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Time for All Ages by Dawn Star Borchelt
January 9, 2000

All year, I've been taking one part of the worship service each month and talking a little bit with you about why we ring chimes, or why we light the chalice, and so on. Well, this month I decided to think about why we have readings. A reading is when someone stands up here and reads words that someone else wrote - like the words [someone] read while they lighted the chalice a few minutes ago.

Do you remember what those words were about? How did you feel when you heard them? Some of you probably are looking at your order of service to try to remember what they were right now, because you weren't really paying attention when you heard them. Some of you probably remember them, though. They were about seeing a flower inside our minds.

So why do we have readings about things like that? Well, we have readings about lots of different things. In some churches and some religions, all of the readings, almost all the words you would hear if you went to a worship service, would be from one book, like the Bible, or the Torah, or the Koran. That's because some people believe that the words in those books are more true, more meaningful than the words in any other book or that any other person could ever write. In our church, sometimes you'll hear words from those books, and a lot of the time you'll hear words from our hymnal. In the back are several hundred different readings of various kinds. But other times the minister or whoever's leading the service will pick words from somewhere else entirely.

Have you ever seen something beautiful, like the poem we read as a chalice lighting talks about, and realized that you were beautiful, too? I have, and so for me, that reading is true. We have readings about lots of different things because Unitarian Universalists generally believe that we can find meaning and truth and inspiration from lots of different people and places.

I think this is why we have readings in almost every worship service: to remind us that it is our job to find out what we believe and how we feel and to challenge us to think about whether the words we are hearing seem true and make sense to us. We don't all have to agree about any particular set of words, not even our principles and purposes - but we do have to agree to respect each other's opinions and feelings.

In your hymnal, there is a very interesting reading, Number 594. It's called Principles and Purposes for all of us. It is about what we believe - but remember when we read it that it's not telling you what you have to believe, only what you might believe. Think about which parts of it seem true, and which parts seem not-so-true. I want the adults in the room to read the plain text, the first part, and the kids in the room to read the italicized words, the second part. I'll read both parts, with you.

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