Letting go, I believe, allows us to be better prepared to receive the gifts of the season and the new year. There is so much possibility in front of us. But we need to prepare ourselves to accept it, or we may miss it.

We may miss the formation of our community and the formation of ourselves, if we are weighed down by guilt, lack of acceptance, a need to forgive or be forgiven, anger, bitterness, sadness, lack of self confidence, and on and on.

This year, as many of you know, we have formalized our worship together into a Liturgical Calendar. This means there is a rhythm to our year, based upon the seasons, annual events and our six sources this year (last year we focused on our seven principles and next year we will focus on our history and the prophetic tradition).

In preparing the calendar, I noticed that we also have a "communion" service for each season- a time when the congregation gathers for a ritual which helps us individually as well as in the formation of our community. In the fall, it is our water ceremony and, in the winter, it is our New Year's "burning away" ceremony. (In the summer, we have Flower Communion, and we will have a new Earth Communion this spring.)

These services help us "set" ourselves for the season we are in and give us a particularly Unitarian Universalist ritual to celebrate and recognize the passage of time and our lives. In a way to "reclaim" a religious ritual, I am calling these "communion" services because they serve the purpose of the traditional idea of communion in the Christian church- we literally form together, through these worship rituals, our community and its spirit.

These services are not creedal in nature, nor magical. They are communions of our spiritual selves with one another, with elements that help us individually as we create together our worshipping congregation. We stop together, in communion, to recognize the messages of the seasons and our Unitarian Universalist faith. I hope you will make these services part or your personal and family traditions as we explore the depths of being in religious community.