A long time ago, in the 1970s, there was a kind and curious woman named Lucile Shuck Longview. She was a Unitarian Universalist and loved her UU church in Lexington, Massachusetts. In 1975, Lucile got to travel to Mexico City as a UU delegate to be part of the United Nations “Women’s Year” assembly. This was a huge meeting where people talked about women’s rights and how to make the world more fair.

When she came home, Lucile had learned something important: even in churches—even in her own beloved Unitarian Universalist faith—women’s voices weren’t always listened to. And that wasn’t fair.

So Lucile spoke up. She asked other UUs, “What if we looked closely at our faith and made sure it truly respected women, too?” Lots of people agreed. They worked together to create something called the “Women and Religion” resolution. It said: let’s take a deep look at the words and ideas we use in church, and make sure everyone is included, especially women and girls. The resolution was passed by the 1977 General Assembly, and for the next few years, people worked to change our faith traditions’ language to be more inclusive of women and to lift up and address the care of Mother Earth as a religious priority. 

In 1980, as part of this work, Lucile and her friend Carolyn MacDade planned a very special gathering just for UU women. They called it “Coming Home, Like Rivers to the Sea.”

At that gathering, the women held a beautiful worship service, “that spoke to our connectedness to one another, to the totality of life, and to our place on this planet.” They included a new, inclusive symbol of women’s spirituality: water, and in doing so, they made a brand new ritual: The Water Communion.

Each woman brought a little bit of water from somewhere special—maybe from a river near her home, or a place she had traveled, or even her kitchen sink. One by one, the women stood in a circle and poured their water into a big bowl. As they poured, they shared the stories of where their water came from and why it mattered to them.

The woman said that water was a powerful symbol—it could come from many different places, just like they did. But when they poured their water together, it became one. Just like them, many voices, but one strong community.

Some of the women even poured out their perfume bottles to carry the special water home, because they wanted to keep that feeling of strength and togetherness close to them.

That first Water Communion helped inspire big changes in the UU faith, like updating our UU Principles to use more welcoming language and to remind us to care for the Earth. And today, UU congregations all over the world celebrate Water Communion as a way to feel connected to each other, to our faith, and to the Earth.