Sunday Services
10 am
Wardle YMCA
1801 Richmond Ave
Port Royal, SC

Our symbol: the flaming chalice

A flame within a chalice (a wide-lipped stemmed cup), like that which you can see at the top of this page, represents the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) and is a symbol of the Unitarian Universalist (UU) faith.

Hans Deutsch, an Austrian artist, first brought together the chalice and the flame as a Unitarian symbol during his work with the Unitarian Service Committee during World War II. To Deutsch, the image had connotations of sacrifice and love. Unitarian Universalists today have many different interpretations of the image. To many, the cup represents religious community, while the flame represents ideas including the sacrificial flame, the flame of the spirit, and more.

The flaming chalice image has changed many times over the past 65 years. There is no single interpretation of today's flaming chalice symbol. Modern chalice designs often incorporate two overlapping circles which, for many people, represent our Unitarian and Universalist heritages.

Worship

Click on calendar for Sunday services.

For Children

Unitarian Universalists have a rich religious community. When Unitarian Universalists speak of "worship," they usually are referring to the shared religious life of their congregation: attending Sunday worship services, creating religious music, honoring life passages like marriage and death, and celebrating traditional and special holidays together.

Special Worship Services

There are two services that many Unitarian Universalist congregations celebrate that are unique to our faith: the Water Communion and the Flower Communion.

The Water Communion, also sometimes called Water Ceremony, was first used at a Unitarian Universalist worship service in the 1980s. Many UU congregations now hold a Water Communion once a year, often at the beginning of the new church year (September).

Members bring to the service a small amount of water from a place that is special to them. During the appointed time in the service, people one by one pour their water together into a large bowl. As the water is added, the person who brought it tells why this water is special to them. The combined water is symbolic of our shared faith coming from many different sources. It is often then blessed by the congregation, and sometimes is later boiled and used as the congregation's "holy water" in child dedication ceremonies and similar events.

The Flower Communion usually takes place in the spring near the time of Easter. In this ceremony, members of the congregation are asked beforehand to bring a flower to the Sunday service. Upon entering the sanctuary, each person places his or her flower on the altar or in a shared vase.The flowers are blessed by the minister or congregation during the ceremony, and the sermon usually reflects upon the flowers' symbolism. At the end of the service, each person brings home a flower other than the one that he or she brought.

Reginald Zottoli wrote "The significance of the flower communion is that as no two flowers are alike, so no two people are alike, yet each has a contribution to make. Together the different flowers form a beautiful bouquet. Our common bouquet would not be the same without the unique addition of each individual flower, and thus it is with our church community: it would not be the same without each and every one of us. Thus this service is a statement of our community."

UUFB Banner/Pulpit Cloth

Artist Penny Russell tells her story about creating the pulpit cloth.

When given the challenge of designing a banner for our Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Beaufort, I thought of a beautiful experience in one of our congregation’s sharing of joys and sorrows . . . a young man told us that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Several in the audience rose to comfort him with their experiences of recovering from cancer. It was by this gesture that I remembered that dolphins swim beneath their sick and wounded to keep them above the water to breath. And, in some ancient cultures the bird was considered the emissary between earth and the spiritual heavens, and so the ocean, the dolphins, and the birds of Beaufort joined our chalice and the colorful dots that represent the founders of our Beaufort Fellowship.
Ginger Smith, a talented Beaufort quilter, brought my design to life and
beauty to our banner.

Artist Penny Russell