Water Ceremony (or Water Communion) is a uniquely Unitarian Universalist ritual with roots in many diverse ceremonial practices. The first UU Water Ceremony was a part of the 1980 Women and Religion Continental Convocation held in East Lansing, Michigan. Carolyn McDade and Lucile Schuck Longview imagined the ceremony as representing feminine spirituality and symbolizing how women’s work in specific locales is all interconnected with a larger work.
At that first Water Communion, women brought water from different sources representing all the places from which they had gathered. They poured their respective waters into a large earthenware bowl, where they were mingled together. Since that time, many Unitarian Universalist congregations have taken up the ritual, with participants bringing water from a variety of personally sacred sources and pouring their water into a common vessel. The combined water might symbolize a number of spiritual truths.
We all bring our individual faiths together to co-create a community of faith without one specific source. We each bring our gifts and talents and abilities and combine them into one beloved community. Once our water is poured into the vessel with everyone else’s, it can’t be separated out again—just as we inevitably become a part of one another’s spiritual journeys in community with one another.
That deep sharing and comingling of our faiths and our spiritual journeys can feel a bit vulnerable. Without a single shared source that validates our faith or our journey, we might start to wonder if our water really belongs in a vessel with the rest of the community’s water. Which is to say, we might wonder if our spirituality is right, or good enough, or acceptable.
It can be tempting to make Water Ceremony more superficial. Naming places we’ve visited without connecting location to any deeper values. Or pouring ourselves into the life of a community without really sharing much about our journeys or what we carry with us. All of that is fine. It might be all that feels safe enough to us.
However, a Water Ceremony could be an opportunity to embrace our interconnectedness, our validity as co-creators of meaningful community, the essential-ness of what we bring to the common vessel, and the necessity of what other people bring to fill that vessel. Spiritual community at its best not only nourishes us, but also reminds us of our capability and our calling to be nourishment to the world around us. If we’re willing, our Water Ceremony might offer a sense of our deep connection, our inescapable interdependence, and our calling to embody liberating love in the larger community.
So, this Sunday, bring your water. It can be from anywhere. A special place you’ve only visited once or your kitchen tap. It can be symbolic of all sorts of things. Your strengths, your openness, your vulnerability, your deepest values, your vision for a hopeful future. Bring your water. We’ll pour it all together in a common vessel of community and explore what it might be like to be living water in all of our communities and relationships.