Blanketed in Beauty: A Winter Solstice Ritual Honoring the Gifts of the Darkness
Sunday, December 21st
4pm PT / 7pm ET
(Click here if you want help translating to your time zone.)
Winter solstice offers an opportunity to pause at a pinnacle, honoring Earth’s longest night. For many moons leading up to this darkest moment, trees have been baring themselves of their leaves, offering a blanket to the Earth below. How can we as humans enter into the energy of this sacred time, using it as medicine, and aligning with the season’s offerings?
Join the UU Ministry for Earth and some very special guests on the evening of Sunday, December 21st for our 5th annual winter solstice service that honors the energy and teachings of Earth’s darkest time of year, which encourages us to rest and seek nourishment in the sacred dark.
Register here!Share with your congregation!
If you’re as excited about our winter solstice ritual as we are, we invite you to share the event information in your congregation’s newsletter and bulletins. Below, you’ll find a link to graphics we’ve created for this event that are perfectly sized for social media and web use.
Access graphics here.About our speakers
Our special guest speaker will be the Rev. Dr. Kristen Harper, UU minister, theologian, and author of The Darkness Divine: A Loving Challenge to My UU Faith. Our special music will be provided by Li Kynvi, hospice music therapist and UU minister-in-formation. UUMFE Acting Director Rev. Lauren Levwood will lead the service. UUMFE Board Chair Swamini Adityananda Saraswati will lead our meditation.
Rev. Dr. Kristen L. Harper is the author of A Darkness Divine: A Loving Challenge to my UU Faith. She has also contributed to Voices from the Margins: An Anthology of Meditations and Centering: Navigating Race, Authenticity, and Power in Ministry. Rev. Harper has served as the senior minister of the Unitarian Church of Barnstable, Massachusetts, for 23 years. A lifelong Unitarian Universalist, she has also served UU churches in Chicago, IL; Lansing, MI; New York, NY; and Ormond Beach, FL. Prior to entering the ministry, Rev. Harper worked for six years with women who were HIV positive and at the UUA in the Office of Diversity Resources. Rev. Harper received her doctorate from Meadville Lombard Theological School and her undergraduate degree in print journalism from Boston University. She is only the second woman of African descent to be called to serve a Unitarian Universalist Congregation as a sole minister.
Li Kynvi is currently a Massachusetts-based chaplain, music therapist, and mental health counselor in hospice and pediatric palliative care. In 2024, they received their MDiv from Starr King School for the Ministry, and have been enthusiastically singing with others & celebrating the solstices since 1990.
Rev. Lauren Spivey Levwood, newly appointed Acting Director of UU Ministry for Earth, is a long-time member of the UU Ministry for Earth community. She also serves as a part-time Minister for two UU congregations in the beautiful western Virginia mountains: the UU Church of the Shenandoah Valley and the UU’s of the Blue Ridge. Rev. Levwood’s vocational life has included working as a massage therapist, birth and postpartum doula, Birthing From Within childbirth mentor, modern dancer, and trauma-informed somatics practitioner. A religious naturalist, she is spiritually nourished by embodied experiences of awe and wonder arising from our natural world.
Swamini Adityananda Saraswati, UUMFE Board Chair, has worked with national and international nonprofit and interfaith organizations from the ground level to the United Nations and World Bank levels, working on climate change, hunger, water scarcity, violence, global poverty, interfaith harmony, and other crucial issues. Swamini Adityananda served as the Interim Executive Director of the world’s largest interfaith organization, United Religions Initiative, which has a presence in 112 nations. She also served as the Associate Executive Director of the Elijah Interfaith Institute, which works closely with faith leaders, including the Pope and Dalai Lama, to build friendship and mutual understanding across faiths. She is certified as a Mindfulness Meditation teacher through the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Greater Good and the Awareness Training Institute.