Where Are We Going?
Join with friends or family to sing this round to celebrate life’s mystery together.
Here are the three parts:
First part: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
Second part: Where do we come from?
Third part: Mystery, mystery, life is a riddle and a mystery!
Listen to the video below to learn the melodies with the Orange County Unitarian Universalist Choir.
To hear hundreds of UUs singing this song at General Assembly 2008, watch the first few minutes of this video from morning worship with Rev. Fred Muir.
The lyrics to this song come from the title of one of artist Paul Gaugin’s paintings (you can see the words from the first part of the round, written in French, in the upper left-hand corner):
Paul Gauguin – D’ou venons-nous (1896) Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Song credit: “Where Do We Come From?” by Brian Tate, as included in the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Singing the Journey: A Supplement to Singing the Living Tradition. Copyright 1999 by Brian Tate.
A Tale of Two Ministers
For our theme of Mystery we actually have two people to honor. The first is Rev. Dr. Judith Campbell, a UU minister who writes mystery novels about a UU minister named Olympia Brown. The second, of course, is the original Rev. Olympia Brown, who the character is named for.
The Olympia Brown in the murder mysteries is, like her author, a modern woman. But she shares a courageous spirit and a sense of justice with the historical Olympia Brown.
Olympia Brown, Universalist minister
That Olympia Brown was born in 1835, and she was the first woman in the U.S. to graduate from a regular school for the ministry, and she was ordained into the Universalist ministry as the first woman to be fully ordained and recognized by her denomination.
Olympia Brown served as a minister until the age of 53, when she decided to retire from church work in order to work full time on promoting women’s rights.
Judith Campbell, our mystery writer, has been both a professor and a minister before turning to writing murder mysteries as well as other kinds of literature.
Searching Among Stones
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The other day I found myself in the home of the president of my congregation. The board of trustees was having its annual retreat, welcoming new board members, setting priorities, etc. Read more →
Face to Face with Mystery
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So you’ve got a bunch of really pressing, life-changing, love-soaked problems, and you’ve tied yourself up into knots of anxiety. Desperate for relief, perspective and a change, you take yourself to the foothills to walk. Read more →
Mysterious Ways
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When my husband Eric and I traded in our old cell phones for iPhones we noticed a subtle but profound change in our lives. Read more →
Embrace Mystery
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In a sense, what it means to be UU is to continually embrace mystery—mystery of the divine, mystery of the sacred, and even the mystery of what is the right language to grapple with these concepts. Read more →
god is no noun
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god is no noun.
and certainly not an adjective.
god is at least a verb,
and even that shrinks her. Read more →
From Your Minister
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My physicist father drove me crazy. I would ask him what rainbows were made of, and by the time he had pontificated for 15 or 20 minutes I would be desperately bored, sorry I asked, squirming to get away. Read more →
REsources for Living
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As part of trying to define who we are and what we are called to do, Unitarian Universalists have come up with not only seven Principles that list the things that we “covenant to affirm and promote” but also a list of six Sources of our living tradition. Read more →
