Let this year be a clean slate for new beginnings.

What “toast, boast, and oath” might you offer this January?

May we remember that we each carry inside of us a spark of the Divine.

I’m proud to belong to a living religious tradition that embraces evolution, both scientifically and spiritually.

What’s the one word you hope will define your upcoming year?

For the new year, just days old, beginning today, always beginning: We light our chalice, symbol of faith, perseverance, and hope, in astonished thanksgiving and irrepressible praise. For beginnings that emerge out of endings, appear amidst continuity, become visible in hindsight: We light our...

One of my most treasured New Year’s traditions is coming up with a word for the year: a single word that I want to be the theme for my entire year. When I’m questioning what’s the right thing to do, I will look to my word of the year for guidance.

This ritual entails having an empty vase on the altar, and cut flowers. It's especially meaningful to have founders or other "pillars" of the congregation have flowers with them in the service, and to have the congregation's children bring those flowers forward and put them in the vase (perhaps...

I invite you now to join me in the spirit of meditation and imagination. Find a comfortable position in your seat and close your eyes. Take a deep breath and try to find the restorative power of air and water in the breath. We must breathe to live, but our bodies also need water to survive. Our...

Let us ground ourselves in gratitude: using the colorful paper and something to write with, we prepare for our Gratitude Confetti ritual. Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg https://www.sharonsalzberg.com/on-being-column-the-hardship-we-accept/"…; I encourage myself to remember that being grateful...

As we come together, let us pause to take stock of the year now concluding: its moments of happiness and hurt, its times of accomplishment and failure, and its occasions of inspiration and fear. We add these experiences to the tapestries of our years, and look bravely towards a new horizon.

This is the season of endings and beginnings.

Fire consumes, and casts a bright light. May our chalice flame consume our regrets for the past, our fears about the future, and our worries about today. May it light for us a path of joy and peace.

One: It may be the hardest thing we will ever do, Many: Caught up in our self-righteousness, honing our pain. One: The one who offended may not deserve forgiveness Many: And we are not obliged to offer it. One: Why, then, should we forgive? Many: Because we have all caused pain....

The new year calls us forward, filled with mystery. As we turn toward that new year, we take a final glimpse of the past year, and reckon with all that it held for us. There are baskets moving through the aisles with pens and something called flash paper. It’s specially treated paper that...

When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to...

Spirit of Life and Love, known by many names and yet fully known by none, we give thanks for this time and this place of renewal. We give thanks for the ability to begin again: after the disaster, after the tragedy, after the loss, after meeting the challenge set before us....

What makes us human beings so uniquely wonderful in this puzzling universe is that we never give up on love. Against all odds, with no guarantee of being loved in return, out of the hate and hurt so often handed us, in the face of the sad suffering history has let us see, we go on loving....

This ritual was designed as part of a worship service/fire communion. Please see that holiday description for more details. Leader: Today’s service is about letting go, metaphoric cleansing and quenching of thirst, setting of intentions, self-anointing, healing, new beginnings and possibilities.

Having let go, Set our intentions, Named our curiosity, Committed our energies, And given ourselves over to lives of balance, purpose and meaning, Let us begin again In love...