I’m glad Chutney and Philocrites brought up the WorshipWeb resource that Philo . . . Chris Walton led-up a few years ago. (These pseudonyms make me think we each have a sidekick, a nemesis, and a lair.)

It includes three of the sixteen services …

Every once in a while, you get a Unitarian Universalist who says — in so many words — we’re not Christian and never were, so why do we insist on doing X like the Christians. (The letters to the UUWorld sometimes go there.) But what we…

I’d love your help with this, Louis.

I gave the liturgy a brief look over, it looks like a wonderful work in progress.

I am interested in daily UU prayers for the individual, not in the context of a group or gathering. Is this part of your interest/agenda at all?

Louis

Perhaps you didn’t notice, but Chance is not a minister at our congregation…and not really planning on becoming one. This isn’t likely something to be adopted by our congregation, because, well, the thought of prayer scares the bejesus out of a lot of us at UUCA (except the ministers!) This is a personal exercise he invited comments on, and instead of wanting to burn him at the stake over using inappropriate acronyms, heaven forbid, we should be encouraging, and rooting him on. [insert Arsenial Hall-esque hooting here.] Methinks you misunderstand what the point of him posting this and the point of him working on this is.

You mention that its a great honor we read and comment on his stuff. Well, then I would see it as an utmost honor for someone to use my stuff as part of a morning prayer ritual. And the point for me would not be for me to get any sort of recognition for it, but to honestly help people in their spiritual journey. Yes, I’ve written things and had other people use it…but honestly, my point wasn’t to make money off it or even to have personal recognition, it was to help people. At work, I make my own sources all of the time for kids to use and send them out to the other centers for them to use, but I don’t put my name on it. Why bother…if they’re learning from it, that’s what matters. I want to shun my ego and my egotism. If what I write is used to honestly help people in their lives, then that’s all I need to know. It wouldn’t matter if my name was attached or not. But that is a discussion for a different post at a different time, because this conversation hijacks the original intent of Chut’s post.

You mentioned earlier in the conversation about how there’s a difference between liturgical and literary efforts. I couldn’t agree more. Literary efforts are the efforts you find in bookstores that is the deeply personal where writers create works so they can make money. Liturgy used for prayer has a different purpose to me, where the writers create works to benefit the lives of those who use and read it and not for any sort of special recognition or money.

Does that mean sources should never be attributed? Of course not. But, if Chutney actually uses this in a prayer service, he would certainly put where he got it on the sheet, as he said so above. My point is that this is a first draft of something that for now he only plans to use in his personal life, and offering for others with the same thoughts to comment on it.

If you want to use poems and writings and old prayers in your Covenant Group, you’re welcome to use whatever you can get hold of, public domain or not. Chutney is attempting something much larger, and he knows it will be a big project. He’s a big boy and doesn’t need all your hysterical “Jesus Christ”ing and protective bullying. Get a grip.

No.

And the mental image is worriesome.

Get a grip, and get over yourselves. Jesus Christ. He’s doing it to give him a little guidance, not get hammered on an innae point. Probably half those things in there are so old their are practically public domain now anyways. So, Peacebang, Scott, get a grip. I said that twice now, and I hate repeating myself, but jesus! This is a first, rough draft. You could have said “you might want to include more of the source information” instead of all this windbag nonsense.

Its nice to know that people’s spiritual endevors in UUism have to conform exactly to your set standards to be considered worthwhile and viable and not worthy of scorn.

Glad you ain’t in my covenant group, or I would have blown a gasket over this. Keep up the good word Chutney, and ignore them. This is your endevor and I am quite glad you not only got something out of Sunday, but took it, made it your own, came up with something great that it seemed a lot of people talked about missing on Sunday, and not only created something, but chose to share it with us.

The UUA’s WorshipWeb — the initial version of which I developed over five months in 2000 before going to work for UU World — drew from some of the models Scott mentions. Because genuinely liturgical worship had already grown rare among UUs, I looked for more “contemporary” models that managed to preserve much of the tenor of the better parts of the 1937 “Hymns of the Spirit.” The part of the site that still reflects my understanding of the strengths of liturgical worship is here, especially in the Learning Guides and Sample Services. These guides are meant to suggest how a range of structures commonly in use by UU churches can accommodate a variety of texts as coherent wholes; I drew on available texts that weren’t under copyright and didn’t write any original texts in the process. (The guides drew on order of service outlines provided in an excellent 1983 UUA pamphlet on leading common worship.) So I feel great sympathy for what you’re attempting.

Part of my practice run for the WorshipWeb was studying the often weird attempts made in “The Book of Hours” by the Congregation of Abraxas (a UU liturgical innovation group in the late 1970s and early 80s). The Abraxas folks were syncretists who drew on “literary” texts, but they were quite serious about reclaiming liturgy for UU ends. I first saw in practice how clumsy literary texts can be in congregational use when I tried adapting one of the Abraxas services for the youth group I was advising in the late 90s: A literary text — especially poetry and drama — often plays with rhythm in ways that are simply too complex or that change gears too quickly for a group of people reading together. (There’s part of the Marge Piercy poem that has always seems to create a congregational stumble, for example.) This is where the Book of Common Prayer is a genuine landmark: It’s literature that was written for group recitation, and its beauty is in the elegance of the vocal patterns, in which subtle changes emerge without throwing the readers off balance — mostly, it seems, by avoiding enjambment.

(Postscript: I don’t think I’ve ever said this explicitly in public, but in selecting and adapting individual texts from UU ministers, I paid particular attention to vocal rhythm and patterning — and occasionally modified texts as lightly as possible to maintain rhythm and patterning. You can see how I amended texts in the source code. Notes and deletions are commented out of texts from the original batch.)