Beauty of the Flame
A Sermon
By Rev. Daniel Gregoire
Unitarian Universalist Society of Grafton and Upton
Sunday, May 3, 2026
Reading:
Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day by Delmore Schwartz
…
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
Sermon:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
But first, a bit of recap:
Last week we held our Earth Day service within our April spiritual theme of Transformation.
That Spirited Sunday, under the leadership of our Director of Religious Exploration, Cherilyn Reno, offered us a chance to welcome new members to UUSGU and to engage in the important work of sacred play, as the children brought the Earth Day pageant to life.
All of this reminded us that this Earth is our mother, our only home, and that we must do what we can for the planet upon whose care we depend.
Now, on this first Sunday in May, we enter a new theme: Beauty.
Beauty is the second to last in our narrative arc of Geographies of the Spirit, Landscapes of the Soul.
Today we will explore a kind of beauty that invites belonging, a beauty that roots us in the deeper memory of our place in the world.
We will also consider the beauty of the flame.
The flame that lights, purifies, burns, excites and teaches us to remember.
We are living in a time of profound dislocation and transformation.
Almost daily, I am reminded how the rise of artificial intelligence is reshaping not only the nature of work, but even our sense of what is beautiful, what is authentic.
It is becoming harder to tell truth from fiction, harder to determine what is real.
And yet, there are things that cannot be rendered in any simulation, no matter how convincing.
One of those is the nearness and immediacy, the presence of an open flame.
I am reminded of the yule log videos that we sometimes play on our televisions during the holidays, when we don’t have access to a fireplace, or when we would rather not go to the trouble of lighting one.
We all know something is not quite right.
It is close.
The popping and cracking sounds are sometimes even better than the real thing.
But we feel, deep down, that it is a kind of imitation, a farce.
We need a real fire from time to time
to teach us something that words, sounds and images cannot teach
We need lessons as old as humanity itself, stretching back tens of thousands of years to those first flames kindled on the African continent, a discovery of extraordinary and transformative power.
Beltane is one such tradition of fire, a festival honored today by neopagans, Druids and Wiccans, with roots in the deep memory of the peoples of the British Isles, among Celtic, Gaelic and Gallic communities.
The lucky fires of Beltane were ignited in great bonfires on hilltops, like beacons in the night calling communities together,
marking a threshold in the year.
Fires were also set in pastures, and cattle were led between them sometimes for protection, sometimes for blessing, always for transformation.
These flames were understood to confer abundance, fertility, and protection in this middle time between the spring equinox and the summer solstice.
More than anything, the Beltane fires communicated that the community was paying attention.
Paying attention to the liminality of the moment, to the way this time of year holds the quality of a threshold between realities.
And in this, we can hear an echo of our own Unitarian Universalist tradition.
We are a people who draw wisdom from many sources
from the direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder which moves through all things,
and from the spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions,
traditions that honor the circle of life and invite us to live in right relationship with the rhythms of nature.
Those Unitarian Universalist sources of inspiration inspire more than just belief, they require:
Devotion,
Presence.
Practice.
Participation.
They require us to do something, in response to the unfolding mystery of life.
The Beltane fires were a way of attending to the changing cycle of seasons with reverence and care, with a willingness to become one with the beauty disclosing itself in the landscape.
Just think of how the world is coming to life, flaming into life.
The chorus of birdsong in the morning. The fruit trees in flower.
One of my favorite sights this time of year is the sugar maple, where the reds and russets of autumn seem to be foretold in the budding seeds of spring. It is as if the trees themselves are on fire, without burning.
We feel called to respond to such beauty
no matter how feeble our response may seem in the face of spring’s overwhelming abundance.
On Friday, my family marked May Day and Beltane with an excursion to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s gardens at Elm Bank in Wellesley, for Tulipmania.
Grace could hardly contain her excitement at the thought of picking her own tulips. Earlier in the day, she painted our fingernails in the colors we hoped to find.
Kate packed a wicker basket. Dressed in floral prints Kate and Grace moved through the gardens like woodland spirits on an errand to the farmers market.
Fairies are known to run rampant during this time of year.
It became, the visit to Elm Bank, unexpectedly, a kind of pilgrimage
to be surrounded, even overwhelmed, by beauty.
We even walked the labyrinth!
Later that night, we lit a small bonfire in what we call our peace garden, at home.
We hoped to see the full moon, though clouds obscured much of it. But we saw Jupiter, bright and steady, and the stars Castor and Pollux in Gemini.
We made wishes. We roasted marshmallows. And something shifted.
I felt something burn away, a quiet trepidation about the future.
And something else arrived in its place: a sense of abundance, of possibility, of connection.
In that simple ritual, I felt linked to countless others across time and space.
A kinship with people who have gathered around firelight, under open skies,
to tell stories, to laugh, to sing, to remember that they belong to something larger.
And I want that sense of connectedness for all of us.
Not just on Beltane, but at every threshold of our lives.
At the celebrations, yes, but also at the more difficult crossings:
Retirement, moving house,
Unexpected change,
Societal change,
Technological change,
The sudden illness, unexpected loss.
Because without ritual, these passages can leave us lost and completely disoriented in the landscape of our souls.
There are things we cannot talk our way through, whatever the therapeutic modality we might use.
We must move through them.
We must mark them.
We must inhabit the sacred with our bodies.
And so perhaps the question is not whether change will come.
We know it will.
The seasons have already answered that.
The trees are answering.
The fire is answering, and saying:
Time is the school in which we learn.
Time is the fire in which we burn.
The question is whether we will meet that change awake, whether we will meet it together,and whether we will dare to mark it.
Because without marking the passage of time, it passes us by.
Without tending the thresholds, we lose our sense of where we are.
Without ritual, the fire still burns but we do not learn from it, and instead we are undone by it.
But with even the simplest gesture, everything can shift.
A candle lit at the right moment.
A stone held and then set down.
A name spoken aloud.
A meal shared with intention.
A fire kindled under the open sky.
These are small things and they are everything.
They are how we say: this mattered.
This changed me.
I am not the same as I was before.
They are how we become human together again in the vast architecture of time.
The late 20th century mystic of Manhattan, the Jesuit theologian, Pierre Teilhard DeChardin reminds us that.
“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.”
So, rediscover fire.
I invite you to admire the beauty of the flame, and to tend it.
When you feel a threshold approaching pause.
Mark it.
We do not need permission.
We do not need perfection.
We only need the willingness to spark the transformation.
Light a candle.
Step outside.
Speak a blessing,
Hold a stone
Or simply stand still and breathe, and know: this moment is changing.
And as you do,
May something burn away that no longer serves you.
And may something else arrive:
A deeper courage,
A blessed assurance
A wider love,
A steadier sense of belonging to this ever-turning world.
Friends,
Let us gather at the hilltop and light the ancient fire.
Let us hold one another through every season.
And when the moment comes, as it always does, let go and step forward.
Come through the flames.
The fire is already lit, and it is beautiful.
May it be so,
Amen.
A Sermon
By Rev. Daniel Gregoire
Unitarian Universalist Society of Grafton and Upton
Sunday, May 3, 2026
Reading:
Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day by Delmore Schwartz
…
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
Sermon:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
But first, a bit of recap:
Last week we held our Earth Day service within our April spiritual theme of Transformation.
That Spirited Sunday, under the leadership of our Director of Religious Exploration, Cherilyn Reno, offered us a chance to welcome new members to UUSGU and to engage in the important work of sacred play, as the children brought the Earth Day pageant to life.
All of this reminded us that this Earth is our mother, our only home, and that we must do what we can for the planet upon whose care we depend.
Now, on this first Sunday in May, we enter a new theme: Beauty.
Beauty is the second to last in our narrative arc of Geographies of the Spirit, Landscapes of the Soul.
Today we will explore a kind of beauty that invites belonging, a beauty that roots us in the deeper memory of our place in the world.
We will also consider the beauty of the flame.
The flame that lights, purifies, burns, excites and teaches us to remember.
We are living in a time of profound dislocation and transformation.
Almost daily, I am reminded how the rise of artificial intelligence is reshaping not only the nature of work, but even our sense of what is beautiful, what is authentic.
It is becoming harder to tell truth from fiction, harder to determine what is real.
And yet, there are things that cannot be rendered in any simulation, no matter how convincing.
One of those is the nearness and immediacy, the presence of an open flame.
I am reminded of the yule log videos that we sometimes play on our televisions during the holidays, when we don’t have access to a fireplace, or when we would rather not go to the trouble of lighting one.
We all know something is not quite right.
It is close.
The popping and cracking sounds are sometimes even better than the real thing.
But we feel, deep down, that it is a kind of imitation, a farce.
We need a real fire from time to time
to teach us something that words, sounds and images cannot teach
We need lessons as old as humanity itself, stretching back tens of thousands of years to those first flames kindled on the African continent, a discovery of extraordinary and transformative power.
Beltane is one such tradition of fire, a festival honored today by neopagans, Druids and Wiccans, with roots in the deep memory of the peoples of the British Isles, among Celtic, Gaelic and Gallic communities.
The lucky fires of Beltane were ignited in great bonfires on hilltops, like beacons in the night calling communities together,
marking a threshold in the year.
Fires were also set in pastures, and cattle were led between them sometimes for protection, sometimes for blessing, always for transformation.
These flames were understood to confer abundance, fertility, and protection in this middle time between the spring equinox and the summer solstice.
More than anything, the Beltane fires communicated that the community was paying attention.
Paying attention to the liminality of the moment, to the way this time of year holds the quality of a threshold between realities.
And in this, we can hear an echo of our own Unitarian Universalist tradition.
We are a people who draw wisdom from many sources
from the direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder which moves through all things,
and from the spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions,
traditions that honor the circle of life and invite us to live in right relationship with the rhythms of nature.
Those Unitarian Universalist sources of inspiration inspire more than just belief, they require:
Devotion,
Presence.
Practice.
Participation.
They require us to do something, in response to the unfolding mystery of life.
The Beltane fires were a way of attending to the changing cycle of seasons with reverence and care, with a willingness to become one with the beauty disclosing itself in the landscape.
Just think of how the world is coming to life, flaming into life.
The chorus of birdsong in the morning. The fruit trees in flower.
One of my favorite sights this time of year is the sugar maple, where the reds and russets of autumn seem to be foretold in the budding seeds of spring. It is as if the trees themselves are on fire, without burning.
We feel called to respond to such beauty
no matter how feeble our response may seem in the face of spring’s overwhelming abundance.
On Friday, my family marked May Day and Beltane with an excursion to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s gardens at Elm Bank in Wellesley, for Tulipmania.
Grace could hardly contain her excitement at the thought of picking her own tulips. Earlier in the day, she painted our fingernails in the colors we hoped to find.
Kate packed a wicker basket. Dressed in floral prints Kate and Grace moved through the gardens like woodland spirits on an errand to the farmers market.
Fairies are known to run rampant during this time of year.
It became, the visit to Elm Bank, unexpectedly, a kind of pilgrimage
to be surrounded, even overwhelmed, by beauty.
We even walked the labyrinth!
Later that night, we lit a small bonfire in what we call our peace garden, at home.
We hoped to see the full moon, though clouds obscured much of it. But we saw Jupiter, bright and steady, and the stars Castor and Pollux in Gemini.
We made wishes. We roasted marshmallows. And something shifted.
I felt something burn away, a quiet trepidation about the future.
And something else arrived in its place: a sense of abundance, of possibility, of connection.
In that simple ritual, I felt linked to countless others across time and space.
A kinship with people who have gathered around firelight, under open skies,
to tell stories, to laugh, to sing, to remember that they belong to something larger.
And I want that sense of connectedness for all of us.
Not just on Beltane, but at every threshold of our lives.
At the celebrations, yes, but also at the more difficult crossings:
Retirement, moving house,
Unexpected change,
Societal change,
Technological change,
The sudden illness, unexpected loss.
Because without ritual, these passages can leave us lost and completely disoriented in the landscape of our souls.
There are things we cannot talk our way through, whatever the therapeutic modality we might use.
We must move through them.
We must mark them.
We must inhabit the sacred with our bodies.
And so perhaps the question is not whether change will come.
We know it will.
The seasons have already answered that.
The trees are answering.
The fire is answering, and saying:
Time is the school in which we learn.
Time is the fire in which we burn.
The question is whether we will meet that change awake, whether we will meet it together,and whether we will dare to mark it.
Because without marking the passage of time, it passes us by.
Without tending the thresholds, we lose our sense of where we are.
Without ritual, the fire still burns but we do not learn from it, and instead we are undone by it.
But with even the simplest gesture, everything can shift.
A candle lit at the right moment.
A stone held and then set down.
A name spoken aloud.
A meal shared with intention.
A fire kindled under the open sky.
These are small things and they are everything.
They are how we say: this mattered.
This changed me.
I am not the same as I was before.
They are how we become human together again in the vast architecture of time.
The late 20th century mystic of Manhattan, the Jesuit theologian, Pierre Teilhard DeChardin reminds us that.
“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.”
So, rediscover fire.
I invite you to admire the beauty of the flame, and to tend it.
When you feel a threshold approaching pause.
Mark it.
We do not need permission.
We do not need perfection.
We only need the willingness to spark the transformation.
Light a candle.
Step outside.
Speak a blessing,
Hold a stone
Or simply stand still and breathe, and know: this moment is changing.
And as you do,
May something burn away that no longer serves you.
And may something else arrive:
A deeper courage,
A blessed assurance
A wider love,
A steadier sense of belonging to this ever-turning world.
Friends,
Let us gather at the hilltop and light the ancient fire.
Let us hold one another through every season.
And when the moment comes, as it always does, let go and step forward.
Come through the flames.
The fire is already lit, and it is beautiful.
May it be so,
Amen.
RSS Feed