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Rituals bring spiritual and religious practice to daily life. I believe there is a stigma attached to ritual for many Unitarian Universalists, where we associate the word and idea of ritual with rituals from other faith practices. Our ritual, unique Unitarian Universalists rituals, need not have any stigma or negative feelings attached. If we are to create a strong UU identity, I firmly believe that we need to start creating unique UU rituals that are used denomination-wide, so that they become part of what it means to be UU.

My goal in trying to spread unique UU Rituals is certainly not to make all UU churches the same; our diversity of thought and practice is one of our greatest strengths.  It would be awful if every UU congregation had the same order of service;  indeed, I do not even seek to have there be one common ritual or liturgical component  at every UU service.  Rather, I hope that there are commonalities among large groups of churches, that there are very many churches that do the Perpetual Food drive for example, but not all.  If there are a large enough number of places conducting various rituals, they will become known as common, and that is the goal, that there be known, common UU unique rituals of which all UUs are aware.

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