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Your high school yearbook. Your kid’s art from grade school. Grandma’s wedding dress. Dad’s Army uniform. Great-grandpa’s piano. These things hold memories, but what do we do with all the STUFF??? Sooner or later, we are all faced with the realization that we have things in our homes we don’t need. Meg Baker, Curator of the Hatfield Historical Museum, talks about how we value things, how to decide what to save, and the process of letting go.
Sunday, June 19, 2022
“To keep, to give, to let go – what to do with the STUFF”
Order of Service
Board Welcome & Announcements Leslie Kinney
Prelude: “Azulão” Jamie Ovalle
Eva Greene, piano
Let us open our time together today with an invocation in Arabic:
bismillah ar rahman ar rahim
which can be translated as “we begin in the name of Allah, the universal divine spirit, which is mercy and compassion”
Chalice Lighting
Children’s Chalice Lighting
We light this chalice to celebrate Unitarian Universalism. We are the church of the open minds. We are the church of the helping hands. We are the church of the loving hearts.
Opening Hymn #19: “The Sun that Shines”
Ttranslated from a work by Dimitri Bortniansky, renowned Ukrainian composer (1751- 1825). His sacred choral works were published in 10 volumes, edited by Tchaikovsky.
Unison Affirmation
“Love is the spirit of this congregation and
service is its call. let this be our covenant:
to dwell together in peace,
to seek the truth in love,
and to help one another.”
Story For All of Us: “Everybody Needs a Rock,” by Byrd Balor, pictures by Peter Parnal
read by Meg Baker
Children’s Recessional: “Go Now in Peace”
Hymn #149: “Lift Every Voice and Sing”
Reading: “In the Struggle, Singing, Shining” Victoria Safford (from “Walking Toward Morning”)
Sermon: “To keep, to give, to let go – what to do with the STUFF” by Meg Baker
Response Time
Anthem: “An Irish Blessing” words traditional,
musical setting by James E. Moore Jr.
All Souls Choir, Tom Baehr, Director
Offering shared with Art in the Neighborhood
Offertory: “Very Early” Bill Evans
Eva Greene, piano
Blessing the Candles of Joys and Concerns
Special Music: “The Circle Game”
written by Joni Mitchell, recorded by Tom Rush
Yesterday a child came out to wonder
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar
And fearful when the sky was full of thunder
And tearful at the falling of a star.
CHORUS
And the seasons they go ’round and ’round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look behind from where we came
And go ’round and ’round in the circle game.
Then the child moved ten times ’round the seasons
And skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like, when you’re older, must appease him
And promises of someday make her dreams.
Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turn to car wheels through the town
And they tell them: ‘Take your time, it won’t be long now
‘Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down.’
CHORUS
So the years spin by and now the child is twenty
Though the dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through.
CHORUS
Closing Words: Taken from “SET IN STONE” By Victoria Safford
(From “Walking Toward Morning”)
“In a cemetery once, an old one in New England, I found a strangely soothing epitaph.
The name of the deceased and her dates had been scoured away by wind and rain, but there was a carving of a tree with roots and branches…
…and among them the words, “She attended well and faithfully to a few worthy things.”
At first this seemed to me a little meager, a little stingy on the part of her survivors, but I wrote it down and have thought about it since,
and now I can’t imagine a more proud or satisfying legacy.
“She attended well and faithfully to a few worthy things.”
Every day I stand in danger of being struck by lightning and having the obituary in the local paper say, for all the world to see,
“They attended frantically and ineffectually to a great many unimportant, meaningless details.”
How do you want your obituary to read?
How will it read, how does it read, and if you had to name a few worthy things to which you attend well and faithfully, what, I wonder, would they be?”
Extinguishing the Chalice
Closing Circle
“Carry the flame of peace and love until we meet again.” (2X)