Options Search using the links below, or by entering your own search terms. Back to: Opening Words Index of First Lines Starting a Service Resource Library WorshipWeb Home See also: Calls to Worship Chalice Lightings Invocations Learn more about: The Author

Opening Words  -  Gordon B. McKeeman

We summon ourselves from the demands and delights of the daily round:
     from the dirty dishes and unwaxed floors;
     from unmowed grass, and untrimmed bushes;
     from all incompletenesses and not-yet-startednesses;
     from the unholy and the unresolved.

We summon ourselves to attend to our vision
     of peace and justice;
     of cleanliness and health;
     of delight and devotion;
     of the lovely and the holy;
     of who we are and what we can do.

We summon the power of tradition and the exhilaration of newness, the wisdom of the ages and the knowing of the very young.

We summon beauty, eloquence, poetry, and music to be the bearers of our dreams.

We would open our eyes, our ears, our minds, our hearts to the amplest dimensions of life. We rejoice in manifold promises and possibilities.

Source: 1997 UUMA Worship Materials Collection

Published in Rejoice Together: Prayers, Meditations, and Other Readings for Family, Individual, and Small-Group Worship, ed. by Helen R. Pickett, Boston: Skinner House Books, 1995, 29. Visit UUA Bookstore.

WorshipWeb Home · UUA Home · Contact UUA

Unitarian Universalist Association
25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108 · Telephone (617) 742-2100 · Fax (617) 742-2875

Information Feedback

This page was last updated December 6, 2000.
All material copyright © 2000, Unitarian Universalist Association.
There have been [an error occurred while processing this directive] accesses to this page since August 7, 2000.
Address of this page: http://www.uua.org/worshipweb/opening/mckeemangb-open01.html