the dramatic complement one another and are treasured. May we know that here, each contributes in their way to the beauty of the whole. Come, let us worship together, all genders, sexualities, politics, clappers and non-clappers, progressive or conservative, may we root ourselves in the values of this faith: compassion and courage, transcendence, justice and transformation.
Chalice lighting: Afraid of the dark, By Andrew Pakula
In sightless night, terrors draw near
Nameless fears of talon and tooth
Hopelessness yawns before us—an abyss
Alone and unknown in the gloom, longing for the dawn
O sacred flame blaze forth—wisdom brought to life
Guide us—
With the light of hope
The warmth of love
The beacon of purpose and meaning
Because we are all afraid of the dark
Let there be light
Sunday January 29, 2017
“Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.”
― Jalaluddin Rumi
Our youth and children will explore dance as a spiritual practice. The service will be fun and interactive.
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.
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
West Fork Unitarian Universalists 