The Way of Water — Carolyn McDade, Lucile Schuck Longview, and the Feminist Origins of the UU Water Communion (9-06-2026)

<p>&quot;When you shed a tear, it is likely that some of the water in your tears has been cried before. Maybe many times. Maybe countless times.&quot;</p><p>This is a recording of our Water Communion service. I&#39;ve left the voices of congregants sharing their blessings in the episode, so that those blessings might be passed on to you as well — sixty-odd voices, one to three words each, spoken into the water before it was poured into the bowl. Some are ordinary and some will stop you.</p><p>The ritual began in November 1980, at the Women and Religion Continental Convocation in East Lansing, Michigan, in a service called &quot;Coming Home Like Rivers to the Sea.&quot; It was co-created by Carolyn McDade and Lucile Schuck Longview, who gathered women from around the country and asked them to bring water from their home places. It was a feminist gathering and a social justice gathering, and its founders asked that congregations keep changing the ritual rather than preserving it. We take them at their word.</p><p>In the message I turn to residence time — how long a water molecule stays in a given reservoir. Hours in your body. Nine days in the sky. Millennia in the ocean. Over a million years in the deepest Antarctic ice, which means a mastodon&#39;s frigid breath became a cloud, fell as snow at the bottom of the world, and is still there. And the arithmetic that beckons the deeper truth: a single cup passing through you today carries enough molecules to add fifteen hundred of them to every other cup of water on earth.</p><p>Our Voice of Wisdom is an excerpt from Carolyn McDade&#39;s water song, read by Sarah Smith. Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.</p>