Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.
Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
November 1, 2026
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Grief is a human experience, but often in our individualist culture we tend to ignore it, to suppress it, or try to make it fit some arbitrary timeline. When we do this, we do a disservice to ourselves. Join Rev. Carrie as she leads us through a grief ritual to acknowledge the many ways grief comes into our lives and to remind ourselves that we are held, and therefore our grief can be held in community. As part of this worship service, Unwound Sound instrumentalists and singers, the First UU Adult Vocal Ensemble, and Tosca String Quartet will debut Glover Gill’s Requiem to life, conducted by our own Brent Baldwin.
Welcome
Prelude: Excerpt from Requiem (Glover Gill) – Orchestra & Singers of Unwound Sound & First UU Adult Vocal Ensemble; Brent Baldwin, conductor
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
THE WORLD IS BOTH BURNING AND BLOOMING
Karen SalmansohnYou get the bad news
And the sunrise in the same day.
You cry over the headlines
Then you laugh at a baby wearing a hat shaped like a bear
This is the dual citizenship of being alive
Rage and reverence,
Grief and grace.
You are allowed to feel both.
You are allowed to scream,
And still notice how good the soup is
You don’t have to choose.
Let it all in.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Anthem
Excerpt from Requiem (Glover Gill) – Orchestra & Singers of Unwound Sound & First UU Adult Vocal Ensemble; Soloists: Bethany Ammon & Noah Reinhuber
Reading
TALKING TO GRIEF
Denise LevertovAh, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone
I should trust youI should coax you
into the house and give you
your own comer.
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dishYou think I don’t know you’ve been living
under my porch
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog
Centering
Music for Meditation: “Meditation in Sunlight” (Brent Baldwin) – Orchestra & Singers of Unwound Sound & First UU Adult Vocal Ensemble; Brent Baldwin, guitar
Sermon
YOU DO NOT CARRY THIS ALL ALONE
Rev. Carrie Holley-Hurt
“You do not carry this all alone
No you do not carry this all alone
This is way too big
For you
to carry this on your own
So you do not carry this all alone.”
When I first heard this song by Alexandra Blakely I started weeping. Much like the hymn from Aly Halpert we sang earlier, its a beautiful reminder that the grief – what Francis Weller defines as our heart and souls response to loss.
It is a human and holy thing
That there is no shame in it,
no waste in it,
and there is no fear in it.
That it is the suppression of it that does harm
Grief is something to acknowledge
Something to make space for
To be in relationship with
And something that can make us more resilient when we hold it in community.
This is not to say that your loss has to be made into something beautiful. I don’t believe we are required to take the worst moments of our lives and turn them into some sort of heroic arch. In the words of Rachel Volentine, a death doula, “You don’t have to make your pain useful.”
But I do believe that the grief that comes in loss place can bring comfort or at a minimum it brings with it the possibility of drawing us into community.
Which is what those of you here or elsewhere who are celebrating Dias Dia de los Muertos and All Souls’ or All Saints Day… or one of the many other sacred times of holding and honoring loss throughout the year are doing. It is remembering those they have lost and doing so in community.
These traditions bring a deep wisdom about acknowledging our loss together.
Which is something we need. All too often our individualist culture that runs at the speed of capitalism makes little to no room for grief.
And for those of us that were raised stepped in that culture we tend to avoid grief and because we avoid it we don’t teach our descendants how to recognize it, to be with it.
We have a culture that trains us to push grief down or see it as something to be solved. As if grief is a check list.
Suppressing our grief makes us less resilient and more cut off from our humanity and from one another.
Whereas when we allow for grief – When we acknowledge it, spend time with it, when we make our tear soup we live more whole heartily and more embodied.
Physiotherapist and Author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Frances Weller writes:
“Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small.. grief is suffused with life-force It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated…”
I want to be a fully embodied human. I want to be an untamed, a cultural rebel… especially when that culture asks of me to cut away my humanity, dull myself, to shrink in order to get by.
I want the resilience that being fully embodied brings.
And so today I want to invite you to spend some time with your grief, here in this sacred space with this beautiful community.
Because you do not carry this all alone.
Recently I created a ritual for myself so that I can sit with my grief each week. Some of you were there for its early stages.
In doing it, I have found that this ritual helps me to see the beauty of the origins of my grief, the love and compassion I have for others and myself. After I acknowledge this grief and what it is telling me, I am reminded that I am held.
It is a beautiful thing to learn that my heart can break so that my spirit doesn’t as the wise Andrea Gibson taught us.
I want to do a version of this with you now. You will have either gotten a small stone or you can get one in one of the baskets located at the back of the sanctuary.
As I take us through various types of grief, the stone becomes a tangible representation of it.
Next, I will invite you to bring your stone up front to the bowl of water or somewhere that reminds you that you are held by the divine… the earth… this community.
But first let’s take some time to meditate on our grief and all the ways that it can show up
From here on out this is your ritual. Go as deep or shallow as feels safe to you. If this brings up really intense feelings that do not flow through you and/or complicated feelings and you want some help, please know that Rev Chris and I are here as are our caring companions.
Francis Weller lays out what he calls the five gates of grief.
The first is the loss we typically think about and the loss that Dia De Los Muerta and Samhein embrace which is that “everything we love we will lose.”
We will lose those we love or they will lose us. It is our common destiny.
The 12th century poet Eleh Ezkerah reminds us that it is a holy thing “to love what death can touch”
Let us set with that for just a moment. Holding space for the grief that comes from THOSE WE HAVE LOST.
(breathe)
And then there is “THE PLACES THAT HAVE NOT KNOWN LOVE” this is for those places in us that were not given love and care that we needed. This could look like the ways that those who were supposed to love us chose ideologies over us. That handed us shame instead of understanding That harmed, neglected, or rejected us instead of embracing us.
Let us take a moment to hold space for the grief we might have for the places that we should have known love.
(breathe)
Next is the “THE SORROWS OF THE WORLD.” This is genocide in Palestine, Congo, and Sudan. This is the climate crisis and the loss of so much life on our beautiful planet., this is ICE violently harassing, harming, and kidnapping our neighbors. This is Cornell and LSU covering up sexual assault and so much more.
It is all the things that keep our heartbroken for the world.
Let us take a moment to hold space for the grief we feel over the sorrow of this world.
(Breathe)
The fourth gate is “WHAT WE EXPECTED AND DID NOT RECEIVE.” This is the loss of our village/ community – a place to be seen and welcome – a place where our grief, our joy, our humanity was seen and held. Weller says it’s a “cultural failure that we have not been given an adequate amount of purpose and belonging, and rather we are taught to fend for ourselves.”
Let us hold a moment for the grief of all we expected but did not receive.
(Breathe)
The last, the fifth gate is “ANCESTRAL GRIEF.” This is the grief we inherited from the pain and loss that our ancestors suffered through. The genocide, slavery, pogroms, the inquisition. The exploitation, apartheid, and all forms of oppression, marginalization, violence our ancestors experienced.
And of course there is the grief we carry by being connected to ancestors who were those that committed genocide, pogroms, that enslaved people, that exploited, and abused. That dehumanized themselves and others and that traumatized themselves and others.
Let us hold a moment for that inherited grief
(Breathe)
As you are ready, please make your way up – drop your stone in the water – water representing the community – and then return to your seat.
(Music)
PRAYER
That which calls us home to ourselves, that calls us to one another, that calls us to deep love. A more embodied life.
Bless the grief that has come up.
Bless us as we acknowledge it and hold it.
May we be able to make space for our it.
May we allow any lessons that grief has to offer us.
Bless this water that is showing us how we are held.
Bless this water that is showing us that all of us – our joy, our sadness our grief are held by life itself.
May we allow it
Extinguishing the Chalice
We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.
Benediction
May you leave this time of sacred holding
Feeling held
May you feel more alive and connected
And may you know that you are loved
Go in peace
Postlude
Excerpt from Requiem (Glover Gill) – Orchestra & Singers of Unwound Sound & First UU Adult Vocal Ensemble
Most sermons during the past 26 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link above to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link above or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776
