There are lots of children in our congregation.  Most Sundays, they have their own worship in their own space in ways that are appropriate for their ages.  The teens have their gathering in the evening, so they don't have to get up so early in the morning, or, so they can get in a day's work before coming to church.  The younger children come with their parents in the morning and have their own church time while the adults are in the sanctuary for worship.  We have a program called "Spirit Play," which is just what it says.  They play with our teaching stories, special stories selected to lead them toward learning important values.

There's a moment of worship as their time together begins, led by one of the two volunteers in each classroom.  Then they hear and see the story.  Each story has its own basket of tools -- a piece of fabric to lay the parts out on, and little figures to remind both the teller and the listeners of the elements of the story.  When the story has been told, and all the parts laid out in front of the children, the leader asks questions about the story.  "I wonder..." she or he begins.  The children join in the wondering, and make meaning from the story themselves.  They go on to a time of doing a craft activity related to the story.  Then they close with "feasting" (a snack), and some closing words together.  

By engaging with the story and developing their own meanings, the children learn something important about learning as well as the important values in the story of the day.  Sometimes during activity time, children will tell each other stories from story baskets.  Sometimes they go back over the story of the day, and sometimes they return to favorite stories of the past.

It's a creative and calm time in our children's week, just as adult worship is a creative calm time in our week.  We all go home smiling, ready to fact our everyday world again. 

At the turning of the year, this year on December 30, the Sunday closest to New Year's Day, our congregation joined in a ceremony of releasing and welcoming, sometimes called the Burning Bowl.  For many Unitarian Universalist congregations, this is an annual event, though we were trying it on to see if it fits for us.  Members spent some time in quiet reflection, reviewing the important events of their lives for the previous year.  We spent some time in sharing from those reflections, listening to testimony about life-changing moments from the events of 2007.  In the second part of the ceremony, we sat with our remembrances of our own experiences of the past year and noticed things about ourselves we might like to change. Each of us wrote reminders of one or two of those things on little slips of paper, crumpled them up, and dropped them in a big bowl.  These were set aside to be burned outdoors, a safe distance away from the building, after the ceremony.  The third part welcomes the new.  How could each of us let our light shine more brightly in the world?  We took time in reflection again, then each wrote or drew reminders about our intentions for the New Year on another slip of paper.   These we kept, putting them in a pocket or purse, to take away and put someplace where we could look at them again, maybe even tape them to the mirror where we'd see them every day.  After the service was finished, we took the bowl of crumpled papers with the things people wanted to release, went outside to a waiting charcoal grill, and burned them up, a symbolic release into the cosmos. 

Yes! do try this at home, kids!  Well, with adult supervision, of course, if you're not already an adult.  It's more powerful with a group.  Gather your friends, light a candle, sing songs and read poems if you like, and take time for the three parts of the ceremony.  First, a meditative review of the past year; then reflection on what you would like to release, with writing and crumpling and putting into the bowl; finally an invitation to the good possibilities for the coming year, with writing and keeping.  Close the ceremony with singing, chanting, or holding hands, go outside and burn the things you want to release, and begin the new year!

Or, find a Unitarian Universalist congregation near you for more of this kind of practical spirituality that doesn't require any particular creed or belief.  You'll find support for finding your own way through your own life, and much more.  In Manchester we're at 669 Union Street, electronically at www.uumanchester.org, 

Yes, we Unitarian Universalists do celebrate the Winter Solstice as a religious holiday.  It's just a few days before Christmas, so everything seems to run together, but the solstice, the day with the longest night of the year, has meaning for us.  There are two strands of meaning, coming from very different perspectives.  First, we are a people who honor reason and the results of science in our religious life, and one of the really important scientific truths is the miracle -- we can call it that -- of the earth's wobbly way of moving around the sun, tipping outward and then inward, creating times of more and less light in different parts of the planet.  It's something to celebrate, for sure, when Earth reaches the farthest extent of its wobbling and starts to head the other way.  The coldest days of winter may still lie ahead, but there will be more light each day after the Winter Solstice.  Second, we honor ancient traditions that existed before Christianity and alongside it in the Northern Hemisphere. In those traditions, the return of the sun was an exciting event full of mythical meaning, accompanied by ceremony and symbolism.  Some of us like to re-create the ancient myths and symbols, honoring the wisdom, as best we can rediscover and reconstruct it, of people who lived long ago, whose traditions were displaced. 

By honoring the Winter Solstice and its traditions separately, we clear the way to honor Christmas as a Christian holiday.  Solstice is about evergreen trees with shiny, sun-like ornaments in their branches, about dreaming in the dark of the return of the light, about the blessing of the cycles of growth and decay in our fields, in nature, and in our lives.  Christmas is about the birth of a baby, the love of parents for their child, the everyone feels as a baby comes into our human family, the Love that surrounds us all, even as we live in a world of struggle and suffering, the Love that comes to life among people with this special birth.  And it's true:  neither one of these special religious days requires trips to the mall. They are both good days to think of helping others, remembering that we are all one.

At the Unitarian Universalist Church of Manchester, we celebrate the Winter Solstice at 7:00 PM on Thursday, December 20.  We celebrate Christmas Eve with two services, one primarily for families at 6:00 PM and a candlelight service at 8:00 PM.      

.