UU principles

Sunday, 9 November 2025: The Hardest Principle

Robert

The Principles are not dogma or doctrine, but rather a guide for those of us who choose to join and participate in Unitarian Universalist religious communities.

— Rev. Barbara Wells ten Hove

The Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism help guide us through the mysteries and obligations we encounter in the world. Robert Helfer will lead a service focused on the First Principle, the one many UUs find the hardest to keep.

We currently conduct a full worship service on the first Sunday of each month, and discuss a different short reading each of the remaining Sundays.

Please Join us for Worship.

Our services are Sundays at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time on ZOOM and in person at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse. A coffee hour, a time for discussion and socializing (including ZOOM participants), follows from the end of the service until 12:00 noon. More about us.

If you prefer not to be seen, video is optional. If you would like to participate online, please email westforkuu@gmail.com for details and a link, or for help with using ZOOM.

We would love to have you come worship with us.

Children are welcome.

The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom. You may park on the south side of the building, which is marked reserved for the PWA, or the north, where the reserved spaces are available on Sundays.

Map

Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302

Sunday 3 August, 2025: Democratic Process

Robert


Still, no metrics exist to measure life without institutions, because they’ve been around as long as humankind. The first institution was the first family. The tribe was the first community. The first tribe’s leader was the first politician, and its elders were the first legislature. Its guards, the first police force. Its storyteller, a teacher. Humans are coded to create communities, and communities beget institutions.

— Ron Fournier and Sophie Quinton, ”How Americans Lost Trust in Our Greatest Institutions”

Robert Helfer will lead a service on faith and community:

Our services are Sundays at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time on ZOOM and in person at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse. A coffee hour, a time for discussion and socializing (including ZOOM participants), follows from the end of the service until 12:00 noon. More about us.

If you prefer not to be seen, video is optional. If you would like to participate online, please email westforkuu@gmail.com for details and a link, or for help with using ZOOM.

We would love to have you come worship with us.

Children are welcome.

The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom. You may park on the south side of the building, which is marked reserved for the PWA, or the north, where the reserved spaces are available on Sundays.

Map

Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302

Sunday July 6, 2025: The Courage to Be Disliked

Robert


In a world the human inhabitants of which are currently being polarised into either the fiery or the ice-bound there often seems no longer to be any point in adopting a more temperate approach. After all, at the moment, those of us who do try to make temperate points in the public space often quickly find their arguments (and nearly always themselves) simultaneously attacked by the fiery from one side and the ice-bound from the other. It can be — indeed, it often is — highly dispiriting. So, what on earth are those of us with a more temperate spirit to do?

Rev. Andrew Brown, ”A passionately cool political/theological meditation on Robert Frost’s poem ‘Fire and Ice’”

Lisa deGruyter will lead a service on principles in difficult times:

Something I have been thinking about also lately is how I believe our first principle, the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, an antidote to what I think I am seeing as an underlying problem in our culture, as expressed in a T-shirt I saw the other day “Calvinism #somelivesmatter”. I think we sometimes take that principle for granted and believe that it must be a principle that is taken for granted by every religion. But it isn’t.

Our services are Sundays at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time on ZOOM and in person at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse. A coffee hour, a time for discussion and socializing (including ZOOM participants), follows from the end of the service until 12:00 noon. More about us.

If you prefer not to be seen, video is optional. If you would like to participate online, please email westforkuu@gmail.com for details and a link, or for help with using ZOOM.

We would love to have you come worship with us.

Children are welcome.

The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom. You may park on the south side of the building, which is marked reserved for the PWA, or the north, where the reserved spaces are available on Sundays.

Map

Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302

The Courage to Be Disliked: Sunday, 20 September 2020

LdeG 1 Comment

Lisa deGruyter, Lay Leader

Welcome before Prelude

Good morning and welcome to West Fork Unitarian Universalists. I feel blessed to serve this congregation as a lay leader. I’m especially glad to have all of you here today.

Let us use the prelude for centering. We are about to enter sacred time. We are about to make this time and this place sacred by our presence and intention.

Please silence your phones… and as you do so, I invite us also to turn down the volume on our fears; to remove our masks; and to loosen the armor around our hearts.

Breathe.

Let go of the expectations placed on you by others—and those they taught you to place on yourself.

Drop the guilt and the shame, not to shirk accountability, but in honest expectation of the possibility of forgiveness.

Let go of the thing you said the other day. Let go of the thing you dread next week. Be here, in this moment. Breathe, here.

God Is A River- Peter Mayer

Opening

The world is holy. Nature is holy. The body is holy. Sexuality is holy. The imagination is holy. Divinity is immanent in nature; it is within you as well as without. Most spiritual paths ultimately lead people to the understanding of their own connection to the divine. While human beings are often cut off from experiencing the deep and ever-present connection between themselves and the universe, that connection can often be regained through ceremony and community. The energy you put out into the world comes back.

― Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America

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Some thoughts on the end of 2016

CZ

I have been thinking a lot about 2016. It is almost over. This article talks about the lessons we have learned to carry with us into 2017. “2016 was a bad year for too many people around the world: We can’t just wait, commiserate, post rueful memes, and hope that the next year will be better. We all have to go out and make it so.

2017 is coming, whether we want it to or not. Will it be better?

That’s up to us.”

Here is to a new year where we live up to our own expectations and make change. 

Namaste, 

Cricket