Every Sunday, a small flame is lit in thousands of congregations—a symbol born from the Unitarian Service Committee’s work helping refugees flee Nazi Germany. Our rituals are how we stay connected to each other and to our history.
In my career as a minister of religious education, I love the moments in the year when I can tangibly connect my congregants with the broader Unitarian Universalist movement through the shared rituals of our faith tradition. We merge water from our personal sacred places during Water Communion at the beginning of the church year. This not only connects us to the cycle of life and ecosystems of our planet but also to congregations across North America coming together with a similar ritual. In the spring, congregants bring many different kinds of flowers together in a ritual called Flower Communion, created by Unitarian minister Norbert Čapek in Czechoslovakia. This celebration connects us with Unitarians in Europe, as well as our neighboring congregations who also celebrate the diverse abundance of their communities in this way.
Each year, the Guest at Your Table program (GAYT) connects us as Unitarian Universalists across the continent and with UUSC’s partners advancing human rights and challenging oppressive systems around the world. I love knowing that while we get to know the four “guests”, so do thousands of other UUs. While our families make a contribution to support our guests, so do UUs across the continent. Many of us choose to donate the cost of a dinner for 6-8 people, the funds required if we were to literally host these guests for a meal.
This year’s Guest at Your Table theme–Next Door, Across Borders, and Worldwide–is an apt description for this sense of connection. Together, our individual contributions add up to something significant, supporting the amazing work UUSC does in alignment with our values.
It reminds me of one of the favorite moments of Chalice Camp, a summer day camp for elementary-aged kids I helped lead for 17 years. We lived our values by offering volunteer service to the park that hosted our camp. On one morning, the campers worked together to pick up trash around the park. Older campers fanned out around the lake, while younger ones stayed close by and picked up bits of trash around the picnic area and under the art table. We had each camper count the pieces they collected. Each group tallied their contributions. Then we calculated the total pieces of trash collected for the whole camp. It was always over a thousand pieces, and that number amazed the kids! Collectively, we could do something big that none of us could do alone.
Davalene Cooper, UUSC Liaison at First Parish in Hingham (also known as Old Ship Church), puts it this way: “Participating in Guest at Your Table gives our congregation an opportunity to put our faith and its values into action in ways we could not do as an individual congregation. We are able to help create a more just world through supporting UUSC in its partnership work. Through Stories of Hope, we learn about important justice issues, and we meet the actual people and organizations we are helping. We look forward to engaging in this program each year during the holiday season.”
At Chalice Camp, I watched 40 elementary school kids gasp when the tally hit a thousand pieces of trash. None of those pieces was impressive on its own. A wrapper. A scrap of paper. A shred of balloon. But a thousand of them, gathered one deliberate pinch at a time? That amazed them. That moved something in them.
The GAYT box on your table is the same kind of thing. The coins your children drop in it, your donation made using the QR code, the conversation over dinner about a partner in Haiti, the small act of setting a place for someone you will never meet – none of it is impressive on its own. But multiply it by the hundreds of congregations across the US and Canada doing exactly the same thing, and the small bits add up to real power: funding, solidarity, and a web of partnership that grassroots human rights defenders can count on.
So this November and December–or in the new year if that works better for you–go for it! Put the box on your table. Get to know your guests. Let the ritual do what our rituals do–connect your family’s daily life to the work of people across the world who are, piece by piece, strengthening the fabric of human rights.
Collectively, we can do something that none of us could do alone.
