Candles in sand

Worship

“The aim of all worship is to help order the religious consciousness in the individual and in the group. To say that in a different way: it is to help us know and feel how we relate as individuals to ourselves, to the world, to the totality of being. The aim of common or corporate worship is to help us face up to our individual and collective limitations and failures, and to open us to sources of creative, healing, transforming and renewing power. It is to help us discover how that which transcends our narrow individual existence can move us, challenge us, inspire us, stimulate us to think, feel, act and be. It is to help us declare, celebrate, rejoice in those things we have found to be “of worth”. The aim of common worship is to help us reorder, reopen, reshape and interpret our experience to help us find the power to reaffirm again and again in word and deed what is worthy of our ultimate commitment.”

~Commission on Common Worship – Unitarian Universalist Association, 1983

Candle being lit
Congregant lighting a candle.