Gathering Music (Mary Bopp) (Begins five minutes before the hour)
Welcome
Announcements
Centering
Prelude
“Grasshopper”
(by Mary Bopp)
Introduction
Chalice Lighting and Opening Words
“Lao Tzu”
Excerpt from Tai Tei Ching
Opening Hymn
“O, the Beauty in a Life”
Words: Based on a text by Bishop Toribio Quimada
Music: Traditional Visayan (Filipino) folk tune
#182 in Singing the Living Tradition
O’ the beauty in a life that illumines honor anew,
that models wise and gracious ways to every seeker;
that every day shall serve in joy and do the right.
O’ praise the life whose beauty shows a justice true.
Let not service of the good be confined to great saints alone,
but every hour be part of all our daily living.
Set not the hope of wisdom’s grace beyond our ken;
how wide the path, how close the goal, which love has shown.
O’ the beauty of a life that illumines care of the soul,
that knows a love that is for self as well as others,
that every day embodies praise for every good,
this is the faith to which we turn, our God and goal.
Readings
“Nothing Gold Can Stay”
by Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
“The Summer Day”
by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Musical Meditation
Joys and Concerns
Musical Meditation
Offering
Every month, fifty percent of our Sunday plate collection goes to a local charity or organization. This month, the recipient of our community outreach ministry is Manchester Senior, Adult, and Family Services. Manchester Senior, Adult, and Family Services provides social work and conservator services to any Manchester resident over eighteen.
Offering Music
“One Wild and Precious Life”
by Mary Bopp
Sermon: “The Inevitability of Change” (David Garnes)
Closing Hymn
“There’s a River Flowin’ in My Soul”
Words and music by Rose Sanders
#1007 in Singing the Journey
There’s a river flowin’ in my soul.
There’s a river flowin’ in my soul.
And it’s tellin’ me that I’m somebody.
There’s a river flowin’ in my soul.
There’s a river flowin’ in my heart…
There’s a river flowin’ in my mind…
Extinguishing the Chalice and Closing Words
Excerpt from “The Methods of Nature”
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Closing Circle
May faith in the spirit of life
And hope for the community of earth
And love of the light in each other
Be ours now, and in all the days to come.
