General Assembly 1999 Event 301

Planning Committee Worship

Speaker: Rev. Sydney Amara Morriss

Several hundred people streamed into the Salt Palace Ballroom early on a sunny Saturday morning to a musical prelude that slowly changed to accompaniment for two songs. Composer and director Joyce Poley of Vancouver, B.C., directed us in singing her "Help Me See," and "When Our Heart Is In A Holy Place." Learning a new song (or two) certainly "affects the quality of the day," the topic chosen by Rev. Sydney A. Morriss, minister of Unitarian Church in Vancouver, for the Saturday morning worship service.

Using a Hindu myth with a god, a very bad ten-headed monster, and the queen he steals from the god, Rev. Morriss wove a story of love, theft, redemption and faith that reminds us that we need to nourish our souls. She suggests we can use the ten-headed monster to chase materialism or we can view the "multitudinous magnificence" of this day. The monster can keep us busy enough to imagine "we are what we do" and mire us in fragmentation. Or that same monster, who would steal our soul, can help us learn to use love, mercy, forgiveness and faith to channel our daily energies so that the fields of promise become fields of reality. And in that yearning and searching, Rev. Morriss urges, we find help comes from each other, and from our faith through the principles and purposes we espouse. The story ends at the beginning with the "quality of the day" affected.

The readings by Rev. Clyde Grubbs and The Rev. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley reminded us of role of faith in our lives. "Faith is a verb," we were told, and "the meaning of your lives is still unfolding."

Reported by Claudia Mongin.